Harpist who worked with the Beatles and the Bee Gees
Sheila Bromberg 1928-2021
In 1967, the harpist Sheila Bromberg got a phone call, offering her a session at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. It would involve her having to work from 9pm to midnight, said The Times, and as she’d started work that day at 8am, Bromberg was reluctant to take it on. But the “fixer” on the phone was someone who gave her a lot of jobs, so she thought it would be a mistake to turn it down. She hadn’t been told who she’d be playing with, but when she arrived at the studio, and started tuning her instrument, a man walked up behind her and asked, in a familiar Liverpool accent: “Well, what you got on the dots [the music score]?” Turning around, she saw Paul McCartney. That night, she played the opening sequence to She’s Leaving Home, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and earned a place in pop history as the first woman to perform on a Beatles album.
McCartney was the only Beatle in the studio that night, and he proved a hard taskmaster. She played the music as it was written on her score, but it didn’t satisfy him. “I think he had an idea in his head of what he wanted it to sound like, but he couldn’t describe it,” she said. She came up with various alternative versions, and the orchestra did take after take until, eventually, the leader of the string section stood up and said it was time to go home. “Well, I suppose that’s that then,” came McCartney’s voice from the control booth. When the album was released, Bromberg realised that they’d used the first take – but that an engineer had put a doubling effect on her solo sequence. “That’s what he was after,” she recalled herself thinking. “Clever!” A halfcentury later, when appearing on the BBC’s The One Show with Ringo Starr on the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, she admitted that she now appreciated McCartney’s perfectionism and was glad she’d worked with him. “But at the time, I could have wrung his neck.”
Sheila Bromberg was born in London in 1928, the daughter of an orchestral viola player and a seamstress. She took piano lessons as a child, then studied harp with Gwendolen Mason at the Royal Academy. By the 1960s, she’d become one of Britain’s “go-to” harpists. She worked with Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra. She played on two Bond soundtracks ( Dr. No and Goldfinger), with the Bee Gees and on Heatwave’s 1976 disco track Boogie Nights. She was also seen playing the harp in a wheelbarrow in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. She was paid £9 (about £170 now) for her work on Sgt. Pepper. Looking back, she said that she was very proud – and grateful – to have been a part of such a seminal album. However, she did find it a “little bit bizarre”, that of all the music she’d performed, “I am noted for four bars”.