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At 8 p.m. on 10 February 1967, forty-two classical musicians, most of them middle-aged, assembled in Studio One at Abbey Road. On the instructions of the Beatles, they had donned full evening dress, for which they were to be paid a little extra.

The musicians included the violinists Henry Datyner, forty-four, who had won first prize in the 1944 Geneva International Music Competition, and Erich Gruenberg, forty-three, who had been the leader of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra from 1938 to 1945, and had since led the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The leader of that evening’s orchestra was David McCallum, sixty-nine, who had led the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

On arrival, the musicians found the studio decked out in brightly coloured balloons. They were then ordered to don a selection of comical masks, party hats, rubber noses, bald wigs, clip-on breasts and gorilla paws. ‘Here you go, mate, have one of these,’ said Mal Evans, handing them out.

‘Most of the musicians seemed taken aback,’ recalled Geoff Emerick. ‘One of them even rudely slapped Mal’s hand aside.’

David McCallum sat motionless in his clown’s nose, while Erich Gruenberg held his bow in a gorilla’s paw.

Next to arrive were a hand-picked selection of beautiful people, or the Beatles’ ‘way-out friends’, as George Martin, also decked in evening dress, preferred to dub them. They included Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Donovan, Pattie Boyd, Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, and Graham Nash of the Hollies. Having drifted in, they wandered around the orchestra handing out party novelties, sparklers, joints and, as Martin put it, ‘God knows what’. As was customary on such occasions, pretty bubbles filled the air. Unusually, Brian Epstein was in the studio too, nervously surveying this bizarre clash of cultures. For Geoff Emerick, the session marked a transition: ‘The lines between classical and pop music were blurring, and even though many of the orchestral players were disdainful of contemporary music, they could see the writing on the wall.’

The four Beatles arrived last of all, Paul in a tweed overcoat, John in a smart blue velvet suit and bright red tie, his face adorned with a Zapata moustache and extravagant sideburns. They were all, noted Emerick, ‘in a decidedly jolly mood … as if they had started the party several hours earlier’. Like royalty, they ‘wandered around bestowing their attention on one subject, then the next’.

Tracksimages.com/Alamy Stock Photo

Already discombobulated by the fancy dress and party novelties, the orchestra were now obliged to take instructions on how to play their own instruments. Between them, Paul and George Martin had decided that the twenty-four-bar bridge between John’s ‘I read the news today, oh boy’ section and Paul’s ‘Woke up, got out of bed’ section should be filled by individual orchestra members playing the lowest to the highest notes in an unsynchronised slide.

Apart from a shared start and finish, there was to be no coordination, no sense of unity, none of the usual orchestra teamwork. ‘I want everyone to be individual,’ Martin told them. ‘It’s every man for himself. Don’t listen to the fellow next to you. If he’s a third away from you, and you think he’s going too fast, let him go.’

Gruenberg, who had delivered the first Russian performance of Benjamin Britten’s violin concerto in Moscow, appeared disgruntled. ‘All we want you to do is some free-form improvisation,’ Paul chipped in.

‘Not completely free-form, Erich,’ said Martin, encouragingly. ‘I’ll be conducting, and there is a score of sorts. But we need each musician to play on his own, without listening to those around him.’

Emerick wandered around adjusting the microphones as Gruenberg passed on these outlandish instructions to his baffled colleagues. ‘For a moment you could hear a pin drop. Then the murmuring began. “Do what??” “What the bloody hell … ?”’ The general response wasn’t so much outrage as dismay. ‘They all looked at me as though I were completely mad,’ recalled Martin. Emerick sensed that ‘The general response wasn’t so much outrage as dismay. The musicians knew they were there to do a job; they just didn’t like what they were being asked to do. These were forty of the top classical musicians in England, and they certainly hadn’t spent decades honing their craft in order to be told to improvise from their lowest note to their highest … It wasn’t exactly dignified, and they resented it.’

But Martin, a natural optimist, felt that they eventually came round to it. At first they ‘thought it was all a stupid giggle and a waste of time’, but in the end ‘they were carried into the spirit of the party just because it was so ludicrous’. The session ended, unexpectedly, with a spontaneous burst of applause from everyone in the studio, including the orchestra. Had it dawned on them that they had just participated in the creation of something extraordinary? Perhaps they were simply relieved.

Twelve days later, the Beatles recorded the long, booming piano chord that ends ‘A Day in the Life’. For this, EMI dogsbodies moved five different keyboards into Studio Two: two Steinway grand pianos, a Steinway upright piano, a Wurlitzer electric piano and a spinet. John, Paul, Ringo, Mal Evans and George Martin each stood by a keyboard, and when Martin called out ‘One, two, three – go!’ they hit the chords as hard as possible. Soon after they had finished, George Harrison arrived with Dave Crosby of the Byrds. ‘Nice of you to turn up, George,’ said John shirtily. ‘You only missed the most important overdub we’ve ever done.’

‘A Day in the Life’ lasts 5 minutes 34 seconds. It had taken, in all, thirty-four hours to record. Four years earlier, the entire recording of the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, was all done and dusted in a day.