The surprises and delights of ABBEY ROAD, the Beatles’ final album – 50 years on
September 2019 is the golden anniversary of the Beatles’ multi-platinum album Abbey Road – the last work they recorded before their seismic breakup. It was both the end of the Sixties and the end of the greatest band of all time.
To hail this anniversary, world’s leading Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn is touring a theatre show of illumination, intrigue, surprises, delights, humour, excitement and entertainment – a fast-moving and smart illustrated history of our forever national-heroes the Beatles, their brilliant album Abbey Road, and other major events of that extraordinary year 1969.
Mark Lewisohn has the world’s greatest archive of Beatles stuff, harvested over 40+ years of unrivalled deep access to archives and public and private collections. He will be showing audiences a stunning array of strong and relevant content, with rare music, photos, films and choice memorabilia. Audiences (even superfans) will see and hear things they didn’t know existed.
Hornsey Road (that intriguing title will be explained …), tells all about how the album was made and the many momentous events that occurred during its recording, when the Beatles were joyously together inside the recording studio but falling apart outside. This was the year of their breakup, and the album was made at a time of turmoil in their personal and business lives.
Abbey Road wasn’t just one of so many glorious and triumphant chapters in the Beatles’ unparalleled time together, it was their best-selling and last piece of work. Audiences at Hornsey Road will be constantly grabbed by the sights and sounds that show how it all came together.
Mark Lewisohn
Mark Lewisohn has been writing about the Beatles since 1977, when he was nineteen, and he’s the author of The Beatles Recording Sessions, The Complete Beatles Chronicle and co-author of The Beatles’ London. Since 2003 he’s been immersed in researching and writing All These Years, a thirty-year project to set down the complete history of it all – a comprehensive, contextual and sociological narrative of 20th century life with the Beatles at its core. According to the Boswell Biography Festival, “It’s the most important biography project being written in Britain today.” Tune In, the first in the trilogy (the only one released to date) was a New York Times best-seller, and in 2015 it was the inaugural winner of the Penderyn Prize for music literature, presented at the Laugharne Festival. Mark is taking a few days out to perform these live shows before getting straight back down to work on volume 2.
The Beatles
The world’s appetite for the Beatles never diminishes, it just grows and grows – year on year, decade on decade, century now on century. As there can’t be any new Beatles music, people are diving ever deeper into finding out who they were and just how those four young men did it all. Great numbers love exploring the constantly-fascinating highways and byways of the Beatles’ remarkable lives and work, the thousands of component moments.
During this year, 2019, on top of all the still-regular Beatles news stories, there will be Universal Pictures’ June release of Yesterday, the much-anticipated Beatles feel-good comedy film by Danny Boyle, and this will be followed by Universal Music’s deluxe new issue of the Abbey Road album, set to emulate – and likely surpass – the enormous success of the White Album release of 2018. With plenty of previously unheard audio content, as well as a new remix of original album, the box will be the subject of an intense marketing campaign in the run up to Christmas.
So, one way or another, you can look forward to seeing the world’s most famous zebra crossing many, many more times before year’s end …
