LONDON: George Martin, the Beatles’ urbane producer who quietly guided the band’s swift, historic transformation from rowdy club act to musical and cultural revolutionaries, has died, his management said on Wednesday. He was 90.
“We can confirm that Sir George Martin passed away peacefully at home on Wednesday evening,” Adam Sharp, a founder of CA Management, said in an e-mail.
Sharp called Martin “one of music’s most creative talents and a gentleman to the end”.
“In a career that spanned seven decades he was an inspiration to many and is recognised globally as one of music’s most creative talents,” Sharp said.
Beatles drummer Ringo Starr tweeted: “God bless George Martin peace and love to Judy and his family love Ringo and Barbara. George will be missed.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted that Martin “was a giant of music working with the Fab Four to create the world’s most enduring pop music”.
Too modest to call himself the “Fifth Beatle”, a title many felt he deserved, the tall, elegant Londoner produced some of the most popular and influential albums of modern times – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Abbey Road– elevating rock LPs from ways to cash in on hit singles to art forms, “concepts”. He won six Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Three years earlier, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Martin both witnessed and enabled the extraordinary metamorphosis of the Beatles and of the 1960s. From a raw first album in 1962 that took just a day to make, to the months-long production of Sgt Pepper, the Beatles advanced rapidly as songwriters and sonic explorers. They not only composed dozens of classics, from She Loves You to Hey Jude, but turned the studio into a wonderland of tape loops, multi-tracking, unpredictable tempos, unfathomable segues and kaleidoscopic montages. Never again would rock music be defined by two-minute love songs or guitar-bass-drums arrangements. Lyrically and musically, anything became possible.
“Once we got beyond the bubblegum stage, the early recordings, and they wanted to do something more adventurous, they were saying: ‘What can you give us?’” Martin told The Associated Press in 2002. “And I said, ‘I can give you anything you like’.”
Besides the Beatles, Martin worked with Jeff Beck, Elton John, Celine Dion and on several solo albums by Paul McCartney. In the 1960s, Martin produced hits by Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas and for 37 straight weeks in 1963 a Martin recording topped the British charts.
Martin started producing records for EMI’s Parlophone label in 1950, working on comedy recordings with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and others, Sharp said. He had his first No 1 hit in 1961 with The Temperance Seven.
But his legacy was defined by the Beatles.
They were among the first rock groups to compose their own material and, inspired by native genius, a world tour of musical influences and all the latest stimulants, they demanded new sounds.
Martin was endlessly called on to perform the impossible, and often succeeded, splicing recordings at different speeds for Strawberry Fields Forever, for example.
He was a gifted musician who mastered Chopin by ear, a born experimenter enchanted whenever he discovered a new chord. In demand as a producer long before he met the Beatles, he was a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music.
In 1955, aged 29, Martin became head of Parlophone. He worked with Judy Garland, jazz stars Stan Getz, Cleo Laine and John Dankworth.
By the early 1960s, Parlophone was fading and Martin was anxious to break into the pop market when a Liverpool shopkeeper and music manager, Brian Epstein, insisted that he listen to a local quartet. The Beatles already had been turned down by Decca Records. Martin also was unimpressed by their music, but, to his eternal fortune, was pushed into signing them by EMI executive LG Wood.
Martin saw the Beatles as “very attractive people”. He was more than a decade older than any of the band members and, like an indulgent parent, tolerated and often enjoyed their sassy humour.
Martin was married twice, and had two children, actor Gregory Paul Martin and record producer Giles Martin, with whom his father remixed Beatles music for a 2006 Cirque du Soleil production, Love. In his later years, Martin was a treasured figure on Britain’s music scene.
– AP