Our final day in London would not be complete without a trip to Abbey Road. So much classic music was recorded here (and one very famous album cover shot just steps away).
The list is far too long, but here’s a sampling:
Glenn Miller, Shirley Bassey, Cliff Richard. The Hollies, Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer & the Dakotas, Cliff Richard, Ravi Shankar, The Zombies, Little Richard, Mary Hopkin and Billy Preston.
190 of the Beatles 210 songs were recorded there. Pink Floyd recorded Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here there.
Sam Smith, Sade, ABBA, The Big Moon, Paul McCartney, Black Midi, Olafur Arnalds, Fontaines D.C., Goat Girl, Johnny Marr, Krept & Konan, Roxy Music, New Order, Frank Turner, Queen, Brian Eno, The Rolling Stones and Mogwai all recoded there.
George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Kate Bush’s Never for Ever, Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac and Live! were all recorded there.
And more recent history has seen artists from Blur, Travis, Massive Attack, Oasis, Radiohead, Nick Cave, Kanye West, The Spice Girls, Take That, and Lady Gaga record there.
In addition to popular music, many movie soundtracks were recorded at Abbey Road Studios as well, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, many of the Star Wars and Harry Potter series, Black Panther, 1917, Avengers: Endgame and Oscar-winners such as Gravity and The Shape of Water.
Tours of Abbey Road Studios are fairly rare from what I could gather, and need to be booked very far in advance. Next door to the studios is the official gift shop, which was small, but quite nice. I picked up a nice Abbey Road Studios: Dark Side of the Moon shirt.
The Crossing / Album Cover
Just outside the studio is the famous crossing featured on The Beatles Abbey Road album cover. There’s a queue to wait your turn to walk across. It moves quickly, so don’t be daunted. Teresa took a series of photos of me crossing the street. Below are the original (raw) photo, one I doctored with my meager Photoshop skills to make it look a little bit less like winter, one with me superimposed on the actual album cover, and finally the actual album cover photo itself. The perspective is different (you’ll notice I appear to be mush larger than the band members did in their photo) because the original photo was taken from further back, using a longer lens, rather then from 10ft away using a cellphone.
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