Daily Mail, March 10, 2016
On the face of it he seemed the most unlikely musical collaborator for the Beatles. There were they, four cheeky, idiosyncratic, exuberantly ambitious boys from Liverpool, obsessed with rock music. And there was George Martin, already 36, classically trained and with the voice, discipline and demeanour of a middle ranking civil servant. And, rock and roll? Well, he wasn’t that keen on it.
‘Listen to the playback and tell me if there’s anything you don’t like,’ he said after recording their first record, Love Me Do.
‘I don’t like your tie,’ came back George Harrison immediately.
That was the start of George Martin’s relationship with the Beatles, an association which was to change not only his and their lives, but also the nature of popular music the world over. Because, although in later years some of them might not have wanted to admit it, getting George Martin as their producer was a lucky break for the Beatles—and for all of us.
George Martin wasn’t a performer and was little appreciated by the general public during the great Beatles years, but his contribution to their records, and the overall sound of the time, was immense.
Modestly he always insisted that the Beatles were so good any competent producer could have recorded them. That was true, but only up to a point. Yes, the Beatles would have been successful had George Martin never existed. They would probably have been very successful, too.
But would they have sounded the same? Would any other producer have had the technical and musical expertise, combined with the patience and the diplomacy to translate their most brilliant whims into the music they were imagining? I don’t think so. Because, while they bubbled with radical creativity, George Martin’s musical know-how put that creativity on record and embellished it.
But there was something else, too. The Beatles knew everything there was to know about rock music. George Martin knew very little. It wasn’t his scene. But he knew a vast amount about classical music, jazz, swing, even Scottish country dance music—stuff the Beatles knew hardly anything about.
Their coming together, the eager rockers from Liverpool, and the cultivated arranger from London was a marriage made in musical heaven. Another producer might have encouraged the Beatles to stay a brilliant four man rock band. But George Martin saw what could be done with their songs. He saw the possibilities.
Would anyone else have thought of laying a string quartet behind Paul McCartney on Yesterday at the height of screaming Beatlemania; or an octet of violins, violas and cellos on Eleanor Rigby in 1966? And then there was the piccolo trumpet on Penny Lane and the Victorian steam organ on For The Benefit of Mr Kite from the Sergeant Pepper album—revolutionary ideas for pop music, and made to work because of George Martin’s skills in the studio.
But George Martin wasn’t just the producer of the Beatles’ records, he was also an arranger, and, albeit largely uncredited, the pianist or harmonium player on thirty five of their recordings, most famously the John Lennon song In My Life. If anyone deserved to be called the “fifth Beatle” it was, in the recording studio at least, George Martin. His musicianship was all over their records.
Most of all, though, he was both musical editor and teacher. And like a good teacher, he encouraged ‘the boys’, as he always called them, making it possible for them to express themselves to the fullest. The inspiration worked both ways. While he helped bring out the best in them: they undoubtedly brought out the best in him.
Yet he might easily have missed the moment. Because, when first badgered in 1962 to see the Beatles at the Cavern in Liverpool by their manager, Brian Epstein, he didn’t go. Nor, it is said, was he in any particular hurry to return Epstein’s phone calls.
He’d been told by EMI that he should find himself a pop star—someone like Columbia’s Cliff Richard and a lot of managers of pop groups were trying to grab his attention. Why should this group from Liverpool be any better than any of the others? Only when he met them and heard them, did he discover how different they really were.
George Martin was born in 1926 in Holloway, North London. The son of a carpenter, his mother scrubbed floors when his father was out of work for two years during the Depression. ‘We were,’ he once told me, ‘very, very poor.’ There was no great musical tradition in the family, but they always had a piano in the house, and he could remember reaching up to play the keys.
‘I can’t remember not playing. I can’t really explain it, but I was born with an understanding of music and perfect pitch,’ and at the age of ten he was sent for music lessons. Then, when he was in his early teens, his life was transformed when he attended a concert in Bromley where his family were then living.
As part of a musical education programme a symphony orchestra visited his school and played Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un Faune. Most of the other boys were probably bored, but George Martin was captivated that music could paint such pictures in sound. He’d already taught himself to play the piano by ear, and at sixteen he showed the width of his interest in music by running his own school dance band.
His ambition at that time, however, was to be an aeronautical engineer, and when in l943 he was called up, he entered the Fleet Air Arm as an observer of planes. Here, as he rose to the rank of lieutenant, the first of the major changes in his life occurred. His accent changed, from that of the Bromley lower middle class boy, to the cultivated, prep school master which was to so impress the Beatles at their first meeting, and which he was to keep for the rest of his life.
When he was demobbed in 1947, however, it was not to aeroplanes that he looked for a career but to music, successfully applying to the Guildhall School of Music. The lessons he learned there would one day be heard on some of the most popular records ever, among the 700 recordings he produced in a fifty year career.
After college he worked at first as a freelance musician, playing the oboe in orchestra pits, and helping out with Sunday afternoon bands in London parks. Then in 1950, he ‘got on my bike’, and was taken on as an assistant “artistes and repertoire” man at Parlophone Records, E.M.I’s tiniest label. Here he produced everything—classical music, Jimmy Shand’s Scottish country dance records, jazz, comedy, and what was then known, somewhat disparagingly, as ‘popular music’.
In fact, initially, pop seems not have been his strongest point, and his first successes were the Goons’ “I’m Walking Backwards To Christmas”, “Goodness Gracious Me” by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, and the “Beyond the Fringe” album from the team of Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. He also produced The Archers theme tune – which is still going strong sixty odd years later
And when rock and roll hit Britain in the late-fifties, he more or less missed it, his hits coming from more established middle-of-the-road artists like Matt Monro (Softly As I Leave You) and Humphrey Lyttleton’s trad jazz band’s barrelhouse piano sound of Bad Penny Blues—a style which Paul McCartney and he would unblushingly borrow in 1968 for the Beatles’ hit Lady Madonna.
I don’t think he ever quite admitted it, but, while working with him on a television documentary series, The Rhythm of Life, some years ago, I got the definite impression that he didn’t actually care very much for rock music until the Beatles.
‘It was,’ he said ‘alien to me.’ He certainly didn’t know a lot about it, and had little respect for Elvis (although his wife, Judy, is a big fan) or indeed the Everly Brothers, which was ironic, as they’d provided much inspiration for, not only Simon and Garfunkel, but also Lennon and McCartney.
But, then, perhaps he was just that little bit too old to love rock as the Beatles did. Because by 1962 when they met he was already in his mid-thirties, with a mortgage on a house in north London, a wife, Sheena, and two children to support.
If the Beatles had chosen different songs to sing at their audition for Decca Records in the winter of 1962 (when, disastrously, they let Brian Epstein talk them into singing novelty numbers like the Sheik of Araby in order to demonstrate how they could be all-round entertainers), George Martin’s second, big career might never have started.
As it was, Decca famously rejected them, and, having received similar short shrift from Pye and Philips, as well as Columbia and HMV, the other main other labels at E.M.I., Brian Epstein turned in petulant desperation to Parlophone. If his group weren’t given an audition at Parlophone, he threatened theatrically, his N.E.M.S. record shops in Liverpool would cease to stock any E.M.I. records.
Whether anyone at E.M.I. took this threat seriously is unlikely, since it was likely to hurt Epstein’s shops more than E.M.I. But Epstein’s moithering was finally successful enough for George Martin to give the Beatles a hearing.
Even then, though the Beatles got their recording contract, there wasn’t exactly huge enthusiasm for them at Parlophone and Martin paid them the minimum royalty rate. Neither was he particularly keen on their first record, Love Me Do, considering it to be little more than a riff. Only when, at his suggestion, they upped the tempo and reshaped the song for their second record Please Please Me, did he begin to see how good they could be.
And then it happened. Practically overnight the Beatles became the toast of Britain. A year later they were the most famous people in the world. Their lives had changed forever. And so had George Martin’s.
As 1963 moved into 1964 and Lennon and McCartney passed out songs like cigarette cards to their old pals from the Cavern, George Martin found himself also producing hits for Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and the Fourmost, as well as another Epstein Liverpool group, Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Indeed it was Martin who suggested that Gerry Marsden record You’ll Never Walk Alone, which has since become the great football anthem of Liverpool Football Club – the record being played at every home match.
He was the hit maker of the moment, the man with the golden ear. In all, George Martin’s records topped the best-selling charts for a total of 37 weeks in that year alone, while Parlophone went from being the runt of the E.M.I. litter of labels to being the most successful in the world.
Unfortunately only £3000 a year out of the millions that E.M.I. were earning out of George Martin’s work for them was going to him. On a middle management salary he wasn’t even entitled to a Christmas bonus. And when he suggested that perhaps he might share in E.M.I’s success with a small royalty on every record sold he was declined.
So, starting a trend which is now accepted everywhere, he took a risk, left E.M.I. and security, and became an independent producer, setting up, along with some colleagues, Associated Independent Recordings (AIR Ltd). He still recorded the Beatles, of course, but now, he, too, was paid a tiny share of the royalties from the records he so lovingly helped craft. In the end it was to make him very rich.
Once caught up in the Beatles caravan of success, his life began to change very quickly. In 1966, now divorced form his first wife, he married his secretary Judy Lockhart-Smith and began a second family, Lucy and Giles. Now he was also making records of his own as the George Martin Orchestra, usually orchestral versions of Lennon and McCartney songs, although his theme tune for the new BBC pop radio station, Radio One, called Theme One, was an original and successful composition. It was also very good.
I got to know him during the making of the Beatles’ White Album in 1968, when, at different times, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney invited me into the sessions at Abbey Road, where I would try to be invisible in case George Martin had me thrown out of his studio. Actually he was always very friendly.
By the end of the Sixties, however, his relationship with the Beatles had changed completely. While once he had been the stern schoolmaster and they the youthful students, increasingly they became the masters and he the hired musical boffin. Bored with their foolishness when they took drugs in the studio, he just got on with the job, steadfastly refusing to become involved in the rows which were pulling the group apart.
In the end that, however, proved to be impossible. By musical nature, and sheer working practise, he had more in common with Paul McCartney than either John Lennon or George Harrison. And, though he continued to work with McCartney on and off for the next thirty years, none of the other three asked for his expertise again after the break-up of the Beatles in 1970. It was ungrateful of them, and, in my opinion, it was a mistake. Some of their solo records missed his discipline and musical knowledge.
‘After John died Yoko said to me that she wished I’d worked with John once more,’ George told me. ‘If he’d asked me, I would have jumped at it, but he never asked.’
Not that George Martin actually needed the Beatles. In the early Seventies he had huge hits with the group America, and was in great demand to work with other artists, like Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers and Jeff Beck, even building a studio on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, where rock stars such as Police could make their albums. Sadly the studio was later destroyed by the island’s volcano.
And then there were the films. After composing incidental music for A Hard Day’s Night, for which he received an Oscar nomination, Martin was asked to score fourteen further films. None, however, with the possible exception of the Bond movie Live And Let Die, where he worked once again with Paul McCartney, met with the same success. In a career laden with such good fortune as an interpreter of other people’s music, he was always disappointed that his own original work, especially in film, was not more appreciated.
Certainly he was very hurt when, after writing the music for the film The Mission in 1985, he was sacked as composer, and the film was re-scored by Ennio Morricone.
Although he was now a celebrity in his own right, eventually even driving around in a Rolls Royce, mainly, he told me, because being so tall it was the most comfortable car he could find, it seemed that the further he moved in time from the Beatle days, the more his Beatle past pursued him. Like the Beatles themselves he could never escape his greatest years.
Continually asked to lecture on them and give concerts of Lennon and McCartney music, in the late Seventies he was even the musical director of an ill-conceived Robert Stigwood film based on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the Bee Gees. More successful was a documentary of the making of Sergeant Pepper which he produced and which worn a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.
By the Nineties, and now Sir George Martin (he was embarrassed when he received his knighthood before Paul McCartney got his), and becoming increasingly deaf, as a result of spending nearly half a century sitting in front of very loud studio speakers, he had practically retired from producing.
His son, Giles, by his second marriage, was now a producer, too, and George preferred to busy himself designing a vast state of the art recording studio for AIR in an old church in London’s Hampstead, and enjoying his seventeenth century Oxfordshire home where his wife Judy had created an exceptional garden.
When he wasn’t doing that , he made television programmes, travelled the world receiving awards, giving lectures and conducting orchestras at charity concerts, or mucked about with his very large yacht. He was also a director of several companies, including Capital Radio.
But then in 1997 came a call he could never have turned down. With the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Elton John asked him to score and produce the tribute version of Candle In the Wind. Despite all his previous successes it proved to be the world’s best-selling single ever—almost fifty years after he had first entered a recording studio.
Even then there was one last Beatles gig to do when in 2006, again with Giles, he remixed a hundred and thirty fragments of Beatle records into Love, an album for the Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. By then he was almost completely deaf, an affliction that, as a musician he resented hugely, but stoically.
‘His brain has to fill in the bits he knows he can’t hear anymore,’ Giles explained as they worked together. ‘But sometimes he’ll suddenly say “I think we need a little more bass there”. And he’ll be right. And I’ll wonder how he knew. It’s uncanny.’
George Martin was nearly always a gracious, patient man, enjoying his celebrity and success, but never appearing undignified. Indeed when, for a time, Greg, his son by his first marriage, got a public reputation as a ladies man, or ‘love rat’, as some newspapers dubbed him, his father was not best pleased. As a venerable elderly gentleman with impeccable manners, that was not his style at all. It never had been.
It goes without saying that the world would have sounded very different today if John Lennon had never met Paul McCartney back in 1957. But it would have sounded very different, too, if the two of them had never met George Martin.
George Martin may never have been the great original composer he would have liked to be. But, taking the songs of the young Lennon and McCartney, and arranging them so that they sparkled so magnificently, his contribution to music will last just as long as will theirs.
