From the ridiculous to the sublime, it was at Abbey Road Studios that the major technical breakthrough was achieved. “We were cutting the album there,” Andre Jacquemin remembers. “Our recording engineer was George Peckham. He had been there for years and had worked on all the Beatles albums. Quite simply, he was the best. Together, we finally succeeded in making two grooves on one side of the record work". The ambitious attempt at running three separate concurrent grooves had defeated them during the making of ‘Monty Python’s Previous Record’, but now Andre had found the solution. “The only way that it could be achieved was by making each groove’s running time slightly shorter. We had to settle with just two grooves but that way they wouldn’t run into each other toward the centre of the record". As a result each groove lasted about eight minutes. Some customers complained that one side of the album was a con, lasting half the length of the other side! To add to the confusion, each side was labeled Side 2. “We were delighted with it”, remembers Terry Jones. “In theory you could play that side four, five, six times and always hit the same groove. Then, one day, you’d play it and it would be something completely different, to coin a phrase!" Michael Palin adds: “We had these visions of stoned fans, of which there were a lot in the early '70s, having the shock of their lives when brand new material was playing on a record they had had for months. Some people thought there was an alternative version because they would hear talk of these mysterious sketches that they had never heard on their record. It drove people mad. This was precisely why we did it, of course".
