Produced by George Martin
Melody Maker
August 21, 1971
George Martin is probably the most shadowy character in rock and roll history. His influence has been immense, yet few people outside the immediate circle of the Beatles truly understand how much of a part he played in the early years of the greatest group the world has ever known. John Lennon was recently quoted as saying, "Show me a piece of music that George Martin ever wrote." Yet, it's undeniable that such classics as "Yesterday," "Eleanor Rigby," and "A Day in the Life" could not have appeared in the form they did without his presence in the background. It's impossible to assess his true contribution, particularly as he's a modest man and his relations with the group are now virtually non-existent (although he did some of the scoring for Paul's Ram album recently and wasn't credited on the sleeve).
He went to work at the BBC music department, and from that he moved almost by accident to EMI, where he went straight into production, knowing nothing about it. Eventually, he took over as head of Parlophone, the youngest label chief EMI had ever appointed. On the label at that time were Jimmy Shand, Johnny Dankworth, and Humphrey Lytleton, and Martin proceeded to make his name with such luminaries as Jim Dale and the Temperance Seven.
He also became known as the Comedy King through his hits with Bernard Cribbins, Peter Sellers and Charlie Drake, and by the end of 1962, he was looking for something different, something that would give Parlophone a rather hipper image.
M M: Do you remember how the Beatles came to you at EMI?
Martin: Oh yes, very easily. Brian Epstein brought them to me, not to EMI. Well, he had already taken them to EMI, and they'd been turned down. I didn't know that until afterwards.
MM: Who turned them down?
Martin: The story is that, first of all, he took them to a guy who was the marketing manager. I don't think I'd better mention his name, and he played the tapes to two producers. Now there were four producers at EMI at the time: Norrie Paramor, Norman Newell, Walter Ridley, and myself. Two of these four heard the tapes, and I didn't. So one of the other three is also innocent. They said they weren't any good, so Epstein went away and played them to Decca, who showed an interest in them and brought them down for a test. It was fairly favorable to begin with. Then later on, Brian found that he'd got to bring them down for a second test while Decca made up their minds, and he got rather shirty about it. He tried them with other companies as well. I think Pye and Phillips. In desperation, he took the tapes to HMV on Oxford Street to get some lacquers cut because he wanted to place the songs with a publisher, and the engineer there, Ted Huntley, thought the tapes were great. He took them upstairs to Sid Coleman, who ran EMI Publishing, and said Sid liked them too, and said, "Have you played them to EMI?" Brian said, "Yes, but nobody wants to know." And Sid told him to play them to me because I was looking for something. Brian brought them round to me, and that was it.
MM: Can you remember the songs on the tape?
Martin: No, I can remember "Your Feet's Too Big" was one of them. There was a motley collection. I think possibly "Love Me Do" was on it, but I'm not sure. Certainly, the songs didn't knock me out. In fact, I wasn't knocked out at all. In defense of all those people who turned it down, it was a pretty lousy tape, recorded in a back room, very badly balanced, not very good songs in a rather raw group, and I wanted something, and I thought they were interesting enough to bring down for a test. I said, "Bring them down from Liverpool. I don't want to go up there, and I'll have to look at them in the studio." Obviously, Brian inwardly groaned, thinking he was going to go through the same thing as Decca, but when he came to London and I spent an afternoon with them in Number Three Studio in Abbey Road, I liked them. I thought they were great. I liked them as people apart from anything else, and I was convinced that we had the making of a hit group, but I didn't know what to do with them in terms of material.
MM: There was a kind of hiatus in pop at that time. Were you conscious of that?
Martin: Very much so. I was very envious of Norrie Paramor, who had Cliff Richard, the big star. I've been making comedy records: Peter Sellers, Charlie Drake, Bernard Cribbins, and I'd done it because I'd enjoyed it anyways. It was a way of giving Parlophone something different, and I was successful, so I became the Comedy King. I envied Norrie for his success with Cliff because every comedy record you made was a onceer. You had to start from scratch the next time around, whereas if you had an artist like Cliff, once you got him up there, all you got to do was find a reasonably good song and give it to him, and you got a second hit. This, to me, was much easier at least, I thought so, and I was always looking for something of that sort. When the Beatles came along, I thought, "Well, I didn't know where I was going to get the songs from, but they seemed a pretty good group, and they seemed to have that kind of raw sound that people hadn't heard about yet."
M M: What was it that was different? The raw sound or the fact that they were a group rather than a solo singer?
Martin: Well, I didn't recognize that because the tapes weren't like that. They were occasionally singing together, but mostly they were alternating. Sometimes it was John, sometimes it was Paul, and sometimes George. In fact, my first sessions with them were looking for the voice. I thought "They're great people, but who am I going to make the lead voice?" I spent an afternoon with each of them in turn listening to them. I chucked out George pretty quickly, so it was left to either Paul or John.
MM: Were all three singing equally when they came to you?
Martin: They were doing all those old rock standards, "Chains," and "Anna," and so on, and they were doing them the way they had heard them on records, imitating the records. So they were singing together, but occasionally one would burst out in a solo. Then it suddenly hit me that I was being stupid. I was looking for a solo voice when I didn't need to. I should just take them as they were. Then we got rid of Pete Best, and Brian brought Ringo along. I was rather suspicious of him.
MM: What was wrong with Pete Best?
Martin: He was the best-looking of the group, which was rather curious, but he never joined in with the others. He was always a bit quiet, almost surly, but the basic thing that I didn't like was his drumming. It wasn't very solid, and he didn't bind the group together. I said to Brian that I didn't want to use him on the records, although he could do what he liked with him outside of the studio, as part of the group. But there was no reason why I shouldn't use a session drummer. No one was going to know. This was obviously the trigger because the boys had been thinking of getting rid of him anyway, but they wanted someone to do the dirty work for them.
M M: What did you think of Ringo's drumming when you first heard him?
Martin: I didn't give him a chance to begin with. He suddenly turned up at the session. I didn't know he was coming, and I booked Andy White. I said, "Well, Andy's here, and he's paid for, so he's going to play. You could join in on tamborine if you like."
MM: This was the "Love Me Do" session?
Martin: Yes, we actually did it again with Ringo playing drums because when I heard him, he was much better than Pete Best. He gave it more solidarity, and the fact he was more raucous than Andy White, and it obviously fitted the group anyway. He was pretty rough in those days, but pretty good.
MM: So he did actually play on that single?
Martin: Oh yes, but we have two versions of "Love Me Do." In all honesty, I can't remember which was which. I think maybe the one that Andy played on was on the album.
M M: When you first met them, did you consider them seriously as musicians at all, as guitarists or composers?
Martin: As composers, they didn't read. They hadn't shown me that they could write anything at all. "Love Me Do" I thought was pretty poor, but it was the best we could do. They hadn't got anything else, and I hadn't got anything else to offer them either. As players, they were quite adequate. They could play guitar pretty well, and they had a fairly uninhibited sound. The question of them being deep minds or great new images didn't occur to me, or to anyone, or to them. I should think it was after we made "Love Me Do," that I was determined to find a hit song for them. I was scouring the publisher's office looking for material on our group, which nobody wanted to know about. EMI heard the Beatles, which they thought was a silly name anyway, and they didn't attach too much importance to it. Comedy Man tries to get into the pop field, you know. We hit number 17 in the charts, which raised a few eyebrows, but only just. So I found them the song by Mitch Murray, which I thought was just ideal for them, and I gave it to them to learn for the next session. When they turned up on the session, they said they didn't like it.
MM What was it?
Martin: How Do You Do It. They actually recorded it, but said they'd rather do one of their own numbers. I said I hadn't heard anything of theirs that was any good, so they did. "How Do You Do It." John sang the solo quite well, actually, and he came to me and pleaded with me. He said, "Look, I think we can do better than this. If we write something better, can we do it?" And I said, "Yes, but you're turning down a hit." They quickly came back with "Please, Please Me," and I must confess, it knocked me out. They worked out all the little harmonies, and it was super. I said, "That's great. You've got your first number one hit." I was so confident about it, and I gave "How Do You Do It" to Gerry, and that became number one too. So I was justified both ways. That was the beginning of them.
MM Did you ever think they'd be able to follow up "Please Please Me" with more of their own compositions?
Martin: It all happened so fast. Then events move so quickly. Brian was pressuring them all the time to write new material, and they were caught up in the success whirlwind. And they wanted to continue writing. They'd come to me and say, "What do you think of this?" And that's how "From Me to You" happened. It needed a bit of polishing here and there. As soon as we'd make "Please Please Me", I decided to make an album very quickly, and I brought them down for just one day. We started at 10 o'clock in the morning and finished at 11 o'clock at night. I made the first album. Brian was also caught up on the success thing, and he wanted to load me with a lot of other stuff. Then it was kind of a partnership. I'll give you the raw material and you give me the goods and we'll sell it. It was a very happy year, but it was terribly hard work. I was in the studio the whole time, and I've never worked so hard in my whole life.
MM: When did the group's attitude to you start changing and vice versa? I expect that With the Beatles and Beatles for Sale were made in much the same way as Please Please Me, weren't they?
Martin: Even though they'd written their own songs, they had them on as songs rather than as records. They weren't thinking in terms of records. They were thinking of a chorus, a middle eight, and an ending. When I started off with them, I'd organize their beginnings and endings and their solos, it seemed terribly elementary now. But when they sang the song first, I'd time a chorus, and when it came to one minute and 20 seconds, I'd say, "Right, it's not long enough. Go back to the middle eight", or else we'd have a little guitar solo or a bit of piano. It was all dead simple, and gradually the collaboration grew. It was just the four of them, and if there was any keyboard stuff, I'd put it in. It wasn't until "Yesterday" that we started using other instruments.
MM: When did you start noticing their use of unusual construction like odd bars of two, four, and so on?
Martin: I can't really remember. They never noticed it at all.
MM: You never tried to make them iron it out and write a 32-bar song?
Martin: Not a bit. I recognize those aberrations, so to speak, were part of that. It would have been silly to change them because that would have destroyed their spirit. I don't think I ever quarreled with them musically at all. The only time I ever really came to blows with them was over something quite different, which was a record sleeve. It was one that was never issued over here. They were dressed up as butchers, and it came out in America. It was their idea of a joke.
MM: In the early days, did John and Paul really write together?
Martin: Yes, but they also wrote separately. "Please Please Me," "From Me to You," and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" were undoubtedly collaborative efforts. They'd sit down and literally construct the songs together. I can't remember the first individual song, so that obviously even before I met them, they were writing individually. But if you go through them, you can hear which of them are John-oriented and which are Paul-oriented. "Yesterday" is obviously Paul, and that's an interesting point because it was the first time we ever used anyone other than Beatles on a record. There was no one on that record but Paul and a string quartet.
MM: How much part did you take in the creation of "Yesterday?" Presumably Paul wrote all the melody and lyrics.
Martin: Oh sure. What happened was that he had this song, which he'd been kicking around for a long time. He'd play it to me on the piano, and it was called "Scrambled Egg." He was looking for lyrics all the time, and we all thought it was a good tune. When he finished it and he wanted to record it, I said that I couldn't see what we could do with it. I couldn't see what Ringo could do with a drum beat on a song like this. I told him the best thing to do was to go down to the studio and just sing it, so he just played the guitar and sang. I honestly couldn't think what to do with it, except put strings on it. And Paul said, "What Norrie Paramor stuff? Manatovani? No." Then I had the idea of using a string quartet, a very classical thing, and Paul thought it was a great idea.
M M: It seemed like a big step at that time.
Martin: It was. I spent a day with him getting his ideas on how the strings should sound, and I went and wrote the score for the string quartet and recorded it.
MM: Did you notice them growing apart, developing distinct personalities?
Martin: Paul and John had their own identifiable styles. Paul was the syrupy one, and John was the hard one. But the rift wasn't there then. They were really a unit.
MM: Being in that high-pressure situation must have pushed them together.
Martin: Even Brian was outside that little castle. Brian and I were looking on.
M M: Did Brian ever have anything to do with the actual music?
Martin: Nothing at all. He was quite right not to. The relationship was fine. Brian was very much the businessman, fixing up all the dates and so on, and he had that tremendous air of.... a snooty air with people, which sold the Beatles as being more important. He had a great manner, really. He liked to be considered a part of the music. In fact, he was very hurt one day in the studio. The boys were downstairs, and I was talking to them through an intercom. Brian picked up the mic and said, "Why don't you do such and such?" And John said, "Brian, you look after your money, and we'll look after our music." Brian flushed to the roots of his hair, and never said any more. He was obviously very hurt by that.
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