Mojo - The Music Magazine

SADDENED BY NEWS that Abbey Road Studios are to be sold off? Join the club. It's depressing on so many levels - not least that sole remaining UK major label, EMI, could be so grievously strapped that a fire sale of the family jewels is the only option. What's next for ebay? Robbie Williams? The Hayes Archive? The Beatles catalogue itself?

Presuming for an instant that EMI's price is matched (an offer of £30m was turned down this week), what future, we have to wonder, has Abbey Road in other hands? Sadly, the least likely outcome would appear to be its continuation as a working studio, despite its enduring reputation as an inspirational facility associated with revolutionary recordings and ground-breaking post-productions.

Almost the best that could be hoped for would be its transformation into a museum, where the public could gawp at the Studio 2 Mellotron or the desk that captured Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. The worst - its innards stripped out and sold off, followed by its re-conversion into an exclusive NW3 town house, presumably for some cash-sodden Russian oligarch - is unthinkable.

Evita irritant Andrew Lloyd-Webber has declared an interest in "saving" Abbey Road. We await more details with bated breath. If he were to pull it off, it would be a karmic default swap of unprecedented proportions, perhaps enough to redeem even his awful Jim Steinman collaboration Whistle Down The Wind.

But if Abbey Road were to shut, it would be only the latest in a recent flurry of closures of legendary recording studios on both sides of the Atlantic. The oughties saw the end of record-making at the Record Plant in Sausalito (Fleetwood Mac's Rumours), The Townhouse in West London (The Jam's Setting Sons), and The Hit Factory in New York (Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA). The Britannia Row desk that captured Pink Floyd's The Wall and Joy Division's Closer lives on, but transported halfway across London in SW6. The room in Islington that held Another Brick In The Wall Part 2's kids' choir and resounded to Peter Hook's murderous Isolation bassline is now a training centre for budding audio engineers.

The demise of the "classic" major label funding model - record company hand group big album advance, group spend it on expensive recording studio, group spend rest of career in hock to label - has been the catalyst. For many obvious reasons, that model will not be universally mourned, but there's no doubt that with it will disappear a certain, much-cherished type of rock album, redolent of big rooms and epic obsessions.

With the ascendancy of Pro-Tools, and the increasing sophistication of DIY recording options, it is now easier and cheaper to make a record, and you can make it wherever you like, or can afford. The bar is lower now, for good as well as ill. But surely no-one would deny the unique romance of dedicated recording studios, and the witness they bear to musical serendipity.

In 2008, I was invited to hymn The Rolling Stones' Jumpin' Jack Flash for a Japanese documentary team, and privileged to be interviewed in the very room at Olympic Studios in Barnes where Keith Richards had first fired up that filthy riff. If I'd known then that Olympic had less than a year to live, I'd have taken a photograph.

If only the same had occurred when two colleagues and I sat in Abbey Road's attic, in August last year, listening to these. The End for Abbey Road? Say it ain't so, Sir Paul.

Danny Eccleston

Check out our Abbey Road playlist!

Photo by Sander Lamme