The Beatles "Abbey Road" Apple PCS 7088 2/1 UK 1st press 1969 no her majesty

	£		53
	$		70

The Beatles ?"Abbey Road"  Apple Records ?PCS 7088  UK 1st press Vinyl, LP, released in 1969. The LP comes in a full laminated cover without flaps on the back side. The front cover has the drain showing, the rear cover has the Apple logo aligned with the text, and 'Her Majesty' is not listed. "Her Majesty" appears as a hidden track. Between "The End" and "Her Majesty" is 14 seconds of silence.
The vinyl appears to have been lightly played and is in good shape. It played through beautifully on my elderly stereo - no hop, stick or jump. It is housed in an Apple inner sleeve, which has a small tear to the bottom edge. The sleeve shows minimal signs of wear and is also in good shape, with no rips or writing. The spine is intact and legible. Matrix / Runout Side 1 : YEX 749-2 Matrix / Runout Side 2 : YEX 750-1
"Abbey Road" is the Beatles' eleventh studio album, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. The recording sessions for the album were the last in which all four Beatles participated. Although "Let It Be" was the final album that the Beatles completed before the band's dissolution in April 1970, most of the album had been recorded before the "Abbey Road" sessions began. A two-sided hit single from the album, "Something" backed with "Come Together", released in October, topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.
"Abbey Road" is a rock album that incorporates genres such as blues, pop, and progressive rock, and it makes prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and the Leslie speaker. Side two contains a medley of song fragments edited together to form a single piece. The album was recorded amid a more enjoyable atmosphere than the "Get Back/Let It Be" sessions earlier in the year, but there were still frequent disagreements within the band. John Lennon had privately left the group by the time the album was released and McCartney publicly quit the following year.
Although "Abbey Road" was an immediate commercial success and reached No.?1 in the UK and US, it initially received mixed reviews, with some critics describing its music as inauthentic and bemoaning the production's artificial effects. Over time, the album became viewed as among the Beatles' best and many critics have ranked it as one of the greatest albums of all time. In particular, George Harrison's contributions, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun", are considered to be among the best songs he wrote for the group. The album's cover, which features the four band members walking across a zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios, has become one of the most famous and imitated images in the history of popular music. The cover was designed by Apple Records creative director Kosh. It is the only original UK Beatles album sleeve to show neither the artist name nor the album title on its front cover, which was Kosh's idea, despite EMI claiming the record would not sell without this information. He later explained that "we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover ... They were the most famous band in the world".
"Abbey Road" initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as Come Together and Harrison's Something are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc … Side Two is marvellous …" Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since "Rubber Soul", Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that "Abbey Road" "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects".
Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism … While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and … Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that "Abbey Road" "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."
While covering the Rolling Stones' 1969 American tour for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau reported from a meeting with Greil Marcus in Berkeley that "opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down "Abbey Road"." Shortly afterwards, in Los Angeles, he wrote that his colleague Ellen Willis had grown to love the record, adding: "Damned if she isn't right – flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too."
Many critics have since cited "Abbey Road" as the Beatles' greatest album. In a retrospective review, Nicole Pensiero of PopMatters called it "an amazingly cohesive piece of music, innovative and timeless". Mark Kemp of Paste viewed the album as being "among The Beatles' finest works, even if it foreshadows the cigarette-lighter-waving arena rock that technically skilled but critically maligned artists from Journey to Meatloaf would belabor throughout the '70s and '80s". Neil McCormack of The Daily Telegraph dubbed it the Beatles' "last love letter to the world" and praised its "big, modern sound", calling it "lush, rich, smooth, epic, emotional and utterly gorgeous". AllMusic's Richie Unterberger felt that the album shared Sgt. Pepper's "faux-conceptual forms", but had "stronger compositions", and wrote of its standing in the band's catalogue: "Whether "Abbey Road" is the Beatles' best work is debatable, but it's certainly the most immaculately produced (with the possible exception of Sgt. Pepper) and most tightly constructed." Ian MacDonald gave a mixed opinion of the album, noting that several tracks had been written at least a year previously, and would possibly have been unsuitable without being integrated into the medley on side two. He did, however, praise the production, particularly the sound of Starr's bass drum.
"Abbey Road" received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications. Time included it in their 2006 list of the All-Time 100 Albums. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named "Abbey Road" the greatest Beatles album. and in 2012, the magazine ranked it number 14 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Musicologist Walter Everett interprets that most of the lyrics on side two's medley deal with "selfishness and self-gratification – the financial complaints in 'You Never Give Me Your Money,' the miserliness of Mr. Mustard, the holding back of the pillow in 'Carry That Weight,' the desire that some second person will visit the singer's dreams – perhaps the 'one sweet dream' of 'You Never Give Me Your Money'? – in 'The End.'" Everett adds that the medley's "selfish moments" are played in the context of the tonal centre of A, while "generosity" is expressed in songs where C major is central. The medley concludes with a "great compromise in the 'negotiations'" in "The End", which serves as a structurally balanced coda. In response to the repeated A-major choruses of "love you", McCartney sings in realisation that there is as much self-gratifying love ("the love you take") as there is of the generous love ("the love you make"), in A major and C major, respectively.
"Abbey Road" sold four million copies in its first two months of release. In the UK, the album debuted at number 1, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' "Let It Bleed". The following week (which was Christmas), "Abbey Road" returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. In all it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart.
Reaction overseas was similar. In the US, the album spent 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969 and was number four on Billboard magazine's top LPs of 1970 year-end chart. "Abbey Road" was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA in 2001. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.