From the archive, 13 March 1969: Is Beatles’ manager George Martin the puppet master?
How much does Beatle music - as heard on record - owe to the quartet of performers, how much to George Martin, their recording manager, their arranger, their technical expert, their musical mentor? Are they mere puppets for a “pop” Svengali? Are they really as imaginative musically as they often seem, or is this another instance of the medium being the message?
After all the highbrow hot-air that has been breathed about the Beatles phenomenon, it is refreshing to have George Martin’s own view. He talks very much as a practical musician, not in generalities but specifically of his own part in the Beatles’ success. When he first met them - they were then doing arrangements of such songs as “Over the Rainbow” and Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big” he found that “their own compositions weren’t very good at all.” They would come to him with a song, which consisted simply of a conventional chorus. “They’d be puzzled how to begin the thing, how to end the thing and what to do in the middle.” Martin, having timed the chorus, would for his part point out (obviously enough) that they needed more than 70 seconds. “I used to be the specialist in beginnings, endings, and solos.”
But then as their musical imagination started developing, so they started thinking up their own ways of beginning, ending, and putting in solos. “I was the natural person they turned to, being on hand and being a musician, and they would ask, ‘Can we do such-and-such?’” In this way Martin was “very much part of them in the writing field.”
By: Edward Greenfield
Source: The Guardian
