Who needs a stage when you have stairwells? Thirty years ago, a chapter in music history came to an end. Between 1960 and 1995 EMI Records’ imposing glass-fronted headquarters was located in Manchester Square and then they moved to new offices in the Hammersmith area.

Don’t look for the building at 20 Manchester Square if you are in London because it was demolished decades ago. Yet, each time we look at the cover photo of the Beatles’s first LP, Please Please Me, we are reminded of the landmark’s iconic stairwell.

It wasn’t a remarkable stairwell even by 1960s standards — a blend of wood, steel and glass. But add the presence of the Fab Four... and the picture changes. The iconic pose John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr struck was reason enough for future musicians to take similar photographs.

Hello Angus McBean

The Beatles were regular visitors to EMI House and were photographed around the building on quite a few occasions. The pictures that stand out were clicked by the legendary Angus McBean, first for the Please Please Me album cover looking over a balcony above the main entrance.

By 1963, he was already famous among film and theatre directors. He was known for photographing Vivien Leigh. One of the earliest photos taken of her by McBean, in which Leigh, in the character of Serena Blandish, wore a big hat under a bower of blossoms, was sent by her press agent to David Selznick, then preparing to cast the role of Scarlett O’Hara in his film of Gone With the Wind.

For him, the romantic, comic or melodramatic quality of the drama was meant to be conveyed through the portrait of the actor. He soon captured the attention of Ivor Novello.

The Welsh actor-dramatist asked McBean to photograph him in 1936… at a time when he became aware that his matinee-idol looks wouldn’t last forever. “I am 44, and the profile won’t last forever,” he told his photographer. McBean and his photo-finishers proved Novello wrong and ensured his good looks lasted till his death in 1951, after a performance of his romantic operetta King’s Rhapsody at the Palace Theatre.

Capturing the Beatles

George Martin, the famous producer and arranger for the Beatles, at first wanted the Fab Four to pose outside the insect house of the London Zoo for the cover photography of Please Please Me, the group’s debut album. Ultimately, McBean entered the picture.

He photographed the Beatles just as they were becoming famous, for the record cover, in colour, and then again a few years later in the same location for a series of Beatles compilations.

McBean wanted to capture the four lads besieged by a horde of screaming girls, but EMI turned down this idea because the label would have to obtain written permission from each girl in the picture. By then, he had abandoned his cumbersome half-plate camera in favour of a 4-by-5-inch Sinar Monorail. For the colour shots, he switched from hard to soft lenses.

To capture the baby-face Beatles on the first floor, McBean had to be flat on the floor by the entrance... looking up. It was a brilliant idea and the EMI stairwell took on a distinct look.

Years down the line, McBean, who died in 1990, remembered the shoot and what he had asked John Lennon: How long did he think the Beatles would stay together? “Oh, about six years I suppose,” said Lennon, “Who ever heard of a bald Beatle?”

Lennon was not off the mark. Some six years later, the Beatles returned to the same balcony to be photographed again by McBean for the ‘Get Back’ album.

Sadly, the album was delayed for a year and, eventually, the group broke up. The LP we got to hear was Let It Be and other photos were used. Both balcony pictures were used for the Red and Blue CDs.

Everything was falling apart with the Beatles. Speaking to Paul Du Noyer years later, McCartney said: “There were the arguments, the business differences and all that. We were sort of coming to an end. Round about that time we made Let It Be, but because of the fraught personal relationships, the final straw that broke the camel’s back was Allen Klein coming in. [He was appointed the Beatles’ manager in February 1969; Paul’s preference had been for Linda’s father Lee Eastman, whose firm would indeed represent Paul’s solo interests thereafter.] He decided that Let It Be wasn’t good enough and that it needed strings. So he brought in Phil Spector, poor old Phil — it’s not really his fault — to tart it up.”

Paul went on to say: “The most final we got was going back to EMI in Manchester Square and taking that photo [the restaged Please Please Me sleeve]. And we all felt spooky: ‘This is pretty final. This is full circle. We’ve started and ended.’ The other stuff was like, ‘See you tomorrow.’ That was a concert for the film.”

Beyond the Beatles

The Manchester Square building became the backdrop for many photographs, some forgotten and some too familiar to miss.

David Bowie, before he became a star, struck a casually cool pose in Manchester Square, as Davy Jones and the Lower Third he recorded You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving for EMI’s Parlophone label in 1965.

Sex Pistols (left) was at the famous EMI House stairwell in the 1970s and English bandleader Joe Loss in 1961

English bandleader Joe Loss got a similar treatment but way before the Beatles — on October 12, 1961. The Sex Pistols were also found at the stairwell in 1977 while Blur made it there in 1995. A hard-to-find moment is that of Sheena Easton posing on the balcony when she signed for EMI in 1980. You can catch the moment on archival shots from The Big Time.

Where did it go?

Some thought EMI Records took the “stairs” with them to the company’s then-new offices at Hammersmith in 1995. They only took a section of the rail that the Fab Four leaned on. It was relocated in 2009 to Wrights Lane in Kensington but is now believed to be owned by Paul McCartney.