and elongation of musical time, was itself revolutionary. The CD also offered something else: a whole new consciousness of musical time. It’s a thrill, really – seeing the first seconds of the track appear on a digital read-out in green or red, with the ability not only to pause, but also to repeat and scan back. The operator was in charge of time in a novel way, everyone a DJ with precise control, Abbey Road in everyone’s road.
Philips then went to Japan to talk manufacturing partnerships. Representatives spoke to JVC, Pioneer, Hitachi and Matsushita, but only Sony signed a deal. Norio Ohga, Sony’s vice-chairman, arrived in Eindhoven in August 1979 to begin hammering out the details of what would become the industry standard, and it wasn’t until further meetings had concluded in Tokyo in June 1980 that an agreement was reached and final patent applications were filed. By then, the original formats proposed by Philips had changed. According to J.P. Sinjou, who led a team of 35 at the Philips CD lab, the 11.5cm disc was changed to 12cm on the personal wish of Norio Ohga. The extra width would allow Ohga, who was a trained baritone and passionate classical music lover, to extend the duration of the disc by a crucial amount. ‘Using a 12cm disc,’ Hans B. Peek wrote, ‘a particular performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a favourite of N. Ohga with a length of 74 minutes, could be recorded.’ Other issues were met with even neater solutions: ‘J. Sinjou put a Dutch coin, a dime, on the table. All agreed that this was a fine size for the hole [in the middle of the disc]. Compared with other lengthy discussions, this was a piece of cake.’13
Could it be that its initial length was really inspired by a lengthy recording – Furtwängler’s interpretation at Bayreuth in 1951 – of Beethoven’s Ninth? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? The story is quoted only as an ‘anecdote’ by an engineer, and doubts have crept in. Another version suggests the Beethoven fan was not Mr Ohga, but his wife. It may be that the Beethoven story was concocted in retrospect, an inspired marketing wheeze. And there was one further twist: Furtwängler’s 74-minute performance could technically be accommodated on a single CD, but it couldn’t be played; the earliest CD players could only handle 72 minutes. It was a fate the conductor was to share with Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland: today both masterpieces fit on a single disc, but initially they were split between two.
But who buys CDs these days? Who but the purist has time to visit a record shop and buy a physical product when a song may be downloaded in three seconds? In an age of SoundCloud and Spotify, who has time to even listen to an entire uncompressed album as it was conceived by the artist? The format no longer restricts the art form; but once, as we shall see from the records kept by the cashier at Abbey Road, the format used to be very strict indeed.
iii) Revolver
A little hush now please: the Beatles are about to record their first LP. It is early in the morning on Monday, 11 February 1963, and Studio 2 at Abbey Road is booked for three sessions: 10 a.m.–1 p.m., 2.30–5.30 p.m. and 6.30–9.30 p.m. The timings comply with standard Musicians’ Union rules. A session may last no more than three hours, from which no more than 20 minutes of recorded material may be used. Each artiste will be paid the same amount per session – 7 pounds and 10 shillings – and you have to sign your chit at the end of the day to get your Musicians Union Fees from Mr Mitchell, the Abbey Road cashier. When they first register for payment, the band are an unfamiliar presence: John Lennon gives his details as J.W. Lewnow of 251 Mew Love Ave; the role of bass guitarist is credited to George Harrison.
The fact that the Beatles are there at all that day is unusual. When the studio was booked, the group had released only one single; when Parlophone’s label chief George Martin broke the news that the band were going to make a long-player, it was a remarkable announcement. Pop music was restricted to singles. The biggest-selling LPs in Britain over the previous two years were not by Cliff Richard or Adam Faith, or even Elvis Presley: they were by the George Mitchell Minstrels with songs from The Black And White Minstrel Show.
The morning session began with the Beatles recording an original song called ‘There’s a Place’, inspired by ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story.14 There were seven full takes, and three false starts, with the last take, lasting 1.50, being credited on the studio recording sheet as ‘best’. Then it was straight into a song listed as ‘17’. There were nine takes in all, including false starts, and after playback it was decided that the first take had been the best, and within a few days the title had changed to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and it was decided that the song should open the album, just as it opened many of their live shows. But George Martin sensed there was something missing – a certain dynamism that the Beatles displayed when he had recently seen them play live at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. So at the very beginning of take one he spliced in the four words that Paul McCartney had used at the start of take nine: ‘One-two-three-FOUR!’ And then it was time for lunch.
So much happened in 1948 – the establishment of the state of Israel, the Berlin airlift, the birth of the NHS and the Marshall Plan – that the launch of a 12-inch record that spun at 331 3 revolutions per minute seems like a minor thing in comparison. But the impact of the LP was astounding. The possibilities of 22 minutes per side, rather than 4 or 6 on the older 10-inch or 12-inch 78 rpm records, changed the way composers and musicians thought about music and wrote it. It changed the way a generation obtained much of their pleasure and enlightenment, and it’s not for nothing that Philip Larkin dates the start of sexual intercourse around the time of the Beatles’ first LP.
It would be simplistic to claim that the standard lengths of musical performances have been determined largely by the technical constraints of recording them. But before the wax recording cylinder and the gramophone there was certainly far less need for structure. Songlines on the African plains rang continuously through the centuries; in medieval courts, entertainment lasted for as long as it pleased the throne, or until the money ran out. In more recent times, performance merely tested human patience: how much could we concentrate, and how long would we behave ourselves? A concert would often end when the candles ran down. It was the same with ancient theatre: how long would an audience sit in an unheated space without demanding the Roman equivalent of a choc ice?
But the recording of music – which effectively began in the 1870s – did change our capacity to hear it. The two-minute and then four-minute limit of the early Edison and Columbia wax cylinders concentrated the mind like a guillotine. Likewise the 10-inch shellac 78 rpm record lasted about three minutes; the 12-inch record (before the micro-grooved long-player) ran about four-and-a-half. The 7-inch 45 rpm vinyl single, introduced in 1949, varied little from this, perhaps three minutes, before the grooves wound so tightly that the sound would deteriorate and the needle would skip.15
Mark Katz, a leading historian of recorded sound, has noted that listening to music at home before the LP was a distinct nuisance.16 He quotes the blues singer Son House from the 1920s, who bemoaned ‘gettin’ up, settin’ it back, turnin’ it around, crankin’ the crank, primin’ it up and lettin’ the horn down’. Bad enough for blues and jazz, fairly catastrophic for classical, for which a recording of a symphony was split into 20 sides on 10 discs (which is how the ‘album’ got its name – a collection of 78s in a folder).
One got used to it, of course, and in the early days recorded sound must have seemed like a miracle. But creatively it was more than a nuisance; it was a hindrance. An opera or a concerto was no longer split up into the acts or movements intended by the composer, but into false movements created by the limitations of a four-minute wax cylinder or disc. Music would suddenly stop, and the only way it would continue was when someone got up from the armchair. What was the effect of this? Shorter recordings, or more recordings of shorter pieces. Mark Katz has noted that while concerts in the early half of the twentieth century contained the usual array of symphonies and operas, ‘any survey of record catalogues . . . will reveal the dominance of character pieces, arias, marches and brief popular song and dance numbers . . . It was not long before the time limitation affected not only what musicians recorded but also what they performed in public.’ Audiences increasingly wanted the short pieces they knew from their records.17 The length of the three-minute