How to tell from the beginning the story of the most legendary music studio in the world (and with it the most photographed crossing ever made)? Simply put, you take the thread from her group who contacted him like no one else (and passed it first, respectively).

“If These Walls Could Sing” this is, of course, not only the history of the studios road to abbey in London, starting with jobs and days The Beatles in it, but also constitutes family business. Literally since the documentary, which has been shown on the platform for several days Disney+ made a commitment to return Mary McCartney, who, as you can imagine, is the daughter Paul (and Linda) McCartney.

As the photographer, presenter and in this case director, recently told NME, her closeness to the legendary Beetle was the reason she nearly quit the project. Strange, because from the very first minutes of McCartney’s documentary makes the story personal we see her in black and white photographs, crawling across the studio carpets and then speaking to her dad in the present, like a little girl waiting for him to tell her a “fairy tale,” a story.

Of course, this perspective is quickly and clumsily discarded (except when he talks to his son George Martin about their fathers) in favor of conventional narrative, with flashbacks and “talking heads”, who remember the key moments of those 90 years of Abbey Road as well as their own careers.

So we listen to him “sir” Paul to unravel the tangle of the Beatles’ most important recordings, we see him make the legendary crossover with Linda McCartney and… a pony named Jet. But also his Elton John and Jimmy Page remember your first steps there, Pink Floyd remember your disturbed star Syd Barrett, to him John Williams look back on the days when he wrote music “for a galaxy far, far away”, their the Gallagher brothers (separately) to describe the nights they were kicked out of the studio for listening to Beatles records too loudly.

If “If These Walls Could Sing” was just one image, it would definitely have to be a label change image. from EMI Recording Studios to Abbey Road Studios (in 1976), which, according to the documentary, is the mistake of four guys who, in 1969, decided to simply cross the road outside the studio to take pictures for their album, which they called Abbey Road. Mainly because this renaming emphasizes Abbey Road’s imprint on the pop and rock universe not only purely musically (there is no doubt how many and how important recordings were made on it), but also as one of the most recognizable landmarks. Even if it’s not true that when someone crosses the Abbey Road intersection, all cars stop, as is heard at one point in the film.

No matter how much “bread” there is outside the walls of Abbey Road, no matter how much the documentary in question was made by “whoever it was”, “If These Walls Could Sing” is ultimately inappropriate for the circumstances, not in the way he says them, nor especially in what he says. The musicians’ interviews contain little more than sweet studio stories that could be told in any other of their interviews, while Mary McCartney’s venture wants to avoid the pop, rock, classical and soundtrack side of over-skilled technical prowess. studios and the history that is written in them from yesterday to the present day, this makes the effect more “tourist” than introspective. It is also this heavy shadow of the Beatles that somehow inevitably makes one think back to Peter Jackson’s “Get Back”, which we saw relatively recently, and weakens what we see even more.

Surprisingly, I personally remember most of all – in addition to a couple of McCartneys with ponies in the middle of London – the image of a passionate Jacqueline De Pre over her cello, even if I “expected it” from someone else. Oh, and, I must admit, a very good name.

Mary McCartney’s If These Walls Could Sing is available on Disney+.