busybeeburns
31-12-2006, 10:24 AM
Abbey Road is playing host to a new venture — live bands on TV. By Tony Barrell
Live from Abbey Road is on More4 on Jan 12, and on Channel 4 on Jan 15
After John Lennon’s death in 1980, hordes of Beatlemaniacs were overcome by a desire to come together, to gather somewhere and share their grief. Many of them streamed into northwest London and poured over the world’s most famous zebra crossing, finally stopping outside a solid-looking, white-fronted Georgian house.
This was EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios in St John’s Wood, the building where the Beatles had created most of their oeuvre, and after which the band named the last album they recorded together. Some hi-fi speakers were chosen from Abbey Road’s formidable armoury of equipment and positioned outside, then Lennon’s music was blasted to the masses.
This scene played itself out again almost 21 years later, when George Harrison died from cancer. “They played All Things Must Pass, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” says David Holley, who, as managing director of EMI Studios Group, is responsible for this hallowed edifice.
But Abbey Road is much more than a shrine to one band. The studio operated successfully for three decades before the Beatles set foot here, and has remained busy in the three and a half decades since they split. Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon here; Radiohead used it for their classic album The Bends;
U2 worked here recently, as did Take That, Coldplay and Kate Bush. And, next month, Abbey Road is reinventing itself as a high-class television studio. It will host Live from Abbey Road, a big-budget international music show on which artists such as Razorlight, the Killers, Corinne Bailey Rae, the Kooks, Richard Ashcroft and Massive Attack perform in front of the cameras.
Number 3 Abbey Road was built in 1830 as a des res with nine bedrooms, a wine cellar and a 250ft garden. It remained a domestic building for almost 100 years, but in 1929, when “zebra crossing” was still just a warning call on an African safari, the Gramophone Company bought it for £16,500 and converted it into a dedicated recording studio. Shortly afterward, the Gramophone Company merged with Columbia to form Electric & Musical Industries, more snappily known as EMI. The studios’ grand opening, in 1931, saw Edward Elgar conducting his own Falstaff suite.
Abbey Road quickly became a bastion of British boffindom, a kind of musical Bletchley Park. It was here, in the 1930s, that the electrical wizard Alan Blumlein developed binaural sound, better known as stereo. Real music nerds will appreciate the fact that Abbey Road has also given us automatic double tracking (ADT) and direct injection (DI) — plugging an electric instrument straight into the recording equipment, rather than miking it up. Studio two, the room where the Beatles virtually lived in the late 1960s, still has extra-special baffles on the wall for absorbing excess sound — stuffed with dried seaweed, naturally. All recording was done in strict three-hour shifts, clipped instructions issuing from the stiff upper lips of producers and engineers, until the lads from Liverpool came and shook things up. In their later years, the Beatles did heaps of overtime in search of sonic perfection. They slept here, took drugs here and wrote songs here.
Progress still marches on at Abbey Road. Today’s digital age has seen it diversifying into cutting-edge audiovisual work. “We’ve got a video services business that chops and edits film, then turns it into whatever format you need — for the web or broadcast or whatever,” says Holley. “And we’ve got a digital product business that creates a whole range of products for the web and for mobile phones.” The boffins still take things apart and scratch their heads here, he says. “They’ve always gone back to the science fundamentals, and they still do. These days, they go into the structure of MP3 files.”
The studios’ latest innovation, the Live from Abbey Road show, took shape after a chance meeting between the American music entrepreneur Michael Gleason and the British record producer and musician Peter Van Hooke. The programme has no presenter and no audience; each hour-long show takes an intimate look at three artists or bands as they perform live. The production values are somewhere up in the stratosphere. “The idea is that it should look like a movie and sound like a record,” says Gleason.
Abbey Road brings out the best in people, says Gleason — but the flip side is that it encourages perfectionism. “We had the Killers in,” he says. “They did an acoustic set for us, and it was gorgeous. But it was hard work — they did their single When You Were Young, and it took them three hours. They said, ‘We’re in Abbey Road, we have to get this perfect.’”
But artists seem unanimous about the joy of performing in this British institution. Corinne Bailey Rae says that she hadn’t really thought much about her session for the show, “until I actually turned up and saw the studio and saw all the pictures on the walls, and just got a sense of how much history and how much music has been recorded here”.
“It’s a bit of a shrine, isn’t it?” says Daddy G of Massive Attack. “It’s funny, coming here and seeing coachloads of people waiting to come up one by one, just waiting to have their picture taken on the zebra crossing.”
Artists are prone to using words such as “warmth” and “magic” to describe the sound here. Is there something spiritual about the place, a je ne sais quoi in addition to all the history and technology? “Well,” says Holley, “there was a fantastic guy who worked here called Alan Brown — if you look right in the middle of the sleeve of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, you can just see the little car he’s driving down the road — and he was convinced we’re at the inter- section of two ley lines.” Surely Abbey Road’s boffins need to get underground and investigate.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2514333,00.html
Live from Abbey Road is on More4 on Jan 12, and on Channel 4 on Jan 15
After John Lennon’s death in 1980, hordes of Beatlemaniacs were overcome by a desire to come together, to gather somewhere and share their grief. Many of them streamed into northwest London and poured over the world’s most famous zebra crossing, finally stopping outside a solid-looking, white-fronted Georgian house.
This was EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios in St John’s Wood, the building where the Beatles had created most of their oeuvre, and after which the band named the last album they recorded together. Some hi-fi speakers were chosen from Abbey Road’s formidable armoury of equipment and positioned outside, then Lennon’s music was blasted to the masses.
This scene played itself out again almost 21 years later, when George Harrison died from cancer. “They played All Things Must Pass, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” says David Holley, who, as managing director of EMI Studios Group, is responsible for this hallowed edifice.
But Abbey Road is much more than a shrine to one band. The studio operated successfully for three decades before the Beatles set foot here, and has remained busy in the three and a half decades since they split. Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon here; Radiohead used it for their classic album The Bends;
U2 worked here recently, as did Take That, Coldplay and Kate Bush. And, next month, Abbey Road is reinventing itself as a high-class television studio. It will host Live from Abbey Road, a big-budget international music show on which artists such as Razorlight, the Killers, Corinne Bailey Rae, the Kooks, Richard Ashcroft and Massive Attack perform in front of the cameras.
Number 3 Abbey Road was built in 1830 as a des res with nine bedrooms, a wine cellar and a 250ft garden. It remained a domestic building for almost 100 years, but in 1929, when “zebra crossing” was still just a warning call on an African safari, the Gramophone Company bought it for £16,500 and converted it into a dedicated recording studio. Shortly afterward, the Gramophone Company merged with Columbia to form Electric & Musical Industries, more snappily known as EMI. The studios’ grand opening, in 1931, saw Edward Elgar conducting his own Falstaff suite.
Abbey Road quickly became a bastion of British boffindom, a kind of musical Bletchley Park. It was here, in the 1930s, that the electrical wizard Alan Blumlein developed binaural sound, better known as stereo. Real music nerds will appreciate the fact that Abbey Road has also given us automatic double tracking (ADT) and direct injection (DI) — plugging an electric instrument straight into the recording equipment, rather than miking it up. Studio two, the room where the Beatles virtually lived in the late 1960s, still has extra-special baffles on the wall for absorbing excess sound — stuffed with dried seaweed, naturally. All recording was done in strict three-hour shifts, clipped instructions issuing from the stiff upper lips of producers and engineers, until the lads from Liverpool came and shook things up. In their later years, the Beatles did heaps of overtime in search of sonic perfection. They slept here, took drugs here and wrote songs here.
Progress still marches on at Abbey Road. Today’s digital age has seen it diversifying into cutting-edge audiovisual work. “We’ve got a video services business that chops and edits film, then turns it into whatever format you need — for the web or broadcast or whatever,” says Holley. “And we’ve got a digital product business that creates a whole range of products for the web and for mobile phones.” The boffins still take things apart and scratch their heads here, he says. “They’ve always gone back to the science fundamentals, and they still do. These days, they go into the structure of MP3 files.”
The studios’ latest innovation, the Live from Abbey Road show, took shape after a chance meeting between the American music entrepreneur Michael Gleason and the British record producer and musician Peter Van Hooke. The programme has no presenter and no audience; each hour-long show takes an intimate look at three artists or bands as they perform live. The production values are somewhere up in the stratosphere. “The idea is that it should look like a movie and sound like a record,” says Gleason.
Abbey Road brings out the best in people, says Gleason — but the flip side is that it encourages perfectionism. “We had the Killers in,” he says. “They did an acoustic set for us, and it was gorgeous. But it was hard work — they did their single When You Were Young, and it took them three hours. They said, ‘We’re in Abbey Road, we have to get this perfect.’”
But artists seem unanimous about the joy of performing in this British institution. Corinne Bailey Rae says that she hadn’t really thought much about her session for the show, “until I actually turned up and saw the studio and saw all the pictures on the walls, and just got a sense of how much history and how much music has been recorded here”.
“It’s a bit of a shrine, isn’t it?” says Daddy G of Massive Attack. “It’s funny, coming here and seeing coachloads of people waiting to come up one by one, just waiting to have their picture taken on the zebra crossing.”
Artists are prone to using words such as “warmth” and “magic” to describe the sound here. Is there something spiritual about the place, a je ne sais quoi in addition to all the history and technology? “Well,” says Holley, “there was a fantastic guy who worked here called Alan Brown — if you look right in the middle of the sleeve of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, you can just see the little car he’s driving down the road — and he was convinced we’re at the inter- section of two ley lines.” Surely Abbey Road’s boffins need to get underground and investigate.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2514333,00.html