2011
“John…” says Sir George Martin measuring his words, “hated his voice. When we were recording he was always asking me to distort and disguise it by putting different sorts of echo on it. In that way when he heard it through his headphones in the studio he could forget that he was listening to John Lennon. I loved his voice.”
So, of course, did hundreds of millions of others who never suspected Lennon’s insecurities. But, for seven years in the Sixties, Martin, the serene, elegantly spoken man who produced every Beatles record, observed in close-up all the little worries and ego clashes of the most famous four people in the world.
It’s sometimes been said that Martin, now 85, was the “fifth Beatle”, in that, as well as helping arrange the group’s recordings, he played on at least thirty five of them. I believe he was more important than that.
It seems to me that had the Beatles never met George Martin, they would still have become a great rock and roll band with some terrific songs. But with him, a classically trained musician with an ear for adventure, they became a cultural phenomenon that changed the course of popular music.
To think of Martin solely as the Beatles’ producer as many do, is,
however, to overlook four fifths of a remarkable career. Did you know, for instance, that as a young man in 1951 he produced what is probably the most familiar piece of music in the UK, when he recorded the theme music for The Archers? By my reckoning that jaunty little jig (officially titled Barwick Green) has been played getting on for 60,000 times since then.
And it’s pretty certain that if he hadn’t recorded Gerry Marsden singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, that song would not have become the great football anthem which is now sung on the terraces not only at Liverpool Football Club but also at Celtic, as well as clubs in Holland, Germany and Japan.
Before that he’d recorded the evergreen children’s favourite Nelly The Elephant, comedy by way of Goodness Gracious Me from Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, and Right, Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins. And then there was the London Philharmonic, jazz virtuosi, tunes for Scottish country dancing, piano recitals, choral pieces, the London Baroque Ensemble and much else that was to prove invaluable when he came across the kaleidoscopic song writing talents of Lennon and McCartney. Tens of thousands of records, all of which explains why on Easter Monday BBC 2’s Arena is devoting a ninety minute film to his life and work.
But how did this extraordinarily varied career begin? Well, not in an educated, musical, upper-middle class home as Martin’s carefully enunciated speaking voice might suggest, and as the Beatles first imagined.
“We were very, very poor when I was a child, living in a flat in Holloway, north London, a run-down four storey house with a family on each floor,” he remembers as we talk at his elegant Georgian country house in Oxfordshire. “My father was a machine carpenter, and was out of work for nearly two years in the Thirties. My mother had to scrub floors to keep the money going. The Depression blighted their lives.”
By sheer chance, however, since neither of his parents could play, they always had a piano. “My uncle was a piano tuner, and he started a company with a friend making pianos. Unfortunately they went broke, but as they had a number of pianos lying around we managed to get one.
“I can remember reaching up to the keys trying to play when I was very small. I only ever had eight piano lessons when I was about ten. Then my mother had a row with the teacher. I’m completely self-taught, because I was playing before I got those lessons. I can’t remember not playing. I can’t really explain it, but I was born with an understanding of music and perfect pitch.
“Paul McCartney can’t read or write music but he’s probably the best musician I know, because he has this innate sense of what music is about and the way that it’s structured. I had that, too. I suppose that was why Paul and I related so well.”
When World War II began the family moved out of London to Bromley in Kent. It was there that he heard his first full orchestra when Sir Adrian Boult brought the BBC Symphony Orchestra to his school for a public performance. Captivated, he began dreaming of becoming the second Rachmaninov, and at 16 went to a private recording studio to record a piece he’d composed.
“Looking back it was nothing amazing, a bit florid and Debussy-like by a very pompous little 16 year old git. At the end of the recording I said ‘You have just heard Fantasy by George Martin’, but when they played the recording back to me what I heard was ‘Fain’asy by George Mar’in’,” and he exaggerates a working class, glottal stop London accent. “I thought, ‘Christ, do I really sound like that!’.” From then on, he consciously began to change his accent. To be a composer he would “have to speak like a BBC person”.
University was financially “out of range completely”, and leaving school at 16, with his parents’ anxious advice to “get a safe job…in the Civil Service”, he did that for a year before volunteering for the Fleet Air Army, much to the distress of his mother who was sure he would get himself killed.
As it happened he never saw any action (“we dropped a few depth charges on what we thought was a submarine, but it might well have been a whale”), but got a lucky break when he went to hear a concert by a fairly well known pianist of the time provided by the Royal Navy.
“I missed my piano when I was in the Navy, so after the pianist had finished and the hall emptied I went up to the piano to play to myself. What I didn’t know was that he was still there, heard me, and asked what I was playing, which was one of my own pieces. He then told me I should send it to a chap called Sidney Harrison at the Committee for the Promotion of New Music.”
The result was a sort of pen-pal relationship with Harrison, sending him everything he composed and getting back pages of stern criticism. And when in 1947, now an officer and speaking like one, he was offered a twelve year commission in the Royal Navy it was Harrison who insisted that he should become a musician. He was good at it.
“I didn’t see how I could. I was 21 and had no musical education to speak of. But he arranged for me to meet the principal at the Guildhall School of Music, where, as an ex-serviceman, I was paid for three years to learn composition, orchestrating and conducting and a second instrument, the oboe.”
He could play enough to earn “a kind of a living”, but knew he would never be good enough to be a performer, when, aged 24 he was invited to a meeting at EMI Records. His influential pen-pal Sidney Harrison had recommended him once again.
“I didn’t know what EMI was, but I put on my naval great coat and got on my bike and cycled over to Abbey Road studios…”, where he was promptly made assistant to the head of Parlophone Records on a salary of seven pounds, four shillings and threepence a week.
Thrown in at the deep end it was a steep learning curve doing every kind of music with the smallest of EMI’s labels. “Jimmy Shand’s Scottish country dance records were our biggest sellers then, but I thought there might be a market in comedy. I loved the Goon Show and recorded Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine. Then there was Rolf Harris, Peter Ustinov (“an expert on baroque music, by the way”) and Flanders and Swann. He produced pop hits, too, most memorably Matt Monro’s Softly As I Leave You and trad jazz with Humphrey Lyttelton’s Bad Penny Blues, which would later become a starting point for the Beatles’ Lady Madonna.
But then he seemed to get it wrong, when, in the late Fifties and now head of Parlophone, rock and roll arrived. Columbia Records, one of EMI’s much bigger labels had Cliff Richard, and the pressure was on for Parlophone to have a rock star of its own.
“I knew something about pop music, but rock and roll….I mean it was there, but it was alien to me. I was never a great Elvis Presley fan, so maybe that was a black mark against me because everybody else was…” including Judy, his second wife of 45 years. “I was always looking for a rock and roll act, but…”
Then in 1962 Brian Epstein turned to him in desperation, having seen his group, the Beatles, rejected by every other recording company in Britain.
“When Brian played me their demo tape I told him that if he wanted me to sign a group based on what I was hearing the answer was ‘no’. But he looked so crestfallen I told him to bring the group down from Liverpool and I’d give them an hour in the studio to see what I could find. That was it. I didn’t fall head over heels.”
But then he met them. “We liked each other. They were charismatic. I thought if they could charm the pants off me they could charm the pants off an audience. And if I could find them a hit song I’d have a hit group. They didn’t have a song themselves.” Love Me Do, he still thinks, wasn’t much more than a riff.
Desperate not to let this opportunity pass the Beatles agreed to record a song Martin had been sent called How Do You Do It? (Later a number one for Gerry and the Pacemakers.) They did a workmanlike job, “but John begged me not to release it. They wanted to write their own songs. When they’d first played me Please Please Me it was really dreary, but they went away and speeded it up, and we worked on it and put a harmonica on the beginning and it was great. I think I said at the time ‘You’ve got your first number one’.”
Did he know that later some American disc jockeys wouldn’t play it because they thought it was about mutual heavy petting? He laughs. “No. We were so innocent then.” He pauses, then smiles.
“But it’s quite probable it crossed the boys’ minds.”
“The boys…” That’s how he still fondly refers to them, as a schoolmaster might about special pupils. Just how special they were he was soon to discover. “They were eternally curious. They so much wanted to learn, and Abbey Road studios (with its band room full of old, forgotten instruments) was like a fantastic toy shop for them.”
But there was something else. Although he won’t admit it, I believe that more influential than the Abbey Road “toy shop” was Martin’s vast musical knowledge which the Beatles also raided. They knew everything about rock and roll and not much else. He didn’t know much about rock, but he did know a vast amount about other kind of music.
When Paul McCartney (“he always had very good ideas”) brought in Yesterday, it was Martin who scored it for a string quartet, and later when the same writer came up with Eleanor Rigby Martin dug into his knowledge of film music, and, as “it was a very spiky piece”, borrowed from Bernard Hermann’s orchestration for Hitchcock’s Psycho. While for Lennon he wrote and played the electric piano break which sounds like a harpsichord on In My Life, made a Hammond organ sound like a fairground on For The Benefit of Mr Kite.
Was he aware of Lennon’s envy of McCartney’s gift for melody?
He sidesteps the question. “There was a competitive element between them, and if John was envious of Paul’s musicianship, Paul was envious of John’s facility with words. John’s musicianship wasn’t as deep as Paul’s but he had an uncanny knack of finding the right musical vehicle for his lyrics. For instance, Imagine (which Martin didn’t produce) is a simple song based on just a couple of chords. Only John could have written that. Paul couldn’t. Both were incredibly talented people, and scoring points off each other and envying each other, proved to be a ladder that they climbed together.”
Shortly after the Beatles broke up John Lennon said to me, “Paul and me were the Beatles. We wrote the songs.” Was that fair?
“It’s not far off really. They got rid of one drummer in Pete Best and Ringo became the luckiest drummer in the world. How many people would get the opportunity to become an integral part of the Beatles? If they’d changed their lead guitarist, too, and engaged another they would still have been the Beatles because John and Paul would have gone on writing those songs which made them so successful.
“Ringo became a rock solid part of the band and George developed. His early songs were derivative and rubbish. He wasn’t part of the Lennon and McCartney song writing team and he found that frustrating. He would have loved to have had a collaborator but he didn’t and had to work by himself.
“I didn’t encourage him enough, which I regret because I should have done, but I was rather occupied with two other people. Eventually he came up with Here Comes the Sun, which was a great song, and one of the best love songs ever in Something. It makes Paul wince when I say that, because that was Paul’s domain.
“But they were a band and they would work out ideas between them. George was always good for a guitar lick, and Paul, too, sometimes. John would sing his songs to me on his acoustic guitar and then I’d go over to the piano and play what I thought it was, and then we’d decide how we were going to do it. They’d all put their oar in with ideas. John had immense faith in Ringo’s taste. If he was singing and playing something he’d ask Ringo what he thought. If Ringo said ‘It’s crap, John,’ he’d just drop it and go on to something else.” He pauses. “I don’t think Ringo was quite so honest or vocal with Paul.”
It’s been said that Paul never knew what his best songs were when he’d written them, I suggest.
“He still doesn’t,” comes the reply. “You can’t expect a genius to have the same critical faculties as someone who isn’t a genius, can you? Yes, I think he’s a genius. I’m happy to go into print on that. John, too. When you look back at their work…it’s incredible.”
His loyalty is touching, because his “boys” weren’t always loyal to him. With the Beatles’ success the balance of power in the studio shifted.
“When in 1969 they recorded the Let It Be album John said bluntly ‘We want this to be an honest album, George, so I don’t want any of your crap on it’” (referring to the overdubbing of additional instruments and arrangements that had made Sergeant Pepper such a tour de force two years earlier).We’ll play and you just sit there and tell us if it’s all right.’
“So they started recording and it never was right. It was a very unhappy time. They’d be up to take 53. In the end he and George (Harrison) took the tapes away and gave them to Phil Spector to edit, who then did all the things John wouldn’t let me do, overdubbing like mad. I was very cross about that.”
Actually he felt betrayed. He never recorded Lennon again after the Beatles broke up. “After John died Yoko said to me that she wished I’d worked with John once more. If he’d asked me I would have jumped at it, but he never asked.”
McCartney did, and there would be several more chart topping collaborations between the two in the Seventies and Eighties, but, due to the caché Martin had acquired through his Beatles work, he was by then in great demand everywhere. “It gave me a freedom to do what I wanted to do.”
That included composing the scores to fifteen movies, including the James Bond film Live And Let Die (McCartney wrote and sang the title song), building two recording studios, one on the island of Montserrat (sadly later destroyed by a hurricane and volcano), and working with the King’s Singers, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Webb, Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers, the John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, the hit group America and dozens of others. Then there was the night he produced the biggest selling single of all time in Elton John’s the reworking of Candle In the Wind after the death of Princess Diana.
He once assumed that after Sergeant Pepper popular music would go on “building into, without sounding too pompous, a new art form. But then along came punk in the Seventies. The Sex Pistols singing God Save The Queen was like people coming in and dropping their trousers and showing their bums. I found that very disappointing. But what we’d done has fed into the bloodstream so it’s still a part of music as it’s metamorphosed into something else. It’s still healthy.”
Less healthy is his hearing, his “nerve endings withered by sitting in front of the studio speakers all those years”. Now one of the patrons of Deafness Research UK, sounds come across as “tinny and Dalek-like” and when five years ago he was asked to mix the music for the Beatles’ Las Vegas show Love he was grateful for the younger ears of his son, Giles, who is also a record producer. “The thing about deafness is that in a social environment it’s very difficult to tell what’s going on and you feel emasculated.”
Not that that stops him composing, having recently finished a 15 minute choral piece based upon his unused score for the film The Mission. “I write from memory because I know what the notes sound like. But, of course, I will never hear the piece properly.”
It seems a terrible irony but he appears to accept it with a smile:
George Martin, still the quietly dignified man who helped make the Beatles something more than extraordinary.
