231027 Collection Digital Cover 1 - Flipbook - Page 118
“According to Bacharach, Cilla,
along with a complete orchestra,
had a staggering twenty-eight
different attempts at the song.”
Film scores, including those for ‘Rocketman,’ ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana
Jones,’ were all recorded at Abbey Road. All were colossal commercial
and critical successes as both soundtrack albums and films. But, amid
the myriad multi-garlanded screen star projects, Abbey Road has hosted
less felicitous experiences.
No such labours were needed back in 1932, the year when Sergei
Prokofiev made his very first recording at Abbey Road. This was in the
same year that an American teenage violin wunderkind by the name
of Yehudi Menuhin arrived to record Elgar’s Violin Concerto, with the
composer himself, at this point already 75 years old, holding the baton.
Back in 1961, the pre-Beatles but already in-demand producer George
Martin brought Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and Jonathan
Miller into the studio to record what was intended to be a spoof of
‘The Bridge On The River Kwai.’
The spirit of Elgar runs deep in the veins of Abbey Road with, perhaps
the greatest performer of his work, Jacqueline du Pre, arriving at the
studio with her cello in 1965 when she was just twenty years of age.
However, nobody had bothered to check with the makers of the film
if the comic quartet could use the title of the movie they intended
to lampoon. When it was ascertained that permission wouldn’t be
forthcoming, the indefatigable Martin was faced with the worst
editing job of all time; namely to remove the ‘K’ from every,
numerous, mention of the word ‘Kwai.’
Thus, the comic classic LP, ‘The Bridge On The River Wye’ was born,
though, one assumes, not without considerable damage to George
Martin’s eyesight and fingertips after endless hours with the original
recording tape and an accurate pair of scissors.
Similar agonies befell a twenty-two-year-old Cilla Black when she
arrived in NW8 in February 1966 to record the theme tune for the
Michael Caine movie ‘Alfie,’ with the track’s composer Bert Bacharach,
a 48-piece orchestra, three backing singers and various apparatchiks
from the movie company, no doubt already concerned about the
budget-devouring set-up that was arrayed in front of them.
According to Bacharach, Cilla, along with a complete orchestra, had a
staggering twenty-eight different attempts at the song. Rumour also
has it that, at the end of what must have been one of the most exhausting
sessions for a single song ever undertaken at that point inside Abbey
Road, Bert decided that her first take was the best one after all.
116
It was here, at the conclusion of her recording with the London Symphony
Orchestra, that the entire cast of musicians burst into applause, a reaction
which is considered, within the strict etiquettes of the classical world,
to be all but unknown.
“That’s all for today,” said du Pre when she recorded Chopin and
Beethoven for a new recording in 1971. Snapping her cello case shut,
she left Abbey Road, never to record again before her death, in 1987,
of multiple sclerosis at the age of just 42.
Listed by English Heritage as a Grade II building in 2010 after threats
from EMI, who warned, amid debts and the rise of artists simply
not needing professional studios to record in, that the studios may
be turned into flats, the famous zebra crossing (also now listed) will,
for the foreseeable future, remain positioned in front of a functioning
musical recording facility, rather than a block of luxury apartments.
Though it’s probably worth mentioning to anyone attempting to recreate
the famous Beatles album cover that, firstly, you will almost definitely
get run over by a volume of traffic that dwarves what existed in the
summer of 1969 in North West London. And secondly, unless you have
a stepladder, which photographer Ian McMillan used to capture the
famous shot, you’ll never be able to get the angle and perspective right.
Perhaps that sums up the staying power of Abbey Road. The fusion of
the analogue and the digital, the historic and the contemporary. A place
where both Pro-Tools and a step ladder are equally valuable parts of its
still unravelling story.
