“It was all done very clinically, that’s the joke. We were in this big white room that was very dirty and hadn’t been painted for years [Studio Two], and it had all these old sound baffles hanging down that were all dirty and broken. There was this huge big hanging light, there was no window, no daylight. It was a very clinical, not a very nice atmosphere. When you think of the songs that were made in that studio it’s amazing, because there was no atmosphere in there, we had to make the atmosphere. After a number of years we asked them could we have some coloured lights or a dimmer or something like that; after asking them for about three years, they finally brought in this big steel stand with a couple of red and blue neon lamps on it. That was the magic lighting they gave us. “The refrigerator had a padlock on it, so if we wanted a cup of tea we’d have to break open the padlock on the fridge to get the milk out. We had to do that every night for five years, it wasn’t like they realized, Oh, well, they drink tea after six o’clock, so we’ll leave the fridge open, oh no, they padlocked it, all the time. It was weird.”

[—George Harrison, quoted in With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper, George Martin]

At around this time [when “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” was being recorded] the sessions began getting quite trippy and psychedelic. Studio Two had these awful, filthy white walls that nobody wanted to look at during the best of times, especially not when they were being harshly lit by the large industrial fixtures hanging from the ceiling. So most of the studio lights were turned off whenever the Beatles were down there rehearsing and recording the late-stage Pepper songs, with the only source of illumination coming from candles, joss sticks, and a single ordinary desk lamp tilted upward so that it lit up one wall. Up in the control room, I made my own personal contribution to the atmosphere: a lava lamp and the red darkroom lamp from my childhood. Anything to counteract the dreariness! Late at night, those lamps, sitting on top of the Altec speakers, would often be the only lights on in the control room, adding to the general spaciness and weirdness of those long evenings. Sometimes we’d even turn those off and operate solely by the glow of the tubes in the tape machines. Late-night sessions were still an unusual thing at Abbey Road; it was rare when sessions for any artist other than the Beatles were allowed to run on for so long. The bean counters at EMI had still not cottoned to the fact that it was in their interest to pamper their most important signing, so there was no milk left out for tea after the canteen staff left at 10 P.M. Everyone got so desperate for a cuppa late one night, Mal actually had to break the lock on the kitchen to get some milk. There was hell to pay the next day—you would have thought that he’d broken into the Tower of London and stolen the Crown Jewels—but after that, they arranged for him to have a key.

Studio II

Over the last two weeks I’ve been so busy working on my studio, programming, and integrative projects that my blog count has dropped down. The flip side of this is that I’ve actually got a lot of work done, and I’ve finished my programming project and should be all set for my studio one.

As I wasn’t qualified to use any of the machines and the 3D labs were very busy, Alana ( @colabpixelpusher ) gave me a hand cutting out the two holes and cutting the board down to size, and then we sanded it smooth. I tied the rope into the board so that you can hang it from the hinges of an open window, and I used some carabiners so that it would be easy to click the birdfeeder onto and off of the window. I also wanted to make it easy to refill and/or clean the bowls, so I cut holes which the bowls sit into. They can be lifted out, but the rim of the bowls supports them when they’re sitting in the board.

The last thing to do is figure out how to set this up. Currently I think that I’ll use nylon wire to hang it from the ceiling in front of a window. Here’s my poster, which I’m mostly happy with.

Printed out, the words are all big and clear enough to read. I do think that I might have too much text on the poster, but I cut out a lot of it and I’ve also got a lot of pictures, so hopefully that balances it out. Photoshop doesn’t have a spellchecker, and a bug meant I couldn’t copy and paste my text into word or anything, so hopefully I caught all the spelling mistakes. Initially I had the poster laid out landscape, but the layout wasn’t working well. 

If you have the time, it would be really appreciated if you could take part in this quick questionnaire. 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKJDzmjQrsICpyWFIr4l4oEFoAQ9iSmfZhR7MsbHI5NpObTw/viewform

I put the bird poster I’d made up by the elevator on the fourth floor and then watched it for twenty or so minutes, keeping track of how many people looked at it. I was sitting twenty meters away to watch, which meant sometimes it was a little difficult to tell whether the person was actually looking at the poster instead of in it’s general direction. In the end about twelve people looked at it (as in, read it while walking past, facing it as they walked, but they didn’t stop or alter their path), five more people studied it (getting close and reading a large portion of it), and three of those five took a photo of the poster once they’d finished reading (maybe because they wanted to remember the information for later?). I wasn’t anticipating people taking photos, but that was a positive outcome. Overall I think the outcome was pretty successful, there is a audience out there that is interested in attracting birds to their home.