SONGBOOK
ABBEY ROAD
Everybody worked frightfully well, and that’s why I’m very fond of it.
– George Martin
Now we can just sit back, relax and enjoy Beatle offerings and appreciate them on their own level. Too much has passed under the bridge to start getting uptight, and the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free
of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism.
– Melody Maker
TRACK LIST
Side 1:
Come Together (Lennon-McCartney)
Something (Harrison)
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (Lennon-McCartney)
Oh! Darling (Lennon-McCartney)
Octopus’s Garden (Starkey)
I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (Lennon-McCartney)
Side 2:
Here Comes The Sun (Harrison)
You Never Give Me Your Money (Lennon-McCartney)
Sun King (Lennon-McCartney)
Mean Mr Mustard (Lennon-McCartney)
Polythene Pam (Lennon-McCartney)
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (Lennon-McCartney)
Golden Slumbers (Lennon-McCartney)
Carry That Weight (Lennon-McCartney)
The End (Lennon-McCartney)
Her Majesty (Lennon-McCartney)
Released: 26 September 1969 (Apple)
Highest chart position: 1
Weeks in chart: 97 (17 at number 1)
FAB FACT
With the Get Back/Let it Be sessions languishing, unloved by the band, in the hands of engineer Glyn Johns, Paul, after speaking with the others, phoned Martin to ask him if he wanted to make an album with the band ‘like they used to’. Although they didn’t know for certain that Abbey Road would be the last album they recorded together, there was a sense of galvanising each other after the disinterest in Twickenham and Apple.
FAB FACT
George was the first musician in Britain to own a Moog synthesiser, which he brought to the Abbey Road sessions. The instrument features on four tracks: ‘Because’, ‘Here Comes The Sun’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
John missed the first sessions for the album as he and Yoko were recovering in hospital in the Scottish Highlands after a crash in their Austin Maxi. They’d been travelling to Durness in Sutherland for a holiday with their children, Julian and Kyoko. John had hardly been behind the wheel since passing his test in 1965 and was known to be a hopeless driver. He remarked at the time that ‘if you’re going to have a car crash, try to arrange for it to happen in the Highlands. The hospital there was just great.’
FAB FACT
Abbey Road features ‘Octopus’s Garden’, the second Beatles song written by Ringo, which he wrote after a conversation with a fisherman in Sardinia when he left the band during the White Album sessions.
FAB FACT
John wrote ‘Because’ after hearing Yoko playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. When it came to performing the close harmonies in the studio, The Beatles set the mood by dimming the lights and lighting incense. John, Paul and George sat close together in a semi-circle with Ringo guiding them to time through their headphones. They sang together in one track, which was then overdubbed to make a nine-part harmony. It was the last time all four of them recorded in the studio together.
FAB FACT
John’s ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ was inspired by a story he read in the Daily Record newspaper of 7 June 1967 about a Scottish civil servant, John Mustard, whose meanness made his wife Freda’s life unendurable. When she divorced him, she described how her husband would shave in the dark to save light and how in the last year before they separated he gave her £1. The judge decided that Mr Mustard had gone ‘far beyond what any wife could be expected to bear’ and granted her a divorce.
FAB FACT
The hidden track ‘Her Majesty’ is the shortest song recorded by The Beatles, all 23 seconds of it.