FORTUNATELY FOR GEORGE, one of his very first and most successful flirtations involved the completion of AIR’s Oxford Street Studios, which enjoyed a gala send-off in October 1970. In spite of the facility’s enormous cost overruns and architectural challenges, the grand-opening party was held in fine style on October 7, with George and his AIR partners officiating. Delivered in “true showbiz tradition,” the event was attended by “all our friends and enemies from EMI,” Martin later wrote, “people from other record companies, and—with a certain magnanimity, I thought—the architects, with whom we had had a major falling-out over the spiraling costs.” During the two-day party, the AIR team and their guests dispatched with more than four hundred bottles of Bollinger champagne.1
But the real story during that memorable week in the life of George’s career was the studio itself. In addition to Martin’s own dogged perseverance, the new facility had been well served by the contributions of Jack Parsons, who had worked tirelessly for the past few years on bringing the complicated project home, especially given the unusual specifications associated with establishing a working recording facility in the bustling heart of London. “It was one of the noisiest places you could choose to build a recording studio,” Dave Harries later recalled. “When Geoff [Emerick] first showed me the pictures at Abbey Road I said that simply can’t work. It will never work. But work it did!” As Simaen Skolfield, one of the studio’s first tape operators, later recalled, musicians adored working at Oxford Street, which, given its Central London location, was seemingly in the middle of everything. “It was a very, very busy spot,” Skolfield later recalled, “but a wonderful spot because you could look out of the windows of Studio 1 and look straight down Oxford Circle. We were actually five floors up, but everybody looked like little people coming in and out of the tube station.” At one juncture, the studio had become “so successful that George and John [Burgess] who had built it primarily for themselves couldn’t get in there and had to go back to Abbey Road. We were certainly one of the pioneering independent studios—and among the first to go 16-track. When we opened, our studio rates were £35 per hour.” Indeed, almost from the beginning AIR Oxford Street emerged as the most successful arm of the partnership. While AIR had begun life with the express intent of producing records by the partners’ clients, AIR Oxford Street demonstrated that there was an even more lucrative market for providing top-drawer production space outside of “dependent” studios and their record company overseers like Abbey Road and EMI. Not long after opening its doors, AIR Oxford Street became especially well known for its spacious Studio 1, which had formerly been a banquet hall. “The main studio was actually quite large and had a quite live sound,” Harries later remarked. “The idea was originally that we would do film scoring in there, with the smaller No. 2 studio which had a much drier sounding aspect and was built for pop. They both had basically the same equipment in the control room.” But in spite of AIR’s original intentions, Studio 1 enjoyed wide appeal among artists of all stripes. “As it turned out,” said Harries, “the main room for a number of reasons, including its great drum sound, got booked out by bands. It just worked. Film people couldn’t get in. We had good equipment and good technicians. We were in the right place at the right time. George once again picked out the right thing. Throughout, he had the Midas touch with artists and with studios, as the hits kept coming on both sides of the Atlantic.”2
On October 9, 1970, with the debris from the raucous opening gala still in evidence, George supervised the inaugural recording session at AIR Oxford Street, an honor that he accorded to Cilla Black. With the Beatles having been consigned to the history books, she was his longest-standing and most successful client, with the exception of occasional sessions devoted to old friends like Johnny Dankworth and Spike Milligan. While Cilla’s television series continued to exceed all expectations, her recording career was in need of a commercial hit. Her latest long-player for Parlophone, Sweet Inspiration, had fared poorly, peaking at number forty-two on the UK album charts, and George and Cilla were determined to stem the tide, just as they had done with “Surround Yourself with Sorrow” backed with “London Bridge” back in 1969. And for a while, it appeared as if they might just do exactly that. With “Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)” backed with “La La La Lu,” Cilla enjoyed a 1971 holiday hit with the A-side, penned by Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook, notching a top-five showing on the UK charts in the bargain. As it turned out, “Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)” was easily Cilla’s biggest hit since her heyday in the mid-1960s. But in the years since the release of Sher-oo! in 1968, her long-players had fallen into a steady decline in terms of her ability to find commercial success. For George and Cilla, this was a continuing source of frustration—particularly given the fact that she enjoyed regular face time with a massive audience courtesy of her variety show. With George in the producer’s chair, Cilla’s long-players continued to fade, with Images (1971) and Day by Day with Cilla (1973) failing to find a steady listenership, and the two longtime collaborators decided to go their separate ways. As Cilla later wrote, “Probably as a way of trying to be positive and keep my life moving along, we’d decided it was time for a new beginning on the musical front.” Besides, she pointed out, “George Martin was an enormous international artist himself, and it was getting more and more difficult for the two of us to find time when we were both free to work together.” Her first Martin-free album, 1974’s In My Life, found her working with Australian record magnate David Mackay, who had set the world afire with the New Seekers’ global hit (and the Hillside Singers’ blockbuster Coca-Cola jingle) “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony),” coauthored by none other than David and Jonathan themselves—Greenaway and Cook.3
Not surprisingly, Cilla’s In My Life LP prominently featured a cover version of the Lennon-McCartney composition of the same name, but by then George was long gone. Running a world-class studio had proven to be a great boon for AIR, but it was not without its challenges. In one such instance, George and his partners rose to the occasion—and, in so doing, established a niche in spoken-word recording, the very same genre in which George had found success with Parlophone back in the 1950s. AIR Oxford Street’s foray into spoken-word recording occurred after Argo Records approached George about becoming the company’s regular vendor for spoken-word projects. Argo was particularly interested in learning about the studio’s capabilities—namely about the “acoustics of the studio, with its floor ‘floating’ two feet above the original floor and its walls and ceilings suspended from acoustic mounts.” Argo had become flustered by the relative ineffectiveness of Decca Studios during recent sessions devoted to a spoken-word recording of Julius Caesar starring Laurence Olivier. During one key passage during the Decca sessions, Olivier’s performance had been spoiled after studio mics captured the sound of a jet flying overhead. Now “it’s well-known and generally found acceptable that there are certain anachronisms in Shakespeare, such as cannons going off when cannons hadn’t even been invented,” Martin later joked, “but it was felt that a Boeing 707 was taking things a little too far!” Determined to test the fidelity of AIR studios, Argo’s chief engineer visited Oxford Street and put the facility through its paces, variously turning up the gain on all of the amps and listening for ambient sound like air-conditioning or the like. With AIR having passed the test, Argo subsequently shifted the Olivier sessions to Oxford Street. “So they were satisfied,” George wrote, “and we gained the first of many customers for recording the spoken word.” But “there was only one embarrassment. Their first session with us was to record a jet-less version of Julius Caesar. Just as Olivier was delivering a speech from the steps of the Roman Forum, he moved, and we discovered to our horror that we had a squeaky floorboard!”4
George spent much of the early 1970s trying his hand with a wide array of artists—with the single proviso, of course, that working with them appealed to his sense of adventure and that he admired their work. This meant that at times George would shuttle from one client to the next as he searched for that same elusive something that had eluded him in his pre-Beatles years. Given the growing success of AIR Oxford Street, for the first time in his life, George enjoyed the kind of financial freedom that allowed him to follow his own whimsy wherever it might lead. As Skolfield later remarked, by this juncture “there were four studios operating at AIR Oxford Street—and those studios were operating pretty much 24/7.” One of Martin’s earliest post-Beatles acts was Seatrain, an American roots-fusion band that ended up drawing the ire of John Lennon, in a backhanded way, when he took issue with Martin’s contributions to the Beatles’ achievements during his 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner. At one point, John began criticizing supporters of the Fab Four like Dick James, whom the former Beatle denigrated as “another one of those people who think they made us. They didn’t. I’d like to hear Dick James’s music, and I’d like to hear George Martin’s music, please, just play me some.” In a 1971 interview with Melody Maker’s Richard Williams, Martin was asked to respond to Lennon’s claims. In a rare moment of unvarnished candor, Martin didn’t mince words, saying, “That’s silly, of course. I guess I feel sorry for him, because he’s obviously schizophrenic in that respect. He must have a split mind—either he doesn’t mean it, or if he does mean it he can’t be in a normal state of mind at that time. The contrary thing is that in June of last year I was in the States, and I did the David Frost Show, [and] obviously, we talked about the Beatles. . . . Then about six weeks after I got back, I had a postcard from the Beverly Hills Hotel, written by John in his own fair hand, saying that he caught the Frost show, thought it was great, and it was so nice of me to say such nice things about him and how he hoped that my wife and children were well and love from John and Yoko. That was the last time I heard from him, and that’s the other side of the coin. He’d probably hate people to know that he was that sentimental.”5
And that’s when John upped the ante, further trivializing George’s role in shaping the Beatles’ sound. In a 1971 open letter to Martin and Williams published in the pages of Melody Maker, Lennon replied with a vengeance:
Here I am again! For a start, I don’t see anything “schizoid” in having more than one emotion, though obviously you do. When people ask me questions about “What did George Martin really do for you?” I have only one answer, “What does he do now?” I noticed you had no answer for that! It’s not a put down, it’s the truth. I sent the postcard about the David Frost Show because you did say nice things about “Across the Universe.” I reciprocated in kind, okay? Schizoid, my arse. . . . Of course, George Martin was a great help in translating our music technically when we needed it, but for the cameraman to take credit from the director is a bit too much. . . . Don’t be so paranoid, George, we still love you.
John (and Yoko, who was there)
P.S. And as for Let It Be, just listen to the two versions, the bootleg “original” and the Spector production.
P.P.S. I think Paul and I are the best judges of our partners. Just look at the world charts, and by the way, I hope Seatrain is a good substitute for the Beatles.
For George, the Melody Maker exchange was a vivid reminder of the producer’s own dictum about working with highly creative musicians and songwriters. “You have to be careful,” Martin had once written. “If the artist feels threatened, it can raise a barrier between producer and artist, and make it harder to work together.” While Martin and Lennon were obviously no longer working together, the producer’s public remarks had clearly left Lennon feeling threatened about the degree of his own achievements, which, by Martin’s every admission, had been superlative. By the early 1970s, George had developed a number of stock phrases for explaining his production efforts with the Beatles. And one of these oft-repeated descriptions about “painting pictures in sound” had clearly gotten under John’s skin—so much so, that the former Beatle disparaged such thinking as “pure hallucination.” For George, it was the summer of 1967 all over again after Time magazine had singled out the producer as the unobtrusive genius behind Sgt. Pepper. But even still, George should have known better. The result of the Melody Maker squabble was almost exactly the same, with the artist—in this case, Lennon—taking conspicuous issue with any suggestion that the supporting players who made their work possible held a larger stake in the artist’s success.6
As for Seatrain, George had relished the opportunity to record the American band, even going so far as to temporarily relocate his family to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1971 in order to immerse himself in the production of their work. “Working with Seatrain was interesting because it was such a varied group,” he later recalled, “a mixture of so many different talents. I loved the homespun, folky feel of the band.” With AIR’s in-house engineer Bill Price in tow, George traveled to Marblehead, where he “discovered that there were houses to rent in the summer, and I started working on the notion of equipping our own studio in one of them. I soon found the ideal house. It was huge, empty, almost derelict, and stood in its own grounds on Marblehead Neck, which was effectively an island, connected to the town by a causeway. It had a very large sitting-room, about 25 feet by 16, which we could use as a studio, and right next door to that was another room which was suitable for a control room.” Not missing a beat, Martin and Price rented a recording desk from 3M’s Rhode Island office, along with a sixteen-track machine. With Dolby Laboratories throwing in some hardware and having shipped his own loudspeakers over from London, George was ready to go. For the Martins and their young family, life in Marblehead was idyllic. Living in a rented house near the makeshift studio, they “would spend most mornings on the beach. Then we would start recording at two in the afternoon, with a break at seven, when I would cycle home for supper, returning to work until about two in the morning.”7
As for Seatrain, George had difficulty getting the group off the ground. He consciously shifted the band’s sound from its roots-music origins into a more folk rock–oriented aesthetic. At one point, George and Seatrain even enjoyed a minor hit with “13 Questions” backed with “Oh My Love,” which cracked Billboard’s top fifty. For The Marblehead Messenger, the group’s much-anticipated second album with George, he directed them toward an even edgier sound, which the bandmates supplemented with subtle lyrics about the Vietnam conflict and other activist issues like the environment. While Seatrain succeeded in landing a British tour as the supporting act for Traffic, their high mark proved to be “13 Questions,” and George bowed out as their producer. But by that point, he had already pivoted to another artist, Paul Winter, whom he had met in Marblehead during his Massachusetts sojourn with Seatrain. With his band, the Paul Winter Consort, Winter had made his name as a top-flight soprano saxophonist with a penchant for “chamber pop,” a genre whose classical origins meshed nicely with Martin’s background. Wanting to take advantage of his makeshift recording facility, which had come to be known as “Seaweed Studios,” Martin suggested that the Paul Winter Consort take advantage of AIR’s investment and undertake an album with him during his stay in Marblehead. According to oboist Paul McCandless, the band didn’t hesitate to take George up on his offer. “Paul Winter was dying to work with George Martin because Paul was looking to find the most powerful, smartest producer he could to help get his music, and instrumental music in general, out to the wider public,” McCandless later remarked. “George’s signature was putting all these unique-sounding instrumental breaks on the Beatles records. They weren’t the normal guitar solos: sometimes there was a string quartet or a Salvation Army brass band or you name it.”8
For the band’s members, working with George was a revelation. Together with Price, Martin was able to challenge them to expand their soundscapes and take risks. As McCandless later recalled, “I remember there was one piece [‘Whole Earth Chant’] for which we were looking for a big tamboura sound. George had the whole band come out, and we held down a chord and the middle pedal of the piano, which effectively creates a harp. Then he had the band strum the piano, and they recorded it but with the tape turned around so they were recording it backwards. So there was this big crescendo, and the engineer, Bill Price, faded it before it actually hit the attack. It had the effect of this swarming, swirling kind of thing.” George later described the resulting album, Icarus, as “probably one of my favorites of all of the albums I have made,” including those with the Beatles. While “sales were nothing special,” George wrote, “the title song has the distinction of being the first record to fly around the moon.” While it may have been apocryphal, the story went that the band’s cellist, David Darling, talked a relative, Apollo 15 astronaut Joe Allen, into taking the recording with him on a NASA mission, during which the astronauts supposedly listened to the song as they circumnavigated the moon. “Part of the mission was to plot the location of unrecorded craters,” George wrote. “Joe spotted a particularly fine one and named it Icarus after our record. So we are now part of the history of our planet’s nearest neighbor.”9
With the recording sessions for Icarus under his belt, George returned to the United Kingdom in late 1971 to mix the album at AIR Oxford Street. In recent months, he had also accepted a commission for the soundtrack for Pulp, a 1972 British comedy starring Michael Caine and directed by Mike Hodges, the filmmaker behind Get Carter. Film and TV work had emerged as a regular income source for George, as witnessed by his composition of the theme for Mister Jerico, a television series starring Patrick Macnee of The Avengers fame. Sung by Lulu, George’s catchy number featured lyrics by Don Black, John Barry’s frequent collaborator on the popular James Bond soundtracks. George also entered into a new collaboration with the King’s Singers, a vocal group founded by six King’s College, Cambridge University, choral scholars. As one of the first groups to apply a choral approach to pop tunes, the a cappella vocal ensemble had formed in 1968 and were clearly on the verge of commanding a much larger audience given their growing popularity on the concert circuit. Under George’s tutelage, the King’s Singers made their first extended forays as recording artists. With Jack Clegg serving as his engineer, George recorded their debut LP, The King’s Singers Collection, at AIR Oxford Street in 1972, which featured a range of cover versions, including the producer’s arrangements of Lennon-McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home” and his own composition “The Game.” Martin’s old friend Ron Goodwin chipped in with lyrics and arrangements for “Watch Me” and “Building a Wall.” The producer’s association with the choral group continued in 1973 with a follow-up LP, A French Collection, an album of French-language tunes, and Deck the Hall, a live recording of religious numbers, which George supervised at St. John’s Church in Hyde Park Crescent in February 1973. Years later, the King’s Singers would evoke their collaboration with George, and their recordings of Lennon-McCartney compositions in particular, with their long player titled Madrigal History Tour.
In March 1973, George received an unusual blast from his past with the release of Pink Floyd’s blockbuster LP The Dark Side of the Moon. In many ways, The Dark Side of the Moon was a brilliant extension of the multitrack achievements of Martin and the Beatles at the height of their studio years together. Working at Abbey Road, Pink Floyd enjoyed access to a sixteen-track machine—an incredible technological leap from the Beatles’ EMI Studios heyday only a few years earlier. The Dark Side of the Moon was helmed by a number of George’s associates, including Alan Parsons, who engineered Pink Floyd’s masterwork, and Chris Thomas, who was brought in to supervise the album’s complex mixing sessions. Over the years, the album would become one of the best-selling LPs of all time, with sales estimated at forty-five million copies. The Dark Side of the Moon would spend a record-setting 741 weeks on the Billboard album charts from 1973 to 1988. Not surprisingly, audiophiles flocked to the multilayered masterpiece, studying every nook and cranny of the record in much the same fashion as the most zealous Beatlemaniacs do with the intricacies of Sgt. Pepper and The White Album. Ardent listeners to The Dark Side of the Moon’s stirring conclusion—as the song “Eclipse” segues into a beating heart—found themselves treated to a sonic Easter egg in the form of the faint sounds of music lingering deep in the heart of the mix. It was none other than a snippet of George’s 1965 orchestral arrangement, as performed by the George Martin Orchestra, of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” Back in the predigital days of the early 1970s, tape was often recycled for later use. Had Parsons and his team failed to effectively wipe the tape that was used to record the heartbeat sound effect? Or, more likely, was the George Martin Orchestra’s “Ticket to Ride” playing somewhere in the extreme background when the sound of the heartbeat was captured at Abbey Road?
For George, 1973 proved to be a significant turning point in his post-Beatles career, the anomalies of Pink Floyd’s legendary LP notwithstanding. After his success with the Pulp soundtrack, George landed the opportunity to score an even bigger film, Live and Let Die, the latest installment in the James Bond movie franchise. But for George, the soundtrack hadn’t fallen into his lap so easily. The opportunity had first come available after the series’ stalwart composer John Barry had feuded with Harry Saltzman during the production of the previous Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever. Still stinging over his falling out with the producer, Barry decided to go on hiatus for Live and Let Die, opting to work on a stage musical instead. In need of a title song for the new film, Albert Broccoli, Saltzman’s coproducer, contacted Paul McCartney about composing the theme song. McCartney’s star was on the rise, having landed a pair of hit singles with his new band Wings in the form of the top-ten US hit “Hi-Hi-Hi” and, most recently, the number-one single “My Love.” As with previous Bond movies, the title track for Live and Let Die was a much-sought-after commercial vehicle for pop singers, and McCartney jumped at the chance, inviting Martin to produce and orchestrate the song. For his part, George was delighted to be working with the former Beatle for the first time since the January 1970 sessions in advance of Let It Be.
To Paul’s mind, George’s participation made perfect sense, having previously produced Matt Monro’s and Shirley Bassey’s hit theme songs for From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, respectively. After reading Ian Fleming’s novel, McCartney made short work of the project. “I read it and thought it was pretty good. That afternoon, I wrote the song and went in the next week and did it,” McCartney later recalled. “It was a job of work for me in a way because writing a song around a title like that’s not the easiest thing going.” During sessions for Wings’ Red Rose Speedway, George and the band convened at AIR Oxford Street to record what the producer thought would be a demo for the Bond producers’ consideration. At Paul’s urging, George had booked an orchestra to accompany the band, whose instrumentation included Paul on piano and lead vocals, his wife Linda on keyboards, former Moody Blues member Denny Laine playing bass and singing harmony vocals with Linda, lead guitarist Henry McCullough, and drummer Denny Seiwell. George had secured ace percussionist Ray Cooper to round out the recording. By this point, AIR’s London studios were in high demand, emerging as one of the city’s preeminent locales, and Paul and his contemporaries were eager to record there. As Simaen Skolfield later recalled, “AIR just took off straight away. It was huge. We had them pulling in big orchestral pieces for films so we had the screen, with projectors and all this kind of stuff. So Studio 1 was busy all the time. It would be Stevie Wonder, and if it wasn’t Stevie Wonder it would be Paul McCartney and Wings.” When Wings had finished playing “Live and Let Die” in the former banquet hall, with the song’s inherent spine-tingling drama on full display, George said to Paul, “We seem to be making a real record, not a demo. Are you sure about that?” he asked, concerned that they were going beyond the producers’ request. “The hell with demos,” Paul replied. “Let’s give it the works!”10
At this point, Martin passed the finished track on to Saltzman and Broccoli. Not long afterward, Saltzman invited the producer to a meeting in Jamaica during which, to Martin’s surprise, the idea of the producer composing the film score for Live and Let Die seemed to be a foregone conclusion, “even though nothing had been agreed,” he later wrote, “and no one had yet said anything to me about time or money or arrangements.” And that’s when the meeting took an even stranger turn, with Saltzman praising Martin’s arrangement for the title track and then asking, “Who are we going to get to sing it in the film? What do you think of Thelma Houston?” George was flabbergasted. “But you’ve got Paul McCartney,” he countered. Undeterred, Saltzman suggested Aretha Franklin. “Aretha’s very, very good,” George answered. “But you’ve already got Paul McCartney.” At this point, with nothing left to lose, Martin delicately explained that Saltzman could only have the song if it was attached to the Wings’ recording that he’d recently produced in London. With Saltzman finally coming around to Wings’ version of “Live and Let Die,” Martin began composing the score. Working with director Guy Hamilton resulted in a great partnership for Martin. Even still, “writing a film score is a race against time,” George wrote, “it is hard graft, but it makes it a lot easier when the director is not a musician but trusts you to do the job well.” Hamilton “was very articulate in his instructions, and as we went through the film reel by reel, he would give me his thoughts, explaining what my music would do to heighten the tension and effect.”11
While working with Hamilton had proven to be a tremendous boon for Martin, the Live and Let Die project soured precipitously for him when it came to negotiating with EMI. After Paul contacted him about working with Wings, “I was delighted, and at the outset didn’t think about the money,” George later recalled. “I never do; I get too excited about the prospect of work that interests me.” The trouble began after the fact, when George contacted Len Wood, his former supervisor at EMI, to discuss his royalty associated with the forthcoming single, “Live and Let Die” backed with “I Lie Around,” which was released in June 1973. George requested a 2 percent royalty, which was below his typical 3 percent rate. “My dear fellow,” Wood replied, “you’ve forgotten that you signed a document saying you would operate on the same terms and conditions for a period of 10 years from 1965, and we’re still within that period.” For George, the retort was ineluctably simple: “But Len, the Beatles don’t exist any more.” Wood’s rejoinder would stick in Martin’s craw for years to come. “You look at the wording on your contract,” he answered. “It says that you will be available to record the Beatles or any one of them.”12
At this rate, George’s effective royalty would be 0.15 of a cent per record. Realizing that the B-side, “I Lie Around,” would be a McCartney-produced Wings track, Martin’s percentage would be halved yet again. Wood ultimately struck a compromise in which he agreed to compensate Martin as if he had produced both sides of the single. “What you mean to say is that you’ll pay me double a pittance,” George soberly replied. At this rate, AIR would receive $310 for every one hundred thousand copies sold. “It was the last straw,” George later wrote. “My relations with EMI were at their lowest ebb.” But amazingly, “worse was to come” when George realized that after three years, he hadn’t been paid at all for the Let It Be LP given his lack of an official production credit. From thenceforward, George had learned his lesson and would never attempt to “negotiate” with Len Wood again. He had resolved in all future disputes to get “bloody-minded” and work through his attorney. Just as George had predicted, “Live and Let Die” became a worldwide smash, notching a number-two US hit in the process. In short order, the “Live and Let Die” backed with “I Lie Around” single earned a gold record from the Record Industry Association of America for having sold more than a million copies, which meant a paltry $3,100 flowing into the AIR coffers on the back of a legitimate blockbuster. Fortunately for George, the soundtrack proved to be far more lucrative, becoming a best seller, as well as netting him a tidy profit for his Live and Let Die score. George had the last laugh of sorts when “Live and Let Die” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song (only to lose out to “The Way We Were”), marking the first time that a James Bond theme had accrued such an honor. In 1974, George earned a Grammy Award for Best Arrangement, Accompanying Vocalist(s), for his work on “Live and Let Die,” marking his first statuette since Sgt. Pepper. Buoyed by the success of the soundtrack, he conducted a series of concerts under the punning title of Beatles to Bond and Bach, including a December 1974 performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. That same year, he released his first album-length collection of instrumentals since British Maid. Distributed by Polydor, Beatles to Bond and Bach included selections from Yellow Submarine, Live and Let Die, and Bach’s Air on the G String.13
For George, the episode with “Live and Let Die” had returned him to the vanguard as one of rock’s most preeminent producers. During this period, he would often meet with up-and-coming or established artists who captured his fancy. One of those bands was the American blue-eyed-soul duo Hall and Oates, who had recently released their Abandoned Luncheonette LP, which had received strong praise from the British music press. Taking the initiative, George invited the duo to lunch at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. He was clearly attracted to the duo’s soulful, bluesy ambience, much as he had been with the Beatles’ harmonica sound during his first session with the beat band in June 1962 after hearing their performance of “Love Me Do.” In their early recordings, Hall and Oates revealed a similar aspect of their evolving sound. “We joined him in the posh, stately, silver-service Edwardian Room,” John Oates wrote, “with its massive windows overlooking a wintry, postcard-perfect, Currier and Ives Central Park. Over a reserved and polite conversation without a lot of musical details discussed, the meeting felt more social and more an opportunity to get to know one another. Perhaps it was the style of the luncheon, held in such an imperial, somewhat stuffy venue, which put us off. There was no doubting this master’s golden, elegant touch in the studio, but Daryl and I were now infused with the energy, grit, and edge of downtown New York, which I believe led us to thinking that George Martin simply was not right for us. At least in that moment.” And with that, George politely withdrew his offer to produce the duo. Years later, Oates would admit that “it was probably a musically life-changing moment that we let slip through our fingers,” but the meeting typified Martin’s attempts to grow his roster of artists during that period.14
Not long after releasing “Live and Let Die,” George tried his hand at producing Stackridge, an up-and-coming Bristol rock band that was riding on the heels of a recent BBC Two television spot and a winter tour. Attempting to build on this momentum, George brought the sextet into Oxford Street to record their third album, The Man in the Bowler Hat. George threw himself into the project, assisting the band in reshaping their rock sound into a progressive admixture of chamber pop and baroque musical stylings. George scored the album’s lush orchestral arrangements and even chipped in with piano parts for “Humiliation” and “The Indifferent Hedgehog.” But the LP’s clear highlight was “Fundamentally Yours,” a song brimming with rich melodies, a nifty synthesized harpsichord, and a driving beat from Billy “Sparkle” Bent. George tapped a wide range of musicians for the Stackridge project, including the Kinks’ Ray Davies, who played trumpet on the album, as well as George’s old Beatles compadre Derek Taylor, who laid down a horn solo for “To the Sun and the Moon.” While the album may have been a one-off for George, The Man in the Bowler Hat proved to be a middling seller for Stackridge after its release in February 1974, clocking in at a respectable number twenty-two on the UK charts. The album cover was devised by John Kosh, the veteran art designer behind Abbey Road and Let It Be. But George didn’t completely leave Stackridge behind. Within a year, Sparkle would retire his drum kit, leave Stackridge, and work as George’s personal assistant.
In 1974, George also enjoyed the unexpected opportunity to right one of the most notorious wrongs of his career—a “big goof,” in the producer’s own words, that saw him passing on the chance to work with Tommy Steele, the musician who would emerge as the United Kingdom’s first legitimate rock ’n’ roll star. After years of working on the cabaret circuit, Steele had developed a beloved stage persona, and Martin was eager to assist the former teen idol in transforming his career yet again. The result was an LP titled My Life, My Song that hit the charts with a thud. It was a “brave attempt” at “an autobiographical experiment,” George wrote, “that did not quite work.” It was also, alas, an outcome that the producer had encountered throughout his long career in the record business. While acts like the Beatles prove to be commercial evergreens, the majority of George’s clientele were victims of circumstance, good or bad, as well as prisoners of the longitude of their own talent. With Steele—and clients before him like Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald—the producer had come to learn that late-career encounters were just that: glowing opportunities and sometimes desperate efforts to recapture the contemporary musical consciousness and, more often than not, old glories.15
While acts like Hall and Oates couldn’t see their way clear to working with George, one band that didn’t decline his entreaties was America, the Anglo-American folk-rock trio that featured Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek, and Gerry Beckley. America had broken onto the music scene in the early 1970s with their best-selling eponymous debut album, which scored a pair of top-ten US hits, including the chart-topping “A Horse with No Name.” While their second album, Homecoming, had continued the band’s success, including the top-ten hit “Ventura Highway,” America’s third album, Hat Trick, had barely cracked the top thirty, failing to go gold where the first two LPs had achieved platinum status. As with Homecoming, America had handled their own production duties for Hat Trick, and by the time they met George, they were understandably in a panic over their recent commercial slide. For his part, George was delighted to help them try to reverse their “nosedive.” “Let’s have a go,” the producer told them. “We’ll work quickly and efficiently.” And did they ever. The bandmates joined him at AIR Oxford Street, where they worked for just over a fortnight from April 17 to May 7, 1974. The album, which was titled Holiday, was released in June 1974, in keeping with George’s plan to work expeditiously with the band. But the speed at which he produced the record belies the intensity of their efforts together. George made a point of working with America like he would have back in his Parlophone days. With Geoff Emerick in tow as the project’s engineer, George had met with them in London in mid-April and began routining their latest material. And for their part, they met George’s challenge with a steely resolve. “They were very well-organized in the studio,” he later wrote, which made it easier for him to score their songs, when necessary, and overdub the instrumentation with great precision. In addition to featuring America’s new drummer Willie Leacox, Holiday also found George providing keyboards on several songs. The bandmates were thrilled to be working with the legendary producer. As Bunnell later remarked, it “was great working with George. It was like we knew each other. We were familiar with the Beatles, of course, and we had that British sense of humor.” Buckley was equally pleased, later describing Martin as “such a hot arranger,” which made their latest tracks even stronger. Their new collaboration proved to be a boon, with Holiday generating a pair of top-five singles in “Tin Man,” with Martin chipping in on piano, and “Lonely People.” The latter composition had been composed by Dan Peek and his wife, Catherine, who self-consciously composed an optimistic rejoinder to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” Instead of resigning itself to the fate of a solitary existence, the Peeks’ “Lonely People” pointedly counseled its audience, “Don’t give up until you drink from the silver cup, / And ride that highway in the sky.”16
For George, the mid-1970s had already seen an incredible turnaround in terms of his professional fortunes. With the twin successes of “Live and Let Die” and America’s new best-selling album, he was rightly chuffed about the state of his career after the post-Beatles malaise. And for the latter release, he was now enjoying a full producer’s cut of 5 percent, which meant that he was being appropriately compensated as a professional, and that meant a great deal to George after dealing with EMI’s conservative ways over the years. “For the first time in my life,” George later wrote, “I was starting to earn some good money.” On a personal front, George was no doubt pleased to learn that John had begun softening his post–Let It Be hard-line stance, as communicated in interviews with Jann Wenner and others, in which he diminished the contributions of folks like Martin to the Beatles’ success. By 1974, Lennon had been explicitly reframing his commentary about Martin’s role. As May Pang, John’s girlfriend during his “Lost Honeymoon” period of estrangement from Yoko, later recalled, “John liked and admired George,” remarking that the producer challenged John to work “beyond his norm” and helped him to imagine seemingly impossible sounds, which George would capture and make real in the studio. In a March 1975 BBC television interview with Bob Harris, John took great pains to clarify his association with George over the years, going so far as to admit that “it’s hard to describe a relationship. They either say that George Martin did everything or the Beatles did everything. It was neither one, you know. We both. . . . George had done little to no rock ’n’ roll when we met him, and we’d never been in a studio, so we did a lot of learning together.” With a conciliatory perspective in stark contrast with his remarks to Wenner, Lennon observed that Martin “had a very great musical knowledge and background, so he could translate for us and suggest a lot of things, which he did.” Lennon concluded that Martin and the Beatles “grew together, and so it’s hard to say who did what. He taught us a lot, and I’m sure we taught him a lot by our sort of primitive musical ability, which is all I have still. I still have to have somebody to translate what I’m trying to say all the time. So it was a ‘mutual benefit society.’”17
During this same period, George made a point of meeting with John during one of the producer’s periodic West Coast visits. It marked the first time that he had seen the former Beatle in the flesh since August 1969 at the tail end of the Abbey Road sessions. For his part, George didn’t mince words when it came to the Rolling Stone and Melody Maker episodes back in the early 1970s. “You know, you were pretty rough in that interview, John,” George remarked. “Oh, Christ,” said John, “I was stoned out of my fucking mind,” adding “you didn’t take any notice of that, did you?” George replied, “Well, I did, and it hurt.” But the producer also knew John well enough to understand that this was the closest he would ever get to receiving an apology for John’s insensitive remarks. For his part, George understood the source of his friend’s malaise, reasoning that John had gone “through a very, very bad period of heavy drugs, and Rolling Stone got him during one of those periods. He was completely out of it.” In his heart, George knew that “John had a very sweet side to him. He was a very tender person at heart. He could also be very brutal and very cruel. But he went through a very crazy time.”18
Meanwhile, George had become inspired by the incredible success that AIR was enjoying with its Oxford Street studios. The project had succeeded, as he imagined it might, in becoming the cornerstone of AIR’s income. As George later wrote, the partnership had begun to take a multiplicity of functions. “We have our own record label. We have our own artists, whom we record. We record artists for other labels. We hire out our studios to other producers—who may either use our own recording engineers, or bring their own as is current practice in America; and we hire out producers and engineers to others. But most often, because we now have a world-wide reputation, people come to us not only for the studios themselves but also to use our staff, knowing they are backed by AIR’s training and high standards. That may sound like a sales pitch, but it happens to be true, to the extent that we have a very live agency which actually exports the talents of AIR’s creative people.” By this juncture, Emerick had joined Martin and his partners on a full-time basis, with the Apple Studios project having fallen into disarray after the engineer had spent years turning it into a world-class facility. At one point in late 1973, AIR’s London studios had become so popular that Emerick couldn’t even book studio space to mix Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run LP, which he was forced to complete at the comparatively remote Kingsway Recorders. Buoyed by AIR Oxford Street’s runaway success, George began hatching a plan for a “total environment” studio. The idea had started percolating after he had recorded America’s Hideaway LP at Jimmy Guercio’s Caribou studio in the Rocky Mountains, some fifty-five miles northwest of Denver. “I loved the creative freedom it gave,” George wrote. “You were there to make an album, and the studio was yours for as long as you wanted it, any time of the day or night. It was very comfortable, with individual homely log cabins and a good studio with a Neve console. The only thing wrong was the time of year that I was there. In February, Colorado can be pretty cold, and a macabre sense of humor could easily label it as an expensive labor camp! Our nickname for it was Stalag Luft III.”19
As Skolfield later observed, the idea of escaping to a “residential studio”—where artists and their production team could “get out of the city, go play tennis, and go horseback-riding”—was becoming fashionable by the mid-1970s. During this same period, Richard Branson had built a pioneering studio that came to be known as “the Manor,” a Virgin Records facility in a historic Oxfordshire manor house. Such studios, according to Skolfield, are “more homely, more personal, and, most importantly, more private.” For George, even studios like Caribou and the Manor seemed constrictive. He imagined something even more daring, a studio space that would be available wherever and whenever a recording artist desired. “I had the temerity to think of building a studio on a ship,” George later admitted. “It could go anywhere—preferably the Mediterranean or the Caribbean—and it would certainly give the groups their get-away-from-it-all feeling.” George assigned AIR’s Keith Slaughter with the task of locating a suitable vessel—which the producer had taken to calling the “AIR Ship”—and Slaughter finally narrowed down his search to two options: the Albro, a spacious and luxuriously appointed 120-foot yacht fashioned out of a converted Scandinavian freighter, or the Osejeuik, a 160-foot Yugoslavian passenger ferry. The latter was a twin-engine vessel that offered even more spacious potential recording facilities than the Albro, which could only be fitted out by placing the studio in the ship’s comparatively cozy hold. But the real issue, as with Oxford Street, concerned the exorbitant expense of converting the space, whether on land or sea, into a state-of-the-art recording studio. “Running costs would obviously be high, power supplies had to be stable, and the acoustic problems presented by a large steel box made the building of AIR London a picnic by comparison,” George later wrote. When the specs had been completed, Slaughter predicted that it would cost some £400,000 to convert the Osejeuik to meet AIR’s needs. With a mid-1970s economic crisis in full swing in the United Kingdom and an oil crisis impacting the world over, George lost his nerve. “So it became an unrealized dream,” he wrote, “and I turned my thoughts to a land studio.”20
With his shipbuilding aspirations having come to naught, George’s terrestrial visions immediately turned to a tropical locale. Over the years, he had come to adore Hawaii, valuing the archipelago’s relaxed tropical climate. Feeling that Hawaii was too far away from the old United Kingdom, George settled his sights on the Caribbean, which was geographically situated between the United States and Europe, where the vast majority of AIR’s jet-setting clientele was based. “I knew the Caribbean fairly well, but never seriously considered it because of its political instability,” George wrote. “There always seemed to be undercurrents in the Bahamas and Virgin Islands, and beautiful Jamaica is sadly an unhappy place.” And that’s when George discovered beautiful, tranquil Montserrat, the British colony that hailed itself as the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean. “I was struck by the natural friendliness of the place, which I am sure has a lot to do with the lack of progress in ‘civilized’ developments. I am happy to say Montserrat does not have a casino, high-rise hotels, or concrete sunbathing pads beside huge chlorinated swimming-pools. But it does have a fresh charm of its own.” George’s problems were finally solved when he found a thirty-acre farm nestled five hundred feet above the Caribbean Sea. As George scanned the landscape, he began to imagine cutting-edge, multitrack studios, with nearby villas where his artists could relax and find inspiration without sacrificing their privacy. For George, Montserrat more than fit the bill. In his eyes, the studio would become nothing short of a tropical paradise.21