Abbey Road up for sale

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Abbey Road up for sale

Is it on eBay - I'd bid £1 for starters.

£1.10

Jono

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Originally posted by Simon Drake:
EMI are reportedly hoping to tackle their debts by selling off Abbey Road Studios, which I think as part of our British musical heritage, is a huge shame.

Any Beatles-crazed multi-millionaires out their?!

Couldn't agree more.


Chris N

If we have no problem selling a British institution such as our chocolate factory to the yanks, what's stopping Sony or even Shinzing Music Copy Co buying it.
Maybe Macca can be persuaded to open his moth eaten wallet.

What earthly difference does it make who owns the Abbey Road studio complex?

It was built by the newly formed combine, EMI, and officially opened in November 1931.

Much great music making has been recorded there, by the greatest artistic roster it would be possible to arrange! But the recordings were variously made by EMI, DG, RCA, and CBS to name a few.

So if Sony bought it, this is no more wrong than EMI retaining it as Sony is the modern face of CBS.

For whatever reason EMI have unsustainable levels of debt [apparently], so selling of the main recording studio seems a reasonable thing to do. No doubt they will be able to hire it just as much as in past times EMI have hired it out to others

The great recordings made there will not evapourate because the name on the title deede changes.

To worry about the studio's ownership or even EMI's future is nothing other than pointless sentimentality. IMHO. of course.

ATB from George

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What earthly difference does it make who owns abbey road

Fully agree George if viewed (quite correctly) from your synopsis
My point is that this country seems to be selling off all the family heirlooms.
Maybe we have sold them all & are now giving away the kitchen table & the coats off our backs
The once world leading industrial manufacturing base, centre of excellence & the inovation of all things new, the learning place par excellence, is more or less all gone.
OK Abbey Road is a small sprat in a big ocean & it will not cause so much as a ripple, but sooner or later this country will need to realise we do need to make stuff ourselves, not just provide services for bankers & stock brockers, and then the land for the homes & workplaces for the foreigners who now own our family heirlooms.

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Originally posted by GFFJ:
What earthly difference does it make who owns the Abbey Road studio complex?

in all likelyhood it could just as easily be asset stripped. would be a shame for that to happen.

Dear Mike,

When we start making things that people want to buy then we shall able to afford the standard of living that we have become used to from a time when we did.

Unfortunately this sale is merely symptomatic of the real problem we have of having given up manufacturing. We have become lazy and have tried to rely on the profits from selling things made overseas. This was always going to end in tears, and apparently it is really beginning to bite!

We cannot even afford to run our Embassies overseas as well as formerly, because the value of the Pound Sterling is falling in the face of the reality of our economic position.

I wonder how long that it will be that we suddenly realise that the Armed Forces cannot be sustained, whether we want to or not, and we accept our position as one of the poorer and more overpopulated countries in Europe as we decline eventually to the status of an aid receiving Third World Country. I give it twenty years.

The Abbey Road thing is a symptom.

Let us forget putting plasters on the symptoms and examine the disease behind the symptoms.

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by Simon Drake:

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:
What earthly difference does it make who owns the Abbey Road studio complex?

in all likelyhood it could just as easily be asset stripped. would be a shame for that to happen.

For why would that be a shame? I don't understand this at all. It is merely inward looking nostalgic naval gazing of the most sentimental kind to wish for the economically impossible. There are very many more serious issues to worry about these days than preserving an old recording studio, IMHO.

Clearly the site will continue as a studio, if economic, or be better used for something else, if not, who ever owns it.

ATB from George

Didn't the purchasers think they were getting Tower Bridge though?

ATB from George

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Originally posted by GFFJ:
Didn't the purchasers think they were getting Tower Bridge though?

ATB from George

Oh yes!

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Tony B Liar was the start of the downturn.

What had he left after Thatcher had sold off most of this countries silverware?

Next they'll be selling titles to whomever......

oh wait, the've already done that in some cases.

It would be great if the big rock N rollers would put up the cash. What's a few million each to them? Get the Sirs to pony up and record there.

I'm in negotiations at the moment though cannot say much but lets just say I've already got a buyer for the zebra crossing outside.



Dean...

This is one of those things which if they were sensible, the National Trust should buy. If you accept that Britain has had a significant and substantial impact on music since the early sixties it stands to reason that you would want to preserve some of the physical manifestations of that impact. Abbey Road is clearly the most famous studio in Britain ergo it is worth preserving as a symbol of British heritage.

To take the contrarian view leads to the situation whereby despite being the initiator of the modern navy specifically the battleship, there are none preserved for prosperity. This ignorance of a things manifest symbolism and therefore any regard for its preservation leads to a loss which can not be recreated. If it is a signal thing for your society, whether a weapon of mass destruction or a place where great music was created, it should be saved.

regards,

Giles

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despite being the initiator of the modern navy specifically the battleship

I always thought that HMS Vanguard, (our last battleship in commission) should have been preserved rather than be scrapped. It could have joined HMS Victory (and HMS Warrior) in Portsmouth as reminders of our Naval heritage.

HMS Vanguard

Yes maybe National Trust should step in , it could still be used and be an "earner" for NT.

We started saving out heritage a bit late and then seemed to save almost everything.

I always wondered why HMS Belfast and not a Battleship a symbol of the pinnacle of conventional seapower, and maybe an Aircraft carrier?

Brooklands? Architectral vandalism, the FIRST purpose built race track, decimated un-necessarily

The only reason that EMI has "unsustainable levels of debt" is that Guy Hands and his Terra Firma (!) mob borrowed all the money needed to buy EMI in the first place. Now that they've gone back, cap in hand to the banks who loaned the money and been told to "F*ck Off", they have to start hawking the family silver instead.

Hands and his crew ought to be marched out onto that zebra crossing and shot.

We'll see the same happening with the Glazers and Man U before long.

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Abbey Road is clearly the most famous studio in Britain ergo it is worth preserving as a symbol of British heritage.

The most famous in the world IMHO - if we got rid of my local council and used the money to preserve it then that would win many a vote. National Trust seems a good idea to me; I've far less interest in preserving military things - if the number of visitors they get pays for them though that's fine - no problem with that as long as I'm not funding it. Quite happy to help fund Abbey Road though.

The Zebra Crossing and the Abbey Road studio facade should be preserved, but I see no reason to waste money in times when the level of debt in the country is so much too high, to put any strictures on what happen the studios themselves.

If it carries on being used as a recording studio, whoever owns it then fine, but to turn it into a museum is plum crazy. In what condition do you preserve it?

As it was when Elgar made records there between 1931 and his retirement from the podium in 1933? The Beatles era? As it is today, completely transformed in all aspects in the smaller studios, and much changed in the large studio?

There are more important things to spend money on just now than rescuing something if it does not retain enough value as a working recording studio, and sold as such.

Otherwise in times when housing is in desperate shortage, the natural thing to me seems to be development in mixed cost apartments, which would be far more useful to working people struggling to find housing in our stretched capitol.

In Britain we have lost our way and cling to things past their sell-by date in all too many cases. If something is no longer viable or useful it should be allowed to evolve into something that is, even if the change is utter.

Think of the construction jobs that would be created in a trice if this site were developed for domestic housing, which is actually the main type of building use in this part of London NW.

ATB from George

Unfortunately all the old recording equpiment was sold for peanuts in the 80's I think so the recording studio bears very little resemblance to when the Beatles were there.

Everyone is speculating as to what the new owners will do with it if and it's a big if it's bought.

No doubt someone will buy it and turn it into a London tourist attraction.

If it can economically justify its continued existence as a tourist attraction this would be fine enough, just so long as the public purse or the Lottery Fund is not called on to "aid" the preservation.

Would you expect non-football fans to support state aid for the financial disaster that is the Premiereship? Keeping the old studios open with state aid would be no different. And a thundering waste of money at a time when the falling pound means we now have shortages of essential life-saving drugs for chronic stroke and heart conditions.

There is no way that racking up debts the way the owners of EMI have should be subsidized by the money of hard working people, of whom the huge majority could not give a fig what happens to the old buildings, and have higher [and saner] priorities for spending on their behalf by the great and the good, or the government.

ATB from George

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Would you expect non-football fans to support state aid for the financial disaster that is the Premiereship? Keeping the old studios open with state aid would be no different. And a thundering waste of money at a time when the falling pound means we now have shortages of essential life-saving drugs for chronic stroke and heart conditions.

Dear George

As a football fan or at least a supporter of the Tractor Boys, I would not one penny of my money to go towards perpetuating the financial disaster that is the Premiership.

Indeed if my taxes went towards essential life-saving drugs for chronic stroke and heart conditions then I be happy with that.

But most of our taxes go towards things I don't agree with at all - some has found its way in to the pockets of investment bankers, for example - and the local council spends the money on itself. So I'm not advocating money be spent on Abbey Road rather than life-saving drugs, but rather it be spent on Abbey Road than funding some of the many things I've no wish to fund including sending troops abroad. Would you spend money on research in to stickier glue or improving education - far more has been spent on the second of these, but in terms of return on investment we do have two stickier glues available - too much money is wasted on the school system and many other such things. Surely preserving Abbey Road deserves a higher priority than some of those.

ATB Rotf

.....I wonder what the average American would say if (say) the Sun Studios were to be sold off to a foreign buyer??

Dear ROTF,

Let's not forget why public money from the Tax-take [some of it your money and mine] is spent in monstrously wasteful white elephants [remember the Dome, and consider the 2012 Olympics] is that it allows our beloved leaders [some elected and some there without the public vote of approval due to our arcane constitution, which the politicians have arranged over the centuries] to show themselves in a good light. Self-aggrandizement at all our costs.

I can see it now - several million pounds of our money blown to bail out Terra Firma - and some horrible little Minister will tell us all how much better off we all are because some worn out old studio, where the Beatles and Co made the seminal recordings, has been saved from the economically sane bulldozer, for the nation! This makes us all the poorer one way and another, and the politicians themselves non-the-worse off, because we not only pay them for their work but provide them with board, lodgings [which they retain having paid the mortguage on our tab ...] etc.

No the issue is to root out this waste by electing politicians who promise to cut it out. And sot out what the general public regards as essential such as a decent well run health service, and similarly, a decent state education system that is good in all schools rather than perpetuating the social divides cause by sink schools which remain a scandal and blot on our country. Etc.

Can we cancel the Olympics? That would be a start IMHO, if one more peeny of public money has to go into it ...

ATB from George