London, UK (November 21, 2023)—Expected to garner “a seven-figure sum,” Bonhams will auction off the original EMI TG12345 Mk I console that recorded The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, as well as numerous solo tracks by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The highlight of the auction house’s Sound of the Beatles offering, the desk will go under the hammer on December 14, 2023. It will be on public display at Bonhams Knightsbridge December 8-14, 2023.
The desk has an intriguing lineage, having first been installed inside Studio 2 of London’s EMI Studios in 1968. Unlike previous desks in the room, the desk was solid-state transistor-based, which is said to have resulted in a smoother, more polished sound. With the new console’s arrival, the Beatles and their recording team were able to take proper advantage of cutting-edge eight-track recording and recorded 1969’s Abbey Road album through it.
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Created as a joint project between the Abbey Road recording engineers and the Central Research Laboratories (CRL) at the EMI Hayes factories, the EMI TG12345 Mk I only served in the studio for three years, but by the time it was pulled out in 1971, it had been used not only on Abbey Road, but also by each of the Fab Four on their respective solo projects: John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, tracks from Paul McCartney’s self-titled album and Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey.
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Rather than send the desk to another of EMI’s many studios around the world, the desk was instead dismantled into usable sections that were individually distributed; oddly, much of the desk was donated to a nearby school in North London. The educational facility later tossed the electronic scraps, but they were recovered by a custodian, and decades later, reunited with other surviving parts of the desk as part of a multi-year private restoration project. As a result, the EMI TG12345 Mk I is today operational and is said to have more than 70 percent of its original parts onboard.
Also being offered at the Sound of the Beatles auction will be a psychedelic Abbey Road logo Illuminated sign that was used in the studio’s lobby throughout the early 1970s, and an EMT 140 echo plate reverb unit owned by John Lennon, which he used to record “Imagine” with inside his home studio at Tittenhurst Park.
