Tom Dunne: My sweet Lord...the mystery of the piano that unites The Beatles, Bowie and Queen

You might not have even noticed it, but you've definitely heard it - the incredible instrument that has featured on so many classic tracks 

The Beatles, Queen, Elton John and David Bowie were just a few of the people to play the Bechstein at Trident Studios.

So what do Bowie’s Life on Mars, The Beatles’ Hey Jude, Nilsson’s Without You and The Rats’ Don’t Like Mondays all have in common?

A simple answer is that they were all recorded in Trident Studios in Soho, but there is a more intriguing connection, almost a mystery guest on each track. A guest that is hard to find.

Trident was a ‘cool’ studio at the time when studios were anything but. Studios, when it opened its doors in early 1968, were if anything cold. Abbey Road Studios may have been providing the soundtrack to the Summer of Love but along its underheated, austere corridors it still had a whiff of Bletchley Park about it.

Its engineers wore white jackets and held utter sway over all the recording equipment. No one, absolutely no one, touched a mic but them. Tape ops were the lowest of the low. They made tea and changed reels. The engineers looked down on them. Producers, like George Martin, looked down on all of them.

This little microcosm of English society, in which it was only possible to tell the actual year by the music being played, was maintained at all costs. It was kept like this, as Alexei Sayle once said when explaining the UK’s bizarre licensing hours, “to make sure we don’t lose World War 1.”

So when Trident, set up by two musicians from 1960s group The Hunters, opened its doors its ambience, laid back cool and, em, heating, made it an instant destination for the music world.

“People would come to hang out, even if they weren’t recording,” recalls Rick Wakeman.

It also had 8-track recording before Abbey Road did, and so McCartney went there to record Hey Jude, marvelling at the time at the sound of its giant Tannoy Speakers. More Beatles tracks followed and also solo Beatles recordings with parts of Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and efforts from Ringo and John’s Plastic Ono Band.

With the imprimatur of the Beatles it was soon home to Harry Nilsson, Queen, Lou Reed, Elton John, Carly Simon, The Stones, T Rex and Bowie who would record Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane all within its now hallowed walls.

A huge part of its allure was the in-house piano: a 100 year old, hand-made Bechstein. Why this piano garnered that reputation is complicated – the age of the strings, the wear on the hammers, how it was mic’d-up - but in demand session players like Wakeman were soon pronouncing it to be the “best sounding piano in London”.

Its reputation grew so great that bands would book the studio just to use it, and wait for the studio to become free if it was busy.

The upshot of all this is that the piano you hear on Hey Jude, My Sweet Lord, Perfect Day, Without You, Your Song, Tiny Dancer, Suffragette City, Moonage Daydream, Life on Mars, Quicksand, Martha My Dear, Get it on, Killer Queen, Seven Seas of Rye, You’re So Vain and even I Don’t Like Mondays is the Bechstein.

It is the mystery guest, quietly starring in some of the greatest songs of all time, anonymous, understated and unheralded. Happy to contribute and leave quietly by the backdoor.

And this is where it gets interesting. Wakeman states, in an interview last year for the Dublin David Bowie Festival, that no one now knows where it is, that eight different people claim to have it and ownership cannot be proven as the serial number was never recorded.

Sources on the internet – in which as always we should put total faith- claim there is a serial number, 44064, and that the piano was sold to a “mysterious buyer” in May 2011 for a price in excess of £400,000.

Other sources claim it was damaged (badly) in a fall, restrung (and ruined), is now owned by Roy Thomas Baker and featured on the last Darkness album.

If any of that is true then Roy got some bargain. The piano John Lennon played during the recording of the Imagine record sold at auction in 2000 (to George Michael) for $2.05 million. Rock paraphernalia has only increased in value since then. Can you imagine the price that the piano used on both Hey Jude and Life on Mars could demand?

It seems incredible that a serial number wasn’t recorded but the questions none the less remain: Where is it now? Who has it and will we ever hear its gorgeous tones again?