Produced by George Martin: DVD Review

This BBC documentary, a profile of George Martin's career, provides an impressive interviewee lineup, including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jeff Beck, and Cilla Black. Rather than being interviewed themselves, Paul and Ringo sit down with George Martin and reminisce over photos and studio tapes. There is also some interesting 1960s footage of Abbey Road Studios, including the familiar 1964 session with the Beatles and a less-familiar (to me) studio session with Cilla Black.

I could not help but feel like wanting more from this DVD, as if the DVD were a trailer to a longer feature. There are many stories to tell from George Martin's producing career, and this DVD provides a brief, albeit a somwhat too brief, overview. A nice companion piece to the previous Beatles documentaries that have been issued over the years.

George Martin on Working with the Beatles in the Studio, 1966

"We now spend more and more time in the studios than ever before. The Beatles have come to accept that recording is their way of life. They accept their voluntary imprisonment of being in the studio for as long as 14 hours at a time... There are no secret unissued Beatles tracks in case of any emergency. Everything that the Beatles have recorded has been released. It has to be this way. The demand is so strong, it is difficult even keeping up with it."

George Martin on George Harrison's "I Need You" (1965)

"'I Need You' worked out very well. George got a bit discouraged some time ago when none of us liked something that he had written. He has got something to say as a songwriter, and I hope he keeps it up."

George Martin on the Revolver Album

"I'm not sure they ever stopped being a good rock-and-roll band. I think once they'd got their first success under their belts that seemed to spur them on to greater songwriting efforts. John and Paul, having found out that it was comparatively easy to make a hit with 'Please Please Me' and then 'From Me to You,' said, 'Great, we know how to do it.' It then became a production line, and their ingenuity was actually spurred on by their success at that stage. They were always thinking of fresh ideas and new things, and each song that came out seemed to be a good one. I don't think they really started developing their best songwriting skills, in a really strange way, until Revolver. I think that was the beginning of the breakthrough, and certainly 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' on the end of Revolver, was the beginning of the so-called psychedelic bit, which was the forerunner of Sgt. Pepper."

Their Recording Manager George Martin (1963)

Any superstitious fears which E.M.I. recording manager George Martin may have had about the figure 13 must have been dispelled in the last 13 months. One year and one month ago George heard The Beatles for the first time--just as he was about to begin his 13th year with the E.M.I. group of labels. Despite his instant enthusiasm about the potential of The Beatles, George could never have imagined that this quartet (plus a neat little Beatalion of other Liverpoplian combos) would make him the nation's most successful hit-disc producer of 1963.

At London's Guildhall School of Music George had equipped himself with a sound, solid background of musical know-how before he joined E.M.I. His studies at the School had included composition, conducting and the oboe. 13 years ago his first tasks for the E.M.I. organization ranged from recording classical music to the traditional jazz of Humphrey Lyttelton. He also brought himself to the attention of the company's top executives by picking out and purchasing for British release an unusual little record entitled "The Happy Wanderer" by The Obernkirchen Children's Choir!

Most of George's 12 years of pre-Beatles studio activity were concentrated upon comedy and off-beat album material although a number of his disc productions--particularly Matt Monro's "Portrait Of My Love" plus "My Kind Of Girl," the Rolf Harris hit "Sun Arise" and the Bernard Cribbins best-seller "Hole In The Ground"--made pop headlines and sold in vast quantities.

He produced plenty of original cast stage show souvenirs including albums of "Beyond The Fringe" and "At The Drop Of A Hat"; he was responsible for that all-time Peter Sellers favourite "The Best Of Sellers." George broke through the unreasonable barrier which appears to prevent most comedy singles reaching the upper segments of the Top Twenty. Prime examples of his success in this line are the Peter Sellers/Sophia Loren jackpot winner "Goodness Gracious Me" and Charlie Drake's "Boomerang" ditty.

Today George Martin finds himself in the thick of the Mersey beat battle. On an average of once a week he supervises energetic studio sessions which produce Parlophone and Columbia singles capable of rivalling each other in the charts and of jostling each other for pride of place at the very top of the hit parade.

"My basic attitude to pop recording technique is unchanged," says George. "I have always looked about for something new, something different. What I really like about my new association with the Merseyside units is that a producer can become more personally involved with groups in the studio. With a solo artist there is a musical director who builds up his orchestra from assorted session musicians. One's ideas are pretty well fixed in the orchestrations. On the other hand the recording of groups allows one to work very closely with the artists. The arrangements are sorted out and modified on the studio floor during the actual sessions."

George agrees that the looser time schedules help. Session musicians stay for agreed periods of playing time and even when additional expenditure does not seem of primary importance the atmosphere of the whole production can become a little tighter, a little less free, with stricter clock-on-the-wall deadlines to be met.

What are George's ideas on the essential qualities of a Number One hit? "First of all" he declared with a familiar twinkle in his eyes "it should sell a quarter of a million copies! Also it should have a good tune, intelligent lyrics which have a personal directness about their approach and it should be slightly different from anything else which has gone before. Finally it should have a good beat to bind the whole arrangement together."

What differences have the current Liverpool Silver Disc winners made to George's professional life? The twinkle returned: "I get a few more sour looks from people who belong to other record companies and I've had my office re-decorated!"

Unlike most of the ultra-busy Mersey artists he records, George has not been obliged to decrease his number of leisure hours. He follows a number of absorbing pastimes and he lists some of them in this order of merit:-- (1) music (2) painting (3) laughing (4) swimming in warm water (5) eating (6) drinking good wines. The varied types of recorded music he prefers to hear for pleasure range from Andre Previn's "Like Blue" to Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe" and from album material by Matt Monro to sets of tracks by The Beatles.

In the first six months of 1963 George Martin produced a total of six records (five singles and one LP) with Brian Epstein's Liverpool groups. Each and every one of those releases reached the Number One spot. If he carries through this astonishing record of 100% success into the early part of 1964, George will notch up 13 top pops in 13 months . . . which is more or less where we came in!

TONY BARROW.

George Martin on Recording "Yellow Submarine"

"On the song 'Yellow Submarine' we were embarking on the sound-picture thing. I mean, 'Yellow Submarine' was almost a Goon record, with John actually in the studio using a P.A. mic and an amplifier. He used them for the captain's commands and the boat sounds."

George Martin on Recording "Tomorrow Never Knows"

"At that time they'd all gotten their own Grundig tape recorders, and I think it was Paul who found out that by removing the erase head and putting a loop of tape on it, you could actually play a short phrase that would saturate itself. It went round and round and overdubbed itself until the point of saturation, and that made a funny sound. When you played it back, it was cute to listen to. It was what we call musique concrète. So they all vied with each other. They each went home and made these funny little loops and they would bring various tape loops in for me to hear. They recorded them at different speeds, you know, one and seven-eighth [inches per second], three and three-quarters, seven and a half, and fifteen.

"With 'Tomorrow Never Knows' I selected eight of them and put them all on different machines. We had people all around the building connected to our control panel with these silly loops held up with bits of pencil to keep the tension going eternally. I then decided the best way to do it was to put them all through a mixer. So all the eight tracks of these loops came into our mixer and it was like an organ. By bringing up any one track you could have any loop at any time. With a 24-track machine that's a fairly common technique, but we didn't have that so it meant that when we were mixing it that was the actual performance. We had everybody on the mixer. Apart from the engineer, who was Geoff Emerick, we had Paul on a couple of faders and John on another, I was on the pan pots. We would all make a concerted mix and just do our own thing. When we felt like the seagull sound should appear, we'd put that fader up and so on. We did many mixes and then decided which was the best one."

George Martin on John Lennon's Voice

"It's a funny thing, but John never liked his voice. I don't know why, because I always said he had the greatest of voices, but I guess it's the same problem you have when you wake up in the morning and you shave yourself and you look at your face and say, 'What an awful face.' He was always wanting to distort it, always wanting me to do things to it, to ADT it or double-track it or whatever. 'Don't give me that thing again, George,' he'd say. 'Give me another one.' He was always wanting something different."

George Martin on "How Do You Do It"

"I was convinced I had a hit group on my hands if only I could get the right song. They'd played me all their stuff and I didn't think anything was any good. So I went around Tin Pan Alley looking for songs and my old friend Dick James came up with one called 'How Do You Do It' that had been written by Mitch Murray.

"I listened to 'How Do You Do It' and said, 'Yep, that's a good song. That's a good commercial song. Give it to the Beatles and I'll have a number-one hit.' So I sent it to the Beatles and said, 'This is what you're going to record.'"