Installation of Apple recording studio at 3 Savile Row

On January 10, 1969, George Harrison walked out of the “Get Back” sessions at Twickenham Film Studios, no longer able to endure the growing tensions within the group. A meeting between the four Beatles on January 12 failed to resolve the issues, as George left early without committing to rejoining.

On January 15, the four Beatles met again. George agreed to rejoin the group. One of his conditions was for the rehearsals to be relocated from Twickenham to Apple’s basement studio, then under construction by Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas.

On January 16, the set at Twickenham Film Studios was dismantled, and the equipment relocated to Apple Corps’ headquarters at 3 Savile Row. George Harrison and engineer Glyn Johns inspected the basement studio constructed by Magic Alex. However, they found the facilities severely inadequate, with significant distortion and hiss rendering the studio unfit for The Beatles’ needs. Glyn Johns promptly contacted George Martin for assistance, and EMI agreed to provide the necessary equipment to ensure the band could continue their work in a functional recording environment.

The installation of the new EMI equipment at Apple Studios took place over three days, from January 17 to January 19, carried out by Dave Harries, Keith Slaughter, and an EMI technical team. To create an 8-track recording system, two portable 4-track mixing consoles were combined, with the sound routed into George Harrison’s 8-track recorder.

With the new setup in place, The Beatles resumed rehearsals at Apple Studios on January 20.

Alex’s recording studio at Apple was the biggest disaster of all time. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing.

George Harrison – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

‘Magic’ Alex must have been a considerable drain on resources. I never had any faith in Alex. It was John and George who championed him. He was going to invent all these incredible things, like a door that could tell friend from foe, and would only let in people with good vibes.

Barry Miles – Manager of Apple Records subsidiary Zapple Records – Quoted in Classic Rock, May 2020

The mixing console [made by Mardas] was made of bit of wood and an old oscilloscope. It looked like the control panel of a B-52 bomber. They actually tried a session on this desk, they did a take, but when they played back the tape it was all hum and hiss. Terrible. The Beatles walked out, that was the end of it.

Dave Harries, recording engineer​ – From “The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions” by Mark Lewisohn, 1988

The metal was an eighth of an inch out around the knobs and switches. It had obviously been done with a hammer and chisel instead of being properly designed and machined. It did pass signals but Glyn Johns said ‘I can’t do anything with this. I can’t make a record with this board’.

Alan Parsons, tape operator​ – From “The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions” by Mark Lewisohn, 1988

The mixing console was sold as scrap to a secondhand electronics shop in the Edgware Road for £5. It wasn’t worth any more.

Geoff Emerick​ – From “The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions” by Mark Lewisohn, 1988

Alex had been mumbling excuses and overrunning his budget for months on end, but once he was put on notice that the Beatles would be starting sessions in the Apple studio in a matter of weeks, he went into overdrive. It didn’t matter: no amount of motivation and hard work could make up for the fact that Alex basically did not know what he was doing. The studio he built for them was a complete and utter disaster.

For a start, there were no wiring conduits between the control room and the studio, so thick and bulky mic cables had to be run under the door and down the corridor. The speakers —sixteen of them, embedded in the walls — sounded atrocious. The mixing console barely worked at all, and what signal it did pass was distorted. Little surprise, given that it was essentially just a sheet of plywood with sixteen faders and an oscilloscope stuck in the middle, which acted as an inefficient level meter. After a day of fruitless recording tests, George Martin ordered in EMI’s mobile console, which came accompanied by newly hired assistant engineer Alan Parsons. For the next few weeks, he, George, and Glyn labored over what John Lennon was to later call “the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever.”

Geoff Emerick – From “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles“, 2006

I often wondered why [The Beatles] were so fond of Alex; nobody else found him all that likable, and most people around the Beatles saw right through him. The mixing console he had constructed for them had been put in storage while I was doing the Abbey Road sessions. In the end I sold it to a secondhand shop in Edgeware Road for the staggering sum of five pounds — probably twice what it was worth.

Geoff Emerick – From “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles“, 2006

From Wikipedia:

Mardas had often said that the Abbey Road studio was “no good”, much to producer George Martin’s annoyance: “The trouble was that Alex was always coming to the studios to see what we were doing and to learn from it, while at the same time saying ‘These people are so out of date.’ But I found it very difficult to chuck him out, because the boys liked him so much. Since it was very obvious that I didn’t, a minor schism developed“. Mardas boasted that he could build a much better studio, with a 72-track tape machine, instead of the 4-track at Abbey Road—which was being updated at the time to an 8-track—so he was given the job of designing the new Apple Studio in the basement of Apple headquarters on Savile Row. One of Mardas’ more outrageous plans was to replace the acoustic baffles around Starr’s drums with an invisible sonic force field. Starr remembered that Mardas bought some “huge” surplus computers from British Aerospace, which were stored in his barn, but “they never left the barn”, and were later sold as scrap metal.

Mardas gave the Beatles regular reports of his progress, but when they required their new studio in January 1969, during the Get Back project that became Let It Be, they discovered an unusable studio: no 72-track tape deck (Mardas had reduced it to 16 tracks), no soundproofing, no talkback (intercom) system, and not even a patch bay to run the wiring between the control room and the 16 speakers that Mardas had fixed haphazardly to the walls. The only new piece of sound equipment present was a crude mixing console which Mardas had built, which looked (in the words of Martin’s assistant, Dave Harries) like “bits of wood and an old oscilloscope”. The console was scrapped after just one session. Harrison said it was “chaos”, and that they had to “rip it all out and start again,” calling it “the biggest disaster of all time.” Harrison’s suspicions of Mardas’ competence had been raised when he saw him wandering around in a white coat with a clipboard, and considered the possibility that Mardas had “just read the latest version of Science Weekly, and used its ideas”. Mardas later stated that he had never been in the basement of Savile Row, as the studio equipment he was building was being tested in Apple Electronics, at Boston Place, Marylebone.

The Beatles asked producer Martin to come to the rescue, so he borrowed two portable four-track recorders from EMI, and long-time Beatles’ engineer Geoff Emerick was given the task of building and setting up a recording studio with the loaned equipment. After Allen Klein was brought in to be the Beatles’ manager in 1969, he closed Apple Electronics and Mardas left the company. It was later estimated that Mardas’ ideas and projects had cost the Beatles at least £300,000 (£5.24 million in 2019 pounds if it was essentially spent in 1968). […]

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