DAVE JAMES writes:
Any fan who hasn’t read "The Beatles: All These Years, Volume One – Tune In," Mark Lewisohn’s first installment of his planned three part history of the Beatles is doing themselves a serious disservice. This was, is and always will be the gold standard when it comes to understanding the band and the four guys who changed music forever. As the author himself describes it:
“The Beatles story has been told very often but, in my view, rarely very well. I'm writing a wide-ranging history and my aim is true: to explore and comprehend what happened in and around the Beatles, and to write it even-handedly, without fear or favour, bias or agenda. A rock and roll group came out of Liverpool and shaped the last half of the 20th century the world over, and their music transcends changing times. The whole extraordinary story needs to be fully recorded and it needs to be done now, while first-hand witnesses are still with us.”
A N writes ...
I don’t think so. For one thing, the band were all still working on Let It Be when Abbey Road was recorded and released. If they were planning to split up at that point (and recent evidence suggests that was not on their minds at all until later) it seems they still knew that Let It Be was on the horizon.
Of course, much of Let It Be had already been recorded before they went into the studio to make Abbey Road, so in a sense you could say Abbey Road was a later album, and indeed some people have argued that point. To me, it’s kind of academic.
I don’t personally think that the Beatles went into the studio with the intention that Abbey Road was going to be the last thing they did together. I think even if they were thinking of calling it a day, they were probably thinking more about taking a break from the band rather than breaking it up for good.
I think all that came later on, things were said and done that were hard to unsay and undo, and The Beatles just weren’t a band any more. I can’t see any of them going into the studio with one another for an entire album if they had already decided that they did not want to be doing this any more.
DAVID V writes ...
The convention wisdom is that Abbey Road was supposed to be their final album and they wanted to go out on a high note. That is what I have believed for many years but recently there has been evidence that this is not true and that they were actually discussing yet another album. If this is true than it flies in the face of what we have always been told. Below is an article that goes into some detail regarding the Beatles planning another album.
