http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8188475.stm
By Lawrence Pollard
7 August 2009
Forty years ago on Saturday, one of the pop world's most infamous and
imitated album covers was shot in a little side street in north London.
The idea for the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album was initially
to call it Everest, after the favourite brand of cigarettes smoked by
their engineer Geoff Emerik.
Then the thought of doing a Himalayan cover helped kill the idea, and
instead they considered doing shoot closer to home.
"There's a sketch Paul McCartney did with four little stick men
crossing the Zebra," says Brian Southall, author of the history of
Abbey Road Studios.
"It gave a pretty good idea of what they wanted."
On the 8 August 1969 that the Fab Four walked out of No 3 Abbey Road,
having finished basic work on what would be - and they subsequently
said they knew would be - their last album.
The photographer who took the famous cover shot was the late Iain
Macmillan, a close friend of Brian Southall's, who knew the Beatles
through working with Yoko Ono.
"He was given about 15 minutes," says Mr Southall.
"He stood up a stepladder while a policeman held up the traffic, the
band walked back and forth a few times and that was that."
He only took seven or eight pictures, now in the Apple archive, but
they're fascinating for their difference to the end product we all know.
Conspiracy theories
Most striking is the one of the band walking in the opposite
direction (right to left), caught mid-stride in different poses.
It looks all wrong of course, and draws attention to the accidental
symmetry - despite Paul being out of step - of the final cover shot
with its pattern of four firm inverted V shapes.
In one of the alternative takes Paul McCartney is wearing sandals he
kicked off during the shoot.
This matters if you remember how the album cover was taken as
evidence for the conspiracy theories that "Paul is Dead."
Barefooted, out of step, the car number plate behind him referring to
his age - 28 if he'd lived - the Beatles forming a funeral procession for him.
George was cast as the gravedigger, Ringo the undertaker, and John the priest.
Years later in 1993, the very much alive Paul McCartney would spoof
the cover and the rumours for his "Paul is Live" concert album.
A lesser noted curiosity is that the album cover has no writing on it
and is just the picture.
That is thanks to John Kosh, who at the time, was creative director at Apple.
"I insisted we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover," he says.
"They were the most famous band in the world after all - EMI said
they'd never sell any albums if we didn't say who the band was, but I
got my way, and got away with it."
Zebra stripes
And it is hard to think of an album cover that has been so thoroughly
repeated.
Dozens of bands have put stripes on their cover, like the Red Hot
Chilli Peppers, but of course the biggest tribute comes from the
thousands of fans and tourists who go to leafy north London every year.
If you want to check the crossing now, there's a webcam.
Watch it for a while and you will see scampering fans snatching at a
gap in the traffic to recreate the shoot - much to the annoyance of
local drivers.
One black taxi cabbie, Ron, who also used to drive a bus down Abbey
Road, told the BBC World Service: "I come here all the time and its
always been the same - it really does annoy you."
"All they're doing is posing on the crossing. Someone's going to get
mown down one of these days there's no doubt about it."
Here's hoping Ron avoids the crossing on Saturday morning when
Beatles fans will stage a mass crossing in honour of the photo shoot.
It is not known how many of those fans are injured on the crossing every year.
But the council have to repaint the wall next to the crossing every
three months to cover over fans' graffiti.
And the Abbey Road street sign has now been mounted out of reach up a
wall, so often has it been defaced or stolen.
If there was a way to steal the stripes off the zebra you can bet
Beatle's fans would have taken them too.
Or maybe they haven't thanks to the rumour that the famous crossing
you now see isn't actually the original and has been moved for safety reasons.
And who would want to steal the wrong zebra crossing?
.
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