George Martin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  George Martin stood at a mixing desk on the 26th of November 1962, listening to the Beatles run through "Please Please Me" for a third time. When the take finished, he leaned over the console and told the four young men from Liverpool: "Gentlemen, you have just made your first number one record." He was right. But that moment was the beginning of something far larger than a single chart prediction. Martin, born on the 3rd of January 1926 in North London, would spend the next eight years reshaping what a pop record could sound like, and in doing so reshape popular music entirely. He produced every original Beatles album. He arranged most of their orchestral and string parts. He played piano and keyboards on dozens of their tracks. And he brought a formal classical training to a group of self-taught musicians who had never read sheet music in their lives. How does a boy who taught himself piano in a modest Highbury flat, who volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm out of admiration for the Battle of Taranto, who spent his early career recording comedy records with Peter Sellers, end up at the center of the most celebrated body of popular music ever made? That question runs through everything that follows.

• 2. North London to Guildhall

  ›

  Harry Martin worked as a craftsman carpenter in a small attic workshop. His wife Bertha cooked meals on a communal stove in the apartment building where the family lived in Drayton Park, North London. In 1931, when George was five, the family moved to Aubert Park in Highbury, where they encountered electricity for the first time. A year later, the family acquired a piano. At the age of eight, Martin composed his first piece, "The Spider's Dance", and persuaded his parents to arrange lessons, though those ended after only six sessions because of a disagreement between his mother and the teacher. He kept playing on his own, teaching himself theory through a natural perfect pitch. He attended several Roman Catholic schools, eventually winning a scholarship to St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill. When World War II broke out, his family left London and he enrolled at Bromley Grammar School, where he led a locally popular dance band called the Four Tune Tellers. Two pianists, George Shearing and Meade Lux Lewis, shaped his style during those years. Despite what he later called "fantasies about being the next Rachmaninoff", Martin did not pursue music professionally at first. At seventeen, in 1943, he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, drawn by the service's exploits at the Battle of Taranto. He trained at HMS St Vincent in Gosport. On the 26th of July 1945, he appeared on BBC Radio for the first time, playing a self-composed piano piece during a Royal Navy variety show. After leaving the service in January 1947, he used his veteran's grant, on the encouragement of the pianist and teacher Sidney Harrison, to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1947 to 1950. He studied piano as his main instrument, oboe as his secondary, and took courses in composition and orchestration. The composers who absorbed him most were Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, and Cole Porter.

• 3. The Parlophone Years

  ›

  Martin joined EMI in November 1950 as an assistant to Oscar Preuss, the head of EMI's Parlophone label. Parlophone was then considered an insignificant imprint, used for acts that did not fit on EMI's more prestigious labels. One of Martin's early duties was managing the classical records catalogue; he soon co-founded the London Baroque Society with Karl Haas and Peter Ustinov. In 1953, he produced Ron Goodwin's first record, an instrumental version of Charlie Chaplin's theme from Limelight, which reached no. 3 on the British charts. When Preuss retired as head of Parlophone in April 1955, Martin took over at twenty-nine, but faced immediate corporate pressure: by late 1956, EMI managers were considering moving Parlophone's successful artists to other labels and placing Martin in a junior role elsewhere. He staved off that threat with a run of successful comedy records, including a 1957 recording of the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann show At the Drop of a Hat. His comedy work was serious laboratory work. He had already been recording magnetic tape at half-speed and playing it back at normal speed, and those experiments with Sellers and Milligan, as he later explained, were possible precisely because "it wasn't music" and the studio's caution relaxed. His first British number-one came in May 1961 with the Temperance Seven's "You're Driving Me Crazy". He also produced Peter Sellers' first music work, recorded the Goons, and, as music historian Mark Lewisohn has noted, The Best of Sellers from 1958 was the first British comedy LP created entirely in a recording studio. Martin became the first British A&R man to capitalize on the skiffle boom of 1956 when he signed the Vipers Skiffle Group after seeing them at London's 2i's Coffee Bar. Between the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Martin-produced and Brian Epstein-managed acts were responsible for 37 weeks of number-one singles in 1963 alone, transforming Parlophone from a "sad little company" into EMI's leading label.

• 4. Signing the Beatles

  ›

  Brian Epstein had already been turned away by Decca Records by the time he traveled to London in November 1961 to meet with EMI executives. He left a copy of the Beatles' single with Sheridan with EMI's general marketing director Ron White, who said he would play it for the label's A&R directors. White later admitted he had neglected to do so, playing it for only two of them. Martin met with Epstein on the 13th of February 1962 and listened to the recording of the Beatles' failed Decca audition. He recalled that he "wasn't knocked out at all" by what he called the "lousy tape". But EMI managing director Len Wood, partly to appease the interest of EMI's publishing arm Ardmore and Beechwood in the Lennon-McCartney songwriting rights, directed Martin to sign the group. The first recording session took place on the 6th of June 1962 at EMI's studio two. Ron Richards and engineer Norman Smith recorded four songs, and Martin arrived mid-session during "Love Me Do". He and Richards were unimpressed: they complained about Pete Best's drumming, and Martin thought the original songs were simply not good enough. Then, in the control room, Martin asked if there was anything the Beatles personally did not like. Harrison replied, "I don't like your tie." Lennon and McCartney joined in with jokes and wordplay. Norman Smith later described that exchange as the turning point, the moment that made Martin think he should sign them for their wit alone. Martin's uncertainty about their songwriting ability persisted through a September session, when he pushed the group to record Mitch Murray's "How Do You Do It" as their debut single. The Beatles pushed back, and Martin eventually allowed "Love Me Do" as the A-side. It climbed to number 17 in December 1962. With his doubts about their songwriting now quiet, Martin told the band they should re-record "Please Please Me" and release it as their second single.

• 5. Building the Sound

  ›

  Martin's formal training gave him something the Beatles lacked and needed. He described his early role in the studio with them this way: "I taught them the importance of the hook. You had to get people's attention in the first ten seconds, and so I would generally get hold of their song and 'top and tail' it." The first album, Please Please Me, was recorded partly in one marathon session on the 11th of February 1963. Nine days later, Martin overdubbed a piano part on "Misery" and a celesta on "Baby It's You". The album spent 30 consecutive weeks at the top of the British charts. When it came to Help! in early 1965, Martin's idea to score a string quartet for "Yesterday" met McCartney's initial reluctance. Martin played the song in the style of Bach to demonstrate the voicings available. The arrangement became one of the most recognized in pop history. On Rubber Soul later that year, Martin recorded his baroque-style piano solo on Lennon's "In My Life" by taping it at half-speed and playing it back at normal speed, so it sounded like a harpsichord. Martin later noted this inspired other producers to incorporate the instrument in their arrangements of pop records. The Revolver sessions in 1966 pushed further. Working with engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Townsend, Martin helped produce "Tomorrow Never Knows" with a tanpura drone loop, a backwards guitar solo, sped-up tape loops, and artificial double tracking on Lennon's vocal. For "For No One", he scored a French horn solo for the player Alan Civil. Martin himself reflected on the shift in how the group was making records: "I think Rubber Soul was the first of the albums that presented a new Beatles to the world. Up to this point we had been making albums that were rather like a collection of their singles."

• 6. Sgt. Pepper and Its Costs

  ›

  By the 24th of November 1966, the Beatles had decided to stop touring. Their late 1966 sessions stretched through to April 1967, eventually becoming Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Martin was involved as an arranger throughout, except on "She's Leaving Home". For "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", he had engineers cut tapes of carnival-instrument recordings into fragments and reassemble them at random to create the circus-themed instrumental breaks. For the climax of "A Day in the Life", he worked with McCartney to instruct a 45-piece orchestra to gradually play from their instruments' lowest note to their highest note across 24 bars. Sgt. Pepper cost £25,000 to produce, far more than any previous Beatles record. When it was released in early June 1967, a Times critic wrote that it represented "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation". The Beatles historian Jonathan Gould wrote that the album received "the most momentous public reception that had ever been given to a popular recording." That reception had an unexpected personal consequence for Martin. Lennon and McCartney grew resentful, complaining that Martin had received too much attention for his part in the record. Engineer Geoff Emerick observed that McCartney had emerged as the Beatles' de facto producer toward the end of the prolonged sessions, with Martin increasingly absent in the final hours. The same period produced one of Martin's deepest professional regrets: he allowed external pressure to pull "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" from the Sgt. Pepper album and release them as a standalone double A-side. The single reached only no. 2, the first British Beatles single in four years not to top the charts. "The biggest mistake of my professional life", Martin called it.

• 7. The Break with EMI

  ›

  Long before the Beatles' final sessions, Martin had been in a private war with EMI's management over money. By the time he signed a three-year contract renewal in 1959, he was already seeking a royalty on record sales and failing to get one. He described his position plainly: "I reckoned that if I was going to devote my life to building up something which wasn't mine, I deserved some form of commission." He said he "nearly didn't sign" his spring 1962 renewal and threatened EMI managing director Len Wood that he would walk away. The rupture came in 1964, when Wood offered Martin a 3% commission minus overhead costs, which would have amounted to an £11,000 bonus for that year. In making the offer, Wood inadvertently disclosed that EMI had made £2.2 million in net profit from Martin's records in 1964 alone. Martin later described that revelation: "With that simple sentence, he cut straight through whatever vestige of an umbilical cord still bound me to EMI." He informed EMI in June 1964 that he would not renew his contract in 1965, and departed in August 1965. He recruited several other EMI staffers, including Norman Newell, Ron Richards, John Burgess, his wife Judy, and Decca's Peter Sullivan, and formed Associated Independent Recording, known as AIR. The company was modelled on the Associated London Scripts cooperative of comedy writers, with equal shares offered to his colleagues. In October 1970, AIR opened its first studio at the top of the Peter Robinson building in Oxford Circus. Nine years later, Martin opened AIR Montserrat on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a studio that would be destroyed by a hurricane ten years after opening. Wood tried to lure Martin back to EMI in 1969 with a salary offer of £25,000. Martin rejected it.

• 8. Legacy Beyond the Beatles

  ›

  After the Beatles broke up, Martin produced Ringo Starr's standards album Sentimental Journey in March 1970, the first solo album by any member of the group. His collaboration with Paul McCartney continued for decades: the critically and commercially acclaimed Tug of War in 1982, Pipes of Peace in 1983, and the soundtrack to Give My Regards to Broad Street in 1984, which reached no. 1 in the UK despite the film's poor reception. He produced seven albums for the American band America, including their hits "Tin Man", "Lonely People", and "Sister Golden Hair". Guitarist Gerry Beckley recalled in a 2017 interview: "He was really great at keeping us focused and moving forward." In 1997, Martin produced Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997", Elton John's tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. The single became the best-selling British single of all time. It was also Martin's final production of a single. In 2006, he and his son Giles remixed 80 minutes of Beatles music for the Las Vegas stage production Love, a collaboration between Cirque du Soleil and Apple Corps Ltd. The final orchestral production of Martin's career was a score for a demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", recorded at AIR Lyndhurst Hall. He received Grammy Awards for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album and Best Surround Sound Album at the 2008 ceremony for that project. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1996, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, and over his career produced 30 number-one hit singles in the United Kingdom and 23 in the United States. Martin died on the 8th of March 2016 at his home in Coleshill, Oxfordshire, aged 90. A memorial service held on the 11th of May at St Martin-in-the-Fields was attended by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison, Elton John, and Bernard Cribbins, among others.