Beatles (52 page)

It is hard enough for John, Paul and George to get the sound they think they can hear in their heads, but it can be even harder for George Martin. They leave him with bits of tracks that can’t sometimes be tied together, or present him with problems that can’t be solved, at least at short notice. Just as they thought they could hire Shepperton studios to film
Magical Mystery Tour
at a week’s notice, so they still decide overnight that they’d like a 40-piece orchestra for the next evening. George Martin is expected to get it for them.

He is sometimes slightly amused by their lack of musical knowledge. ‘They ask for such things as violins to play an F below middle C, which, of course, violins can’t do.’

But he approves of and enjoys their method of piling track upon track until they get the sound they like. He’s always enjoyed the electronic side of recordings, since the days of trying funny noises for his Peter Sellers records. He thinks that they could often do with 64 tracks, not just four, in order to add on everything they think of.

‘I once saw a film of Picasso at work. He starts with an idea,
then he overlays it with something else. He still has the same basic idea, but he changes it by putting something else over it. Sometimes the original idea can get obliterated.’

Complications arise when it’s not just a matter of adding something to an existing track, but taking bits out of two separate tracks. ‘Strawberry Fields’ was one of the more complicated creations, in a technical sense. They did the usual basic tracks, then John, playing it at home, decided it wasn’t what he’d wanted.

‘He’d wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous. He said could I do him a new line-up with the strings. So I wrote a new score and we recorded that. But he didn’t like it. It still wasn’t right. What he would now like was the first half from the early recording, plus the second half of the new recording. Would I put them together for him? I said it was impossible. They were in different keys and different tempos.’

While George Martin was trying to puzzle out a way of getting round this, without having to do the whole recording session all over again, he noticed that by speeding up the slower tempo recording by five per cent, it not only brought it to the same tempo as the other one, it brought it in the same key. By chance, he was able to join both together, without too much trouble.

The Beatles have never worried about being told things were impossible, nor have they worried when George has told them that new ideas they’ve thought of were very old hat. They got an idea at the end of ‘She Loves You’, which they thought was really new. This was to go down on the last yeh yeh to an added sixth. ‘I told them it was corny. Glenn Miller was doing it 20 years ago. They said so what. That was what they wanted.’

George Martin sees his work with them as having been in two stages. ‘At first, they needed me enormously. They knew nothing and they relied on me to produce their sound, the deafening sound they’d produced in the Cavern, but which nobody was doing on record. People like Cliff and the Shadows were very quiet and subdued.

‘The second stage is now, when they know what they want to put in a record, but they rely on me to arrange it for them.

‘In between, I’ve changed from being the gaffer to four Herberts from Liverpool to what I am now, clinging on to the last vestiges of recording power.’

This is a half joke, he hopes. There is a bit of teasing on both sides. The Beatles tend to mock him slightly. He in turn is slightly amused by their innocence and naivety. He is worried that it might one day make them go too far, not in music, but in films perhaps, refusing to rely on anyone experienced, such as himself. He did think they were taking on too much with their TV film. From the response of the British TV critics, he was right.

He thinks Paul has the most all-round musical talent, with an ability to turn out tunes almost to order. ‘He’s the sort of Rodgers and Hart of the two. He can turn out excellent potboilers. I don’t think he’s particularly proud of this. All the time he’s trying to do better, especially trying to equal John’s talent for words. Meeting John has made him try for deeper lyrics. But for meeting John, I doubt if Paul could have written “Eleanor Rigby”.

‘Paul needs an audience, but John doesn’t. John is very lazy, unlike Paul. Without Paul he would often give up. John writes for his own amusement. He would be content to play his tunes to Cyn. Paul likes a public.

‘John’s concept of music is very interesting. I was once playing Ravel’s “Daphne and Chloë” to him. He said he couldn’t grasp it because the melodic lines were too long. He said he looked upon writing music as doing little bits, which you then join up.’

Both Paul and John do have natural musical talent and originality, but they both have it in different ways. Paul can produce easy, sweet music, like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’, while John’s music is much bumpier and more aggressive, like ‘I Am The Walrus’. In a way, it comes out of their personalities. As people, long before they started writing songs, John was always the rough, aggressive one and Paul the sweeter and the smoother.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about them as composers is that despite writing so closely together for over ten years they are still strong individuals. Each has retained his own flavour.

If anything, their individuality has got stronger over the years. In their rock and roll days, both were writing the same sort of songs, but since ‘Yesterday’, a Paul or a John song is fairly easily identifiable. They’ve influenced each other, in that Paul has been spurred on to try harder with his lyrics, while John has been spurred on by Paul’s keenness and dedication. But they are still very different.

Their music has been constantly analysed and praised and interpreted, right from the beginning in 1963, when
The Times
music man had admired their ‘pandiatonic clusters’. They are said to have been influenced by everything, from Negro blues to Magyar dances.

References to drugs have been seen everywhere, once it was known they took drugs. Even the ‘help’ in Ringo’s ‘A Little Help From My Friends’ was said to mean pot. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was said to stand for LSD, which was just a coincidence. John’s son Julian had drawn a picture for John showing Lucy, a girl in his class, in the sky. In America it was said that ‘meeting a man from the motor trade’ obviously meant an abortionist. It was in fact a joke reference to their friend Terry Doran, who used to be a car salesman.

They have used drug slang in their songs, but not as much as people have said. Strangely enough, several deliberate slang obscenities have gone unnoticed. In ‘Penny Lane’, for example, the finger pie referred to is an old Liverpool obscenity, used by Liverpool lads about Liverpool lasses.

They are amused by all the interpretations. John deliberately let all the verbal jokes and stream-of-consciousness nonsense stuff stay as they had come out of his head in ‘I Am The Walrus’, knowing a lot of people would have fun trying to analyse them.

But whether they are the greatest songwriters in the world today, as some have said, or even better than Schubert, doesn’t
interest them. They never discuss or try to evaluate or appreciate their music. When forced to talk about it, Paul says simply that it must obviously get better all the time.

‘Each time we just want to do something different. After “Please Please Me”, we decided we must do something different for the next song. We’d put on one funny hat, so we took it off and looked for another one to put on.

‘Why should we ever want to go back? That would be soft. It would be like sticking to grey suits all your life.

‘I suppose everybody would like to do this, try something different every time they do any work. We do, because it’s just a hobby, that’s all. We put our feet up and enjoy it all the time.’

George doesn’t think they’ve done many songs worth talking about yet (his songwriting is discussed separately later).

But now and again George does yearn for the old days. ‘I often think it would be nice to play together again. We’ve never done it since we stopped touring. Perhaps one day we might hire a studio, just to play in for ourselves.’

‘They’re good songs,’ says John, ‘but nothing brilliant. I just feel indifferent when I hear them on the radio. I never listen to them properly. Maybe if someone was attacking them, saying they were rotten, then maybe I’d work up some reaction to them.’

They never play their own records, except perhaps when they’re about to start a new album. Then they might play the previous one through, just to see where they got up to last time. None of them sings their own songs, either before they’ve recorded them or afterwards. When John or the others break into a chorus of ‘She Loves You’, it’s as if they’re ridiculing a corny song written by someone else.

‘We did all the proper listening to them, over and over again, when we wrote them,’ says John. ‘When it’s finished, it doesn’t matter any more.

‘I actively dislike hearing bits of them that didn’t come out right. There are bits of “Lucy in the Sky” I don’t like. Some of the sound in “Mr Kite” isn’t right. I like “A Day in the Life”, but
it’s still not half as nice as I thought it was when we were doing it. I suppose we could have worked harder on it. But I couldn’t be arsed doing any more.

‘I don’t think our old songs are all that different from our new ones, as people are always saying. The words are different, but that’s because they’re done up differently. The tunes are much the same.

‘I suppose I’m so indifferent about our music because other people take it so seriously. It can be pleasing in a way, but most of it gets my back up.

‘It’s nice when people like it, but when they start “appreciating” it, getting great deep things out of it, making a thing of it, then it’s a lot of shit. It proves what we’ve always thought about most sorts of so-called art. It’s all a lot of shit. We hated all the shit they wrote and talked about Beethoven and ballet, all kidding themselves it was important. Now it’s happening to us. None of it is important. It just takes a few people to get going, and they con themselves into thinking it’s important. It all becomes a big con.

‘We’re a con as well. We know we’re conning them, because we know people want to be conned. They’ve given us the freedom to con them. Let’s stick that in there, we say, that’ll start them puzzling. I’m sure all artists do, when they realize it’s a con. I bet Picasso sticks things in. I bet he’s been laughing his balls off for the last 80 years.

‘It’s sad, though. When we’re not laughing, we’re conning ourselves into thinking we are important. People won’t take anything as a laugh. If we said when we wrote “She’s Leaving Home” we were actually thinking about bananas, nobody would believe you. They don’t want to believe you.

‘It is depressing to realize we were right in what we always thought, all these years ago. Beethoven is a con, just like we are now. He was just knocking out a bit of work, that was all.

‘The thing is, do Beethoven and these sort of people realize they’re a con? Or do they really think they’re important? Does the prime minister realize he’s just a bloke? I don’t know. Perhaps
he’s taken in by all this pretending to know what he’s doing. The drag is he sounds as if he really thinks he knows what’s going on, when he doesn’t.

‘People think the Beatles know what’s going on. We don’t. We’re just doing it. People want to know what the inner meaning of “Mr Kite” was. There wasn’t any. I just did it. I shoved a lot of words together, then shoved some noise on. I didn’t dig that song when I wrote it. I didn’t believe in it when we were recording it. But nobody will believe it. They don’t want to. They want it to be important.’

John lives in a large mock-Tudor house on a private estate full of mock-Tudor houses in Weybridge, Surrey. Ringo lives on the same estate. John’s house cost him in all £60,000, although it was only £20,000 to buy. He spent the other £40,000 doing it up, knocking rooms around, decorating and furnishing, landscaping the garden and building a swimming pool. He has spent too much on it, which he knows. ‘I suppose I’d only get half the money back if I sold it, about £30,000. I’ll need to find a pop singer to sell it to, someone soft anyway.’

In the garden he has a psychedelically painted caravan, which was done to match the patterns of his painted Rolls-Royce. The house is on a slight hill, with the grounds rolling beneath. There is a full-time gardener, a housekeeper called Dot and a chauffeur called Anthony. None of them lives in.

Inside, the front hall is dark and book-ridden, but the rooms beyond are bright and large and lushly decorated. There are long plush sofas and huge pile carpets and elegant drapes, all of which look brand new and unused, like a Hollywood set. But amongst them are scattered irrelevant ornaments, old posters and bits of antiques. They look highly used and personal, obviously chosen by John, rather than an interior decorator, but just dumped and forgotten about once the initial whim wore off.

These reception rooms might as well be corridors. Nobody ever seems to use them, although they are kept beautifully
dusted. They just walk through them to get out. All the living is done in one little rectangular room at the back of the house. It has one wall completely made of glass and looks over the garden and trees beyond.

John, his wife Cynthia and their son Julian (born 8 April 1963) spend most of their time in this living room and kitchen. The surrounding opulence seems to have nothing to do with them. Dot looks after that.

Inside their quarters, Cyn looks after her family on her own, doing all the cooking for the three of them – though John sometimes makes tea. She looks after Julian by herself. She has never had a nanny, although Dot does a lot of babysitting. It was she who looked after Julian while John and Cyn were in India in early 1968.

Cyn gets worried now and again by the expense of having and not using such a big house. John, when he thinks about it, finds it a laugh.

‘Everything seems to cost a fortune,’ she says. ‘John spends impetuously and it’s catching. I’m always feeling guilty. I have to pull myself together now and again, when I realize how much something would mean to some people. Our food and drink bill is amazing. It’s mostly bread, tea, sugar, milk, cat food and soft drinks, as we don’t drink. Yet it somehow comes to £120 a month. I don’t know how.’