Why This Beatles Album Cover Is Impossible to Recreate transcript

Every day, hundreds of people come to this sea crossing in North London to do exactly the same thing. They wait for a gap in the traffic, line up their friends, and walk across the road, trying to recreate one of the most famous photographs in music history. But however carefully they do it, they can never completely recreate the original. A few weeks ago, when Sam Mendes and the team making the new Beatles biopics returned to the crossing to recreate that famous August morning one particular detail caught my attention because it's something that almost everybody who comes here to recreate the cover gets wrong.

And if you've ever tried it yourself, however carefully you position everyone and however perfectly you time those steps, there's one part of the original photograph that's surprisingly difficult to reproduce. And that's the angle. The idea for the cover design had come from Paul. He sketched out roughly what he had in mind. And MacMillan developed the idea. A few days before the Beatles themselves stepped onto the crossing, photographer Iain McMillan came here to test the idea using four stand-ins, including Beatles Roadie Kevin Harrington.

MacMillan was already testing the basic composition here, but notice that the viewpoint is lower than the one he would use for the finished cover. A few days later, on Friday the 8th of August, it was time to do it for real. At around 11 that morning, a policeman stopped the traffic, MacMillan climbed onto his stepladder in the middle of the road, and the Beatles began walking backwards and forwards across the crossing.

He took just six photographs. And when you look at them together, you can see just how many little things had to come together to make the photograph. We know their spacing, their stride, the traffic, where each of them was looking, and of course that elevated camera position. MacMillan was shooting with a Hasselblad camera and a 50 mm wide-angle lens. Interestingly, you can get quite close to that field of view today with a main camera on a modern smartphone.

The difficult part isn't the lens. It's getting the camera high enough in the middle of a busy London street. Shortly afterwards, Paul examined MacMillan's transparencies and chose the one in which all four Beatles were walking in time. But even that wasn't quite the photograph that appeared on the finished album. Apple art director John Kosh thought that the original sky looked rather dull and grey, so he airbrushed it, making the blue much stronger.

The photograph was also slightly cropped and its colour and contrast adjusted. Despite the often repeated story that the crossing was later moved, Historic England compared the original photograph with other historical pictures and concluded that the crossing is still in the same place today. The crossing itself has changed little since 1969. The zigzag lines you see on either side today weren't there when the Beatles walked across it.

If you're not from Britain, those zigzag lines are there to warn drivers that they're approaching a pedestrian crossing and to keep the area around it clear, and you're not allowed to park on them. The black and white striped poles topped with flashing orange globes are known in Britain as Belisha beacons named after Leslie Hore-Belisha the Minister of Transport who introduced them in 1934. They were already there in 1969 and although you can't see them on the finished cover, they do appear in some of the other photos from the session.

MacMillan then went looking for something to use on the back cover and found this old tiled street sign at the junction of Abbey Road and Alexandra Road much further down the street from the studios. As he took the photograph, a young woman in a blue dress walked through the frame and she ended up on the finished sleeve as well. But there's something else here that wasn't actually on the wall. The word Beatles was added afterwards by retoucher John Cockcroft, who made it look as though it was part of the original tiled street sign.

And it's beautifully done. Unless you knew, you'd probably never guess those letters weren't really there. This was all done by hand long before Photoshop. And it shows just how skilled those photographic retouchers were. For a short while, this became another place for Beatles fans to have their photographs taken. But not for long, because this part of Abbey Road was redeveloped in the early 1970s. The old junction with Alexandra Road was swept away along with the wall and the original tiled sign.

And remember those photographs from the new Beatles biopics that I mentioned at the beginning? They knew that getting the photograph right wasn't just about recreating the Beatles. They had to recreate MacMillan's viewpoint as well. But perhaps the more interesting question isn't why so many of these photographs look different from the original. It's why more than half a century later, so many people want to take one.

Perhaps part of the answer is that unlike almost any other famous Beatles image, you can actually step inside this one. In 2010, the crossing was given grade 2 listed status, becoming the first zebra crossing in Britain to receive that protection. Today, Historic England estimates that more than 300,000 people visit it every year. That's an extraordinary afterlife for a photograph that took only a few minutes to make.

But all those visitors have created a problem which Ian McMillan didn't have to deal with in 1969. He had a policeman stopping the traffic. Today, this is still a very busy London road with buses, cars, vans, motorcycles, and bicycles passing through it all day. And tourists aren't simply using the crossing to get from one side to another. They're stopping, turning around, walking backwards and forwards, and sometimes standing in the middle of the road while someone takes their photograph.

There have been accidents here. Although fortunately the reported incidents appear to have been minor but the safety problem became serious enough that in 2014 Westminster Council even considered putting a permanent crossing attendant here to manage the tourists and the traffic. And that rather highlights the strange situation Abbey Road has found itself in. It's become one of London's great tourist attractions, but it was never designed to be one.

Beatle's history isn't concentrated in one place. It's scattered across the capital. And although many of the buildings connected with the group are still there, most aren't places you can actually go inside and visit. Abbey Road is different because you don't need to know the history beforehand. You arrive, see the crossing, and immediately know exactly where you are. But once you've walked across it and perhaps looked through the gates of Abbey Road Studios, there's really nowhere else to go.

The studios are still a working recording facility, not a Beatles Museum. So for most visitors, the experience takes place entirely outside. But that may be about to change. In 2027, Apple plans to open an official Beatles fan experience at 3 Savile Row, the former Apple headquarters, and of course, the building where the Beatles gave their famous rooftop gig. Spread over seven floors, it will contain exhibitions using material from the Apple Archives, a recreation of the studio where Let It Be was recorded, and visitors will even be able to go onto the rooftop itself.

It won't replace Abbey Road. I don't think anything could. But for the first time, Beatles fans visiting London will have an important location where they can actually go inside and learn more about the group rather than simply standing outside and taking a photograph. And I think that helps explain why this particular Beatles image has endured so well. There are countless famous photographs of the Beatles, but most belong firmly to their time.

Abbey Road is different. It's something you can still take part in. You don't have to imagine yourself inside a photograph taken in 1969. You can come to London, stand in the same place, and walk across the same road. So, every new photograph taken here becomes another version of the original. That constant recreation is surely part of the reason Abbey Road has become such a powerful Beatles image. And more than half a century after four men walked across this road for a photographer standing on a stepladder, people are still coming here to do exactly the same thing.

They may never quite get the angle right, but perhaps that's not really the point. Have you ever made the pilgrimage to Abbey Road and walked across the crossing yourself? If you have, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. I'll be back next weekend with more fascinating beetle stories. So, I hope you'll join me for that. But that's all for this one. So, I'll say bye for now and thanks for watching.