Throughout John and Paul’s press conference at the Americana, Magic Alex sat at John’s right hand, toying with a bunch of flowers. Long-haired and bearded, he looked much like any other hippy, but he was now head of Apple’s Electronics Division.
A month later, he was filmed for an Apple promotional film to be screened at a Los Angeles sales convention later the same day. The film begins with heavy guitar music, and a voiceover says: ‘The concept of Apple is to bring together the artists of today with the methods and media of tomorrow.’
For the next three minutes Mary Hopkin plays guitar beneath a tree and sings sweetly, while Paul’s dog Martha potters around. When she finishes, Paul walks on, and crouches beside her on the grass. ‘That was Mary Hopkin – and this is Alex.’
The scene switches to a room full of boxes and machines. Magic Alex wears a white shirt and trousers beneath a white technician’s coat. He is seen ‘fiddling with a pile of junk’, as the director of the film, Tony Bramwell, put it.
Against an insistent background clamour of Dr Who-ish bleepy-bloppy noises, Magic Alex walks towards the camera, picks up a microphone and says, in his heavy Greek accent, ‘Hullo. Arm Alexis vrum Abul Elegtronigs. Ar, I vood like to say hullo to vall my bruzzers around the world and to all the gells around the world and to all the electronic people around the world er und er –’ (points to the machines and boxes behind him) ‘– thad is Abull Elegronigs.’
The wacky noises continue as a blue light trails up and down across a screen, as in a low-budget sci-fi movie, or an amateur heart monitor.
The film cuts to an office. John passes a phone to Paul. Music seems to be coming out of it. Paul holds the phone to the ear of the unApple-ish figure of the Beatles’ music publisher Dick James, bald and heavily bespectacled. ‘Fair enough,’ he says, with the tired curiosity of an exhausted parent. ‘Where’s that come from? Whassat? Oh, it’s a radio built in.’
‘Wrong,’ says Paul, with a laugh. ‘It’s a phone. Just a little thing we have up our sleeves.’
Those of Mardas’s ideas that worked were not his own, and those that were his own failed to work. In all, Apple applied for one hundred different patents for Mardas’s inventions, not one of which was accepted. The telephone in the promotional video might well be the one he claimed to have invented, which had voice-recognition, and could display the number of the incoming call. But Apple lawyers were soon to discover that both of these had been patented by the Bell company some time before.
Other inventions by Magic Alex included:
a) an X-ray camera that could see through walls
b) a force-field that envelops any building in coloured air, rendering it invisible
c) a solar-powered electric guitar
d) paint that makes objects invisible
e) a house that hovers in the air, suspended on an invisible beam
f) a home heating system that runs on ordinary household batteries
g) a device for preventing records being taped off the radio by sending out a series of high-pitched squeals
h) special paint that changes colour at the flick of a switch
One of his more audacious inventions was ‘loudpaper’, an audible form of wallpaper. Paul listened wide-eyed as the electronics guru described it: ‘He would sit and tell us of how it would be possible to have wallpapers which were speakers, so you would wallpaper your room with some sort of substance and then it could be plugged into and the whole wall would vibrate and work as a loudspeaker – “loud-paper”. And we said, “Well, if you could do that, we’d like one.” It was always, “We’d like one.”’
But George Martin, older and wiser, was less easily impressed. ‘Of all the army of hangers-on, the one I recall most vividly … was Magic Alex … who was so preposterous that it would have been funny had he not caused so much embarrassment and difficulty with me in the recording studio.’ His irritation increased after he overheard Mardas boasting that he could do Martin’s job so much better. ‘I found it very difficult to chuck him out, because the boys liked him so much. Since it was very obvious that I didn’t, a schism developed.’
Martin remained studiously undeceived. ‘I confess that I tended to laugh myself silly when they came and announced the latest brainchild of Alex’s fertile imagination. Their reaction was always the same: “You’ll laugh on the other side of your face when Alex comes up with it.” But of course he never did.’
Persuaded by Magic Alex, Apple bought two huge computers for £20,000 each. But no one could make them work, least of all Magic Alex. Before long they were moved to Ringo’s garage, where they remained for years to come.
Of all Mardas’s visions, the one that impressed the Beatles most, and George Martin least, was the Sonic Screen. ‘I was informed of this work of inventive genius by the boys one day. “Why do you have to put Ringo with his drums behind all those terrible screens?” they asked. “We can’t see him. We know it makes a good drum sound, and it cuts out all the spill to our guitars and things, but damn it, with those bloody great screens locking him in, it makes him feel claustrophobic.”
‘I waited silently, knowing that the problem would have been solved by a flash of Greek inspiration. And so it had. “Alex has got a brilliant idea! He’s come up with something really great: a sonic screen! He’s going to place these ultra-high-frequency beams round Ringo, and when they’re switched on he won’t be able to hear anything, because the beams will form a wall of silence.” Words, I fully admit, failed me.’
Mardas started work on a flying saucer, built around two V12 engines, one borrowed from George’s Ferrari, the other from John’s Rolls-Royce. The Beatles also financed his scheme to create an artificial sun to light up the sky above the new Apple Boutique in Baker Street. But on opening night – 7 December 1967 – the sun failed to appear. This was, of course, not Mardas’s fault: it all came down to a lack of ‘energy’. Other inventions had, he insisted, been days from completion when, as luck would have it, a fire swept through his workshop, ensuring that their due date had to be postponed.
He somehow persuaded the Beatles to let him design them a new studio, the best in the world, equipped with recording consoles that were not just four-track, as at EMI, or eight-track, as in America, but seventy-two-track. For months he pretended to be busying away, constructing a studio in the basement of the Apple headquarters at 3 Savile Row, and regularly asking for more money for the task.
As autumn turned to winter, the Beatles, already fractious, began to find their Twickenham studios too cold and draughty. Their patience was ebbing away; they demanded to move into the swish, state-of-the-art new studio as soon as possible.
Magic Alex finally let them into their new studio late in 1969. It immediately proved unusable, with no studio desk or any form of soundproofing. Conversations from neighbouring rooms and footsteps from upstairs could easily be heard, while every time the building’s central heating was fired up a great whooshy noise filled the studio. Geoff Emerick was unimpressed: ‘Alex basically did not know what he was doing. The studio he built for them was a complete and utter disaster.’ George Martin realised at once that there was no space in the wall for the cables between the studio and the control room; the only solution was to open the doors so the cables could snake along the corridor. Far from being revolutionary, the mixing console was just a sheet of plywood with sixteen faders and an oscilloscope stuck in the middle. ‘It looked like the control panel of a B-52 bomber,’ complained the sound engineer Dave Harries. ‘They actually tried a session on this desk, they did a take, but when they played back the tape it was all hum and hiss. Terrible. The Beatles walked out, that was the end of it.’ George Martin made a frantic call to Abbey Road: ‘For God’s sake get some decent equipment down here!’
‘He’d charged them thousands, and bought the stuff second-hand,’ said John Dunbar, who had grown disillusioned with his former wunderkind. George Harrison, too, suffered a crisis of faith: ‘Alex’s recording studio at Apple was the biggest disaster of all time. He was walking around with a white coat on like some sort of chemist, but didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.’ Alan Parsons, a junior EMI tape operator, arrived with equipment borrowed from Abbey Road. He too was disappointed by Mardas’s efforts: ‘It had obviously been done with a hammer and chisel instead of being properly designed and machined.’ But their recordings struggled on, creating what John later called, in his undainty way, ‘the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever’. Finally, when Allen Klein took over the management of the Beatles’ affairs in 1969, he wound up Apple Electronics, and stopped all payments to Magic Alex. In the end, the famous cutting-edge mixing console was sold as scrap metal to a second-hand electronics shop in the Edgware Road for £5.
Magic Alex came to personify the hippy-dippy gullibilities of the Beatles’ later years. He spent the rest of his life in Greece, selling bulletproof cars and security devices to the wealthy and paranoid. He also made a fortune selling all the Beatles memorabilia he had managed to accumulate: in 2011 he was paid $408,000 for a custom-made Vox Kensington guitar with a plaque reading:
TO MAGIC ALEX
ALEXI THANK YOU
FOR BEEN [sic] A FRIEND
2–5–1967 JOHN
In 2008, after an article in the New York Times described him as a ‘charlatan’, he threatened to take the newspaper to court. Following two years of protracted negotiations, he agreed to drop his action on condition that the paper made it clear that by calling him a charlatan, it did not intend to mean that he was also a conman.
On his death in 2017, his obituarist in The Times calculated that, in today’s money, Alex Mardas’s projects had cost the Beatles £4 million, with no tangible return.