Sir George Martin, the legendary producer who in his work with The Beatles helped to fundamentally change the shape of popular music, has died. He was ninety years old.
Martin began his career working for Parlophone Records, where he produced classical music, as well as British and Irish folk music and comedy albums. Despite having had great success with original cast recordings, he hadn’t yet hit with pop music when he was approached by The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in 1962. Martin agreed to sign the group to Parlophone and ended up producing virtually everything the band ever recorded. His close relationship with the group and his ability to push their sound (and thus the sound of modern popular music) further into abstraction and experimentation earned him the title of The Fifth Beatle.
Their chumminess was always slightly amusing: Martin’s age (he was fourteen years John Lennon’s senior), his high BBC accent, and his conservative fashion sense marked him as hailing from a different sector of society than the one that birthed The Beatles. As the Washington Post reports, though, Martin grew up the son of a carpenter in North London, and as a teenager he was playing piano at school dances in a group called George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers.
Still, his cultivated sophistication undoubtedly changed the way Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr approached pop music. The shapeshifting calliope solos that give Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” its character were the result of a Martin studio experiment in which he cut up various recordings of Victorian steam engines, mixed them up without regard for their order, and re-assembled the tapes with some recordings facing forward and others backwards.
After the dissolution of The Beatles, Martin went on to produce McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” (he also wrote the film’s score) and Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” among many other songs and albums. He retired in 1998.
In reaction to Martin’s death, Starr tweeted an early photo of the band with a dapper, cigarette-smoking Martin in the foreground. “Thank you for all your love and kindness George peace and love,” he said. Meanwhile, in an essay on his website, McCartney called Martin “a true gentleman” and said he was “like a second father to me.”
Martin’s manager, Adam Sharp, confirmed the producer’s death but did not say where Martin was or how he died.
(via the Washington Post)
