There's a place which is forever the Beatles

There's a place which is forever the Beatles

Abbey Road throws open its doors to the public

Alexis Petridis
Saturday March 19, 2005
The Guardian

As cathedrals of dreams go, Abbey Road's Studio Two is unprepossessing. It has something of the air of an old school gymnasium: battered parquet floors, whitewashed brick walls, a ceiling with elaborate mouldings that could do with a lick of paint.
According to the studio manager, Dave Holly: "It's functional and unchanged since about 1960, because people who use it want the heritage as well as the sound."

Stripped of any instruments or recording equipment, the only hints of its glamorous function are some theatrical spotlights, apparently installed in the mid-60s at the Beatles' behest.

It suggests that Studio Two was no more alluring when musical history was being made within its north London walls than it is today, open to the public for the first time, serving as a makeshift gallery for a photographic exhibition.

But it is still hard not to feel overawed. This was the room in which that first, clanging chord of A Hard Day's Night echoed around, where the whine of feedback at the start of I Feel Fine was accidentally discovered, the room from which John Lennon was led away by Paul McCartney after mixing up his supply of pills and accidentally taking LSD while recording Sergeant Pepper's Getting Better.

Dave Holly is full of tales of American record company executives kissing the studio floor and bursting into tears while being shown round. Not even rock superstars are immune. The exhibition brochure contains a poem by Roger Waters in which the erstwhile leader of Pink Floyd hymns the "asdic ping" of pianos past and "dancing motes that never fade away".

The exhibition forms part of the Abbey Road Film Festival, a fortnight-long attempt to draw attention to the studio's "pre-eminence as the world's greatest centre for film scoring". Films are being shown in the larger Studio One, and accordingly, the Studio Two exhibition makes a brave attempt to play down the Beatles' role.

They recorded virtually everything they released here, but there are only two photographs of them, plus a rare post-Beatles shot of Paul McCartney with a loaded tray from the studio canteen.

The first Beatles photo dates from around 1963. They are in shirts and ties, listening intently to their producer, George Martin: these were clearly still the days when he told them what to do. By the time of the second photo, the opposite istrue. Lennon and Ringo Starr stand in their Sergeant Pepper regalia, surrounded by impossibly beautiful-looking young women and men.

The rest of the exhibition is given over to Studio Two's other denizens. Pink Floyd are pictured listening to a playback in the control room, wearing expressions that strongly suggest their motes are failing to dance and their pings are insufficiently asdic.

But most of the subjects emphasise Abbey Road's pre-pop history - Glen Miller recorded his last studio session here - and its links with the cinema: Dirk Bogarde, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, Bette Davis and, perhaps slightly less exotically, Gracie Fields, who apparently turned up to recording sessions dressed in a manner that would be considered too formal for dinner at Buckingham Palace.

Dudley Moore plays the piano, while just out of focus, the rest of the Beyond the Fringe team look on from the control room stairs.

You take the exhibition's point, but it has set itself a hopeless task. Nobody kisses the floor or bursts into tears because Harry H Corbett and Frankie Howerd recorded a version of Alice in Wonderland here. Nobody who wanders through Studio Two's doors in the next fortnight is in search of a sense memory of Matt Monroe's hair oil or Sophia Loren's perfume.

Almost 36 years after they last convened here, The Beatles still seem to own the studio. Every scrawled message on the wall outside relates to the Fab Four, apart from a game effort to assert McFly's superiority to Lennon and McCartney, a couple of mentions of Pink Floyd, and a Japanese tourist's attempt to draw attention to his own band - which seems to be called PLINCIPAL.

The studio was not even called Abbey Road before the album of the same name was released: for the first 68 years it was simply EMI Studios.

"I've spoken to about seven film crews this morning," says Dave Holly. "We seem to get on to the Beatles pretty quickly."

And yet, it's easier to picture the early Beatles here than the makers of Sergeant Pepper. It is difficult to imagine Strawberry Fields Forever or To morrow Never Knows emanating from such ascetic surroundings.

Perhaps it would seem different if it was late at night, and the lights were low and the air was thick with incense and marijuana smoke.

What you can imagine is the sort of scene depicted in the exhibition's first Beatles' photograph: the four of them in shirts and ties, listening intently and respectfully to their producer, before he bounds up the staircase to the control room and they dutifully launch into another ver sion of Money or All My Loving or It Won't Be Long.

· Alexis Petridis is the Guardian's pop and rock critic.

· The Abbey Road Film Festival runs from today until April 3. Admission to screenings are £15 and £20