If These Walls Could Sing

There’s a lot of sentiment that can be appreciated from If These Walls Could Sing – the brand-new Disney+ documentary on the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. Effort and passion are evident, but it lacks a certain edge that many productions of its kind have, especially ones that focus on the music industry. While the concept is interesting, the feature tries to do too many things at once to disguise the fact that the iconic recording venue just doesn’t sustain enough material to have an entire film-length documentary based on it. To compensate, director Mary McCartney instead explores the many different artists who have had historical recordings and ties to Abbey Road. But as there are so many and so little time to get through them all, the documentary comes across as unfocused, unbalanced, a little unstructured, and at times, meanderingly boring with no clear throughline.

If These Walls Could Sing’s biggest downfall is perhaps its heavy reliance on archival footage. McCartney manages to procure film of some very big names with very interesting comments on their experiences and thoughts on the studio and the music that bloomed from it. But instead of capitalising on the variety of voices at hand, the picture instead crams as many clips and soundbites from the past into the 80-minute runtime. This results in a bit of staleness, both in the visuals and the audio. There’s not enough movement to remove the sameness of multiple black-and-white videos and images – and from a storytelling standpoint, it detracts from the more interesting statements made by the interviewees. Elton John says, “Magic happened here. It’s history. You can feel it seeping through the walls” – but what the screen presents doesn’t necessarily provide the audience with that feeling, so the tone remains confused.

One final frustrating production note is the unpolished sound mixing and transitions between the different clips. Archival music is too loud and drowns out many interviewees’ comments, and the transitions from spoken word to music are choppy at best, with uneven mixing; anyone listening via headphones will find it hard trying to balance out all the different sounds coming through. This is a great shame for a documentary based on a musical recording studio because audio editing and production should be the heart and soul of this feature, but they unfortunately are not.

Mae Trumata

If These Walls Could Sing is released on Disney+ on 6^th January 2023.

Watch the trailer for If These Walls Could Sing here: