Abbey Road

The last album the band recorded as a unit — though Let It Be was released later, its sessions had been completed in January 1969. Abbey Road was begun in February 1969 (with the I Want You sessions), shelved during the messy Get Back project, and resumed in earnest from July to August 1969. The sessions were the most amicable since 1967: McCartney and George Martin agreed to make 'an old-fashioned Beatles record,' each side a curated programme.

The first Beatles LP to use the EMI TG12345 transistor console (debuting on Abbey Road; the older REDD valve consoles were retired during the sessions). The TG had compression on every channel as standard — partly responsible for the album's smoother, glossier sound compared to the brick-dry White Album. Eight-track tape throughout. Geoff Emerick returned as engineer alongside Phil McDonald and Glyn Johns. Alan Parsons, John Kurlander and Tony Banks were among the second engineers in the studio for nights they would all later recall.

Side one is six discrete songs (Come Together, Something, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Oh! Darling, Octopus's Garden, I Want You (She's So Heavy)). Side two is the celebrated medley — sixteen minutes of stitched-together fragments leading to The End, with the only Beatles drum solo (eighteen bars) and a sequence of three guitar solos: Paul, then George, then John, then Paul, then George, then John, alternating two-bar exchanges. Something, Frank Sinatra later called 'the greatest love song of the past 50 years.' Here Comes the Sun, written in Eric Clapton's garden after George had skipped an Apple business meeting, would become the most-streamed Beatles track of the streaming era.

Released 26 September 1969. Seventeen weeks at UK number one. Iain Macmillan's zebra-crossing photograph (six minutes, six frames; the fifth was the cover) became one of the most parodied images in pop. Paul's bare feet, John's white suit, and the registration plate 'LMW 28IF' fed the 'Paul is dead' rumour-mill for years.

Abbey Road is the band's commercial high-water mark and the LP that contains, in The End's couplet, their own valediction: 'And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make.' Within a month of its release, John would tell the others he was leaving; six months later Paul would announce it publicly; the band had already played their last note together in front of a microphone.