Regarding recording at Abbey Road:
“It was all done very clinically, that’s the joke. We were in this big white room that was very dirty and hadn’t been painted for years [Studio Two], and it had all these old sound baffles hanging down that were all dirty and broken. There was this huge big hanging light, there was no window, no daylight. It was a very clinical, not a very nice atmosphere. When you think of the songs that were made in that studio it’s amazing, because there was no atmosphere in there, we had to make the atmosphere. After a number of years we asked them could we have some coloured lights or a dimmer or something like that; after asking them for about three years, they finally brought in this big steel stand with a couple of red and blue neon lamps on it. That was the magic lighting they gave us. “The refrigerator had a padlock on it, so if we wanted a cup of tea we’d have to break open the padlock on the fridge to get the milk out. We had to do that every night for five years, it wasn’t like they realized, Oh, well, they drink tea after six o’clock, so we’ll leave the fridge open, oh no, they padlocked it, all the time. It was weird.”
[—George Harrison, quoted in With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper, George Martin]
At around this time [when “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” was being recorded] the sessions began getting quite trippy and psychedelic. Studio Two had these awful, filthy white walls that nobody wanted to look at during the best of times, especially not when they were being harshly lit by the large industrial fixtures hanging from the ceiling. So most of the studio lights were turned off whenever the Beatles were down there rehearsing and recording the late-stage Pepper songs, with the only source of illumination coming from candles, joss sticks, and a single ordinary desk lamp tilted upward so that it lit up one wall. Up in the control room, I made my own personal contribution to the atmosphere: a lava lamp and the red darkroom lamp from my childhood. Anything to counteract the dreariness! Late at night, those lamps, sitting on top of the Altec speakers, would often be the only lights on in the control room, adding to the general spaciness and weirdness of those long evenings. Sometimes we’d even turn those off and operate solely by the glow of the tubes in the tape machines. Late-night sessions were still an unusual thing at Abbey Road; it was rare when sessions for any artist other than the Beatles were allowed to run on for so long. The bean counters at EMI had still not cottoned to the fact that it was in their interest to pamper their most important signing, so there was no milk left out for tea after the canteen staff left at 10 P.M. Everyone got so desperate for a cuppa late one night, Mal actually had to break the lock on the kitchen to get some milk. There was hell to pay the next day—you would have thought that he’d broken into the Tower of London and stolen the Crown Jewels—but after that, they arranged for him to have a key.
[—from Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Beatles, Geoff Emerick]
