Monday 11th February 1963

'keeping themselves going with just drinks of milk'

The group arrived at EMI’s Abbey Road Studio 2 to begin recording their debut LP at 10.00am. (George Martin had made the suggestion to make an LP at a meeting at EMI House on November 16th, 1962, the day after the group had returned from their penultimate trip to Hamburg. At that stage, the plan was to record them live at the Cavern.)

In the three-hour morning session, they recorded ten takes of There’s A Place and nine of Seventeen (subsequently retitled I Saw Her Standing There). When producer George Martin and engineers Norman Smith and Richard Langham took a lunch break at the Heroes of Alma pub, the group stayed behind in the studio and continued working, keeping themselves going with just drinks of milk. Fans in Liverpool were expecting the group to make a lunchtime appearance at the Cavern.

During the afternoon session from 2.30pm to 6.00pm, five takes and two overdubs of A Taste Of Honey, six takes and two overdubs of Do You Want To Know A Secret, written by John the previous August when he was staying at Brian Epstein’s Liverpool flat just after he’d got married, three overdubs of There’s A Place, three overdubs of Seventeen and eleven takes of Misery were recorded.

After an hour and a half dinner break, they returned to the studio at 7.30pm, recording thirteen takes of Hold Me Tight, three takes of Anna (Go To Him), one take of Boys, four takes of Chains and three takes of Baby It’s You, a cover of the Shirelles’ 1961 US hit.

At about 10.00pm, the group took a break for coffee and biscuits, before returning to record one of the highlights of their live show, Twist And Shout. It was cut in two takes. Paul later said, “We did Twist And Shout last because if we’d done it first we couldn’t have done any of the others.” When all was said and done, the entire LP had taken 585 minutes to record.

George Martin said of the remarkable day, “There wasn’t a lot of money at Parlophone. I was working to an annual budget of £55,000 and I could spend it however I wished, but I had to produce a certain amount of records a year. So, I wanted to get the Beatles’ first album recorded in a day and released very quickly, because once we’d made the first single, my commercial mind told me that I had to have an album out very soon. So I got the boys together and asked them, ‘What have you got? What can we record quickly?’ They replied by telling me, ‘Only the stuff we can do in our act!’”

Norman Smith told The Beatles Book monthly, “It wasn’t too difficult. Instead of sticking the mics only a few inches away from the speakers I put them several feet away, so that the sound bounced off the walls of the studio. The whole idea was just to let them record numbers exactly as they’ve been doing onstage. I added to the performance feel in the studio by positioning them much as they are onstage, with Ringo and his drums at the back, then George in front of him, and Paul and John in the centre doing their vocals.

The main things I remember were a large tin of Hack cough sweets which were stuck into a handy position on the piano, so that Paul and John could dig into it whenever they wanted to, and a couple of cartons of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes that they steadily worked through during the day. The boys were very, very happy when they heard the playback at the end of the day. I hadn’t done the final master tape, of course. I have to do two of those - a mono one for this country and a stereo one for America. I do a stereo version in the studio by putting all the instruments on one track and the voices on another.”

He also told Sound On Sound magazine some years later, “I really don’t know how the Beatles’ voices held out for that entire session. In fact, John’s very nearly didn’t for the last number, Twist And Shout. Paul found it pretty easy to sing, but John was always under a bit of strain, given the timbre of his voice. I remember they did have a large jar of cough lozenges - Zubes - as well as a carton of cigarettes, and he just went for it ... if you listen to it, perhaps the sore throat and the hoarseness improved the performance. It’s a terrific performance.”

Martin also recalled the day for The Beatles Book. “They were by now perfectly happy in the studios. They started putting in their own ideas but they never once got out of hand. They listened to what we told them from the control box. They had at least three cases of sore throat between them and they obviously felt considerable strain towards the end of that long, long day. They leapt into the control room to hear playbacks and were ruthlessly critical of themselves. Right at the end of that day, they were still able to produce a sound that I can only say was ‘thrilling’.”

With their equipment packed into Neil Aspinall’s van, they were driven back to the Royal Court Hotel where they spent a second night before heading back up to Lancashire the following day for another series of one-night stands. Paul later described the making of the album as “one of the main ambitions in our lives. We felt that it would be a showcase for the group and it was tremendously important for us that it sounded bang on the button. As it happened, we were pleased.”

John described his performance on Twist And Shout as “a frantic guy, doing his best. That record was the nearest thing that tried to capture us live, you know, and the nearest thing to what we might have sounded like to the audience in Hamburg and Liverpool.”

“I was a war baby and didn’t see my mother for the first five years of my life. I was sent to a babies’ home near Haslemere, which was run by Surrey Council. The first sound I ever remember was an air-raid warning siren. It still sends shivers up my spine now. When the siren started we all had to sit under the windows because if they were blown in you would avoid being showered by broken glass. Then in 1944 I was evacuated to Yorkshire, probably because of the V bombs. I was there from October until the end of the war when I arrived back to London at King’s Cross station, where my mother was waiting for me. Apparently the first thing I said with the Yorkshire accent I had picked up was, ‘I want our Mom!’

We lived in Camden Town and, after leaving school, I took up a five-year apprenticeship as a typewriter mechanic. Because of that I was deferred from doing military service. When the deferment was up they decided to take only half of those born in the third quarter of 1939, and I was one of those who didn’t have to go. I would probably have liked it, as I’m a very orderly person, and would have liked to get away from home, but it wasn’t to be.

Towards the end of my apprenticeship, I joined a French typewriter company in London. During my work with them I would explore the West End in the evenings and one evening in a pub I met Alan Kane. We got talking, and he asked me what I did. I told him about my job at that time and mentioned that I’d like to get another job that paid some overtime. He had just left EMI Studios to join Rediffusion Television, and said, ‘Well, why don’t you become a recording engineer?’ I thought, ‘Yes, why not?’

He suggested I get in touch with EMI as there might be something there. So the next day I wrote a letter and they wrote back inviting me to an interview at their studios in Abbey Road. Basically because I had been to grammar school, spoke well, and could change a light bulb, that was good enough for them! EMI were like the BBC, they liked to train you. They didn’t like you to come in with preconceived ideas.

Bob Beckett, who was in charge of the engineers, showed me around with his clip board. It had the week’s programme on it and I had seen Craig Douglas and Helen Shapiro’s names on the list. When I went home I remember telling my mother that they were going to be at the studios the following week. Bob thanked me for coming and said they’d be in touch. I got a letter a few days later saying please start whenever you can.

It was February 1962. Norman Smith, Peter Bown, Malcolm Addy (Cliff’s engineer) and Stuart Eltham were the big engineers on the pop side. You had to be a people person as a second engineer, making sure the artists were comfortable, whether they wanted a cup of tea or anything really. You would set the tape machines up, clean all the recording heads on them with cotton buds and amyl acetate and clean the pinch rollers, making sure there was no dirt on the heads so the tapes could run smoothly.

We kept logs of exactly what happened on the sessions. I had always kept immaculate records. If you didn’t, it would come back to bite you. The producer may say something like, ‘Just mark that, the middle eight was good’, which had to be logged.

A year after joining, Norman mentioned to me that they’d had the Beatles in for a session and I was asked if I would do a three-session day the following week. You always had to be asked if you wanted to do overtime. The producer would then book the studio and allocate the engineers. The date was February 11th and I didn’t have any plans so I said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’

George Martin was to produce with Norman as first engineer and me as second engineer. I’d worked with George many times, from Charlie Drake to Matt Monro, and we got on well. The group arrived about half an hour late. I had been in Cambridge recording the King’s College Choir the day they had come in to do their test so had no idea who was who. Norman introduced me to everyone - the four Beatles and Neil Aspinall.

We brought them in through the side exit - the one that people didn’t know about, past the air raid shelter which is now used as an echo chamber - and straight into Number Two from the garage side and helped them unload the van and set up their equipment. It was all rather shabby and there were no backs on the amplifiers. When we checked for dirt inside, there were lots of bits of paper girls had thrown up from dance floors with telephone numbers on them. We knew all the songs we were going to record. They had performed them hundreds of times, and knew them well, it was just a question of adapting the live show for a studio setting. Ten songs in thirteen hours, we just recorded one song after another. Most of what I was doing was making notes - if George said, ‘We’re going to do that afterwards’ or ‘Mark this on the master,’ ‘That’s the best’ etc. The group were down on the floor and we were upstairs in the control room.

The studio management were quite insistent on staff having a break. During the course of a long session Bob Beckett would come in and ask, ‘How much longer are you going on for? My boys have got to have their break.’ You would sometimes be asked if you didn’t mind missing your break but on this day we went down to the Heroes of Alma pub, George, Norman and myself, whilst the group stayed behind. We’d never seen this before, artists would generally go to the canteen, but they wanted to go on rehearsing. When you look back, it’s rather strange considering they’d just come down from playing a concert and were more or less playing every day and we were basically recording their stage show, but it shows their dedication. During the afternoon when the group were upstairs listening and we were downstairs adjusting the microphones, Norman and I helped ourselves to a couple of Ringo’s cigarettes! He’d left on the drum kit, so we had a quick smoke.

‘Twist And Shout’ was the last track we recorded, and there’s been a lot of erroneous talk about how that came about. It was always planned to record it, it was just a matter of whether John could do it, so it was just a matter of George saying, ‘Well, let’s give it a try and see how we get on.’ Neil supplied him with some milk and throat lozenges. He did it in two full recordings and a breakdown. Halfway through the evening, Brian Epstein and Dick James turned up together. It was the first time I had met Brian. He was a perfect gentleman, I won’t have a bad word said against him. He was a lovely man. They turned up just to listen and of course wanted to hear what we had done. I played the tapes back and then they wanted to hear them again. I looked at the clock and looked at Norman and said, ‘Well, I’ve got a session in the morning.’ In those days EMI didn’t pay for taxis or anything like that and the tubes had stopped.

Although home wasn’t far away, it was a meaty walk, so I said, ‘Well, how am I going to get home?’ Brian asked where I lived and said, ‘Well I’ll drive you home, if that’s all right?’ I said as long as somebody drives me home, that’s all right, because I had to be back in the morning at nine o’clock for the session. So I played the tapes again and Brian drove me home in his car. These days you would call it a Harry Potter type car - a Ford Anglia with the sloped window at the back. Whether it was his or whether he had borrowed it, I don’t know, but that’s what he drove me back in. The overtime rates at EMI were actually very generous, they were very good like that. I think it went 5.30pm to 6.30pm flat rate then time and a half, and our contracts were basically for life.

After a couple of years, I was having problems at home and I wanted to get out. I’d always been keen on languages and wanted to learn German. I contacted Otto Demler, who had been Cliff’s language coach when Cliff was to record some songs in German at the studios. He worked for the EMI’s Electrola company in Cologne. I asked him if was possible for me to get a job over there and he said he would arrange it. I would have preferred to transfer internally but in those days EMI didn’t do that, so I made arrangements and gave my notice in.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going as I didn’t know how things worked politically at EMI. When I went to say goodbye to the studio manager Chick Fowler, he said I was the first engineer he was going to say this to, but if ever I wanted my job back it was there for me. Just before I left, EMI had just employed a guy to transfer all written details on tape boxes onto computer. He said, ‘I’ve gone through nine thousand tapes now to log everything, and your name is on three thousand of them!’

He asked me if I’d like a list of the artists, so I said yes, because I couldn’t remember all of them. He put the dates down as well, everyone was there from Judy Garland to Noel Coward to Marlene Dietrich and Julie Andrews etc., etc.

So I left England and lived in Holland for six months, worked in a factory, learnt a bit of Dutch, then moved to Germany. It was New Year’s Day, 1965. EMI in Germany had arranged everything - my work permit, resident’s permit etc. They’d even rented a room for me, and I think in those days it was very ‘in’ to have an English friend! Germans seemed to follow everything from England at the time, from the music to the fashion. I always had to take over the latest boots and shoes whenever I’d been back to London to visit. I had a great year in Germany and learnt the language.

When I came back to England, I didn’t want to go straight back to work at EMI, so I tore tickets at the Carlton Cinema in the Haymarket for a while. One evening John Barry came in, another time Ron Goodwin, also George Martin, all to see the films showing there. John Barry was perplexed - he knew he knew me from somewhere. I had worked with him many times with Adam Faith and there I was, tearing tickets in the Royal Circle. He came up to me and said, ‘I know you from somewhere!’ After about ten minutes of standing there watching me, he said, ‘I know - EMI Studios!’

After a while, I decided it was time to see if Chick’s offer still stood and made enquiries through a friend at the studios. ‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘we’ll have you back.’ I remember walking along the corridor, all new boys in there, and walked into Number Two Studio control room. The Beatles were in there. The first person I saw was Paul in the control room, who screamed out, ‘Richard! Where have you been? You went out four years ago to get some milk and you’ve only just come back!?’

I wasn’t on the session, but it was great to see them again. I didn’t work on ‘Rubber Soul’, ‘Sgt. Pepper’ or ‘Yellow Submarine’, although you will find some books listing me as being there. It’s the same with the Cliff Richard books because when you went to EMI, you were allocated by your initials. So I was RL. When I left, Richard Lush came in, and he became RL. So when I came back I couldn’t have RL back, so became RJL - Richard John Langham, which is my full name. I was RJL to the end then. Researchers on Cliff and the Beatles see ‘RL’ and put me down, and I say I wasn’t even working at EMI then!

‘Please Please Me’ and ‘With The Beatles’ were the only two albums I worked on, and considerably on ‘Abbey Road’ when I returned. And don’t forget, it wasn’t album to album. It was various tracks and they selected what tracks they wanted to go on various albums. They could have recorded a track three years previously and decide to put in on a certain album. The last one I worked considerably on was ‘Abbey Road.’

Towards the end, it had all got a bit stressful, and it was a case of if you had been a bit naughty, you were put on a Beatles session. It wasn’t a particularly satisfactory working environment. Instead of turning up at one, they would turn up at ten at night, and you knew then you would be there ’til the early hours of the morning.

I then moved onto post-production, disk cutting, mobiles and finally CD preparation. I wasn’t dealing with artists, just dealing with tapes that came in to go to the factory. I still saw artists I knew, but they wanted younger people in the studios. The sessions by this time would go to about three or four in the morning and I couldn’t have coped with that. Because I spoke German by this time I would also be asked to go on all of these classical recordings in Europe. I worked in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria all these places, which was fine by me as I have always liked to travel.

I didn’t work with any of the Beatles after ‘Abbey Road’, although I would see Paul quite a bit. Because I lived round the corner, they would pop in, he and Linda, and if I was in the canteen and they were there, I’d hear a scream across the canteen, ‘Richard!’ It would be Paul. I’d go and join them and have a chat. My second spell at EMI lasted from 1968 to 1995, which completed my thirty years. When I left, I was the longest serving engineer there, I wanted to get that achievement.

By the mid ’90s, they wanted to reduce the head count and asked me if I’d considered early retirement? I said, ‘Yes, I had,’ and gave them a list of all the things I would like in order to go. They came back with an offer - it was a generous one. They gave me everything I’d asked for, so I said. ‘Yes, organise the party, have the collection, I’m off!’ It had been getting very stressful there, so in the end I was looking forward to going.

I had a flat in Cyprus which I had bought some years earlier and would travel back and forth. I’d always used a soap called Lifebuoy, which was a red carbolic soap. Unilever decided to change the formula and I was not pleased, I wrote to them to ask them, ‘Why?’ They wrote back saying it wasn’t one of their biggest sellers and they weren’t going to upgrade the factory and sent me a couple of vouchers. I felt that wasn’t good enough, so I got in touch with Tony di Angeli who had a consumer slot every Thursday on the Jimmy Young Show on Radio 2. I asked him to ask Unilever why they didn’t sell the original Lifebuoy soap any more and of course they were nicer to him than they were to me. They essentially told him the same thing, although in Cyprus you could still buy the original carbolic version of the soap.

I bought one of these off-the-shelf companies and went back to Unilever Cyprus and said I wanted to import Lifebuoy soap from Cyprus into the UK. They thought I was mad but gave me a permit to buy 10 cases from their supplier on the condition I didn’t sell them on the island. I brought them back to England and sent half a dozen bars to Tony. He wrote back and said his house smelt wonderful now, and would I mind if he put my details on the BBC Radio 2 helpline?

Sometime later he was asked by a listener why he couldn’t buy carbolic soap any more, and Tony said on air what Unilever had told him and that one of his listeners (me) had started to import it, and he had put details on the helpline. I had about fifteen or twenty calls via the helpline. The next day I rang Tony to thank him and he told me that the switchboard at broadcasting house had been jammed for two hours after the broadcast. They had to have extra girls come down to the switchboard to handle the calls!

Also, he said, on the JY programme they didn’t normally do follow ups but they had to on this one. The next Thursday they gave out my home number on air (because I worked from home) and ten seconds after they mentioned it my phone rang. It was about half past two then, and by about eight o’clock, I had to take the phone off the hook so I could eat!

Newspapers then started ringing, stories began appearing, one with the headline ‘Beatles Engineer Imports Soap’, accompanied by a photograph of me in a bath, surrounded by bars of Lifebuoy and a loofah! It just went on from there.

That was the beginning of my business Jupiter Soaps. We specialise in soaps people are having difficulty finding. The larger manufacturers have largely given up on carbolic soaps due to EU restrictions, but we can still supply them, and have introduced our own version of a household carbolic soap called Redbuoy - nostalgic, retro and back to basics.”

RICHARD LANGHAM, PURVEYOR OF QUALITY SOAP, PALMERS GREEN, LONDON