SOUL SURMISE

MY DAY IN ABBEY ROAD

It was February 1998 and it caught up on me unawares. I had gotten off the tube at St John’s Wood Station and walked down Acacia Road. I had no preconceived thoughts or anticipation about what was about to happen. 

I was thinking about the fact that I was here to be part of a film about the late great Rich Mullins, a Christian songwriter that I had had the privilege of spending some time with.  Rich’s friends were making a tribute film and because of Rich’s love for Ireland thought I might add some nuance about that love. He had stayed with us in Dublin and called an instrumental track, 78 Eaton Wood Green, after the house. I was excited about meeting Jimmy Abegg, Rick Elias and Ben Pearson who was making the film. Rich had passed away just five months before and being with his friends was still part of the grieving.

I was also mindful that my wife was pregnant with our first child. It was due in a week’s time. I was hoping she didn’t go into labour until I got back home again!

Anyway, minding my own business I turned a corner and there it was. Wow! My body physically reacted. My emotions fired. There in front of me was the zebra crossing… THE zebra crossing. It was like looking at something almost sacred. Now it isn’t and if you are theologically squeamish don’t quote me and abuse the hyperbole, as some have in the past. I am using sacred poetically but poetically sacred seems the correct word.

I knew this zebra crossing. It was a part of me. It was part of the culture. I had just turned into Abbey Road. Abbey Road! The name of the last album that The Beatles recorded. A classic album even by Beatles’ standards. Come Together, Something, Here Comes The Sun. That amazing medley. Iconic and this cover was the icon on the cover. The Beatles walking across the Abbey Road zebra crossing, exactly where I am walking now.

I fell in love with The Beatles as a fifteen year old boy in 1976. I have spoken about how finding Jesus out of a love for this band did influence my faith. I go off and listen to many other bands, bands that I love, but I always come back to The Beatles. As I listen to their records I feel the feelings of my teens and twenties and thirties and… 

Now, it must have been that, in February 1998, I was not listening as much as I had. Walking into this space took me by too much surprise. I wasn’t considering them as I had walked down Acacia Road.

Now I was in the space. A few tourists were around about me. They stopped to look at the wall outside the studio I was heading towards. Abbey Road Studios where most of The Beatles’ records were recorded. Fans sign the wall outside. I stopped for a moment and joined the fans, checking out the names.

Then I had work to do. I walked through the gates and through the door of the Studio. I suddenly started to think that there was no way that they would let me in here. The Beatles (broken up almost 30 years earlier) might be there or some other big band. I wasn’t getting in. A couple of fans were turned away. I approached the desk, gave my name and was told that I had been expected and pointed in the direction of Studio 2.

It was now getting crazy in my head and heart and soul. Studio 2. That was where they did it. The Beatles used this “office” to change the entire world. I opened the door and Jimmy Abegg came over, gave me a hug and introduced me to the others.

The console space is reasonably small and immediately I was at the recording desk. Now it was bigger than any The Beatles had in the sixties but it was where their desk sat. Breathe. Then I looked to my left and there was the window that looks down into the studio. Two steps and I was at that window looking in. Oh my goodness me!

As well as filming the tribute video, Jimmy and Rick were recording the orchestral parts of an album that Rich was working on before he died. It later came out as the Jesus Album. I watched, mesmerised at where I was and what had happened. Later I got to walk down the steps and for a moment stand on the floor where The Beatles stood to make Please, Please Me, A Hard Days Night, Revolver… 

So, there I spent the day. People I knew came in to see Jimmy and Rick and to just stand and bask in the historic space. It was a special day. The film worked out great and I was honoured to be in it alongside Amy Grant, Michael W Smith and a host of star names.

As I headed back up Acacia Road to catch the train to Heathrow. My head was full of The Beatles. I thought about all those records, the photos I had looked at of that studio. What an amazing day I had had. Maybe if the child  we were expecting was a girl (she was) we could call her Abbey. Road seems not appropriate. It was only years later that I thought of Abbey Rhoda. Maybe Caitlin’s lucky it took me a little time.

SWAPPING A FEW SINGLES FOR 4 BEATLES' ALBUMS - MY LIFE IN THE MUSIC I LOVED -

It was the summer of 1976 as I remember it. I was still only fourteen. For four years I had been a teeny bopper consuming copious amounts of 45s. It was another 7” single that led to the next chapter on my musical development and probably emotional development too. Eventually, a few years up ahead it led me to spiritual revelation. I was in the middle of adolescence after all. 

For some reason, maybe because Paul McCartney’s band Wings were the biggest on the planet at that time and playing concerts all over the world, in 1976 Parlophone decided to release all of the Beatles singles in been picture sleeves. As well as the 21 original UK releases, Parlophone released Yesterday for the very first time. It made the Top 10 and was the very first Beatles’ product that I owned. 

It was the b-side that completely captivated me. I am convinced that I heard it a few years earlier at my very first school Christmas Party when the cool and trendy Upper Sixth used newly released The Beatles 1962-66 to proliferate the dance tunes. I Should Have Known Better was never a single, never a hit, yet for me the very first time I set it on my record player I heard that sound. The driving beat, the catchy melodies, the harmonies, that harmonica. This was a step up from The Glitter Band, Slik and Smokie!

As fate would have it my best buddy at the time, Colin Millar, had just inherited a few Beatles’ albums from an uncle. Now, Colin was a year younger than me and perhaps still in the middle of his teenybopper phase. Whatever, he agreed to swap me four, close to original released date, Beatles’ LPs for a stack of singles, none of which I can even remember. I have felt a little bit bad about it ever since but Colin you are not getting them back!

As luck (“providence” for the theologically squeamish) would have it, the four records were Please Please Me, A Hard Days Night, Beatles For Sale and Help. They were the pop tunes that drew me in before I had to  grow up enough to digest Sgt Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band.

At the very same time in a wee shop on Broughshane Street in Ballymena, just across from Camerons, I found the first Beatles Monthly. The 1976 Beatles’ revival sparked the republishing of all the original Beatles Monthly magazine with a few pages around it about what the four ex Beatles were doing now.

All of this and it was not very long until the posters on my wall changed. Santa brought me Wings Over America, a live triple album, and two George Harrison records, 33 & 1/3 and The Best Of George Harrison.

Without question this was the next phase in my life. The Beatles took music from something that I loved to a resource in the development of my mindset. Though I fell in love initially with their pop records, by Christmas I was listening to George Harrison singing about God and social concerns in Bangladesh. 

Ballymena was a country town and The Beatles had me looking over my father’s neatly groomed hedge and begin to wonder about the world’s big questions way out there. That afternoon when Colin Millar off loaded some outdated pop records, was the afternoon when I took a turning on the road that led to God, international development and peacemaking. I have no doubt about it!

THE GLAM ROCK KIDS - MY LIFE IN THE MUSIC I LOVED

(in this series on my blog I am going to share my life in the land mark albums I loved. It is to meet the Facebook needs of those asking for 10 albums that... and to give my children the story of my life... When looking for the definitive album of my late Primary School days I realised there were no albums... I was a singles' boy back then!)

It was around my 11th birthday. I was staying over with my cousin Sharon. She was a couple of years older than me and I remember looking around her bedroom that was wall to wall Donny Osmond and David Cassidy posters. My friend Brian had taken me into a record shop that summer to buy Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs' Sea Side Shuffle but it was looking at my cousin's wall that got me thinking about music for the very first time. There was no record player in our house. No songs, apart from what might have appeared on early morning radio.

A switch went off in my soul that evening. I started listening to the Sunday afternoon chart show, I asked Santa for a record player for Christmas. I need to be honest and say that I was a Donny Osmond fan for a good year after. I bought Jackie magazine and had Donny on my wall too!

At Gracehill Primary School, it soon became the Tuesday lunchtime routine, to gather around a radio at 1 o’clock to hear who was this week’s number 1. I remember it being overjoyed when it was Donny’s Twelfth of Never and the mad excitement when Slade’s Cum On Feel the Noize went straight in at number 1. They did it with Skweeze Me, Pleese Me too! There was pop group rivalry. It was the Slade fans verses T. Rex! I went T. Rex who's best days were behind them but I loved Solid Gold Easy Action and 20th Century Boy.

We were the Glam Rock kids. We loved it. It was exciting to be at the end of Primary School with all the face paint and eye glitter of Wizzard and Sweet; See My Baby Jive and Hell Raiser! We used to sprinkle glitter in our hair and lick it onto our eye lids too! Bowie was there too but he was deeper and longer lasting! 

Perhaps my all time of favourite single of that time was Sweet’s Block Buster! The glam rock rhythmic thud. The siren. Steve Priest’s hammed up “We haven’t got a clue what to do”. And how cool was Brian Connolly?

Block Buster! came out about a week after I got my record player and was the first ‘new release’ I bought. I remember bringing it home and leaving the arm of the record player over so that the needle just kept going back onto the vinyl. I might even have played it too much. I have never played a song three times in a row EVER again!

It was all just pop, teeny bop glam! Apart from T. Rex’s Children of the Revolution calling me to some kind of commitment to something that I hadn’t worked out yet and The Osmonds' Crazy Horses, a tad heavy for a boy band, preaching environmental issues, long before it was fashionable, these were not life changing songs.

It would be a wee while before I discovered the album but this was a threshold to a whole new world for me and my life would never be the same again. I have been buying, enjoying, critiquing and obsessed with music ever since. In just a few years after glam rock, the music would start shaping my life, changing my directions, firing my imagination and dreams, leading me to finding God and life long vocation.

STOCKI’S GLAM ROCK PLAYLIST

Sweet - Block Buster!

Suzi Quatro - Can The Can

David Bowie - Jean Genie

T. Rex - Children Of The Revolution

The Osmonds - Crazy Horses

Wizard - Ball Park Incident

Slade - Gudbuy T Jane

Elton John - Crocodile Rock

Carly Simon - You’re So Vain

Alice Cooper - Schools Out

10cc - Donna

Rod Stewart - Angel

Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes

Wings - Hi Hi Hi

Alvin Stardust - My Coo-Ca-Choo

Gilbert O’Sullivan - Get Down

Steelers Wheel - Stuck In The Middle

Geordie - All Because Of You

Lieutenant Pigeon - Mouldy Old Dough

Lynsey De Paul - Sugar Me