Abbey Road — 1969

Background

Abbey Road was recorded in the early months of 1969, after the fractious Get Back sessions that would eventually become Let It Be. By this point The Beatles knew they were close to finished as a working band — Paul McCartney has since said the group approached these sessions determined to go out on their own terms, with George Martin agreeing to produce again only if the band would let him work the way he wanted, without the internal power struggles that had derailed the previous album. The result is the sound of a band pulling together for one last disciplined effort rather than falling apart in public.

Side one

The album opens with Lennon's 'Come Together' — a slinky, half-spoken blues built on a bassline so distinctive it's been imitated for decades, its lyrics a run of surreal non-sequiturs assembled from an aborted campaign jingle for Timothy Leary. Harrison's 'Something' follows, arguably the most straightforwardly beautiful love song any of the four ever wrote, and the only Harrison composition ever issued as a Beatles A-side. The side moves through Lennon's queasy 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)', which ends the side on an unresolved, droning wall of guitar and Moog that simply cuts to silence — a genuinely unsettling way to end a side of a pop record in 1969.

The Long One

Side two is the reason Abbey Road is remembered as more than a great song collection — the sixteen-minute medley that runs from 'You Never Give Me Your Money' through to 'The End', stitched together from fragments too short to stand as full songs on their own. McCartney has described the medley as an attempt to make something more ambitious than a straightforward song cycle, closer to a classical suite. 'Golden Slumbers' and 'Carry That Weight' bleed into each other with an orchestral swell that feels genuinely symphonic, before 'The End' delivers Ringo's only drum solo on any Beatles record, followed by a three-way guitar trade between McCartney, Harrison and Lennon — five bars each, in that order, three times — before the medley closes on the couplet that effectively serves as the band's epitaph: 'And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.'

Legacy

Abbey Road topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and has never really left the conversation about the best album The Beatles made — it regularly runs neck and neck with Sgt. Pepper and Revolver in critical polls, but where those albums are celebrated for pushing outward into new territory, Abbey Road is loved for precision: a band operating at the absolute peak of its abilities, choosing restraint and craft over experimentation for its own sake. The zebra crossing on the cover, shot in ten minutes on a single morning outside the studio, has become one of the most recognisable and endlessly recreated images in music history — a strange kind of immortality for what was, at the time, just four men crossing the street outside their studio.