1. As a child Martin was eagerly enrolled in piano lessons but only attended a handful before being pulled from them after an argument. He went on to teach himself the piano.
2. In his early 20s, Martin’s oboe teacher was Margaret Eliot, the mother of Jane Asher, who would later become involved with Paul McCartney.
3. Martin’s genius with the Beatles lay in his understanding of orchestral arrangements and musical scores that elevated songs and entire albums from rock music to rock standards. But his genius went beyond his groundbreaking arrangements. As one publication noted, “He and his engineers worked tirelessly with the Beatles in their experiments with loops, tape speeds, backward recording and editing to create the psychedelic masterpiecesRevolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Lennon said that Martin, “helped us to develop a language to talk to [other] musicians” while McCartney, in a tribute on his website earlier today, remembered a specific instance when Martin’s musical talents revolutionized one of his tunes:
It’s hard to choose favourite memories of my time with George, there are so many but one that comes to mind was the time I brought the song ‘Yesterday’ to a recording session and the guys in the band suggested that I sing it solo and accompany myself on guitar. After I had done this George Martin said to me, “Paul, I have an idea of putting a string quartet on the record”. I said, “Oh no George, we are a rock and roll band and I don’t think it’s a good idea”. With the gentle bedside manner of a great producer he said to me, “Let us try it and if it doesn’t work we won’t use it and we’ll go with your solo version”. I agreed to this and went round to his house the next day to work on the arrangement.
He took my chords that I showed him and spread the notes out across the piano, putting the cello in the low octave and the first violin in a high octave and gave me my first lesson in how strings were voiced for a quartet. When we recorded the string quartet at Abbey Road, it was so thrilling to know his idea was so correct that I went round telling people about it for weeks. His idea obviously worked because the song subsequently became one of the most recorded songs ever with versions by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and thousands more.
This is just one of the many memories I have of George who went on to help me with arrangements on ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Live and Let Die’ and many other songs of mine.
4. Before setting his sights on a music career, he worked in fields ranging from construction to a clerk with the British government during the Second World War to a stint in the Royal Navy.
5. Following his graduation, he worked for the BBC’s classical music department, then joined EMI in 1950, as an assistant to Oscar Preuss, the head of EMI’s Parlophone Records from 1950 to 1955. Although having been regarded by EMI as a vital German imprint in the past, it was then not taken seriously and only used for EMI’s insignificant acts.
6. Beginning in the late 1950s, Martin began to supplement his producer income by publishing music and having his artists record it. He used the pseudonyms Lezlo Anales and John Chisholm before settling on Graham Fisher as his primary pseudonym.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36EwiB42dGg
7. Martin also produced numerous comedy and novelty records. His first hit for Parlophone in 1952 with the Peter Ustinov single “Mock Mozart” – a record reluctantly released by EMI only after another producer insisted they give Martin a chance. Later that decade Martin worked with Peter Sellers on two very popular comedy LPs.
8. Martin met the Beatles in early 1962. At the time, they had a cult following in parts of England, but little success in landing a recording deal. The group’s manager, Brian Epstein, approached the producer, who worked for EMI records, and got him to agree to give their demo tape a listen. “The recording, to put it kindly, was by no means a knockout,” Martin wrote in his 1979 memoir, All You Need Is Ears. “I could well understand that people had turned it down. But there was an unusual quality of sound, a certain roughness that I hadn’t encountered before. There was also the fact that more than one person was singing.”
9. In The Beatles’ first audition for Martin, he asked the individual Beatles if there was anything they personally did not like, to which George Harrison replied, “Well, there’s your tie, for a start.” That was the turning point as John Lennon and Paul McCartney joined in with jokes and comic wordplay that made Martin think that he should sign them to a contract for their wit alone.
10. He was great at predicting hits. The Beatles’ first recording session with Martin was on September 4th, 1962, when they recorded “How Do You Do It”, which Martin thought was a sure-fire hit even though Lennon and McCartney did not want to release it, not being one of their own compositions. Martin was correct: Gerry & the Pacemakers’ version, which Martin produced, spent three weeks at No. 1 in April 1963 before being displaced by “From Me to You”.
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