1990s
The 1990’s saw the advent of prog rock and bands including Radiohead, Spiritualized, Manic Street Preachers, Texas, Gomez, Travis and Blur all chose Abbey Road to record, mix and master their tracks.
Radiohead recorded their second album The Bends and third album OK Computer at Abbey Road, reviewed as ‘one of the most acclaimed albums of the 90s’. As well as hitting the top spot in the UK album chart it also climbed to an impressive position of no.21 in the Billboard top 200. The band also established a working friendship with Abbey Road’s Chris Blair who was first choice of engineer in mastering their debut album Pablo Honey and continued to master their subsequent album and single releases.
The Manic Street Preachers recorded their first album as a trio after the mysterious disappearance of singer Richie Edwards. This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was one of the first recordings to take place in the newly re-vamped Studio Three, which boasted a live studio space and additional live drum space with walls covered in unparallel mirrors. Their follow-up album Everything Must Go, also mastered at Abbey Road, was voted Best Album Of The Year by no less than five popular music magazines and a host of national newspapers.
Additionally many rock artists were visiting the Studios to record string arrangements and to overdub choirs or orchestras onto their contemporary albums, including The Lightning Seeds, Reef, Bush, Vent, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Deacon Blue, Sade, Take That and Chris Rea.
In other areas of the building the film scoring went from strength to strength. Films such as Batman, Memphis Belle, Shining Through, City Of Joy, The Fisher King, Immortal Beloved, Interview With A Vampire, Little Women, The Madness Of King George, Apollo 13, Braveheart, Evita The Movie, GI Jane, Dark City, Deep Impact, Desperate Measures, Event Horizon, Land Girls, Lost In Space, Practical Magic, What Dreams May Come, Chocolat, Eyes Wide Shut, Message In A Bottle and many others were all scored and/or mixed in the Studios throughout the decade. Abbey Road established firm links with Hollywood and UK composers attracting the international elite: James Horner, Michael Nyman, Michael Kamen, Ennio Morricone, George Fenton, Trevor Jones, John Barry, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joel McNeely, Bruce Broughton, Debbie Wiseman, Ed Shearmur, Howard Shore, Jocelyn Pook, Maurice Jarre and of course John Williams.
In 1996 a joint venture between EMI Music Studios and Apple Computers was established and a new multimedia business Abbey Road Interactive was launched. Its primary aim was to bring together the four basic elements of television - video, audio, graphics and text - and utilise the new emerging formats for personal computers Enhanced CD and websites, not to mention the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc).
In 1997 Abbey Road’s Interactive team were responsible for producing the first commercially available DVD in the UK, Queen’s Greatest Flix, subsequently followed by the first feature film on DVD, The Graduate. Since then the award-winning team have created DVD-Video discs for the film, television and music industries.
Alongside the developments in visual technologies, the audio teams in the studio were experimenting and developing new mixing techniques. In the field of surround sound. 5.1 audio was hailed as the ‘only way to truly experience all around sound’ and was brought to the public and press’ first attention with the release of the groundbreaking Yellow Submarine Songtrack. A triumph by no short measure, the project was the first in a succession of The Beatles catalogue masterpieces to undergo the 5.1 treatment. Whilst the cinema had already been creating soundscapes for many years, now the most influential band of the twentieth century were about to follow suit, emerging to a new younger generation of fans.
The nineties could not have concluded without a visit from the Spice Girls. The group followed their international success by recording Spice World in Studio Three and once again brought the world’s media and the fans to the steps of Abbey Road.
In 1999, rumours were spreading that there were to be a further three Star Wars films. The prequel Episode 1: The Phantom Menace indeed was being filmed and the original team once again returned to Studio One to score the music. This time the makers chose to edit the entire score at Abbey Road, making use of the improved facilities and network of ties between Abbey Road’s studios recording, mixing, mastering and interactive facilities. In fact, as the twenty first century approached, it was now possible to record, mix, edit, master and create the DVD of a movie all under the one roof.
