6 January : Abbey Road

The number 1 UK album at the start of 1970 was Abbey Road. Also in the top 20 were Let it Bleed, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Led Zeppelin II and Basket of Light, not a bad selection all things considered.

Abbey Road holds a special place in my heart as the first grown-up LP I asked my parents to get me for Christmas. I still have that copy. Rather like Dark Side of the Moon, the fact it has been with me so long breeds a certain over-familiarity, and these days I don’t play it so much, but listening to it again this evening it all came together, right now, over me.

The first thing to say is that this is not the Fab Four; nor is it day tripping under marmalade skies: this is music on a boat on a river, floating downstream out of the sixties and into the seventies. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is usually  credited as sparking musical revolution; Abbey Road didn’t, but it should have. The band were reinventing themselves, and popular music, again. I can’t think of anything else in the Beatles songbook that develops like the coda to I Want You (She’s So Heavy) or the intro to Come Together.

Second, it has some great songs on it, notably George Harrison’s Something and Here Comes the Sun (the latter at least in part incorporating Harrison’s feelings about the Beatles coming to an end) and John Lennon’s Because and Sun King.

Third, the playing is great throughout by all of the band and their guests. Paul’s Rickenbacker bass is, er, fab: tight, melodic, inventive.  Ringo Starr’s drums are perfection. The band’s harmony singing is mature and beautiful. The studio, and George Martin’s use of it, is an instrument in itself. The whole is very musical.

But it has to be said that Abbey Road is a strange album, in many respects greater than the sum of its parts, especially the long medley on side 2 of half-finished and unfinished songs, none of which hang around long enough to outstay their welcome.  There is no overt sense of trying to be new, as there was on Sgt. Pepper, and yet it still feels new, although (or perhaps because) they all knew it would be their last album as a band.

Fifty years later, I can’t think of another album like it, and I can’t think of any other band who would have been able to make it.

You probably have it already, but if not here it is in all its glory on Spotify