Loading ...Lennon purchased this Georgian manor house and land from the Blindell family after the sale of Kenwood in Surrey, his earlier home with first wife Cynthia Lennon, because of its resemblance to Calderstones Park in Liverpool, where he had spent time as a child. He and Ono spent twice the £145,000 purchase price on renovations, transforming the interior of the house to their liking, commissioning a set of hand-woven Oriental rugs, and installing a man-made lake which they could see from their bedroom window
The last Beatles photo session took place at Tittenhurst Park on 22 August 1969, and the photos were used for the front and back covers of their Hey Jude album (a collection of single sides) early in 1970. Also during that year, and in the wake of the Beatles’ breakup, Lennon built his own recording studio, dubbed Ascot Sound Studios, in the estate grounds, where he and Ono recorded their next several albums. The matching cover photos of their twin Plastic Ono Band albums were taken at Tittenhurst by the pair, using an Instamatic camera, and portions of the Imagine movie-length video – which included selections from the Fly album – were also filmed in the grounds.
Ascot Sound Studios
Ascot Sound Studios was a tape-based analog recording studio, built by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1970, on the grounds of Tittenhurst Park.
Lennon built the studio, which featured eight recording tracks on one-inch open-reel tape and a sixteen-channel mixing console, so that he and wife/collaborator Ono could record without the inconvenience of having to book studio time at Abbey Road or another location. They could also avoid negative pressure from EMI and Apple Records staffers, and members of the British public, who disdained Ono’s avant-garde stylings and tried to persuade Lennon to make more “sellable” music, as he had with the now-defunct Beatles. (Chance encounters with other ex-Beatles were likewise avoided.) Technical personnel and outside musicians were summoned as required, kept on standby, or stayed at Lennon and Ono’s guest quarters (as they did for the Imagine and Fly sessions) if necessary, to make records that satisfied the two.
First to be recorded were the twin Plastic Ono Band albums (portions of which were also recorded at Abbey Road), released simultaneously in December 1970. (Lennon’s rose to #6 in the Billboard charts, while Ono’s – largely recorded in a single night of jamming with Lennon, Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums – barely made the Top 200.) The following year brought Lennon’s best-selling Imagine, with Phil Spector as co-producer. George Harrison joined Lennon and Voormann at Ascot to play on several songs, including “How Do You Sleep?”, a song that criticised the odd ex-Beatle out, Paul McCartney. The album sessions were extensively filmed, and the footage appears in both the Imagine: John Lennon documentary and a separate documentary about the making of the album.
Recorded at the same time as Imagine was Yoko Ono’s album Fly (whose title song was the soundtrack to their movie of the same name), and these appear to be the last recordings the couple completed at the studio.
Source – Wikipedia.
Note – The Tittenhurst Park Blog has a number of articles on Lennon’s time at Tittenhurst Park.
