8 things you may not know about Abbey Road

Radio 2 celebrates the famed Abbey Road Studios in a special edition of The Paul Gambaccini Collection, featuring music recorded inside its iconic walls from the 1930s right up to the present day.

Across the episode, you will hear some brilliant facts, and occasionally bizarre stories, about Britain's most famous recording studio, including tales from sessions with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Cilla Black and more.

Below we explore eight things you may not know about Abbey Road...

1. The building wasn't built to make records at all

Long before it was the seminal Abbey Road Studios that it is today, the site was actually just a fairly normal (but also huge) nine-bedroom Georgian townhouse in St. John's Wood. The record label EMI bought the property in 1929 for £16,500 (the equivalent of just under a million in today’s money) and converted it into recording studios. It opened properly as studios in November 1931 when Edward Elgar conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road.

2. Sometimes a pop star’s shoes would end up on recordings

Getting a clean vocal take in the days of a single hanging microphone wasn't easy. When Danny Williams recorded his 1961 Christmas Number 1 Moon River in Abbey Road’s Studio 1, the producer Norman Newell made him stand rooted to the spot throughout the take. Why? Well, the issue wasn't nerves or anything like that, it was his shoes. The story goes that Williams' leather soles kept clicking against the studio's wooden floor, and the sound of them threatened to show up on the recording and ruin every take. So the solution was simple: either take your shoes off or keep very still.

3. Cilla Black once called her producer a "maniac"

Renowned singer-songwriter Burt Bacharach flew to London himself to conduct the orchestra for Cilla Black's song Alfie in 1966. But allegedly Bacharach was not an easy collaborator to please. Black recalled being run through the song again and again before finally snapping at George Martin about Burt: "This man is a maniac!" What Cilla didn't know was that Martin had quietly chosen the perfect take much earlier in the session, but simply let Bacharach carry on. It’s estimated that Black recorded up to 29 vocal takes in total. Bacharach was full of praise regardless, saying later: “Cilla was great and wound up delivering a killer vocal as she did on so many of my songs”.

4. The Zombies "borrowed" John Lennon's keyboard without asking

While recording their now-classic second album Odessey and Oracle in Abbey Road’s Studio 3, The Zombies noticed that The Beatles (who had just released Sgt. Pepper's) had left a distinctive piece of kit sitting unattended in the corridor after wrapping their own sessions. It was John Lennon's Mellotron. Freshly dropped by their label and working with a limited budget, the band wheeled the instrument straight into their own session and used it across their record without so much as asking permission. Singer Colin Blunstone later put the album's stripped-back honesty down to necessity as much as artistry: "We didn't have the cash to mess around”.

5. Abbey Road helped create the world's first hidden track

When The Beatles were putting together the closing medley of their album Abbey Road, aptly named after the studio and with an iconic artwork shot just outside on the street crossing, there was a short, 23-second fragment called "Her Majesty" that was cut from the running order. Paul McCartney asked for the tape to simply be thrown away, but studio policy forbade destroying any Beatles recording (probably for good reason, given their legacy now), so tape operator John Kurlander instead spliced the snippet onto the very end of the master reel, after a stretch of blank leader tape. The result, and the unexpected nature of it, made the band laugh so much they left it in. And there you had it: one of music’s very first hidden tracks - purely by accident.

6. Pink Floyd once didn't recognise Syd Barrett in the studio

While mixing the title track of Wish You Were Here in Studio 3 in 1975, Pink Floyd were interrupted by a man - seemingly a stranger, completely bald with shaved eyebrows - wandering into the control room. It took the band several hours to work out that the man was Syd Barrett - the group's original songwriter and frontman, who had by then withdrawn almost entirely from public life. David Gilmour and Roger Waters are both said to have been reduced to tears once they realised it was Barrett.

7. Ringo Starr had to be talked into his only Beatles drum solo

For all his lighthearted, fairly easy-going reputation, Ringo Starr was actually adamant about one thing: not doing drum solos. And it took real persuading from his bandmates to get him to play a drum solo that appears in The End, the closing song of their Abbey Road LP. Paul McCartney later admitted the band had to push hard to make it even happen, saying: "Ringo always hated drum solos." It remains the only drum solo Starr ever recorded with the group, and was recorded right there at Abbey Road Studios.

8. Strawberry Fields Forever is secretly two different recordings stitched together

It’s a classic Beatles song now, but did you know that Strawberry Fields Forever could have sounded a lot different? In fact, John Lennon loved two completely different studio takes of the track - one a stripped-back rock arrangement, the other a lush, orchestral version - and couldn't bear to choose between them. Rather than pick one, engineer Geoff Emerick sped up the tempo of one take and slowed down the other until their keys and tempos lined up, then spliced the two recordings together seamlessly partway through the song. Lennon had written the track while reflecting on his childhood, saying of the finished song's strange, dream-like quality: "I've always seen the world a little bit differently than everyone else”.

You can hear our celebration of music recorded at Abbey Road on The Paul Gambaccini Collection, available now on BBC Sounds.