Alan Parsons reveals the “genius” who forged The Beatles’ sound
As far as internships for creating progressive, forward-thinking pop music can go, you won’t get much better than being behind the scenes at Abbey Road Studios in the late 1960s. Being a fly on the wall while some of the greatest pop of the decade is being made. Getting a once-in-a-lifetime look at the creative processes of the likes of Pink Floyd, The Hollies and… some also-rans called The Beatles, I guess. We know what a leg up this can give a person because Alan Parsons already did it and became a major league musician in their own right to boot.
After dropping out of school at 16, Parsons lucked into a training scheme with EMI Records. One which prepared him for a career behind the scenes in the music industry. After completing the course, he was brought into Abbey Road to work as a tape operator. This is more or less a fancy word for the tea boy, but when your very first job is to head out to Apple Corps studios on Savile Row and assist on the Let It Be project, and you’re making brews for actual John Lennon and actual Paul McCartney and the like, that’s something you swallow your pride for.
In this particular case though, Parsons was needed for more than just the occasional builders with two sugars. In an interview with Uncut, he explained: “My job was to keep the tape rolling and replace it when needed. The Beatles were literally recording all the time during these sessions.”
Clearly, he did the job to a high standard, because when the band reconvened one final time to make ‘Abbey Road’, the band specifically asked for him to assist. The way Parsons talks about the experience is positively Forrest Gump-like in its proximity to rock history.
In the same interview, Parsons said: “Paul doing endless takes of ‘Oh! Darling’. I remember George doing ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun‘ on his own. I remember John doing ‘Polythene Pam’ and also coming in while I was doing the final mix of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and telling me to cut it dead rather than fade it out!” However, his closeness to the project also shows that just because something brilliant is on a Beatles record doesn’t necessarily mean one of the fabs was responsible for it.
Parsons was also particularly effusive about the work of Geoff Emerick. Emerick is one of the true unsung heroes of The Beatles. The way that John’s voice sounds on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’? Emerick worked out how to do that (putting his voice through a Leslie speaker, then back again and re-recording it, natch). The fluttering synths on ‘Here Comes The Sun’? Parsons talks us through how Emerick achieved that “by threading sticky tape around one of the pressure rollers on the tape player, so it was literally juddering all the time.”
It’s not for nothing that in the interview, Parsons labels Emerick “a genius”, and clearly, his work would go on to influence the rest of Parsons’s career. From his engineering work on Dark Side of the Moon to his solo work with The Alan Parsons Project. Of course, great art comes from experimentation and creative nous, but it also comes from listening and learning from anyone around you, from a Beatle to your Line Manager.
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