Abbey Road at 57: the parts The Beatles treated as leftovers are the parts that lasted

Abbey Road came out in the UK 57 years ago today, on September 26, 1969. It was the last album The Beatles recorded together. Let It Be came out after it, on May 8, 1970, but it was recorded first, in January 1969. The parts of Abbey Road that lasted best are the parts the band treated as leftovers.

The medley Lennon called junk

Side two runs eight song fragments into one stretch of about 16 minutes. The medley was mostly Paul McCartney's and George Martin's idea. John Lennon never came round to it. He later told Rolling Stone it was junk: "None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together."

Nik Cohn, reviewing the album for The New York Times in 1969, argued the opposite. He dismissed much of the rest as an "unmitigated disaster" but wrote that "really, the medley should have carried on throughout the whole album, and that might have been something marvelous." Fifty-seven years on, Cohn's reading is the one most listeners share.

The 23 seconds nobody meant to keep

"Her Majesty" was cut from the medley. Engineer John Kurlander worked under a standing order that Beatles tape was never thrown away, so he kept the fragment and spliced it onto the end of the reel with leader tape. McCartney heard it on a rough mix, liked how abruptly it arrived, and left it there. It is often cited as one of the first hidden tracks in pop.

Ten minutes on a crossing

Iain Macmillan shot the cover on the morning of August 8, 1969. He stood on a stepladder in the middle of the road while a policeman held the traffic, took six frames, and the fifth became the cover. The white Volkswagen Beetle at the curb belonged to someone who lived in the flats nearby. Its number plate, LMW 28IF, was stolen again and again once the album came out, because "28IF" fitted the Paul is dead rumour already circulating in America that autumn. The car was later auctioned and now sits in a Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg.

Harrison's turn

"Something" became George Harrison's first A-side as a Beatle, released as a double A-side with "Come Together" on October 6, 1969. It went to number one in the US, his only chart-topper while the band was together.

The numbers

The 2019 anniversary reissue took Abbey Road back to the top of the UK chart, and that gap was a record at the time, per the Official Charts Company.