George Martin

Early years

Martin was born on 3 January 1926 in North London to Henry ("Harry") and Bertha Beatrice (née Simpson) Martin. He had an older sister, Irene. In Martin's early years, the family lived modestly, first in Highbury and then Drayton Park. Harry worked as a craftsman carpenter in a small attic workshop, while Bertha cooked meals at a communal stove in their apartment building. In 1931, the family moved to Aubert Park in Highbury, where they lived with electricity for the first time.

When he was six, Martin's family acquired a piano that sparked his interest in music. At eight years of age, he convinced his parents that he should take piano lessons, but those ended after only six sessions because of a disagreement between his mother and the teacher. Martin created his first piano composition, "The Spider's Dance", at age eight. Martin continued to learn piano on his own through his youth, building a working knowledge of music theory through his natural perfect pitch.

As a child, he attended several Roman Catholic schools, including Our Lady of Sion (Holloway), St Joseph's School (Highgate), and at St Ignatius' College (Stamford Hill), where he won a scholarship. When World War II broke out, Martin's family left London and he was enrolled at Bromley Grammar School. At Bromley, Martin led and played piano in a locally popular dance band, the Four Tune Tellers. The pianists George Shearing and Meade Lux Lewis influenced his style. He also took up acting in a troupe called the Quavers, and, with money earned from playing dances, he resumed formal piano lessons and learned musical notation.

Despite Martin's continued interest in music and "fantasies about being the next Rachmaninoff", he did not initially choose music as a career. Aged 17, in 1943, Martin volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, having been spurred on by their exploits in the Battle of Taranto. He trained at HMS St Vincent in Gosport. The war ended before Martin was involved in any combat, and he left the service in January 1947. On 26 July 1945, Martin appeared on BBC Radio for the first time during a Royal Navy variety show; he played a self-composed piano piece. As he climbed rank in the Navy, Martin consciously adopted the upper-class accent and gentlemanly social demeanour common for officers.

Encouraged by the pianist and teacher Sidney Harrison, Martin used his veteran's grant to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1947 to 1950. He studied piano as his main instrument and oboe as his secondary, being interested in the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, and Cole Porter. Martin also took courses at Guildhall in music composition and orchestration. After graduating, he worked for the BBC's classical music department, also earning money as an oboe player in local bands.

Career

EMI and Parlophone

Martin joined EMI in November 1950 as an assistant to Oscar Preuss, the head of EMI's Parlophone label. Although having been regarded by EMI as a vital German imprint in the past, it was then not taken seriously and used only for EMI's insignificant acts. Among Martin's early duties was managing Parlophone's classical records catalogue, including Baroque ensemble sessions with Karl Haas; Martin, Haas, and Peter Ustinov soon founded the London Baroque Society together. He also developed a friendship and working relationship with composer Sidney Torch and signed Ron Goodwin to a recording contract. In 1953, Martin produced Goodwin's first record, an instrumental rendition of Charlie Chaplin's theme from Limelight, which made it to no. 3 on the British charts. Despite these early breakthroughs, Martin resented EMI's preference in the early 1950s for short-playing 78 rpm records instead of the new longer-playing 33+1⁄3 and 45 rpm formats coming into fashion on other labels. He also proved uncomfortable as a song plugger when occasionally assigned the task by Preuss, comparing himself to a "sheep among wolves".Preuss retired as head of Parlophone in April 1955, leaving the 29-year-old Martin to take over the label. However, he had to fight to retain the label, as by late 1956 EMI managers considered moving Parlophone's successful artists to Columbia Records or His Master's Voice, with Martin possibly to take a junior A&R role at the His Master's Voice under Wally Ridley. Martin staved off corporate pressure with successes in comedy records, such as a 1957 recording of the two-man show featuring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, At the Drop of a Hat. His work boosted the profile of Parlophone from a "sad little company" to a highly profitable business over time. As head of Parlophone, Martin recorded classical and Baroque music, original cast recordings, jazz, and regional music from around Britain and Ireland. He became the first British A&R man to capitalize on the 1956 skiffle boom when he signed the Vipers Skiffle Group after seeing them in London's 2i's Coffee Bar. Martin's first hit production came in 1956 in the Johnny Dankworth Band's jazz parody "The Three Blind Mice".

Martin produced numerous comedy and novelty records. His first success in the genre was the "Mock Mozart" single, performed by Peter Ustinov with Antony Hopkins. In 1953, Martin produced Peter Sellers' debut in music, the failed single "Jakka and the Flying Saucers". Two years later, Martin worked with BBC radio comedy stars the Goons on a parody version of "Unchained Melody", but the song's publishers blocked it from release. The Goons subsequently left Parlophone for Decca, but Sellers, a member of the group, achieved minor success with Martin in 1957 with "Boiled Bananas and Carrots"/"Any Old Iron". Recognising that Sellers was capable of "a daydreaming form of humour which could be amusing and seductive without requiring the trigger of a live audience", Martin pitched a full album to EMI. The result, The Best of Sellers (1958), has been cited by the music historian Mark Lewisohn as the first British comedy LP created in a recording studio. Martin scored a major success in 1961 with the Beyond the Fringe show cast album, starring, among others, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore; the show catalysed Britain's satire boom in the early 1960s.Martin courted controversy in summer 1960, when he produced a cover of the teen novelty song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" and released it mere days after the release of the record in the UK, opening him to public accusations of piracy. Nonetheless, his first British number-one came a year later, in May 1961, with the Temperance Seven song "You're Driving Me Crazy". He then earned praise from EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood for his top-ten 1962 hit with Bernard Cribbins, "The Hole in the Ground". Though Martin wanted to add rock and roll to Parlophone's repertoire, he struggled to find a "fireproof" hit-making pop artist or group.

The Beatles

In November 1961, the Beatles manager Brian Epstein travelled to London to meet with record executives from EMI and Decca Records in the interest of obtaining a recording contract for his band. Epstein met with EMI's general marketing director Ron White, with whom he had a longstanding business relationship, and left a copy of the Beatles' single with Tony Sheridan, "My Bonnie". White said he would play it for EMI's four A&R directors, including George Martin (though it later emerged that he neglected to do so, playing it only for two of them). In mid-December, White replied that EMI was not interested in signing the Beatles.

Martin claimed that he was contacted by Sid Colman of EMI music publisher Ardmore & Beechwood at the request of Epstein, though Colman's colleague Kim Bennett later disputed this. In any event, Martin arranged a meeting on 13 February 1962 with Epstein, who played for Martin the recording of the Beatles' failed January audition for Decca Records. Epstein recalled that Martin liked George Harrison's guitar playing and preferred Paul McCartney's singing voice to John Lennon's, though Martin himself recalled that he "wasn't knocked out at all" by the "lousy tape". With Martin apparently uninterested, Ardmore & Beechwood's Colman and Bennett pressured EMI management to sign the Beatles in hopes of gaining the rights to Lennon–McCartney song publishing on Beatle records; Colman and Bennett even offered to pay for the expense of the Beatles' first EMI recordings. EMI managing director Len Wood rejected this proposal. Nonetheless, to appease Colman's interest in the Beatles, Wood directed Martin to sign the group.

Martin met with Epstein again on 9 May at EMI Studios in London, and informed him he would give the Beatles a standard recording contract with Parlophone, to record a minimum of six tracks in the first year. The royalty rate was to be one penny for each record sold on 85% of records, which was to be split among the four members and Epstein. They agreed to hold the Beatles' first recording on 6 June 1962.

Though Martin later called the 6 June 1962 session at EMI's studio two an "audition", as he had never seen the band play before, the session was actually intended to record material for the first Beatles single. Ron Richards and his engineer Norman Smith recorded four songs: "Besame Mucho", "Love Me Do", "Ask Me Why", and "P.S. I Love You". Martin arrived during the recording of "Love Me Do"; between takes, he introduced himself to the Beatles and subtly changed the arrangement. The verdict was not promising, however, as Richards and Martin complained about Pete Best's drumming, and Martin thought their original songs were simply not good enough. In the control room, Martin asked the individual Beatles if there was anything they personally did not like, to which Harrison replied, "I don't like your tie." That was the turning point, according to Smith, as Lennon and McCartney joined in with jokes and comic wordplay, that made Martin think that he should sign them to a contract for their wit alone. After deliberating for a time whether to make Lennon or McCartney the lead vocalist of the group, Martin decided he would let them retain their shared lead role: "Suddenly it hit me that I had to take them as they were, which was a new thing. I was being too conventional."Though charmed by the Beatles' personalities, Martin was unimpressed with the musical repertoire from their first session. "I didn't think the Beatles had any song of any worth—they gave me no evidence whatsoever that they could write hit material", he said later. He arranged for the Beatles to record Mitch Murray's "How Do You Do It" at a September session, with the Beatles now featuring Ringo Starr on drums. The Beatles also re-recorded "Love Me Do" and played an early version of "Please Please Me", which Martin thought was "dreary" and needed to be sped up. While Martin pushed for "How Do You Do It" to be released, the band and Murray protested, so he decided to have "Love Me Do" issued as the A-side of the Beatles' first single and save "How Do You Do It" for another occasion.

Post-breakup Beatles work

Martin produced the first solo album by a member of the Beatles after John Lennon had privately announced he was leaving the group, Ringo Starr's March 1970 standards album, Sentimental Journey. Throughout the next three decades, he collaborated with Paul McCartney extensively for the latter's studio albums and compositions. After scoring some orchestral arrangements for the 1971 album Ram, Martin produced Wings' "Live and Let Die" theme song for the 1973 James Bond film of the same name, They reunited in 1980 to record "We All Stand Together", a song for a Rupert Bear animated short film. He produced the critically and commercially acclaimed Tug of War (1982), as well as Pipes of Peace (1983). For the latter's lead single, "Say Say Say", Martin scored a horn arrangement. He also produced the soundtrack album to McCartney's 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street. Though the film was poorly received, the soundtrack reached no. 1 in the UK. In the 1990s, he recorded orchestral overdubs for McCartney's singles "Put It There" (1990), "C'Mon People" (1993), and his album Flaming Pie (1997). In 1998, at Yoko Ono's request, Martin scored an orchestral arrangement to the 1980 Lennon demo of "Grow Old with Me".

Martin oversaw post-production on The Beatles Anthology project in 1994 and 1995, working again with Geoff Emerick. Martin decided to use an old 8-track analogue mixing console to mix the songs for the project instead of a modern digital console. In his view, the old console created a distinct sound which a new one could not accurately reproduce. He said he found the project a strange experience, as they had to listen to themselves chatting in the studio, 25 to 30 years previously. However, he was not involved in producing the two new songs reuniting McCartney, Harrison, and Starr: the Lennon demos "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love". Though Martin's hearing loss was publicly cited as the rationale, he was not asked by the band members to produce the tracks; Jeff Lynne performed these duties instead.

In 2006, Martin and his son, Giles Martin, remixed 80 minutes of Beatles music for the Las Vegas stage performance Love, a joint venture between Cirque du Soleil and the Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd. A soundtrack album from the show was released that same year. As part of his contribution to the soundtrack album, Martin orchestrated a score for a demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; the orchestra session, recorded at AIR Lyndhurst Hall, was his final orchestral production. Martin received the 2008 Grammy Awards for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album and Best Surround Sound Album.

Independent projects and work with other artists

Martin's early work under his new Associated Independent Recording (AIR) banner included Cilla Black's rendition of Burt Bacharach's "Alfie", which made no. 6 in the UK, and musical scores for Lionel Bart's much-maligned Twang!! theatrical production. He also reunited with other artists from his Parlophone days, such as Matt Monro and Ron Goodwin, though these reunions often failed to produce the same success as earlier records had. Martin continued to produce novelty music acts, such as The Master Singers and the Scaffold. Other artists that Martin worked with include the singers Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers, Yoshiki, and Neil Sedaka, the guitarists Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin, and John Williams, and the bands Seatrain, Ultravox, and Cheap Trick. Martin produced seven albums for America, which included the hits "Tin Man", "Lonely People", and "Sister Golden Hair". As the band's Gerry Beckley said in a 2017 interview, "He was really great at keeping us focused and moving forward." In 1997, Martin produced "Candle in the Wind 1997", Elton John's tribute single to Diana, Princess of Wales, which became the best-selling British single of all time. It was also Martin's final production of a single.

In 1988, Martin produced an album version of the play Under Milk Wood, with music by Martin, Elton John, and Mark Knopfler; Anthony Hopkins played the part of "First Voice". In 1992, Martin worked with Pete Townshend on the musical stage production of The Who's Tommy. The play opened on Broadway in 1993, with the original cast album being released that summer. For this, Martin won the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album. In 1998, Martin released an album of Beatles covers titled In My Life.

In October 1970, Martin and his AIR partners opened their first company studio at the top of the Peter Robinson building in Oxford Circus, London. Nine years later, he opened another studio, AIR Montserrat, on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. This studio was destroyed by a hurricane ten years later.

On 15 September 1997, Martin arranged a benefit concert for the island of Montserrat, which had been devastated by volcanic activity. The event, Music for Montserrat, featured Paul McCartney, Elton John, Sting, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, and Carl Perkins. Martin served as a consultant to the June 2002 Party at the Palace at Buckingham Palace Garden for the Queen's Golden Jubilee. In 2010, he was the executive producer of the hard rock debut of Arms of the Sun, a project featuring Rex Brown, King Diamond, Lance Harvill, and Ben Bunker.

Other work

Film scores

Beginning in the late 1950s, Martin began to supplement his producer income by publishing music and having his artists record it. His second wife, Judy, whose father was chairman of the Film Producers Guild, contributed to his film work. Martin's earliest composing work was incidental music to accompany Peter Sellers' comedy records. In 1966, he signed a long-term deal with United Artists to write instrumental music. Martin composed, arranged, and produced film scores beginning in the early 1960s, including those of A Hard Day's Night (1964), Yellow Submarine (1968), as well as an instrumental for Ferry Cross the Mersey (1965). Martin produced two James Bond themes: Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" (1964), and Paul McCartney and Wings' "Live and Let Die" (1973), as well as the score to Live and Let Die. Martin was commissioned to write an official opening theme for BBC Radio 1's launch in September 1967. Entitled "Theme One", it was the first piece of music, but not the first record, heard on Radio 1.

In November 2017, the Craig Leon-produced album George Martin – Film Scores and Original Orchestral Music was released. The album of new recordings collected a selection of Martin's compositions together, including previously unheard sketches from the feature film The Mission (1986) which were not used in the original soundtrack.

Television

Martin hosted a three-part BBC co-produced documentary series titled The Rhythm of Life, which aired in 1997 on Ovation. Here, he discusses various aspects of musical composition with professional musicians and singers, among them Brian Wilson, Mark Knopfler, and Burt Bacharach. In April 2011, a 90-minute documentary feature film co-produced by the BBC Arena team, Produced by George Martin, aired to critical acclaim for the first time in the UK. It tells the life story of how Martin, a schoolboy growing up in the Great Depression, grew up to become a legendary music producer. Mark Lewisohn curated an accompanying six-volume musical box set. He also contributed to the 2016 documentary Soundbreaking, a history of recorded music featuring over 160 interviews with influential artists and producers.

Artistry and legacy

In his Parlophone days, Martin frequently used comedy records to experiment with recording techniques and motifs used later on musical records, such as recording magnetic tape at half-speed and then playing it back at normal speed. He would use this effect on several Beatles records, such as his sped-up piano solo on "In My Life". In particular, Martin was curious to see how tape offered advantages over existing technologies favoured by EMI: "It was still in its infancy, and a lot of people at the studio regarded tape with suspicion. But we gradually learnt all about it, and working with the likes of Sellers and Milligan was very useful, because, as it wasn't music, you could experiment. ... We made things out of tape loops, slowed things down, and banged on piano lids."

Martin was one of a handful of producers to have number-one records in three or more consecutive decades (1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s).

With the Beatles

BBC News notes that Martin's formal musical expertise and interest in novel recording practices facilitated the group's rudimentary musical education and desire for new musical sounds to record.

Martin's contribution to the Beatles' led to him being described as the "fifth Beatle". In 2016, Paul McCartney wrote that "If anyone earned the title of the fifth Beatle it was George". Julian Lennon called Martin "the fifth Beatle, without question". In the immediate aftermath of the Beatles' break-up, a time when he made many angry utterances, John Lennon trivialised Martin's importance to the Beatles' music and claimed that he took too much credit for the Beatles' music. In a 1971 letter responding to a Melody Maker interview with Martin, Lennon wrote, "When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?' I noticed you had no answer for that!" However, that same year, Lennon said, "George Martin made us what we were in the studio. He helped us develop a language to talk to other musicians."

Personal life

In 1946, Martin met Jean ("Sheena") Chisholm, a fellow member of the Royal Navy's choir. They bonded over their mutual love of music. Martin's mother, Bertha, strongly disapproved of Chisholm as a partner for Martin, fuelling early strain in the relationship. Nevertheless, they were married at the University of Aberdeen on 3 January 1948. Bertha died three weeks later of a brain haemorrhage, and Martin felt responsible for his mother's death. Martin and Sheena had two children, Alexis (born 1953) and Gregory Paul (born 1957). Around 1955, the Martins moved from London and bought a home in the development town of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, some 20 miles north. By the early 1960s, Martin pleaded Chisholm for a divorce and moved out of their home, but she refused, citing her childcare needs. Their divorce was finalized in February 1965.

On his first day of work at EMI Studios in 1950, Martin met Judy Lockhart Smith, a secretary to Parlophone director Oscar Preuss. Martin chose to retain her as a secretary when he assumed the direction of Parlophone in 1955, and they commuted together from Hatfield each day. Martin and Lockhart Smith began a discreet affair in the late 1950s. They married on 24 June 1966 at the Marylebone Registry Office, and had two children, Lucie (born 1967) and Giles (born 1969).

Martin was firm friends with Spike Milligan, and was best man at Milligan's second wedding: "I loved The Goon Show, and issued an album of it on my label Parlophone, which is how I got to know Spike." The album was Bridge on the River Wye, a spoof of the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, being based on the 1957 Goon Show episode "An African Incident".

In the mid-1970s, Martin's hearing started to decline; in an interview with the Institute of Professional Sound, he stated that he first noticed it when realizing that he couldn't detect high frequencies that an engineer was using to evaluate tonality. Giles consequently served as an impromptu assistant and helped George hide the condition as it worsened over the next two decades. Martin attributed his hearing loss to his constant production work, stating that "I was in the studio for 14 hours at a stretch, and never let my ears repair. There's no question that listening to loud music was a major contribution to my hearing loss." By 2014, he relied on a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate face to face.

Selected discography

Over his career, Martin produced 30 number-one singles and 16 number-one albums in the UK, in addition to a then-record 23 number-one singles and 19 number-one albums in the US (most of which were by the Beatles).

Parlophone releases

Complete Parlophone (UK / IE) vinyl singles catalogue

The Beatles / band members solo releases

Listed below are all Parlophone vinyl singles released in the UK and IE by the Beatles and band members as solo artists. Original releases only.

Shading denotes B-side; non-inclusion of chart activity; and non-core released album.