“They Don’t Know to This Day”: The Questionable Methods The Beatles Used To Keep Engineers in the Studio

Countless hours and an equal amount of effort go into making an album sound effortless, which is something The Beatles became increasingly aware of as their creative vocabulary expanded and they began to prioritize studio time over live performance. But while The Beatles might have had plenty of artistic motivation to work on their music for hours on end, the engineers were less emotionally involved. They wanted to cut a good record, sure. But they wanted dinner at home, too.

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So, the band began implementing some, er, questionable practices to guarantee the folks behind the board would stick around past dinnertime. As George Harrison recalled in an early 1990s interview, “Some of the people here—the engineer, for instance—would always be…trying to go home at 5:30. And we’d all be like, well, you know, trying to make history or whatever.” Enter Mal Evans, roadie.

Harrison went on to describe how Evans used to make tea for the band and crew in a large aluminum teapot and how he “doused the tea with uppers.” Evans gave George Martin and Geoff Emerick the laced tea. “Cause they were like, you know, ‘Can we go home?’” Harrison recalled. “‘No, you can’t, you bastard. Have a cup of tea.’ They were up there, you know, till eleven o’clock at night.”

Paul McCartney added, “Then they didn’t want to go home. They don’t know to this day. Till they see this program.” Ringo Starr chimed in, “George [Martin] hasn’t come down yet.”

The Beatles Began Using Uppers While Cutting Their Teeth in Germany

Drinking tea infused with amphetamines might have been a shock to the system for The Beatles’ engineers, but it was an old trick for the band. The musicians began using “uppers” regularly while they cut their teeth at hours-long gigs in Hamburg nightclubs. “That’s the only way we could continue playing for so long,” Ringo Starr later said in Anthology. “They were called Preludin, and you could buy them over the counter. We never thought we were doing anything wrong. But we’d get really wired and go on for days. So with beer and Predulin, that’s how we survived.”

According to John Lennon, the musicians got the idea—and, initially, the pills themselves—from Hamburg wait staff who used the over-the-counter medication to work long hours themselves. “The waiters, when they’d see the musicians falling over with tiredness or with drink, they’d give you the pill. You’d take the pill, you’d be talking, you’d sober up, you could work almost endlessly.”

As The Beatles progressed in their personal and creative journeys, other drugs made their way into the studio, too. Marijuana was a common addition to lengthy recording sessions. And as Lennon once learned the hard way, LSD was known to be lying around EMI Studios (now Abbey Road) as well…and it looked dangerously like uppers.

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