Rules of sound – Newspaper Kommersant No. 2 (7447) dated 01/10/2023

Disney+ is showing Mary McCartney’s If These Walls Could Sing, about London’s Abbey Road Studios. What the authors were interested in, besides the fact that The Beatles recorded at this studio, found out Boris Barabanov.

In nature, there are not many documentaries in which the recording studio is in the lead role. I remember only the film by Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl “Sound City” and “At the foot of the volcano” – a tape about the studio that The Beatles producer George Martin built on the island of Montserrat. It is strange that so far there has not been a big film about Abbey Road – the great London studio, immortalized in the title of the album of the same The Beatles.

The eldest daughter of Paul and Linda McCartney, Mary, took over the business. She is a photographer, and in the video format, until now, she has been mainly engaged in vegan cooking programs – her show “Mary McCartney Serves It Up” was even nominated for an Emmy. Mary McCartney got into Abbey Road Studios as a baby. It is unlikely that she remembers how The Beatles recorded the album of the same name there, she was not even a year old then. However, photos remained in the family archive, and most importantly, a big legend remained, and Mrs. McCartney, of course, feels like a part of it, like her brother James, a rock musician, and sister Stella, a fashion designer.

Mary McCartney tells the story of Abbey Road Studios from its inception in 1931. To be fair, Mary McCartney spends a lot of time on the history of classical recording, from studio sessions with composer Edward Elgar and the London Symphony Orchestra to sessions with cellist Jacqueline Dupré and pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. But the main dish is, of course, rock and roll.

The Abbey Road studio rock and roll recording guide is George Martin’s son Giles, who has been in charge of The Beatles’ archives and remixes and remasters of their classics for many years. And the first of the rock and roll on the screen is Cliff Richard, who is now 82 years old. He got into Abbey Road studios before The Beatles.

The Beatles’ studio magic is directly related to their Hamburg experience of daily club performances and the genius of George Martin as a sound producer. Ringo Starr in this film refers to The Beatles as a “street band” that was able to work without rest. The first album was recorded in one day, and the film shows how focused the producer was on the work, how exactly he knew what he wanted to achieve from the group. At the same time, all parts were recorded on only two tracks. It’s hard to believe today, especially if you watch “If These Walls Could Sing” after the film “Sound City”, which depicts the culture of expensive studios with multi-channel consoles.

But these are still flowers. The entire complex song “A Day in the Life” was recorded on four tracks. Moreover, a whole symphony orchestra – the idea with an orchestral fragment came to Paul McCartney right during the recording of the song – fit on one track. Neither the band, nor the producer, nor the orchestra has done anything like this before. But the studio allowed their imagination to go as far as possible.

Another important milestone in the history of Abbey Road is the recording of music for Bond. An undoubted music lover’s pleasure are the memories of Jimmy Page, who, even before his triumph with Led Zeppelin, was a sought-after session musician, and first got into the Abbey Road studio at the age of 17. So, in Mary McCartney’s film, he talks about recording John Barry’s music for the film “Goldfinger” and how Shirley Bessie sang literally at arm’s length from him. Here, Mary McCartney glues on an old interview with Shirley Bessie herself, and the viewer gets a three-dimensional picture of the creation of a masterpiece literally first-hand. The singer had to hold the last note until the credits ended, and at the end she just fell unconscious. By the way, Shirley Bessie, like Cliff Richard, is alive and well, just recently a video version of the concert “The Sound of 007: Live from the Royal Albert Hall”, which took place in October 2022, was released on digital platforms. There she sings “Diamonds are forever” and “Goldfinger”. Maybe it was the air of the Abbey Road studio that was so healing.

Another miracle of Abbey Road is Pink Floyd and their work on the album “The Dark Side of the Moon”. It is valuable that two irreconcilable opponents and at the same time two bearers of Pink Floyd’s DNA, David Gilmour and Roger Waters, talk about the record in the film. Naturally, they are not together in the frame. But the story of one complements the memory of the other, and it’s a compelling story. “I find it incredible that this was even possible,” says David Gilmour, nearly 50 years after The Dark Side of the Moon was released.

Each of the significant works featured in the film was not only musically talented, but also innovative in terms of recording technology. In the film, there was a place for a story about the heads of the studio, and about the engineers who stood in the shadow of the musicians and producers. However, the technical side of recording legendary albums still takes up much less space than the monologues of the stars. And if one of the current sound engineers decides to watch the film to learn something new about microphones or the acoustics of studio rooms, it is unlikely that they will find something that they did not already know. Yet Mary McCartney’s film is primarily focused on the shining of legends. As well as many tapes and entire series with the participation of her father, released in the last three years. In that sense, If These Walls Could Sing is more of a continuation and expansion of a conversation that began during the release of McCartney III (2020) than a historical document of value in its own right.