Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studio (with a foreword by Paul McCartney)

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Pleased to see that the paperback of my book about Abbey Road Studios is out under the sign of the Penguin. I’ve spent my life with the music of The Beatles and Pink Floyd , for example, but now I feel as if I was there at the recording sessions.

Half the magic of Dark Side of the Moon that people still remember years later is not even Pink Floyd; it’s Hazel Yarwood’s voice.

These studios still exist and this book covers all the great bands and albums made there but also deals with the challenges along the way and the studios reinvention in the 21st century to embrace the modern Digital age and todays music. Being lucky enough to enter Abbey Road it was strange to hear stories about the rooms and studios I have entered.

As we get closer to the present day, there's more opinion, with a definite undercurrent of nostalgia, which perhaps is understandable, and anyway never veers too close to grumpy old man territory.Another classical pianist, Artur Schnabel, fretted that records meant performances might be listened to by the wrong sort of people. Emma Calvé, the great French soprano, was horrified on arrival at her first recording studio in 1902, refusing to alight from her carriage and four because the place looked more like a thieves’ den than a venue for an artiste of her standing. He was one of the presenters of the BBC rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test and one of the anchors of the corporation's coverage of Live Aid in 1985. He does a really meticulous job of here of charting the history of the world-famous studios, and it makes for a fascinating read.

Though the studio is, of course, synonymous with the legendary work of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, our history contains many lesser-known but equally special recordings from Paul Robeson, Fats Waller, The Hollies, Deep Purple, Cilla Black, Shirley Bassey, John Williams, Amy Winehouse, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, Massive Attack, Muse, Travis, Oasis, Nile Rodgers, Brockhampton, Adele, Little Simz, Sam Smith and many more. I enjoyed it because I have lived through the many changes in how music is recorded and listened to.

The hardback is white with a black zebra crossing embossed on both front and back, and the spine has the title embossed onto a little road sign, too.