12. The BeatlesAbbey Road
With The Beatles I was a skipping stone: I was like one of those stones that gets thrown on a lake and you try to flash that stone as far as you can. That was my relationship with The Beatles. So I remember as a kid, as a really young kid, listening to ‘She Loves You’ and I remember my dad had all the Parlophone 45s and I kind of remember going to see A Hard Day’s Night and going to see Help! at the cinema, but I was never a Beatles fan. I was, like, "yeah, ok!" But I was never one of those who went, "oh they’re brilliant" and had posters on the wall. I missed Revolver – it didn’t make sense to me when I was a kid – but Abbey Road was The Beatles’ album that got me, especially that whole side two thing. The way it was made up of small sections of songs and melodies and lyrics that seemed to follow this curve. Moments like ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’ are just gorgeous, but it had the singles on it too. The carefully wrapped arrangements acted as core structure, but Abbey Road had freedom as well. I mean, it was just the way the whole album moved. I can’t explain it.
For me it’s a perfect album. It’s another one of those albums which gets missed by a lot of people because people say Sgt. Pepper’s or Revolver or The White Album. But The White Album was a damaged album to me. There are some fantastic tracks on it but every time I put the CD on I want to jump tracks. It has too many sleeping policemen in it. But Abbey Road as an album I can sit and listen to it in one big session. Abbey Road was an album that rooted me in that period.
