Beatles (33 page)

During the war he served in the Fleet Air Arm, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He was demobbed in 1947 and found himself with nothing to do. Thanks to someone who’d heard him play the piano in wartime concerts, he tried for the Guildhall School of Music. He spent three years there, taking up the oboe as a second instrument. After graduating, he freelanced for a while as an oboist, but never rose above pit orchestra work or Sunday-afternoon playing with bands in London parks. He got the sack from that eventually, for not being good enough.

Late in 1950 a proper job presented itself, as an assistant
A and R man at Parlophone, one of EMI’s smaller companies. At the time he didn’t know what EMI meant. It stands for Electrical Musical Industries, now the world’s biggest record organization.

Although it was his Guildhall classical training that had got him the job, he was expected to help with jazz and light music. The range was wide at Parlophone but, in the main, unexciting. ‘Parlophone was the poor relation in those days, compared with the EMI big boys, HMV and Columbia. We were still recording on wax when I joined in 1950.’

Parlophone had been bought just before the war from Germany. It had done little since being taken over and a lot of people inside, according to George Martin, expected it not to last very much longer.

Its familiar symbol ‘£’, the pound sterling sign, has no connection with the millions of pounds it has made since. It comes from the initial of the founder’s surname, Carl Lindberg.

George’s salary at EMI was very modest, £7 4s. 9d. a week. To eke it out, he still played occasional Sunday-afternoon concerts in the parks, when he could get them, and arranged some school orchestral recitals.

George Martin found himself doing more and more of the popular records. Two of his earliest stars were Bob and Alf Pearson, who used to sing songs about ‘My Brother and I’. He also recorded The Five Smith Brothers and the Scottish country dance band, Jimmy Shand and his Band. He recorded their ‘Bluebell Polka’, still a successfully selling recording. He moved into jazz, recording Johnny Dankworth and Humphrey Lyttleton.

LPs were a great innovation in the early 1950s, though they now seem to have been with us for ever. ‘EMI were very late getting on to them, not until 1954. I don’t know why it took us so long. Decca had them about 1952. It meant we had a lot of leeway to catch up.’

In the early 1950s, producing records in Britain was a very routine, traditional business. It was like bringing out a regular monthly magazine. Each month, a company like Parlophone brought out around ten new records, all planned about two
months ahead, which they called their monthly supplements. They were always very strictly and fairly balanced. Out of the ten new records, two would be classical, two jazz, two dance music – the Victor Silvester sort of dance music – two would be male vocal and two would be female vocal. There was no such category as pop. ‘We never talked about pop. All we had was classical, jazz, dance and vocal.’

Out of all these categories, Parlophone had very few of the leading lights. Victor Silvester, for example, was with Columbia, one of EMI’s more successful offshoots. The main money-spinning singers came from America. Parlophone had none of them.

But slowly George Martin managed to create a little niche for himself by producing a stream of comedy records, though no one in the record business said they would ever sell.

One of his earliest comedy records was Peter Ustinov’s ‘Mock Mozart and Phoney Folklore’. He also did Peter Sellers, Flanders and Swann and, later on, ‘Beyond the Fringe’, recording them in Cambridge, before they came to the West End.

Then skiffle and rock arrived, transforming the teenage pop music scene. British groups at last started to make hit records, though still nothing on the scale of the American stars. But poor old Parlophone was left farther behind, despite George Martin’s comedy numbers.

‘Everybody seemed to find a group or a singer, except Parlophone. I toured the London coffee bars looking for talent.’ He turned down the chance of signing Tommy Hicks, or Tommy Steele as he became, because he thought he was just another Elvis copy.

‘I envied so much HMV and Columbia with their American stars or other companies with British stars like Cliff Richard. In a way that is so easy. Once you have a singer or a group that you know the public likes, all you have to do then is find them another song. With comedy, you start each time completely from scratch.’

As rock revealed a huge new teenage market and as record charts and record sales became increasingly important, Parlophone,
the company which many people didn’t think had much life left anyway, got even farther behind.

By May 1962, unbeknown to Brian Epstein and the Beatles, Parlophone was desperately waiting for something like the Beatles to turn up. The great George Martin, whose every cough and comment they tried to analyse, was far from being great.

Judy Lockhart-Smith, then George Martin’s secretary and now his wife, remembers being very impressed by Brian Epstein at their first meeting. ‘He had a very nice coat and was well mannered and well spoken, not the usual sort of Charing Cross Road manager.’

George was also favourably impressed. ‘But I wasn’t particularly knocked out by what he played me. I didn’t think a great deal of the songs or the singers. But I did think they produced an interesting sound. I said I’d give them a recording test.’

Brian had gone away ecstatic, but to George it was just another would-be recording group. He was so keen to find a good new group, he was giving tests to a great many.

‘I was originally thinking of using them as a backing group with a named lead singer, like Cliff Richard and the Shadows. I desperately wanted my own Cliff. That was how my mind was working at the beginning, looking for the possibilities of one of them being the lead singer. When I met them, I soon realized that would never work.’

George met them for the first time on 6 June 1962, when he gave them their recording test at EMI’s Number Three studio in St John’s Wood. This was the time Brian sent him the new list of suggested numbers.

‘I found them very attractive people. I liked being with them, which was funny, I suppose, as they were so insignificant and I was so significant. It shouldn’t really have mattered to me whether they liked me or not, but I was pleased they seemed to. I discovered that John was a fan of Peter Sellers and the Goon records I’d produced.’

George chose only three or four numbers from Brian’s list, including ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’. He thinks it must
only have been an early version of ‘Love Me Do’, because the song itself didn’t knock him out. But he again liked their sound and their personalities. ‘I thought, I can’t lose anything if I sign them up, although I had no idea what to do with them or which songs they could record.’

He was still busy with other records, much more important to him at the time, such as an LP of ‘The Establishment’, London’s first, but short-lived, satirical night club. This is when the long wait for the Beatles began, during which time Pete Best was sacked. George Martin was taking his time over fixing a date for the Beatles because he still wasn’t sure what he would let them record, whether he could chance them doing something of their own, or whether he should get a songwriter to do one for them.

At long last, on 11 September 1962, he brought them down to London to record their first British record, ‘Love Me Do’, with, on the B side, ‘PS I Love You’.

‘I chose “Love Me Do” as the best of the bunch in the end. It was John’s harmonica that gave it its appeal.’

George Martin had heard that Pete Best had gone and they’d got a new drummer. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He decided to hire a really experienced session drummer called Andy White and have him all ready, just in case. He told Brian this, but Ringo wasn’t told.

Before they started the session, George Martin explained to them what he was trying to do. ‘Let me know if there’s anything you don’t like,’ said George Martin.

‘Well, for a start,’ said George Harrison, ‘I don’t like your tie.’ This was a half-serious joke, and has been recalled many times since, but it didn’t go down all that well with George Martin. It was, in fact, a brand new tie, which he was particularly proud of. It was black with red horses on and came from Liberty’s. But everyone laughed, and the session proceeded.

It was the first ever recording session for Ringo and he was far from confident. He would have been even more scared, if he’d realized from the beginning, which he didn’t, that another drummer was hanging around, waiting.

They went into ‘Love Me Do,’ which took about 17 takes before George Martin was happy. ‘I didn’t rate Ringo very highly. He couldn’t do a roll – and still can’t – though he’s improved a lot since. Andy was the kind of drummer I needed. Ringo was only used to ballrooms. It was obviously best to use someone with experience.’

‘I was nervous and terrified of the studio,’ says Ringo. ‘When we came back later to do the B side, I found that George Martin had this other drummer sitting in my place. It was terrible. I’d been asked to join the Beatles, but now it looked as if I was only going to be good enough to do ballrooms with them, but not good enough for records.

‘They started “PS I Love You”. The other bloke played the drums and I was given the maracas. I thought, that’s the end. They’re doing a Pete Best on me. They then decided to record the other side again, the one on which I’d originally played the drums. I was given the tambourine this time.

‘I was shattered. What a drag. How phoney the whole record business was, I thought. Just what I’d heard about. Getting other musicians to make your records for you in the studios. If I was going to be no use for records, I might as well leave.

‘But nobody said anything. What could the others say, or me? We were just lads, being pushed around. You know what I mean. They were so big, the London record company and all that. We just did what we were told.

‘When the record came out as a single, my name was on “PS I Love You”, but I was only playing the maracas, the other bloke was on drums. But luckily for me, they decided to stick to the first version of “Love Me Do”, the one in which I’m playing drums, so that was OK.’

‘Love Me Do’, their first record, was released on 4 October 1962. By that time, they were back in Liverpool, trailing round the local halls and ballrooms again, but waiting for their record to astound the world. Nothing happened.

The Beatles’ Liverpool fans very faithfully bought the record in great numbers, but of course sales in a provincial town don’t
have much effect on the charts. They also wrote in hordes to all the request programmes. The first play of it was on Radio Luxembourg.

Mrs Harrison, George’s mother, sat up for hours the night George said they might be on. She got fed up waiting in the end and went to bed, only to be wakened by George screaming that they were on. He also woke Mr Harrison with his shouting, who was very angry as he had to be up early for the first shift on the buses.

‘The first time I heard “Love Me Do” on the radio,’ says George, ‘I went shivery all over. I listened to some of the lead guitar work and couldn’t believe it. But the most important thing in our lives was to get into the Top Twenty.’

They eventually crept into the charts at number 49, in the
New Record Mirror
. The next week it started showing up in another pop newspaper, the
New Musical Express
, where it got to 27. It stayed there for some time.

On the strength of having a record, Brian managed to secure them their first TV show, though it was just in the North. This was on Granada’s
People and Places
from Manchester.

They were then due to go back to Hamburg for another appearance at the Star Club. They had contracted to do this before their record had been made. They thought that if they were out of the country, unable to get in any live plugs on radio or TV, their record would go straight down. But they went off, on their fourth visit to Hamburg. Their record slowly kept creeping up while they were away, which gave them an excuse each time for wild celebrations. The highest ‘Love Me Do’ ever got was to number 17.

George Martin, meanwhile, was pleased, but not overexcited, by ‘Love Me Do’. ‘I didn’t think it was all that brilliant, but I was thrilled by the reaction to the Beatles and their sound. The problem now was to get a follow-up record for them.’

He’d found a song he was sure would be a hit. It was called ‘How Do You Do It’. He sent it to the Beatles, who didn’t like it. George Martin said he did. He was the boss. He wanted them
to record it. So they had to. They still said they didn’t like it and didn’t want it produced.

It was a brave, or perhaps simply naive, show of stubbornness for a group of young, inexperienced provincials, who couldn’t even read or write music, to tell the highly knowledgeable and powerful George Martin that they knew better than he did.

‘I told them they were turning down a hit. It was their funeral, but if they were going to be so obstinate, then they had better produce something better themselves. They were very self-opinionated in those days. They haven’t changed one bit.

‘They did produce something better, “Please Please Me”, which knocked me out.’

But he was right about ‘How Do You Do It’. He eventually gave that instead to another Brian Epstein group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, who made it number one.

The Beatles’ second record, ‘Please Please Me’, was recorded on 26 November 1962, but not released till January of 1963. They came back from Hamburg to do it, then went off again, this time just for a couple of weeks, for their fifth and final session in the Hamburg clubs.

At the end of the year, the
New Musical Express
did their usual popularity poll. The Springfields were voted top of the British Vocal Group department with 21,843 votes. The Beatles were way down with 3,906 votes, presumably all sent in from Liverpool. But they were in. They existed, though there was still little sign that they might be the group that George Martin and Parlophone so desperately needed.

Dick James is the only traditional show-business man who has ever got into the Beatles’ circle, either professionally or as a friend. He entered just after George Martin and, like him, he was desperately looking for the Beatles to turn up.