In contrast to the White Album and Let It Be, Abbey Road – released in September 1969 – found The Beatles operating relatively cohesively; attempting to pull together, in step with one another if not exactly on the same page. “Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together,” bemoaned John Lennon. “None of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all.”

It was the final collection of songs The Beatles recorded together, and our track-by-track guide tells its story.

Come Together

Very much John Lennon’s song, Abbey Road’s opener started out as Let’s Get It Together, a campaign song for Timothy Leary, standing against Ronald Reagan for Governor of California.

Lennon kick-started his lyric with a phrase from Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me (‘Here come old flat-top’), but neglected to cut the line from the finished recording. Berry’s publishers initiated plagiarism proceedings but settled out of court in 1973 on condition Lennon record three of their songs (hence his 1975 album Rock ’N’ Roll).

With a thinly veiled Lennon as central protagonist, Come Together is a groove-based espousal of the counter-culture, rich in selfconfessed ‘gobbledygook’, which references Yoko Ono (then recovering from a car accident, in a hospital bed actually in Abbey Road Studios) and features the zeitgeist-defining line ‘you got to be free’.

Recorded across nine days in July, all four Beatles featured, with Lennon on double-tracked guitar solo, Paul McCartney on bass and piano, and Ringo shuffling beautifully on juju drums. Outwardly good-natured, there was tension in the air; “Shoot me” Lennon whispered over the opening bars. McCartney told journalist Ray Coleman: “On Come Together I’d have liked to have sung harmony with John, and I think he’d have liked me to, but I was too embarrassed to ask him.”