Radio: Everett Is Here – 14 August 1969

Thursday 14 August 1969 | John Lennon, Radio

During a break in the 12-hour Abbey Road mixing session on 14 August 1969, BBC Radio 1 disc jockey Kenny Everett interviewed John Lennon in Studio Two at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. The interview was recorded in mono on EMItape reel E93325, using the studio’s own equipment rather than the BBC’s standard recording gear.

The interview was for Everett’s Saturday morning show Everett Is Here and focused primarily on The Beatles’ recording methods. It was broadcast in two parts on 20 September and 27 September 1969, from 10am until midday — just before and after the release of Abbey Road on 26 September 1969.

What Lennon said

The interview ranged across several subjects, offering a rare and candid glimpse into Lennon’s thinking at one of the most significant moments in Beatles history.

On the new album’s title: Lennon told Everett that the album The Beatles were currently working on would be titled after the street on which the studio stood — confirming, in effect, that the record would be called Abbey Road. This was one of the earliest public confirmations of the album’s title.

On Get Back: Lennon revealed that the next LP, Get Back — the recordings that would eventually be released as Let It Be in May 1970 — was complete and ready for release, but that the group had “got fed up [and] just left it.” This candid admission captured the exhaustion and disillusionment that had followed the difficult January 1969 sessions at Twickenham Film Studios and Apple Corps’ Savile Row headquarters.

On Gene Vincent: Lennon asked Everett to play Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ on his show, specifying that he wanted “the real old [version] with the tape echo.” The request was characteristic of Lennon’s lifelong devotion to early rock ‘n’ roll — the music that had first inspired him as a teenager in Liverpool in the mid-1950s.

On recording techniques: Everett noted that early rock ‘n’ roll songs had been recorded with a single microphone, and observed that The Beatles seemed to use “millions of tracks.” Lennon replied that most of the group’s backing tracks were in fact done live — a reminder that despite the complexity of their studio work, The Beatles retained a fundamentally live approach to their basic recordings.

On Strawberry Fields Forever: When Everett complimented Lennon on his patience in the studio — the Abbey Road album was being painstakingly assembled across weeks of mixing sessions — Lennon said that ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ had been their most complicated work, due to the various remakes and recordings required. The song had famously required the joining of two incompatible takes — recorded in different keys and at different tempos — by slowing one down and speeding the other up until they matched.

On Yoko Ono: Lennon revealed that he played Beatles recordings to Yoko Ono, as she had been unfamiliar with the group’s catalogue when they first met. He also mentioned that he only knew one joke — the first dirty joke he had ever been told. The BBC being a conservative institution in 1969, he declined to share it on air.

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Kenny Everett and The Beatles

Kenny Everett (born Maurice James Christopher Cole, 25 December 1944) was one of the most inventive and irreverent broadcasters in British radio history. He had been among the earliest champions of The Beatles on radio, and his relationship with the group stretched back to the mid-1960s when he worked as a pirate radio DJ on Radio London before joining BBC Radio 1 at its launch in September 1967.

Everett’s anarchic, creative approach to radio — his shows were characterised by elaborate sound effects, comic characters and unconventional presentation — made him a natural fit with The Beatles’ own experimental sensibility. He had previously broadcast exclusive previews of Beatles material, including early plays of tracks from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.

The 14 August 1969 interview was recorded during a break in the mixing session, using the studio’s own equipment rather than the BBC’s standard portable recording gear. This gave the recording an unusually high audio quality for a radio interview of the period.

Everett’s Abbey Road jingles

One of the most intriguing footnotes to the interview concerns Kenny Everett’s own recordings of Abbey Road material. Although it is unlikely that Everett was given copies of the actual Beatles recordings on 14 August, he subsequently recreated ‘Sun King’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ using his own four-track tape recorder, producing versions intended for use as radio jingles on his show.

These Everett-made recreations were used as an audio bed underneath the interview when it was broadcast, leading many listeners — and subsequently many Beatles fans — to presume they were hearing The Beatles’ own recordings. The interview and Everett’s jingles now circulate widely on bootlegs and are considered an important document of the Abbey Road recording period.

Key Facts

Frequently Asked Questions

→ Mixing, editing: Sun King, Mean Mr Mustard, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Polythene Pam – 14 August 1969
→ Recording, mixing: Yer Blues, What’s The New Mary Jane – 14 August 1968
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→ August in Beatles History
→ On This Day in Beatles History

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