London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And word time.
Right.
Stop the traffic.
No, really.
Stop the traffic.
There are four blokes who need to cross the road.
Won’t take long.
Ten minutes should do it.
One policeman.
One photographer.
One stepladder.
Four lads from Liverpool.
Six photographs.
And a zebra crossing in St John’s Wood.
What could possibly come of that?
Oh, not much.
Just one of the most famous photographs ever taken in London.
And probably the only pedestrian crossing on earth where, more than half a century later, people arrive from Japan, Brazil, Wisconsin, Germany, Australia, God knows where, stand in the middle of the road, hold up the traffic and annoy the locals.
All because four Scousers crossed the road.
There’s a joke in there somewhere.
Why did the Beatles cross the road?
To get to the other side.
And, as it turned out, into immortality.
Today is September 26th.
And on this day, September 26th, 1969, Abbey Road was released.
The last album the Beatles recorded together.
Not the last one released.
Let It Be came out afterwards.
But Abbey Road was the last time John, Paul, George and Ringo went into the studio and made a Beatles album together.
And what an album.
Come Together.
Something.
Here Comes the Sun.
Because.
Golden Slumbers.
The End.
And then, after The End, because apparently even the end wasn’t the end, along comes Her Majesty.
Twenty-three seconds of her.
Very British.
Even the ending has an afterthought.
And that brings us nicely to our word for today.
Medley.
As in the great Abbey Road medley.
A medley is a mixture.
A mingling.
Bits and pieces brought together.
And it’s an old word.
It comes into English through French, from a word meaning to mix or mingle.
Same family as mêlée.
And, wonderfully, meddle.
Mix things up.
Get involved.
Stick your oar in.
Meddle.
Medley.
And that’s exactly what happens on the second side of Abbey Road.
Bits of songs.
Half-songs.
Musical scraps.
Things lying around in the Beatles’ bottom drawer.
And they take them and stitch them together.
One song tumbles into another.
Which tumbles into another.
A medley.
And there’s something rather lovely about that.
Because the Beatles were coming apart.
And the music was coming together.
Hold that thought.
We’ll come back to it.
But first, let’s go back to that road.
Because here’s the thing.
It nearly wasn’t called Abbey Road at all.
For a while, the working title was Everest.
Why Everest?
Some vast Himalayan artistic concept?
Spiritual enlightenment?
George had been communing with the infinite?
Nah.
The recording engineer Geoff Emerick smoked Everest cigarettes.
That was it.
Everest.
There was even talk of going to the Himalayas for the cover photograph.
At which point, presumably, somebody looked at the airfare.
Or looked at Ringo.
Or both.
And thought, sod that.
There’s a perfectly good road outside.
Paul came up with the idea.
Walk across the zebra crossing.
Take a photograph.
Back inside.
Kettle on.
Album cover sorted.
So, on the morning of August 8th, 1969, photographer Iain Macmillan climbed onto a stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road.
A policeman stopped the traffic.
The Beatles walked backwards and forwards across the crossing three times.
Six photographs.
That’s all.
Six.
Imagine that now.
Six photographs?
You take six photographs deciding what you’re having for lunch.
And photograph number five was the one.
John first.
White suit.
Ringo behind him.
Black suit.
Paul.
Dark suit.
Bare feet.
George bringing up the rear.
Denim.
And that was that.
Except, of course, it wasn’t.
Because the picture acquired a life of its own.
Especially Paul’s bare feet.
Ah.
The conspiracy theorists saw those bare feet and went completely round the bend.
Paul was dead.
Had to be.
John in white was the priest.
Ringo in black was the undertaker.
George in denim was the gravedigger.
Paul had no shoes because corpses are buried barefoot.
Except they aren’t necessarily.
And Paul McCartney wasn’t dead.
Which was, admittedly, something of a setback for the theory.
There’s also a Volkswagen Beetle in the photograph.
Beetle.
Beatle.
You see?
Evidence everywhere if you’re determined enough.
Poor old Volkswagen.
Park your car in St John’s Wood one morning and accidentally become part of rock-and-roll theology.
But there’s something else about that cover that I love.
No title.
It doesn’t say Abbey Road.
It doesn’t even say The Beatles.
Nothing.
Just the photograph.
Imagine the confidence of that.
“Who are these people?”
Oh, come off it.
You know who we are.
That’s swagger.
Liverpool swagger.
No need to introduce ourselves, mate.
You’ve heard of us.
And on September 26th, 1969, that image went out into the world.
A north London street became the name of a record.
The record became a phenomenon.
And then the street got the fame back.
That’s the bit I love.
Abbey Road gave its name to the Beatles.
And the Beatles gave Abbey Road its name to the world.
A little London two-way traffic.
Though preferably not while somebody’s standing in the middle of it taking a selfie.
And there’s another London transformation tucked away in this story.
We call them Abbey Road Studios today.
They weren’t Abbey Road Studios then.
They were EMI Recording Studios.
But the Beatles helped make the place and the name so famous that eventually the studios themselves became Abbey Road Studios.
The record effectively renamed the building.
Not bad for four blokes crossing the street.
And now back to the music.
Because Abbey Road is an extraordinary goodbye precisely because it doesn’t sound like four men who have run out of road.
They were having difficulties.
Serious difficulties.
Business difficulties.
Personal difficulties.
Artistic difficulties.
They were getting on each other’s nerves.
The Beatles were coming apart.
But listen to the record.
They’re still inventing.
Still playing.
Still taking the mickey.
Still making something that sounds gloriously, unmistakably Beatles.
George brings Something and Here Comes the Sun.
Ringo gives us an octopus and his garden.
John gives us Come Together.
And Paul, especially on that second side, starts gathering up the fragments.
The scraps.
The half-finished songs.
The musical odds and ends.
And stitches them together.
There’s our word again.
Medley.
And now think about it.
The band is breaking up.
And the music is joining up.
That great long sequence.
You Never Give Me Your Money.
Sun King.
Mean Mr. Mustard.
Polythene Pam.
She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.
Golden Slumbers.
Carry That Weight.
The End.
One thing becoming another.
And another.
And another.
Fragments becoming a whole.
Four men moving apart.
Four voices still coming together.
That’s the strange beauty of Abbey Road.
And eventually we reach…
The End.
Could you write it?
Four Beatles.
Last album they record together.
And near the finish they record a song called The End.
Subtle, lads.
Very subtle.
And then comes the joke.
Because after The End…
there’s another song.
Her Majesty.
The original sleeve didn’t even list it.
It’s tucked away there.
A little musical stowaway.
So the Beatles’ ending has an encore.
Of course it does.
They couldn’t even finish without taking the mickey.
And there’s one more London story hiding in that title.
Abbey Road.
We say it so easily we stop hearing the words.
Abbey.
Road.
Why Abbey?
Because long before Lennon and McCartney, long before EMI, long before recording studios and screaming girls and zebra crossings, this was an old London landscape with an ecclesiastical past.
The name ultimately reaches back into the medieval religious history of the area and Kilburn Priory.
Think of the journey that word has made.
Medieval religious house.
Abbey.
Road.
Recording studio.
Beatles.
Album.
Zebra crossing.
Global icon.
That’s London for you.
Layers.
One on top of another.
And September 26th, 1969 is the day another layer went down.
A record appeared in the shops.
Its cover didn’t tell you its name.
Didn’t tell you who made it.
It just showed you four men crossing a London street.
And fifty-seven years later, people are still crossing it.
Still taking the photograph.
Still stopping the traffic.
Still listening to the record.
Still hearing four men who were coming apart make music that came together.
A medley.
There’s our word.
And there’s our story.
The Beatles had reached the end of the road.
So what did they do?
They crossed it.
Not a bad way to go.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
See you tomorrow.