Rock
IF I WAS HAVING TROUBLE listening to music, then what on earth must it be like to know that it’s music itself which has made you deaf in the first place?
For both classical and rock musicians, there is an entirely genuine threat posed by getting too close for too long to the thing they most love. In the last four-hundred-odd years since human beings started gathering songs into groups and ensembles, the risk of deafness has remained their shadowy accompaniment. One recent German study put the risk of hearing loss as four times greater among professional musicians than it is for the general public. Amongst the classicists, many violinists damage their hearing in the left ear – the side closest to the body of the instrument. French horn players can not only deafen themselves but those positioned closest to them. In fact, it’s orchestral musicians generally who are most at risk of hearing loss since they may well be placed physically closer to another instrument and expected to rehearse and perform for far longer than most rock musicians every day.
In the rock world, the problem is not so much sitting for long periods next to loud noises as being surrounded by very high volumes. The majority of club sound systems operate at over 90 decibels – somewhere between a power drill and a chainsaw. Return to that early image of the mechanism of the ear – the eardrum, the middle ear, the cochlea, the auditory nerve, all of them operating with a lapidarist’s precision – and then imagine wave after wave of overpowered sound banging like a lump-hammer onto the tympanum. It’s not the frequencies that are doing the damage, it’s the motion. Hit anything hard enough for long enough, and of course it’s going to break.
Everyone from the World Health Organisation to Zane Lowe has started issuing warnings about the potential epidemic of hearing loss among music lovers. In 2015 the WHO produced a report suggesting that 1.1 billion people are at risk of permanently damaging their hearing by listening for long periods to over-amplified music. Half of 12- to 35-year-olds in richer countries are exposed to unsafe sound levels through personal audio devices and 40 per cent are going to gigs or festivals where the sound level will almost always exceed safe levels. The WHO recommends that we should all reduce the volume, give our hearing a break by stepping out of noisy environments every few minutes or so, and wear earplugs – better still if they’re the ones designed specifically for music and which have some filtration capacity.
But there are flaws in this plan. Firstly, teenagers may be unaware that loud music can be permanently damaging and are often resistant to wearing earplugs. Back in 2005/06, AoHL surveyed a group of young clubbers and found that 70 per cent of them had experienced ringing in the ears after a night out, though almost none of them realised that this was a warning of potential future problems. Besides, if you’re at a gig and you’ve just spent three hours worming your way to the front of the stage in order to catch every fleck of spittle from your favourite band, then nothing short of forceps is going to get you out again.
And secondly, musicians play it loud because we like it loud. There’s a lot of music out there which just isn’t designed to be quiet. Punk, dub, drum & bass, hip-hop, rap, house, techno, metal, old-fashioned rock’n’roll – all of them were born to be heard at high volume. All were supposed to kick against the rhythm of a heartbeat or thrill you up through the soles of your feet, and many music lovers would probably say that if you take the noise out of music it stops doing its job. The Sex Pistols did not write ‘Anarchy in the UK’ to be heard at the WHO’s recommended safe noise level, nor the White Stripes howl America down for an audience of HSE-approved earplugs. A live experience has the ability to lift people because it’s right there banging against their bones, and even music which sounds as if it’s supposed to be heard quietly – the work of Palestrina or Arvo Pärt, say – is still designed to be heard just as loud as the unamplified volume of several dozen human voices.
IT TOOK ME A LONG, long time to find anyone from the rock world who would talk to me about hearing and music. When I started this book I searched for musicians with hearing problems and came up with what I thought was a fairly extensive list – not just older suspects like Pete Townshend or Gary Numan but those in their twenties and thirties, many of whom may have developed tinnitus. In fact, there were so many people prepared to declare themselves sufferers it often seemed as if there were a far larger number of musicians out there with deafness than without. Great, I thought, this shouldn’t take long.
But trying to get them to talk on record was a different story. Over the next few months I approached everyone on that list from Jazzie B to Plan B. Nothing doing. They might all have been enthusiastic supporters of charitable campaigns in theory, but in practice they were all amazingly busy on new albums. In the end I tried over thirty musicians in both Britain and the States, but I’ve had more luck persuading unconvicted criminals to talk to me than I did rockers with hearing loss. I began to get an inkling of what 1950s Hollywood or 1970s Westminster must have been like – an entire professional class still locked in the closet.
OK, I thought, if musicians themselves won’t talk, then perhaps the people who make those musicians’ music work will. In March 2016, a friend texted to say he’d just heard a radio obituary of George Martin during which they’d played a clip of him talking movingly about his deafness. His son Giles is also a producer, so I got in touch with his management. Sure, they said. Would half an hour at the studio be OK?
Take the word ‘Beatles’ out of Giles Martin’s CV and he’s a successful record producer who has worked with artists including Jeff Beck, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush and the fastest-selling classical musician of all time, Hayley Westenra. He helped put together the music for the Queen’s golden jubilee and the London 2012 Olympics, he’s an instrumentalist and a producer of audio-visual spectaculars, he’s composed film scores and assembled soundtracks. But put back that word and you get a whole different story. Search for Giles Martin online and he becomes less a person in his own right and more a piece in a much bigger machine. Or just a familial connection; the son of the Fifth Beatle. Or – as the Telegraph would have it – the music-producer son of the greatest music producer who ever lived.
The studios on Abbey Road are in the process of being refurbished so when Giles Martin appears he leads me over to the building next door, which is currently providing a temporary home for his own offices. Somewhere outside the window a perpetually self-renewing stream of tourists and trippers freeze mid-step on the famous zebra crossing, a thousand families recreating the cover of the Abbey Road album a thousand times a day.
Giles is tall and well kept with thick swept-back hair and a particular stillness to him, a kind of caution, as if some part of him is always listening for trouble. His hearing, incidentally, is fine – more than fine, in fact; it’s in demand, and very expensive. In addition to his production work, he’s an audio consultant to Sonos, an audio home-entertainment company, and is occasionally called in by other specialists to provide an expert overview.
His father’s death was still recent and as he talked about him he flipped between present and past tenses. His bond to George is written all over him, but so is the conflict between honouring that bond and being his own man.
Giles is 47 now, though he was still a child when his father first started to lose his hearing. As George Martin explained in later interviews, the first he knew of it was some time in the late 1970s when he was in his own studios at home. In the control room the sound engineer was running a series of tone tests in preparation for a recording session. As he spooled through the tapes, George found himself watching the dials. He could see that all the needles on the dials were twitching to the right, which meant that sound should have been filling the room. He could hear nothing. ‘“Bill,” I said, “what’s the frequency you’ve got there?” He said, “It’s twelve kilohertz.” I said, “Oh shit.” I knew I could no longer hear 12 kHz and never would again.’
To start with, George Martin lost the treble, though. ‘He ended up losing all his hearing almost up to a kilohertz,’ says Giles now. Severe deafness would be between 70 to 90 dBs, or around 1 kHz. ‘That much. All frequencies. Like a filter. He became very deaf.’
Several decades after that first hearing test, father and son tried again. ‘We used one of the studios downstairs and I was being deafened by things that he couldn’t hear. Didn’t even have any idea that they were on.’ So it wasn’t like he was hearing some frequencies but not others? ‘No. They just didn’t exist. So beyond a certain point hearing aids didn’t help because they’re just amplifying sound, and as his hearing became worse there were no receptors to pick up those frequencies.’
It took a long time before George Martin went public. Though the Beatles had already split when his hearing started to decline, he still packed in a further three decades of work before finally retiring in 2001. In addition to the 30 number ones he’d had with John, Paul, George and Ringo, he then produced or contributed to everything from Bond soundtracks to Elton John’s multimillion-selling tribute to the Princess of Wales and co-wrote a memoir rather poignantly entitled All You Need Is Ears. Throughout all that time, his hearing continued to worsen. It was a loss which he knew had been caused by years of sitting in studios listening to music at high volumes. ‘Self-abuse,’ he called it later, castigating himself for not realising the consequences of prolonged exposure. ‘Is your hearing loss a result of listening too carefully to loud music?’ he was asked in a 2012 Jazzwax interview. ‘No,’ replied Martin. ‘It’s because I wasn’t listening carefully enough.’
‘Not until very late on in life did he talk about it,’ says Giles now. ‘He died at the age of ninety and you won’t find an interview with him in his seventies talking about it.’
Initially George had not wanted his son to follow him into the music business, though by the time Giles was sixteen or seventeen his father had started asking him along to meetings or sessions, ostensibly as work experience but really in order that Giles could translate. ‘He didn’t tell anyone he was going deaf because he still wanted to work. And who wants a deaf record producer? So I was my father’s ears. And we became very close because if you’re someone’s ears, you learn a lot about a person even if they are your father. And I’d be this person hanging around with him and people would think, “There’s that precocious son, why is he bringing his son along?”’
So what did that mean in practice? ‘To begin with, when his hearing was failing – so this would have been when he could still work – I would have been about seventeen or eighteen, he would say things like, “I’ve got a feeling that this record doesn’t sound right.” So, for instance, the red and the blue albums, the famous Beatles’ greatest hits albums from different eras, they came out on CD, and he sensed that they sounded too bright. That would probably have been 1990 or 1989. And I came in here to check, and I remember the guy absolutely hating me for being here because I was this eighteen-year-old coming in and saying, “It doesn’t sound right,” because it didn’t. I compared the CD to the vinyl, played the vinyl, played the CD, played them again, and I said, “They don’t sound the same, and they need to sound the same.” So you learn what the other person wants to hear. And it’s not as though my father was gelded completely by his hearing. He could still do lots of things. He was still a very good musician and he could still write and arrange and all these sorts of things, but yeah, he would present me as being a trainee, which I was, but …’
So for a long time, you were keeping his deafness a secret between the two of you? ‘Yes. And then as people got to know us, they would know what was going on or … just accept it.’
Were you ever tempted to misreport anything?
‘No! No. What I wanted to do was make sure my dad didn’t come across as looking like an idiot. Because he wasn’t an idiot, he was just losing his hearing.’
But to be that guide – that’s a difficult position to be in.
‘Yes, but you learn a lot.’
Were there moments when it was too close for comfort? It’s an almost intimate role.
‘But it’s your parent. You can be intimate with your parent. And he couldn’t have had anyone else do it, that’s the thing. It was funny – I lived my life a bit like Benjamin Button with my dad where, by the time he died, we were incredibly close. I was probably one of the closest people to him, if not the closest person to him. Because we’re very similar, and we have the same talent, and also I was his ears. It was a weird situation. I now have a rejected guide dog for the blind as a pet, but I was a hearing-aid person from the age of fifteen.’
On a practical level his father was able to make some changes to improve things, but emotionally it was a different matter. ‘There was nothing for him. There was no bonus or added experience about becoming deaf whatsoever. It was just darkness. And that sounds terrible to say, but to him … It was this thing that, above anything else in the world, was the one thing that he would have changed. Absolutely. Totally. Because it was … his powers were taken away from him.’
Is that how he felt? That his hearing wasn’t just a sense, it was a power?
‘Yes. I think so, yes. Because it was an ability. One of his abilities was that he had very good ears and suddenly he couldn’t hear. He found it very frustrating. He could sense things but he couldn’t hear them.’ It was that familiar thing – some frequencies declined quicker than others, which meant that in the studio his ability to listen to a track and spot the defects or omissions also declined. Having once possessed perfect pitch, George was now groping around for mislaid notes.
One hearing specialist who sees a lot of musicians says that while many of the issues they grapple with are common to anyone with hearing loss, there are also some which are particular to music. Often, musicians are dealing with several interlocking status anxieties. Many are too famous and well established to worry about being cool, so that’s not a problem. A few of them worry about being seen as vulnerable and dependent, so that’s sometimes a problem. But the overriding concern for almost all of them is the association of deafness with age, there being nothing quite so noxious to rock as oldness. Which means that on the one hand they’re proud they’ve lost their hearing because it testifies to a life spent smashing sound barriers, but on the other they’re worried that admitting it means that they’ve finally lost it.
For record producers or engineers, however, it’s a different story because the whole of their professional reputation is built on the foundations of one single sense. Giles likens his musicality to a palate. ‘So much of what we do is to do with balance and taste. If you imagine making wine, it’s complex and has acidity and strength and fruitiness or whatever they call it, but there’s a balance to getting it right. And music is to do with taste, but also balance – you need to balance the right frequencies. If you balance the wrong frequency you’ll have a record that sounds too tizzy or too muffled and boomy. And my father always made good-sounding records.’
But the thing was, it wasn’t music that his father missed most. ‘People would say to me, “It’s so awful, your father’s hearing loss. He must miss music so much.” And you’d go, “He doesn’t give a toss about music.” He didn’t. He’d heard enough music to last a hundred people’s lifetimes. It was all the other stuff. The sad thing for him isn’t that he lost his hearing when he had such a huge talent for music, the sad thing for him was losing his hearing because he wanted to talk to people. The rest of it is just showbusiness bollocks, it really is.’
What do you think are the emotional consequences of deafness?
Giles responds without hesitation. ‘Fear of isolation. That, above all others. I think isolation is the key word for me as far as hearing loss goes. My father always said that given the choice he would rather lose his hearing than go blind, which in some ways surprised me and in other ways didn’t. He died looking at the tree in his garden from his bed, and loved looking at his grandchildren. I get it now.’
He tells a story from a couple of years ago when his father was seriously ill but still sometimes able to participate in family events. Giles had cooked Sunday lunch but could see that George was struggling, so he suggested he go upstairs to rest. His daughter Alice, who was seven at the time, tucked George in and pulled the bedclothes up around him. ‘She kissed him on the forehead and she said, “Now maybe your ears will get better.” Because for her that was the biggest thing. They knew about the sadness of his isolation, not being able to hear his grandchildren.’
Connection?
‘Yeah. It’s that.’
And humour.
‘Yes. And being witty. And the fact that people think you’re stupid. And he was very bright, and both he and I rely on wit and being almost acerbic at times because that’s our nature, you know. We take the piss out of people, we take the piss out of each other, and we expect the same thing. And he would still be very funny, but he had to consider it instead of it being instant.’
Giles’s voice is deep, which meant that George could hear him right up until the end. But with other family members, it was harder.
Could he hear your children?
‘No.’
Your wife?
‘Not as well.’
So women’s voices generally …?
‘No. Sexist.’ He grins.
What about instruments?
‘He could hear a drum because he could hear the low frequency of the beat, but a violin would be useless.’
How did other musicians respond to his deafness?
Giles considers. ‘I think probably with fear,’ he says slowly. ‘It’s like how we respond as humans. We’ve got to that age now, you and I, where friends get cancer and things happen, and our response when we hear about it really is fear. So if you meet someone who’s a legend in music and who has made more records than most other people, and you suddenly find that there’s a frailty to it all, I think the reaction is probably, “I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”’
And also a suspicion with many of them that it is happening.
‘Yes. Without question. But it’s how you deal with that. I saw someone in New York, a very very famous recording artist who I haven’t seen for a long time, and I was backstage at an aftershow party. And as soon as I talked to him, I went, “Oh my God, you’re deaf.” And I said to him … I said, “Are you OK?” And he went, “Ooof!’’ He lets out a long, troubled breath. I said, “This is awful for you, isn’t it?” And he went, “Yeah,” and I went, “I know, because I’ve grown up with this, and because you knew about my dad, you’ve worked with him, so you know I grew up with this.” And he goes, “Yeah, I know.” And I said, “It’s just so nice to see you and I’m sorry you have to deal with this crap.” And you’re in this weird kind of isolation booth, and it gets tiring for the people around you, and you don’t want to be that burden and all that sort of stuff. And you just wish that with a knife you could cut the bubble wrap from around you enough to hear anything – it’s almost like you’ve lost a language.’
So, I ask, are you good at picking up the signs of deafness?
‘Oh yes. It’s like a gaydar.’ He laughs. ‘Absolutely, of course. I can know by looking at someone.’
How?
‘By seeing how much someone is watching someone’s lips move. I’ve grown up around it, and it’s like anything else – it’s not a huge talent, but I can spot it.’ Which reminds him of a friend of the family who was deafened through meningitis at a young age and who now lives in New York. ‘He’s now forty-four years old, became a kite-surfing champion, and women think he’s the most unbelievable man because a) he’s incredibly good looking, and b) he’s incredibly engaging, because people don’t realise he’s deaf. He looks so intently at people. And I remember saying to him, “Geordie, it’s extraordinary – these women just love you. They think you’re so deep, but you’re just shallow and deaf.”’ He laughs again and adds, ‘It’s true. They say, “My God, he’s really interested in me,” and you go, “No! He’s just struggling to hear what you’re saying!”’
So, as well as getting very good at spotting the physical signs, it seems like working with George also made him an astute psychologist?
He considers. ‘Yes. But there’s so much more communication than being able to hear. We sense so much. It’s like Stevie Wonder – I went to interview him with my dad in my early twenties for this programme called Rhythm of Life, and he was extraordinary. He sat at the piano and he almost scored his conversation. He constantly played the piano, played along with his conversation to embellish what he was saying. It was the most bizarre connection that he had with music and speech.’
So presumably he knows a lot of deafened musicians?
He looks down. ‘I’m not in a position to name and shame people, but you would find that most touring musicians who are beyond the age of fifty will either have some or severe hearing loss.’
They won’t talk about it to anyone? Or do they talk about it between themselves?
‘Yes, they do, because it’s apparent. It’s very apparent when you talk to them that they’re deaf.’
One estimate suggests that around 60 per cent of rock’n’roll’s Hall of Fame have some degree of hearing loss or tinnitus, but it remains unlikely that any of those individuals will discuss it publicly. Just as in 1950s Hollywood, their reasons for not coming out on the issue are persuasive. Deafness is a difficult thing to admit to yourself, let alone an audience of millions, and besides, a decline in hearing doesn’t mean a decline in ability. Musicians who have been playing for thirty years don’t suddenly lose that capacity overnight; what they risk losing is their audience’s faith in that capacity. So why should those musicians go public when doing so risks rendering them a professional write-off?
‘I don’t think that being deaf would make you a worse musician in any way,’ Giles says. ‘It might make you a worse recording engineer or record producer or a worse person at making speakers sound good, definitely. But it wouldn’t make you a worse guitar player or drummer or bass player, or even singer.’
So what would deafness do?
‘It would make you enjoy things less. The people I know who are suffering from hearing loss, the people that I’ve worked and recorded with, you wouldn’t know that they were deaf by their performances. But you would know they were deaf by their conversation.’
Which presumably means that many musicians – Pete Townshend of The Who being one – go on playing live long after they became deafened? Townshend is one of the rare stars to have spoken openly about his hearing loss. ‘I have terrible hearing trouble,’ he said in a 2006 interview, and then, wrily, ‘I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.’
‘Yes,’ says Giles now, ‘but Pete’s not even that deaf. He’s just talked about it, so he’s known for it.’
Whereas you know people who are far worse?
‘Yes. Absolutely, yeah. Like my father, for instance.’
As he explains, he’s just been working on a single to go with the new Ron Howard film of the Beatles at Hollywood Bowl in 1965. A year later the band gave up playing live as the screams of their fans drowned out the sound of their playing. ‘So at buildings like the Hollywood Bowl, they couldn’t hear themselves. And I said to journalists, “If you have earplugs in and you try and play an instrument or sing, it’s difficult. Singing’s OK, but listening to your instrument is very hard. Doing it with two people with earplugs in is ridiculous, and doing it with four people with earplugs in – that’s effectively what the Beatles did at the Hollywood Bowl. And yet they all sang and played pretty much in tune and in time.’ In other words, the Beatles must have spent much of their live career playing deaf. They weren’t actually deaf, they were just forced to behave as if they were.
But those who are actually deaf aren’t going to stop playing either. So, I ask, you could have an entire band playing live every night, and each member would have some measure of hearing loss or tinnitus?
‘I wouldn’t say if you could do, I would say you probably do do. If you gave the Rolling Stones a hearing test …’
But they’re in the age bracket where …
‘They’re in their seventies. People lose their hearing anyway. Fact. We’re designed not for electronic music, not for amplification, not for headphones blasting out your ears really loudly, our ears are designed to hear a crackle in a forest.’
But why would some musicians be playing better with hearing loss than without?
‘Because they’ve been playing for longer.’
So it’s just muscle memory?
‘Yes.’
OK, I say, still trying to puzzle something out, but why do so many of us have such a need for loudness? I know about protecting my hearing, I really do, but I still want to feel completely surrounded by the sensation of music even if I know that too much of that sensation is harmful.
‘Because,’ says Giles, ‘you need that volume to create that excitement, and because I think it’s something we don’t experience. We like things we don’t experience. We like going on a roller-coaster. We like to go fast, and then we want to go faster. We want to listen to music loud, and then we want to listen to it louder. We like one glass of wine and then we want four. We’re drawn to excess, I think, and sound is part of that. If I played you two versions of the same song through exactly the same speakers and I audio-balanced them for you and one was a decibel louder, you wouldn’t be able to perceive that decibel change, but you’d think one was better than the other, and it would always be the louder one. It’s an interesting test to do. It sounds brighter, it sounds better – it’s funny, but it’s easy to trick ourselves. And it’s the same thing with loud music as it is with smoking. We know it’s pretty bad for us, but we still do it. When you turn up music, you want to hear that thud, that shake. That’s what you get excited by, by being shaken slightly, and that’s why you want to stand by the speakers. And that’s why live music, music in the air, even if it’s a symphony concert – it’s still sound waves hitting you, and there’s something about being there, and being bombarded by sound.
‘The other thing about music and sound is this sort of wavering purple aura, this magical fragile thing.’ Music being, of course, half science, all art, and pure enchantment. So while his own skill at listening is called on by audio boffins, what they want from him is not formulae or equations but his wizardish tricks with a hook and a bridge. And, almost certainly, something else. They want a little sprinkle of Beatles fairy dust – names, a few anecdotes, maybe just to stand next to someone who had stood next to Paul McCartney.
But from Giles’s point of view, that proximity means he’s often left dealing with a combination of envy and wish-fulfilment from others. Projects which had in fact either been collaborations between father and son or which Giles had worked on alone were credited entirely to George.
‘People would come up to me and they would completely ignore age or disability because they didn’t want to believe that was the case. They’d say to me, “What’s your dad working on now?” I don’t think I ever really got angry about it, but I redid the Love show in Vegas and Steve Tyler from Aerosmith was there. He came up to me and he said, “You’re Giles,” and I go, “Yes,” and he goes, “Did you have anything to do with this?” I said, “Well, I made it.” He goes, “I thought George made it.” And you want to say, “Of course I did it. He was eighty. And he was deaf.” But instead you go, “Well, we worked on it together, we worked very closely on this thing.”’
Was that lack of understanding about your father frustrating?
‘No. I loved him.’ His voice has risen.
But loving someone and finding it frustrating are not mutually incompatible.
‘I think you balance things out. You take the rough with the smooth. It was just the way it was. I’m not sure I would have changed much.’
We’re looping back to the beginning. Almost the first thing Giles had said was, ‘People think people only employ you because you’re the son of George Martin. I don’t mean that in a sad way, but it’s an inbuilt battle, your mechanism for not getting too cocky or too ahead of yourself.’
Is that a risk? That you might get too cocky?
‘I think you can always get too cocky. I don’t know. But the point is that I always approach any job or any situation by thinking, “Can I do this, am I the right person for this?” as opposed to, “Thank God you’ve come to me!”
‘I actually said this to my father when he was very sick – I said, “Dad, did you ever think that you weren’t good enough?” And he went, “Why? That’s a strange question.” I go, “Well, good enough at music.” And he goes, “That’s a very strange question.” I said, “Well, because I often have that.” He goes, “That’s a ridiculous attitude. Why would you think that? I think you’re brilliant at music.” I said, “Well, thanks, Dad! But do you sometimes get asked to do something and you think, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to do this?’ And then you end up doing it and people say it’s OK or they like it and you think, ‘Well, I got away with that, what’s next?’” And he goes, “No. I always thought I was brilliant!” He laughs, remembering. ‘It was a very funny interchange.’
He checks his phone. He needs to go. If you can think of any musicians with hearing loss who might talk on the record, I say, then let me know. I’ve said it so often to so many people in the past year the words are just mechanical, and his mind is elsewhere. ‘I’ll have a think,’ he says as we walk back down Abbey Road. ‘But I already know what the answer will be.’