"ABBEY ROAD ITSELF WAS A MASSIVE FACTOR"

GRAHAM NASH on how home comforts fuelled music from another planet.

4: GETTING BETTER The Hollies were The Beatles’ Parlophone labelmates and we were even recording at Abbey Road at the same time. But the Sgt. Pepper. sessions seemed quite secretive, like they had an extra mysterious edge to them. I remember getting a tape off Brian Epstein and The Turtles coming over to my apartment, straight off the plane, with my old friend Allan McDougall, who was a BMI songwriter. I proceeded to get them really high with this hash pipe I had, and then I said, Are you really, really high yet? And they said, “Yes,” and I put Sgt. Pepper on full blast. And it was astonishing to see the effect it had. Which tracks particularly blew our minds? Yikes! Well, She’s Leaving Home – what a beautiful piece of music. And A Day In The Life – above everything else on the record, A Day In The Life was almost from another planet. The record is total genius, and let’s get real here, I don’t think there will ever be a group as brilliant as The Beatles, but I think Abbey Road itself was a massive factor. Abbey Road was comfort. It was repeatability. You knew that if you put your drums in that particular place they sounded great. You could trust the studio and you could forget it. Sgt. Pepper taught people that the imagination really can be fully represented on a pop record. Think of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – unbelievably forward-thinking music. You really had to absorb every microsecond of it. And it’s still the same today. I listened to Sgt. Pepper two nights ago and it still gives me the same feeling of… Holy shit!