That Crossing (2005)

What can you say about The Beatles which hasn’t already been said in some form or another? Not only already been said, but too many times to number? It seems, whether for good or for ill, everyone has an opinion. Born only two years before the release of their first album, I feel like I grew up with them. I can remember when they were on the radio – the real radio, as opposed to today’s classic mix stations regurgitating the most appalling examples of yesteryear (no wonder so many of the younger generation think baby boomers have remarkably bad taste in music). One of my fondest memories is of walking to school as a five year old and humming the tune to Michelle, which just that morning over breakfast the radio announcer had referred to as the new Beatles single. The house where I grew up in England was only a few streets from the town hall where The Beatles once played. Sadly, I was not only too young to go, I was much too young to even know about them, since they quit touring in 1966.

As a teenager in Australia I devoured all manner of Beatles music and trivia. I spent my twelfth summer riding my bicycle along the hot Adelaide streets, the asphalt sticking to my tires, humming the melodies from Yellow Submarine. My fourteenth autumn and the year of my first serious crush it was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Beatles albums are the catalogues of my teen years; each year is defined by which album I happened to receive the previous Christmas. The Beatles accompanied every formative period of my early life.

It may come as no surprise then that in January 2005 when my wife, Tess, and I visited London, on the top of my agenda, along with four days in Paris, was a visit to Abbey Road – the now legendary setting of the EMI recording studios where the Beatles recorded all but one of their albums. So much of my history was entwined with theirs I didn’t really know what I expected. Except that I wanted to walk on that crossing, the one on the cover of the Abbey Road album itself, and have my picture taken doing it. I wanted to stand where they had stood, walk where they had walked. Beyond that it was up to the ether to inform me.

We took the Jubilee Line to St. John’s Wood and, hot and clammy because the tube stations are always overheated, made our way up the stairs towards ground level where the entrance framed a dazzlingly optimistic mid-January sky. As each step took me closer to the surface I felt like I was on some kind of pilgrimage. I’d been to London before, of course, but never had I spent time chasing the ghosts of a band which had called it quits almost forty years ago. Why now? Why in my mid-forties? I suspect it had something to do with the knowledge that, against all expectations, I was growing older (seemingly a baby boomer thing, this: a sense of denial concerning the aging process). Perhaps I felt that my youth had gone, having dissipated slowly into the long midday calm of middle age. Maybe I wanted to relive a moment of youthfulness, capture a sense of exuberance and carefree abandonment. It might have been all those things.

We emerged right next to the entrance to the Abbey Road Café – the place to go for Official Abbey Road and Beatles Merchandise, according to the sign. Next to the door a life-sized cut-out showed The Beatles as they were in their early days, mop-topped and suited. They were the happy lads everyone wanted to remember, a symbol of less complicated times, when everyone was young and believed they would somehow live forever.

Excited, I wanted to keep moving, but Tess, who is a coffee addict, insisted we stop for a cappuccino. So we pushed open the door and stepped into – well – a cupboard. The Abbey Road Café was tiny – minute, miniscule, diminutive. If you wanted to be kind you might say it was petite. More accurately, it was microscopic. It wasn’t so much a café as a large closet – my grandmother’s clothes drawer was bigger – and it was made even smaller by a plethora of Beatles paraphernalia scattered about on every available surface. I had to stop myself from shrieking, ‘Don’t move; you might knock something over!’

Behind a glass-fronted counter were two extremely bored-looking girls with strong East European accents. Not only did they seem fed up, they were also exceptionally thin – though I guess they had to be. Heavy-lidded and sultry, they stood looking back at us. I expected them to say at any moment, ‘Vat you vant?’ But they just kept staring and I began to wonder whether they’d fallen asleep. Eventually we ordered two cappuccinos – sad to say, this involved me gesturing with two fingers held aloft – and the two of them slid sideways through a narrow opening into a back room.

While we waited we shuffled about the café – an inch here; an inch there – browsing the merchandise and before long I could feel myself cringing. Most of it was in embarrassingly poor taste. Actually, it was downright tacky. And it was ludicrously expensive. You can accuse me of being a whiner if you want – many people have – but if you expect someone to walk into your shop and spend their hard-earned money you damn well want to give them something that’s worth buying. I had to suppress a few hearty guffaws at some of the price tags on display. Sure, I would have bought something – if I thought it was worth it. Alas, most of it wasn’t. You see, the thing about The Beatles – it’s why they’ve managed to stay so popular for so long – is that everything they had a hand in producing was of such superior quality you just knew you were getting value for money. What this means is that for the true Beatles fan – I prefer to think of myself as an aficionado – it’s easy to spot a fake. As I perused I put each item to the ultimate litmus test – would The Beatles have authorized it? My answer was a simple “No”. Followed very closely by “At least I hope not”.

Eventually the girls returned with our coffee. They carried them very carefully, hoisting the Styrofoam cups between thumb and forefinger. There was nowhere to sit so we were forced out onto the street where despite the sun it was cold and we sat at a table squeezed between the door and a neighbour’s wall. But still, I was close enough to Abbey Road itself to smell the crossing, and during the Sixties Paul McCartney had lived just round the corner on Cavendish Avenue. I inhaled the piquant aroma of pop culture history. Ignoring the café at my back, it was everything I’d pictured it to be. Large fine-looking houses with picturesque gardens and an abundance of trees. I experienced a sense of well-being and a certain lightness of spirit. Then I tasted the coffee.

The first sign of danger was the expression on Tess’s face. She lifted her cup to her mouth and took a long sip. She compacted her lips into a threadlike line. She screwed up her cheeks. Her eyes receded into the back of her head. She actually shuddered. Then she placed her cup on the table, moved her chair back, and held her hands out towards it as though to ward off an evil spirit. Because she is such a connoisseur of caffeine – she even once criticised Starbucks – I thought perhaps she was being just a little too finicky. That is until I tasted it myself. As coffee goes it was awful. My guess is the girls used one spoon of generic brand discount coffee to make two cups and then added as little milk as possible. Oh, and they forgot to boil the water. Tess wondered whether they had some kind of farm animal out back. I can take my coffee pretty much any way it comes, but even for me the Abbey Road Café variety … Well, I’ve tasted better dishwater.

Disheartened, though not defeated, we set off along Grove End Road, a short walk past well-maintained Edwardian houses, and then, all at once, and taking us completely by surprise, we turned a corner and there were the Abbey Road studios and in front of them was that crossing.

The first thing to strike me was how small it was. That’s the thing about myth – it makes everything loom so much larger in the imagination. We stood looking at it for awhile. I walked up onto the steps of the studio where The Beatles were filmed arriving for the Sergeant Pepper sessions. I gazed at the rows of expensive cars in the car park. Then I went back to the crossing and crossed the road several times in front of passers-by who gazed at me with expressions that said, ‘There goes another git.’

And that was it. No great thunderclaps, no voice from heaven, no startling insights. I got my picture taken and walked away.