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The following information was collected for personal use from the multitude of various magazines and interviews issued around the time of the Anthology. At the time, much of the material was quickly collected without any reference to its source, however most of the information sources used have since been identified. No attempt is being made to claim authorship nor infringe any copyrights and the material is reproduced here for private use by Beatles fans.
If I've unintentionally neglected to credit anybody for either information or images then I offer my sincere apologies; please contact me and I will rectify the omission or if preferred remove the material.
Many thanks to Paul and Steve for offering to host the material at http://whizzo.ca/beatles/rs/gobnotch.html and http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/ respectively.
The material follows roughly the same format as Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Recording Sessions book, and does not cover any of the Anthology related promo CDs, none of which seemed to include any exclusive musical material not also released on the comercially available Anthology releases.
Amendments, suggestions and new material would be warmly welcomed.
According to an excellent and lengthy article in L.R.E King's book Fixing A Hole, the first time anyone at EMI officially went looking through the archives for unreleased Beatles material was in 1976, when the Beatles contract with them legally expired. At irregular intervals between then and 1985, EMI executives and staff, including Geoff Emerick, worked on mixing and compiling a single album of previously unreleased material eventually called Sessions. Although the album made it as far as the test pressing stage (and was subsequently bootlegged), the whole project was finally abandoned (mainly due to the objections of George, Paul and Ringo, who were apparently never consulted about the album) and the EMI tapes were left to gather dust for another decade.
Eventually, in 1995, immediately after the completion of the Live At The BBC album, the remaining Beatles and George Martin began compiling and mixing unreleased Beatles material for the forthcoming Beatles Anthology.
The Beatles had blown out of Abbey Road Studio Two a long time ago; in fact the last time all four Beatles were there together was the 20th of August 1969. When they returned together in 1995 there was still an ancient Hammond organ sitting on the battered parquet floor in the famous Studio Two. There was an old Steinway upright in the corner. And the famed sounds effects closet, which the band members raided like school children, was still under the stairway, empty now except for a thunder machine, a cardboard box full of tambourines and a flickering florescent light.
The
reunion at Abbey Road
Harrison, McCartney and Martin went for a nostalgic meander on their first day back at Abbey Road, popping into Studio Three where a dumbfounded Michael Nyman, composer of The Piano soundtrack, was recording. Mel Gibson, observing the soundtrack recording for Braveheart in Studio One, was overcome when he learned that Paul, George and Ringo were in the same building on their first day here together for something like twenty five years (by an odd quirk of fate, it was George, Paul and Ringo who attended the very last group session here, again without John, on the 3rd of January 1970).
Paul: It's strangely unchanged. Studios One and Two are largely unchanged. But Three is modern. Two, well, they don't wanna change the room that 'got' the Beatles. And it got a lot of Cliff's early good stuff, Move It, Living Doll. And now Oasis. EMI is like the Beeb, it has rules. And we used to make a lot of noise, doing things like Helter Skelter or a loud track anyway, and you'd always get the classical guy next door - in our time it was Daniel Barenboim's producer - going bang, bang, we're doing a quiet classical piece and we can hear you though the walls. The walls obviously aren't that good for soundproofing. And we'd be going, under our breath, fucking bastard classical, we subsidise them! However we would turn it down a little bit, pull out a bit of a sulk, put the acoustics on. We lived with it.
George Martin: I am trying to tell the story of the Beatles lives in music, from the moment they met to the moment they split up in 1970. I have listened to everything we ever recorded together. Every take of every song, every track of every take, virtually everything that was ever committed to tape and labelled 'Beatles'. I've heard about 600 separate items in all. I didn't start any serious listening until early this year, when I got Paul, George and Ringo to come in occasionally and listen with me. Of course they couldn't sit through all the sessions, so I would tend to have them come in about once a week.
Paul: It’s been trippy going through it all, sitting there in Abbey Road with George Martin and George and Ringo trying to make some sort of story, God it’s so strange after all this time
George Harrison: The main gist of it with the music is to find the most ancient Beatles music possible and come in chronological order through the various other records we made and bring it up to date.
Paul McCartney: It's deja vu, actually. We're sitting in Abbey Road Studio Two, where we always worked, listening to the work we did when we were twenty. It is quite strange but it's exciting as well. It's like being archaeologists. We're actually finding tracks that we didn't remember recording, that we didn't want, or thought 'No, that's not too good'. Now of course, after thirty years, they don't look too bad at all. There were obvious reasons why a lot of the stuff didn't make it into the shops, but we're not looking at it from a recording quality point of view. It's history, and what we've been putting together is an historical document.
The material guarded at Abbey Road Studios was largely in excellent condition.
George Martin: They really know how to look after their tapes. Those that they have kept, that is, because they destroyed an awful lot of the early ones. In fact, there are few tapes left from the early 1962-63 sessions. A lot of the material that has come to light from that period has been in the from of laquers and acetate discs. Occasionally, some quarter inch tapes have emerged, but no masters as such. We only managed to get hold of two tracks from the very first session the boys did in June 1962, and I happened to have one of them. My wife found it and it transpired that no one else had it. That was Love Me Do, the other being Besame Mucho, both with Pete Best on drums. There are other things which I thought had gone forever, such as an early version of Please Please Me which we recorded in September 1962. It doesn't have the harmonica on it but it's very interesting, with a totally different drum sound.
Archived Beatle tapes are never allowed outside the Abbey Road building. As a result, all the listening and subsequent mixing sessions were held at the studio's penthouse suite. The normally beneficial modern technology that is plentiful at Abbey Road posed a dilemma for George Martin.
George Martin: If I was going to remix a recording made in the 1960s on four or even eight tracks, there would be no point in processing it in a modern manner. What I really wanted was an old valve desk, although I knew that it would be causing more trouble that it was worth, because if we found something suitable it would inevitably be unreliable. To our great fortune we discovered this early 1970s console and there is no question that it does affect the sound.
US$788,000 worth of modern equipment was replaced with this 1970s mixing board for a string of mixing sessions which began in earnest at Abbey Road on 22nd May 1995.
George Martin: In the spirit of the exercise I couldn't justify using modern effects processors like digital reverb, or even echo plates, which didn't exist in the 60s. The only way we could achieve echo was by using either a chamber or tape delay. Unfortunately, neither of the two echo chambers that we used at Abbey Road was available. One has an enormous electrical plant in it, emitting terrible humming noises. Eventually they were able to dig out and refurbish the second chamber to make it work for us the way it used to, even to the extent of putting back a lot of the old metalwork sewage pipes, which were originally glazed and actually contributed to the chamber's acoustic qualities.
Among those tracks considered for inclusion, but ultimately vetoed, were Love Of The Loved and To Know Her Is To Love Her (both from the Decca audition), Red Hot (live from Hamburg), She's A Woman (live from Shea Stadium), Think For Yourself, Love You To, Paperback Writer (vocal only rendition), Nowhere Man (Live from Tokyo), Getting Better, Magical Mystery Tour, the mysterious Hey La Le Lu / All Together Now and the legendary 27 minute version of Helter Skelter (all EMI studio tracks unless otherwise specified).
George Martin: The live recordings we listened to from the Cavern and Hamburg were too poor to consider.
Alternate EMI takes of From Me To You, Getting Better, Magical Mystery Tour, Yer Blues and Paul’s demo of Goodbye were included on a reference DAT prepared in mid 1994 featuring material slated for the Anthology CDs. Apple is also believed to have acquired an acetate of Paul singing an acoustic version of Love Of The Loved.
The live Quarrymen tape with John singing Putting On The Style and Baby Let’s Play House (recently purchased at auction by EMI) also had some work done on it, but was eventually omitted (possibly due to the extremely poor quality of the recording).
Paul McCartney apparently wanted Carnival Of Light on Anthology 2 but George, Ringo and Yoko didn't, and there was also speculation that George and Ringo originally vetoed Come And Get It from Anthology 3 because it was never intended for the Beatles.
The Anthology videos also include a large number of small selections from the EMI archive tapes, including many takes and alot of Beatles studio chat that didn’t make it onto the CDs. Most of this material was presumably chosen, edited and mixed during these sessions.
Neil Aspinall: The Beatles didn't hold anything back from the three Anthology CDs. Everything they thought was worth releasing is on those three CDs.
Bob Smeaton, Anthology TV series director, has revealed that footage of the three Beatles and George Martin at Abbey Road together was filmed for possible inclusion in the forthcoming Anthology series (see entry for 23rd June 1994 for the full quote). None of it ever seems to have been used.
Sources include: The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions - Mark Lewisohn (Hamlyn Publishing 1988); Fixing A Hole - LRE King (Storyteller Productions 1989); Mojo Magazine Dec 95; Independent On Sunday 16th Jul 95; Q Magazine Jun 97; Beatles Monthly No. 235 Nov 95, No. 236 Dec 95, No. 249 Jan 97 (Beat Publications)
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Don't miss the Whizzo page on The Beatles Anthology book, CDs and DVD!
March 21 & 22 1995
November 21 1995
