Beatles get back to No1 in album charts

The Beatles’ Abbey Road is on course to top the album charts again, 50 years after its release.

The album, which emerged from the final recording sessions in which all of the Fab Four took part, stormed into the charts in October 1969, spending 17 weeks at number one.

Buoyed by the release of a 50th anniversary edition, including previously unreleased material, Abbey Road has stolen a lead of 12,000 chart sales over last week’s chart-topper, by Beatles fanatic Liam Gallagher.

Abbey Road’s album cover, showing John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Sir Paul Mccartney and George Harrison striding single file over the zebra crossing outside the studios in north-west London, is one of the most widely recognised in music history.

In August fans of the Liverpool group flocked to the zebra crossing to mark the album’s 50th anniversary.

Beatles lookalike band the Fab Four arrived in a replica of Lennon’s psychedelic Rollsroyce.

Oasis singer Gallagher, 47, last week scored his second solo number one album, titled Why Me? Why Not, which he described as “biblical”.