Though looking remarkably spry for an 80-year-old, Sir George Martin seems
momentarily confused. “Hezbollah want to kidnap me? Why would they want to
do that?” Sitting opposite him in an office at Abbey Road studios, his son
Giles, 37, is attempting to explain the sketch — written by the creators of
Father Ted, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews — in which Arab terrorists
take the venerable Beatles producer hostage.
“It was from a show called Big Train. The joke was that you’re always talking
about your work with the Beatles — and even being kidnapped by Hezbollah
can’t stop you going on about it.” Alas, Martin seems no clearer as to what
to make of it all. “And when did this happen?” he inquires. “Round about the
time Anthology came out,” says his son. “I just didn’t tell you about it
because I didn’t think you would find it funny.” The perplexed response from
Martin suggests that his son’s initial instincts were correct. However, as
the producer explains, there’s a perfectly good reason why people only ever
see him talking about the Beatles. “People rarely ask me about anything
else,” he shrugs.
That’s hardly likely to change now. His years as an esteemed producer of
comedy records — among them, Peter Ustinov’s Mock Mozart and Goodness
Gracious Me by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren — were probably not foremost
in the minds of the UK Music Hall of Fame awards steering committee when
they decided to induct him. This being a week before the awards ceremony, he
sounds profoundly unexcited at the prospect of being honoured. “
What does it entail? A bloody great headache,” he blurts. “I’m in the Rock &
Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. That should be enough, shouldn’t it?” Though
he doesn’t mention it during our encounter, one presumes the “headache” to
which he is referring is the awards’ grand finale — a Golden Slumbers medley
redux, scored and conducted by Martin himself, with added gospel choir. On
reflection, there isn’t an orchestra on the planet that can prevent the
voices of Johnny Borrell and Corinne Bailey Rae curdling upon impact with
each other. Unwittingly, the whole exercise proves Giles Martin’s point that
“Beatles music only starts to sound like Beatles music when you have the
Beatles playing on it”.
It was a conclusion that he and his father had three years to come to — the
exact period of time that elapsed between the conception and execution of a
“brand new” album by the Fabs. In 2006 there may be nothing significantly
new left in the Abbey Road vaults, but the Beatles’ Love bears rich
testament to hitherto unexplored possibilities. Pieced together by father
and son for Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles-inspired show that opened in June in
Las Vegas, the 80-minute collage of Beatles tunes takes its cues from the
recent trend for mash-ups, records in which DJs (often illegally) mix
together different songs to create “new” tunes.
Appropriately, Love is a labour of pre- cisely what it calls itself. Where the
originals couldn’t be bettered — A Day in the Life, All You Need is Love —
they rise up fully formed among the ever-shifting landscape of Beatles
fragments. But elsewhere, you think of the video for the 1995 Anthology
“newie”, Free as a Bird, in which a mythical Beatleworld opens up around
you, complete with pretty nurses selling poppies from a tray and running
piggies. Songs you thought you knew backwards (including Sun King, which
actually is played backwards) reveal new colours when juxtaposed against
other songs. If, until this point, you couldn’t be talked around to the
childlike vulnerability of Ringo’s singing on Octopus’s Garden, hearing it
over the sweeping strings of Good Night might change your mind.
Although the project emerged from George Harrison’s friendship with the
founder of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberté, it was by no means a foregone
conclusion that the remaining Beatles would assent to having such liberties
taken with their music. So it was only natural that Giles Martin (previous
experience, Kula Shaker, Velvet Jones) should have been asked to audition
with a demo. The clincher, it seems, was his idea of putting George
Harrison’s Within You Without You over the lysergic landslide of Tomorrow
Never Knows. “It’s a shame that Giles hadn’t even been born when we made Sgt
Pepper,” says his father, “because that version would have been terrific on
there.”
Deploying the self-deprecation that seems common to both father and son, Giles
is swift to add that not everything from that original demo found favour
with the surviving Beatles. Paul McCartney gently disavowed the 37-year-old
of the notion that it was a good idea to remove his piano part from Hey Jude
and use the percussion from Sun King “to create a sort of Mexican mariachi
band effect”.
With EMI’s latest six-month profits down by a whopping £22.4 million from last
year, to just £18.6 million, the company is relying on Love to perform well
— though just how much of those royalties George and Giles Martin stand to
receive for an album which so blurs the line between production and
wholesale reconfiguration is open to speculation (neither party is willing
to disclose the maths). As far as the younger Martin is concerned, these are
peripheral issues. Right now the main issue for him is a sense of relief —
not just that McCartney and Ringo Starr have given their blessings to the
finished album — but that early reviews of the album have been positive. No
one, as yet, has felt moved to cry sacrilege. And if they did, you would
surely have to draw to their attention the spirit of creative randomness
with which many of The Beatles’ finest moments were created in the first
place.
George Martin’s role in Fabs lore as the plummy, paternal facilitator of those
moments cannot be underestimated. In this respect, he says that his
relationship with John Lennon was especially fertile with creative
possibilities. “Both John and Paul knew what they wanted, but John always
struggled to express it — which meant he would always end up talking in
metaphors. He had great ideas, but I wasn’t quite sure whether I was
delivering them. I Am the Walrus was a case in point. He wrote it and told
me he wanted me to write a score to go with what he had. So, in a way,
that’s me trying to get into John’s head.”
If Lennon and McCartney’s encounter at the Woolton Parish Church garden fête
in 1958 stands as the century’s single greatest moment of musical
serendipity, then the Beatles’ alliance with Martin must run it close.
Having already broadened his sonic palette with comedy and classical
records, Martin’s hunger for new ideas kept his mind open. Indeed, by 1962
Martin was making experimental records of his own. Released under the
futuristic pseudonym of Ray Cathode, Time Beat showcased many of the
techniques — tape loops, backwards voices — seized upon by Lennon when he
first steered the Beatles into truly psychedelic waters with Rain. “I was
always playing about with tapes, and the Beatles were constantly pushing me
to see what else I had to show them.”
However, Martin adds that the most vital quality he brought to the mix was
discipline — which was necessary, he explains, because of the technological
limitations of the age. “If you only had two four-track machines to work
with, then those tracks were precious. I couldn’t waste them. And Giles
would get frustrated when we were doing this album, because he would want to
use the voice from a song and discover that it couldn’t be separated because
that track also had a cowbell on it.”
If every creative enterprise requires discipline, it was a point that Martin
inadvertently proved all over again with the release of his last
Beatles-related project. For his In My Life album, released in 1998, the
producer invited some of his favourite pop and movie chums into the studio,
where they proceeded to “interpret” their fave Fabs moments. Obviously, it’s
only proper that the man who signed the Beatles is allowed to do whatever he
wants in perpetuity, but some of us who saw the accompanying documentary
still struggle with those mental images of Jim Carrey gaily tiggering around
the recording booth, all the better to tease out the dormant wackiness in I
Am the Walrus.
When the subject is raised, Martin Jr is swift to play down his involvement.
“I just engineered it,” he smiles. Was he there when Phil Collins told the
world about his idea to extend the drum solo in Golden Slumbers to “make it
more interesting”? A long pause ensues. “Yes, well. I didn’t have a creative
role in that one.” The conversation turns to Goldie Hawn’s appearance on the
same record, who George Martin says he knew “from way back when”.
“You fancied her!” pipes his son, and for a moment you wonder if he isn’t too
old for a clip around the ear.
“Behave yourself!” says his father.
A week later, at Alexandra Palace, Giles Martin’s teasing is abruptly put into
perspective by the reception meted out to Gordon Brown by sections of the
audience as he attempts to induct Martin into the UK Music Hall of Fame.
Given the famed gentility of the man that Brown is here to honour, it all
seems a little unseemly. Nonetheless, deliberately or otherwise, the jeers
serve to underscore a question thrown up by Brown’s duties here. Where, you
wonder, are the surviving members of the group whose ideas his musical
midwifery helped to bring into the world? Martin has the air of a man happy
to manage without the extra fuss that their presence here would bring. To be
part of the Beatles’ story and yet to enjoy relative anonymity, he says, has
been “like a lifeline to me and my family”.
Besides, it wasn’t so long ago that he saw McCartney. At a 40th wedding
anniversary party held by Martin and his wife Judy, the silver-haired
producer recalls a touching exchange between mentor and musician. “It was
just a lunch with some friends, really,” he remembers. “The only
showbusiness people there were Cilla (Black), Rolf Harris and Bernie
Cribbins. But dear Paul drove 130 miles to be there. Anyway, as he was
leaving he said, ‘It’s lovely to be an ordinary person again’.”
“At which point,” adds Giles, much as Lennon might have once done, “we got him
to do the washing-up.”
The Beatles’ Love is released on Monday by EMI
