A forgotten piece of The Beatles’ history has gone on sale after being buried in a skip for decades and it’s now worth over £2,000,000.
The one-of-a-kind recording equipment used to create the album Abbey Road has been restored 55 years after the record was originally released.
Abbey Road was the last Beatles album before the band split in April 1970, featuring tracks like Come Together and Here Comes The Sun.
The album artwork has become a symbol of the Beatles with the four band members – Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and George Harrison – walking in tandem over a zebra crossing.
This now iconic photo was taken outside Abbey Road Studios (then called EMI Studios) and has become one of the most imitated artworks of all time.
However, an album is nothing without its tracks and the irreplaceable custom-built EMI TG12345 console used to create this landmark record has finally been restored to its former glory.
The TG12345 allowed the Beatles to use eight-track recording for the first time, as opposed to four-track, giving the album a softer sound overall.
Hard-core fans note how different this final hurrah from the Hey Jude hitmakers sounds to their earlier works, all thanks to the solid-state transistor mixing desk.
Not only was it used for Abbey Road but the EMI console was also used for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which was recorded at the studio just four years later.
After being a key player in creating two of the greatest albums of all time, the prototype console was donated to a school and eventually discarded.
It was fished out of the skip by an engineer, who took it home as spare parts – unaware that he had just saved this legacy equipment.
Four years ago, after sitting disassembled for five decades, the original pieces were reunited with the frame and a painstaking restoration began.
The repair was done under the guidance of Beatles collaborator and former EMI engineer Brian Gibson, who died in August 2024.
Now, the piece of music history will be auctioned off by music site Reverb with a whopping £2,250,000 starting price tag.
Anyone with a spare few million can make an offer on the website in a closed bid and take home this crucial piece of Beatles history.
Abbey Road has sold nearly 27.5million copies worldwide since its release in 1968, despite the fact it was initially met with mixed reviews.
It sold over 4million copies within two months of release, debuting a number one on the UK Album Charts where it stayed for 11 weeks.
In 2019, it was named the highest-selling vinyl record of the past decade, with Dark Side of the Moon in second place.