Isabel Langguth
12 Feb 2025
Abbey Road’s history has often been shoved in a Beatles shaped box, while a rich and unique cinematic past is left behind.
This May, across the pond in Jeffersonville, Indiana, “Abbey Roaders” will be kicking off the summer with a five-day celebration of all things Beatles. Abbey Road On the River is proclaimed to be the largest organised celebration of the Beatles in the world, and the frequency of Beatles themed fun will increase as we approach World Beatles Day in June.
Situated in St Johns Wood, in West London, the street is unassuming. Without the signposts and the assorted Beatles memorabilia stuck in shop windows, you probably wouldn’t spare a second glance as you walked by.
And yet, a series of black and white stripes and a Victorian era townhouse make Abbey Road one of the most interesting places in London. Around the clock you can watch people snap photos of one another posing midstride on the zebra crossing. A nightmare for drivers, and delight for fans.
Outside the studio, there is a wall where visitors are encouraged to leave their mark, and it is sprawling with love for Paul, John, George and Ringo.
Abbey Road Studios had a legendary history before and after the Beatles and has played a vital role in making legendary soundtracks for many iconic films, and that role has been overshadowed by one of Britain’s most beloved bands.
In the past, the soundtrack for Indiana Jones: Raiders of The Lost Ark (1981) has been mistaken as the first film score to be recorded at Abbey Road Studios. While it was not, the classic was very early on in the studio’s film scoring career and was the first film score produced out of Abbey Road to reach such a wide listening audience.
The soundtrack received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, but to many Indiana Jones fan’s dismay, it lost to the score for Chariots of Fire (1981).
To this day, The Raiders March is considered one of the most iconic theme songs of all time and has since been included in the other Indiana Jones sequels that followed.
While Abbey Road was the first purpose-built re- cording studio ever, it was built for recording records, not film scores. The control room in Studio One was too small, and the layout meant that producers and musicians were often facing away from one another.
During one of the film’s early recording sessions at Abbey Road, Steven Spielberg famously joked: “Which way do you want me facing? The speakers or the screen?”
And yet, in imperfect circumstances, one of the most legendary soundtracks ever was produced.
Two years later, another bout of creative genius to come out of Abbey Road was Return of the Jedi (1983). At the time, the Star Wars film was thought to be the last, and even though it was not, the soundtrack is epic enough to do justice to a finale. Unlike the previous Star Wars films, the whole soundtrack was recorded in the same room at the same time over just ten days, the process must have been painstaking but well worth the result.
Just before the start of a new millennia, Abbey Road was a part of another film that will forever leave its imprint on cinema.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick’s final film, is a part of Abbey Road’s history that goes largely unnoticed. The two are an unusual pairing; most would not think Kubrick’s last project with Warner Bros would have a score recorded in a small Victorian house in West London. However, Eyes Wide Shut is a lot more English than people might think, despite being set in New York, the film was filmed in England at Pine Wood studios. Kubrick sent set designers to New York to measure the dimensions of the streets and buildings and replicated the city flawlessly.
Kubrick was known to be a perfectionist, and his expectations for the soundtrack were no less rigorous, and he wanted the genius of the creatives at Abbey Road. English composer Jocelyn Pook, who was still very early on in her career then, was hired by Kubrick to compose the soundtrack. Despite limited time as a composer, Pook and the producers at Abbey Road created a soundtrack that perfectly complimented Kubrick’s direction and met his notoriously high expectations.
Today, endless film scores are still recorded at Abbey Road Studios. The process may be a little more technical now, but the same creativity and passion that drove filmmakers to Abbey Road in the early days is still very much present today.
Once one dives into the lesser-known histories of Abbey Road Studios, the wall covered in love for solely the Beatles makes the past of Abbey Road Studios seems a little sparse.