The fab farewell

It was the last album the Beatles did together – though Abbey Road would come out second last, because Let it Be had been delayed. The band knew it was the end: they were going their separate ways, with the arguments and legal rows over their company Apple Corps having worn them out. John would rather be with Yoko any time. George would rather not be a Beatle, and be in India. Ringo was fed up and had left the Beatles for a short period, but did not know what he was going to do next. Paul now had Linda – and he and Linda had just had a two–week holiday in Portugal with me and my wife and children. He was the only one who wanted the Beatles to continue, at least recording in the studio, perhaps making another film.

But when they gathered in Abbey Road Studios in July 1969 to start their new album, all their worries appeared so far away. They knuckled down to work, the atmosphere was good. Perhaps because they knew it was the end.

By the time they got to the second side of the album, they were determined to get in as many new songs as possible, even those half finished. They wanted to clear the decks, clear their minds. These shorter songs, from after ‘Because’ to ‘The End’, are commonly known as ‘The Medley’ because they segue one into the other, without any gaps. All these shorter numbers could easily have been filled out and made longer and even richer, but when I first heard ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ (which begins ‘The Medley’), I just could not get it out of my head. John and Paul both told me later that ‘Because’ was their favourite song on the album.

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George Martin, who supervised the whole thing, for the occasion used a special recording console. Extraordinarily, that very console – back in working order – is now offered by Bonhams (the technical details are overleaf) in the Sound of The Beatles: The Abbey Road’ Console sale in Knightsbridge. He always said Abbey Road was the best Beatles album, but then he was slightly biased.

In popularity polls over the decades, Sgt. Pepper is often voted the best Beatles album, for its contents and the cover, but there are lots of Beatles fans and Beatles academics – yes, there are loads of them today – who consider Abbey Road to be their finest work.

Certainly, the cover is today their most recognised, showing the pedestrian crossing outside Abbey Road Studios. As a result, the crossing has become a London icon and is now Grade II listed.

The cover would not have been permitted seven years earlier, when the Beatles started recording. EMI would have been against it, so would the record stores, for the simple reason that the band’s name is not on the cover, and nor is the name of the album. But the Beatles were in charge of themselves by the time Abbey Road was released.

George has two songs on the album, probably his best songs ever. Poor old George felt he had been ignored for years, being the youngest, kept in his place in the shade cast by the genius of Paul and John. He often brought his songs hesitantly into the studio for them to hear, but they rarely made it on to the albums.

The reasons are partly that he was a late developer, but also that he was on his own, as a composer, whereas John and Paul had each other to spark off. John and Paul had been so productive that it was hard to find room for a George song.

On Abbey Road, though, he had ‘Something’, which is now considered a Beatles classic, and most people know it is a George song – despite the fact that Frank Sinatra, when he performed it, introduced it as a “Lennon–McCartney” number.

There is no story behind the words: it is just a love song. George wrote it on a piano in an empty studio when the others were busy recording the double LP that became 1968’s The White Album. He had got fed up with being bossed around by Paul.

George, though, clearly had his wife Pattie in mind when writing ‘Something’. Alas, wondering if their love would grow turned out to be prophetic – she eventually left him for his friend, the guitarist Eric Clapton.

George’s other song on the album, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, also has Eric connections. George was fed up with yet another Apple Corps round-table discussion, with them all shouting at each other, so he went off to Eric Clapton’s garden. He walked round, communing with nature, watching the sun, and realised spring was coming and the winter of discontent with Apple could not last for ever.

During the making of Abbey Road, spread over seven months in 1969, John missed the recording of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. So they just bashed on without him, something they would never have done back in 1962, when John was clearly the leader. By 1969, Paul was the leader, if anyone was.

John and Yoko had been involved in a car crash in Scotland. When John was eventually beginning to recover, Yoko ordered a double bed from Harrods to be set up in the Abbey Road studio and a microphone suspended over John’s head. She would also offer her own comments and suggestions – which did not exactly please Paul.

It was just one more reason why this album was the end. To make it absolutely clear, the final song is called ‘The End’. Its lyric is only half a dozen lines, but finishes with what could be a Shakespearean couplet. ‘And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to the love you make’. The song concludes with a huge crescendo, the band all taking part, bidding their final farewell.

But – aha! – just when you think it is all over, there is a witty little ditty tacked on to the end: ‘Her Majesty’. Paul tells us that ‘Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl/But she doesn’t have a lot to say’. One day, though, he hopes to make her his.

Affectionate teasing, that didn’t stop the Queen from knighting Paul in 2014.

Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles (published in paperback by Ebury) is the only authorised biography of the band.