If These Walls Could Sing review — charming history of Abbey Road Studios

A venerable collection of musical grandees are summoned by Mary McCartney in If These Walls Could Sing, her new documentary on Abbey Road Studios. Most of them call on a variety of supernatural descriptions to capture the place’s special qualities: “magical”; “spiritual”; “like a church”. McCartney’s famous father is more down-to-earth in his praise. “All the microphones work,” he says with pragmatic fervour. “It sounds silly but you can go to studios where they don’t.”

The oddly formal conversations between Paul and his photographer daughter are dispensed with quickly at the beginning of this charming, but not hugely revealing, memoir of a pop shrine. That story is after all well-established: Abbey Road made The Beatles, and vice versa, with more than a little help from producer George Martin along the way.

As motorists navigating north-west London will attest, the zebra crossing outside the studio remains an irritating touristic talisman to this day. It could have been so different: the cover of the group’s final studio album might have been shot on a volcano, or among the pyramids of Cairo, reveals a lugubrious Ringo Starr. Instead, “We thought, ‘sod it, let’s just cross the road,’” — the apotheosis of late-1960s ennui.

But there are some lesser-known nuggets here too, put together with visual flair, in a shamelessly nostalgic tone. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page recalls playing acoustic guitar on Shirley Bassey’s recording of “Goldfinger”, and watching her collapse, after overextending her final note to liaise perfectly with the projection of the film.

There is a touching account of a 1971 session by cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who was struggling with what she thought was nervous exhaustion, but turned out to be the beginnings of multiple sclerosis. She played a few bars of a Beethoven sonata, remembers producer Suvi Raj Grubb, before stopping and announcing: “That ends the entertainment for the day.” She never recorded at Abbey Road again.

There is much talk of the studio’s sound, but little attempt to define it. The most eloquent comes from film composer John Williams, who recorded his score for Return of the Jedi with the London Symphony Orchestra at the studio. “It was dry enough, not too reverberant,” he explains, “but not so dry that it didn’t have a nice bloom about it. It’s a gift to music.” Like many studio users, he loved the wine-serving canteen, an entirely alien concept to his American ways. “Everyone came back from lunch a little bit more relaxed,” he concedes.

By the time the powerhouses of Britpop discovered Abbey Road in the 1990s, the studio’s distinguished alumni had already cast their own spell on its lauded rooms. Oasis’s Noel Gallagher remembers the group being “asked to leave” during their Be Here Now sessions in 1997, not because of any orgiastic partying, as was rumoured, but because they had been playing all The Beatles’ albums back-to-back in darkness at “excruciating” volume, and had blown a piece of equipment.

There was no further trouble following the incident. Not for the first time, the sacred space had tamed a bunch of rowdy iconoclasts into glorious submission.

★★★★☆

On Disney Plus from January 6