Abbey Road

IT WAS my fairy godfather at work again, as I was about to discover after I had parked my bike outside the huge old white-painted mansion in Abbey Road that had been converted into the EMI studios.

Oscar Preuss had a large, homely office in the front of the building, with thick carpet, easy chairs, coal fire and grand piano. He sat at an old roll-top desk in the corner by the window, facing his secretary, a young and attractive girl with a distinctly cool manner - towards me, at any rate.

My first question to him was, naturally: ‘How did you get hold of my name?’

‘I’ve been looking for an assistant for a while,’ he said. ‘I mentioned it to one of my colleagues here, Victor Came, and asked him if he knew anyone suitable. He told me that he didn’t, but that he would ask around.’

Victor Carne, it turned out, was a great friend of Sidney Harrison, and when he had asked Sidney if he knew anyone, Sidney had replied: ‘There’s a young man who’s just finished at the Guildhall. His name is George Martin.’ So Victor, a fascinating man who was a great friend of Gigli, and who did all EMI’s operatic work, told Oscar, and Oscar told me I’d got the job, at the princely sum of £7 4s 3d a week, which was just £1 8s 10d more than I’d been getting as a music student.

Oscar was the head of Parlophone, which was just one of the labels under the EMI umbrella, along with HMV, Columbia, and Regal Zonophone. All these labels had existed before the war, but when it came, some of them were cannibalised to help the others. Parlophone had been the one that had suffered the most. It had originally been a German label, with music taken from the Lindstrom catalogue, and its trade-mark, which people often take for a pound sign, is in fact the German L. But that was coincidental to the fact that all Oscar’s top performers, like Victor Sylvester and Rawicz and Landauer, were taken from Parlophone and put on to the Columbia label. Parlophone had been reduced almost to extinction, but now, in 1950, Oscar was trying to build it up again, though it was still weak.

He did the lot. He was administrator, and at the same time made all the records. The label was a one-man band, but it encompassed the whole world of music. It had classical records, jazz, light orchestral, songs, dance music with performers like Ivor Moreton and Dave Kaye, piano music, Billy Thorburn’s ‘Organ, Dance Band, and Me’, and occasional comedy records like the classic ‘The Laughing Policeman’.

With all that on his plate Oscar certainly needed his assistant, whom he proceeded to toss in at the deep end. With my background I was regarded as very ‘twelve-inch’ - a reference to the old 78 r.p.m. shellac records of those days, which had popular music on ten-inch and classical on twelve-inch discs. ‘Right,’ said Oscar, ‘the first job you can do is to look after the classical end.1 I suppose, with my being a classical musician, it seemed logical enough.

I was put in charge of a group of musicians called the London Baroque Ensemble, conducted by Dr Karl Haas. Dr Haas was a lovely old man, a doctor of music. He had suffered badly in the war, was never very well, and in addition was always broke. But if he had any money at all on him, he would be off out to buy me presents like boxes of liqueur chocolates, or take me out to lunch. He would borrow from one person in order to be able to give a present to someone else, and then probably vice versa.

His generosity was matched by the problem his name could cause. I remember him coming to see Oscar one day; the commissionaire from the door came in and said: ‘Mr Preuss, there’s a man outside who calls himself Mr Arse. Is that right? Mr Arse?’ It’s wonderful what you can do with aspiration - or the lack of it!

The good doctor was a musicologist rather than a great conductor, and he had a tremendous knowledge of baroque music, at a time when it was still very unfashionable. He had persuaded Oscar to make recordings of baroque music with his group, which was in fact a get-together of the top musicians in London - playing mainly in the studio, though I think they did give occasional concerts. They were mostly woodwind players, and it was fascinating for me, an oboe player of moderate achievement, to be recording people of the stature of Frederick Thurston on clarinet, Dennis Brain on French horn, Jack Brymer, Terence MacDonagh and Geoffrey Gilbert.

We recorded things like the Dvorak Serenade for Wind, Mozart serenades, a lot of Bach and marches by Beethoven: pieces which today have become very popular, but were then virtually unheard of. The recordings were mono, of course, since stereo didn’t exist, but I was still very proud of what we achieved. And whenever we used small string sections, they were invariably led by Jean Pougnet, a charming hulk of a man. His favourite pastime was chop-ping up timber at his country home, and his huge hands looked quite incapable of making the nimble and beautiful sounds which he coaxed from his violin.

Apart from the pleasure of hearing how woodwind should really be played, I also gained from these sessions an early lesson in recording. By careful placing of the instruments, it was possible to record using only one microphone. The natural acoustics of the studio gave the recordings their fine sound, and I learned that to obtain a natural sound one should use as few microphones as possible, a principle which I believe still holds good today.

It was while the Ensemble was in full swing that Dr Haas went one day to a party. There he met Peter Ustinov, who at that time used to do impressions of opera singers and so on as his party piece. He discovered that Ustinov was not only very keen on baroque music, but was knowledgeable about it as well. So he decided to form the London Baroque Society and invited Peter to be the President. Karl was the conductor, I was the secretary -and that was the London Baroque Society; just the three of us. We would meet from time to time at Abbey Road, have a nice lunch, chat about music in general, and decide the Ensemble would record. There was a certain eighteenth-century elegance about it all. That was how I came to meet Ustinov, and later to record him.

When I entered EMI in 1950, I was entering a world in which there was already a great deal of controversy. Long-playing records had been pioneered by CBS in America, and in June of that year Decca had issued their first. But the big-wigs at EMI stupidly refused to acknowledge that this was going to be a viable form of recording. They said that no one would want the tedium of having a very long-playing record, that it would be too expensive, and that they would be content to stick with their 78 r.p.m. singles.

I couldn’t understand it at all. I was making classical records, and nothing was more annoying than having to chop up pieces of music into tiny fish-finger lengths of four and a half minutes each. I had to plan the music that was to be played, going through the score and deciding where to make the breaks. They were quite arbitrary, sometimes even in the middle of a movement. When the music had no natural break, I’d have to have the last chord on the first side played again to start the second side, to stop it sounding peculiar. It was absurd, but it had to be done, because we were limited to an absolute maximum of four and three-quarter minutes. Different producers would have different breaks for the same piece of music, which would also depend on the tempo at which the conductor was taking the orchestra, and it became a matter of some fascination to hear where other people were making those breaks.

It was good fun, but it wasn’t good business. Yet EMI issued a statement saying that they would give six months’ notice of any departure from standard records. The man responsible for that catastrophic decision was Sir Ernest Fisk. I say ‘catastrophic’ because they lost two years, and I believe the decision was fundamental to their subsequent loss of the repertoire from Columbia Records in America. In 1953 they were to lose that catalogue to Phillips, and in 1957 they also lost the RCA-Victor catalogue to Decca, after an association of fifty-seven years. Sir Ernest Fisk was an Australian, and a cycling fanatic who delighted in nothing so much as pedalling round Hyde Park, and he will go down in history as the chairman who delayed the entry of EMI into the long-playing record market, bicycle or no bicycle.

What history may not record is the day I nearly got the sack as a result of not knowing what he looked like, since he worked at the head offices down at Hayes. I was working with a choir in the number one studio at Abbey Road, which had a big organ in it. The organist was late, keeping me waiting, the engineers waiting, and the choir waiting.

I didn’t know this particular organist. At twenty past ten in the morning, when the session should have been well under way, I went upstairs and waited around for the unknown musician to turn up. Through the door came a man with a domed head, dressed in a black coat and striped trousers and carrying a music case.

I rushed up to him in a fury and said: ‘It’s about bloody time. Do you realise we’ve been waiting for you? You’ve been keeping everyone waiting for the last twenty minutes.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,’ I said. ‘The session was due to start at ten, and you’ve kept us hanging about.1

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked coldly.

A terrible doubt started to tug at the back of the Martin mind. ‘Yes, you’re the organist ... aren’t you?’

‘No, I am not the organist. My name is Fisk, and I am the chairman of this company.’

Ghastly silence. It looked as though I had a great future behind me. I made grovelling excuses and attempted to sink through the floorboards, trying to make myself as anonymous as possible. For the next few days I was in fear and trembling, because I really had been very nasty to him. Happily I heard no more, so I suppose I should thank him for that.

The group managing director, by contrast, went by the nickname of ‘the Japanese General’. His conversations were sparse in the extreme. I rarely spoke to him, since Oscar did most of the direct communication with ‘God’, but if I did pick up the phone when he rang, he would simply say: ‘Mittell here.’ Then there would be silence, but a silence pregnant with the unspoken demand that one should speak. So one spoke. Then there would follow another long silence. He just wouldn’t say a word.

I think that at this time, although the record companies possessed quite a sizeable part of EMI’s earning power, the entertainment industry was still regarded by the hoard as slightly suspect. My impression was that they would rather be making bicycles than gramophone records. And I think they were terrified at the capital expenditure involved in going into LPs, But they had no excuse for not knowing their potential value, for the simple reason that everyone told them so - Oscar, Leonard Smith and Norman Newell on the pop side of Columbia, and Walter Legge who ran Columbia’s classical side.

Walter Legge was the prima donna of the classical world in those days. He was married to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and he had a hand in running the original Philharrnonia Orchestra, which obviously did him no harm. They were just two of the many artists who recorded under his direction. He was something of a maverick, and I always admired him, since he did bring a breath of fresh air into the fuddy-duddy company that was EMI at that time.

No less extraordinary a man was Oscar Preuss himself. I suppose when I joined him he was about sixty; he had begun at the age of fourteen or fifteen as an engineer apprentice, not all that long after Edison had started it all. He made diaphragms and needles for the early types of phonograph, including the old cylinder machines, because in those days the engineer who did the actual recording used to make his own machinery. He had risen over the years until finally he had become head of Parlophone, so he had an enormous amount of experience.

For my first month or so at Parlophone, my training consisted of dogging his footsteps and trying to absorb as much of that experience as possible. Then, after a while, he started to ease me into doing things on my own. He might say: ‘George, I might not be in on the dot tomorrow. You start the session off, will you?1 And I would be there on the dot, and get the musicians and engineers organised, so that we would have our first take done before Oscar would breeze in and say: ‘That’s no damned good; we’ll do something about it.’ I had to steel myself to introducing myself to musicians and then more or less informing them that I was in charge. I’ve no doubt that in those early days they regarded me as a bit of a whipper-snapper, but I had the authority (even if no great salary!) and they had to tolerate me.

One of the most terrifying of all those sessions was the first time 1 recorded with Sidney Torch and the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra. It was in the number one studio at Abbey Road, which is a cavern of a place about half an acre in size. Even with the fine old Compton pipe organ in place (on which, apparently, Fats Waller had made his only organ recordings), the floor was still vast. Oscar had told me that he wouldn’t be in until 11 a.m., which was an hour after the session was due to start. I think he did it deliberately to see how I would cope. My main recollection is of the long, almost unending walk across the floor of the studio, and through the assembled forty-five-piece orchestra to where Sidney Torch stood on his rostrum. It must have been rather like the feeling a batsman has when he first walks to the crease at Lord’s.

‘Good morning, Mr Torch,’ I squeaked in a piping voice. ‘My name is George Martin, and I’m Oscar’s assistant, so I’ll be starting the session.’

I was almost wetting myself with fright at the apparent impertinence of it, but luckily Sidney was quite nice about it. He smiled benignly and said that that was O.K., and more or less indicated that, if I didn’t get in his way, he wouldn’t get in mine.

After that we were to get on pretty well, but he could be irascible in the extreme. I have seen him, when the orchestra were not bending to his will, fling his baton right across the studio (a long throw!) and shout: ‘For Christ’s sake, gentlemen, do get it right!’

Meanwhile, I had to learn fast, and learn from my mistakes. One of the earliest of those was right at the start, in 1950, when I was sent to see a film in which Mario Lanza was singing the theme ‘Be My Love’. Being still very classically minded, I was wholly offended by this man’s singing, just belching it out with brute force and bloody ignorance. I hated every minute of it, and wrote a scathing report which read rather like something from the pen of an avant-garde music critic. I said that it was a corny song, that it had every cliche in the book, and that it was too calculated.

So we did nothing about it. What I had overlooked, in my asperity, was the simple possibility that it could be a hit song. And, of course, it was.

Another lesson came when Oscar started giving me jazz sessions to handle as well as the classical and light music ones. The band in question was Humphrey Lyttelton’s, and as they ran through one of their numbers I found myself becoming very critical of the bass player. All we seemed to be getting was a dull thud.

1 watched this player for a while, and then said to him: ‘Do you think you could play the notes more clearly?’

After a silence, short but shocked, he made a reply which is unprintable, but the gist of which was that he considered I knew little about it - which was true.

Undaunted, I floundered on: ‘It sounds as though you’re playing with boxing gloves on.’

This was also true, but Humph exploded. Calling me names of which I had not previously heard, he stomped out of the studio.

Clearly 1 needed help of the highest order. I sought out Oscar in his office and told him what had happened. This immediately prompted a second explosion, this time from Oscar. ‘You go and get Humph back into the studio, and you apologise to all concerned, he ordered. And then the twist of the knife: ‘If you lose us Humph, you’ve lost yourself your job.’

Outside in Abbey Road I found my disgruntled artist wandering up and down. Eating great dollops of humble pie, I told him how sorry I was to have been so stupid, and eventually persuaded him to carry on with the session; thus ensuring, though I didn’t mention it at the time, my continued employment.

Later, Humph and I were to become firm friends, and we made many records together, such as ‘Bad Penny Blues’. But the lesson was learned. Musically I was right. Diplomatically I was wrong. Tact is the sine qua non of being a record producer. One has to tread a fine line between, on the one hand, submitting to an artist’s every whirn, and, on the other, throwing one’s own weight about. I had to learn how to get my own way without letting the performer realise what was happening. One had to lead rather than drive. I think that now, as then, that is probably the most important quality needed in a record producer.

Another, lesser, quality was the ability to hold one’s liquor. This was particularly necessary when dealing with Scottish artists. Parlophone had a corner in the Scottish market. It was the record label for Scotland, with its output of eightsorne reels, jigs and so on. Oscar used to record Robert Wilson, and there were the accordion duettists, Mickey Ainsworth and Jimmy Blue, whom I would have to go up to Scotland to record.

They were great whisky drinkers. We would start recording at ten in the morning, and after an hour and a half or so they would say sorrowfully: ‘We’re working up a terrible thirst, George. Let’s have a wee drop.’ So we would leave everything and proceed to the bar on the corner (it being Scotland, there always was a bar on the corner). There they would order their tots, always doubles, of neat whisky. It was never your ordinary Johnny Walker or Bell’s, but always Pride of Methlane or something like that, unknown brands with the effect of firewater. I would have to partake of these tots with them, which they would sling down the bar-top towards me like desperadoes in some Western movie. As for their own drinks, no sooner had the glass reached their hands than it was downed, and would be slung straight back at the barman with the urgent request: “Ah, let’s have another one.’

The curious thing was that it never affected them. They would get rid of half a bottle each during a session, and the only result was that their fingers flew over the key-boards even faster. Matching them in this ability was Annie Shand, a pianist who had a little band in Aberdeen. I recorded her in the Aberdeen Theatre, and halfway through the session she suddenly stopped and started to delve into her handbag, from which she produced a large whisky bottle. “Would anyone here like a wee tot?’ she asked, as she unstoppered the medicine. ‘Wee’ of course meant ‘extremely large’, as indeed was her handbag, which she kept specially as a kind of personal bar. To Annie, whisky was the natural food of life.

On top of these lesser lights, we had the great Jimmy Shand (no relation to Annie) under contract. I did a great deal of work with him, and became steeped in Scottish music - you couldn’t help doing so. Scottish dancing was very popular in those days, in England as well, and Jimmy would even get me at it. Each time I went up there we would record about eighty-four titles, twelve or fourteen a day, and stockpile them for the year, issuing a few every month.

Jimmy was a shy and retiring man - and, unusually for a Scots musician, teetotal - who spoke with a decided Fife accent. He was very kind, though rather suspicious of people in general, a product perhaps of a general Scottish distrust of ‘foreigners’. But we had one great thing in common. I had acquired my first powered vehicle, in the shape of an old Ariel VB 600 side-valve motorcycle and sidecar. It turned out that Jimmy, who delighted in all things mechanical, was particularly fanatical about motor-bikes. He had a beaten-up old machine which he tended with great love, and his great outlet, away from the incessant sound of his own music, was flying round the Fife countryside at something like ninety miles an hour with his cap on back to front.

Then there was our ‘Latin American’ Scot, Roberto Inglez, whose real name was Bob Ingles. He had truly taken his coals to Newcastle, because he was the biggest seller of Latin American music records in Latin America. He used to play what he called ‘one-finger piano’, very low down in the register, and had very lush orchestrations, rather more sophisticated and schmaltzy than Edmundo Ros, using strings and even the French horn, which Dennis Brain used to play for him.

His exotic ‘cover’ could be better than he thought. One day he was doing a session in the number two studio at Abbey Road, when there was a visit from some girl dealers, being shown how records were made. They were standing wide-mouthed and wide-eyed in the control room, when over the mike came Bob’s thick Glaswegian accent.

’Oh,’ said one of the girls, ‘he really is foreign then, is he?’

Bob was one of the first people whose records I tried to ‘plug’. Oscar had decided as part of my early education that I should do some record promotion, which meant going to the BBC and trying to get records played. I was hardly a dazzling success. I took one of Bob’s records to Jack Jackson, and tried to persuade him to play it on his ‘Saturday Night Show’, the one with Tiddles the Cat. He was very kind to me, but regrettably unmoved by my persuasion. ‘Bring me stuff by Guy Mitchell, or Mitch Miller, or anyone like that, and I’ll be interested,’ he said. The trouble was I didn’t have anyone like that to offer, and said so.

‘Look, son,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to be unkind to you. If you can bring me a record that’s suitable for my programme, I’d love to play it. But Roberto Inglez! I mean . . .!’

I felt immensely crushed.

One man who did play my records, on ‘Housewives’ Choice’, was Godfrey Winn, and I became quite friendly with him. I remember taking him to lunch one day, at some plush restaurant in Ebury Street, and drawing five pounds expenses to pay for it. As usual, I rode there on my motorbike, to save on taxi fares.

After lunch he offered to give me a lift back to the studios in his conveyance, which was a Bentley or something of that ilk. What could I do? Having lashed out the fiver on the meal, I could hardly improve my efforts to impress by confessing that I had arrived on a motorbike - though nowadays, of course, it would be regarded as rather chic. ‘No problem,’ I said. Til easily get a cab round the corner. Thanks all the same, Godfrey, but there’s really no problem.’ It wasn’t enough. Kind man that he was, he insisted on finding a cab and seeing me into it, whereupon I had to go through the charade of tapping on the glass behind the driver and saying: ‘St John’s Wood studios, please.’

A hundred yards up the road, with Godfrey safely out of the way, I had to bang furiously on the glass again, shouting: ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ I’ve no doubt the driver thought I was mad. But I couldn’t let the EMI image down.

That was important, and may have been one reason why I was no good at record plugging. I was a sheep among wolves, and didn’t even realise it. In those days there was a great deal of scandal surrounding the plugging business, and all sorts of people were taking backhanders. But that was not Oscar’s style. He was a very upright person, and the question of backhanders never came up, so that I was never really aware of what was going on. Besides, my image of EMI was that they, too, were very upright.

To work for EMI then was rather like it must have been at Rolls-Royce in the 1930s. They were terribly proud of their ‘By Appointment’ sign, of the dog-and-gramophone label of HMV, and so on. They paid abysmally, but then you were supposed to be privileged to be a member of the company, as in the BBC today but more so.

As for formality, it was rather like working in the Civil Service. Everyone wore a suit and a tie; there was no slopping around in jeans as there is today. You couldn’t even take your tie off in the studio, and the engineers wore white coats which made them look like surgical assistants. I remember one, Peter Bown, now at the top of his profession, who only had one suit, and that was the demob suit a grateful nation had bestowed on him; he had to wear the wretched thing to work every day.

This code applied to artists too. Even the jazz drummers would be playing in collars and ties. It was a rather stupid sort of snobbery, which could have ludicrous results. There was the occasion when Eddie Fisher, an enormous star, arrived at the main entrance. He was due to make a record, but he was wearing his American army uniform. Unfortunately he wasn’t an officer, so the commissionaire sent him round to the back door. That was the status of ‘other ranks’ in those days!

But the big stars didn’t often get treated that way. There was much more glamour about them then. They came in great big cars, and their refreshment was smoked salmon and champagne. You knew when a star was coming to the studio - there was a feeling in the air. And when someone like Jane Morgan came, she would look absolutely fabulous. She would be immaculately made-up, in a glittering fur and decorated with diamonds. That has all gone now. The big stars shuffle in wearing old jeans, looking no different from anyone else.

Often, the big stars were entertained, when they arrived, by Oscar’s secretary, Judy Lockhart-Smith. One who always expected his tot of whisky was Robert Wilson, the Scottish tenor. Unfortunately our nightwatchman also fancied a drop and, having taken it, would add water to the bottle to make up the level. Judy, unknowing, poured Wilson a glass of this diluted liquid one day, and he took one sip and spat it out. He couldn’t believe his own taste-buds!

Judy, as I said earlier, remained distinctly cool towards me for a long time. I found her attractive, but a trifle snooty and obviously upper-crust and her first glance at me had been as though I was something the dog had brought in. In spite of her youth, she was very much the old-timer, and I was the sprog. We worked together in a kind of uneasy truce, with a fair helping of mutual apathy, which was an unlikely start for two people who were later to have a marvellous marriage.

But she got on well with our performers, and on top of her normal work would go and turn the music over, during recordings, for people like Kentner, Gerald Moore, Yehudi Menuhin, Rawicz and Landauer, and Solomon, the pianist. Not that that was always happy. Another of our performers, Ray Martin, had a little dachshund who wandered into the studio one day while Solomon was recording a sonata. Unfortunately, the beast wasn’t studio-trained, and deposited a small pile of excreta beneath the piano. Solomon put his foot on the loud pedal, and - squish, right in it. He stalked out of the studio and refused to do any more recording that day.

That was the sort of trouble you never got with Sir Thomas Beecham. He was a lovely man, who lived nearby and who frequently recorded with us. On these occasions he would go for lunch in McWhirter’s, the workers’ restaurant next door, rather than the posh one up the road. It served very basic food - three shillings and ninepence for lunch, and an extra threepence if you had the joint. On one occasion he went in there and asked the serving lady if he could see the wine list. ‘No wine, dear,’ she said. Til go and get you a nice drop of Tizer.’ He didn’t mind, because he was that sort of man. With Malcolm Sargent it was quite different. It always had to be the smoked salmon sandwiches and the champagne. He had his star status and liked to be kept separate from the ‘peasants’, whereas Beecham enjoyed being one of them.

Sargent’s nickname, of course, was ‘Flash Harry’, and I remember one day, during a rehearsal of one of Beethoven’s works, someone put the music for Tm Just Wild About Harry’ on his rostrum while he was out of the studio. He came hack, picked it up and said: ‘I suppose this wouldn’t be referring to one very famous conductor not very far from here, would it?’

Another conductor I worked with was Charles Mackerras. I had met him much earlier when we both got gigs playing the oboe in the stage hand of Don Giovanni at Sadler’s Wells. The band had to march across the stage and play in a balcony in full view of the audience, but conducted from the orchestra pit. We had to dress up in wigs and doublets and so on, and got extra money for doing so, for which I was only too grateful. There were two oboes in this band, Charles Mackerras and myself, with the difference that he was very good. Beside his, my playing was, to put it kindly, mediocre, but he was very friendly and very helpful. He was also learning to be a conductor with Sadler’s Wells at that time, and in his spare hours he was collecting all the Gilbert and Sullivan music, of which he was a great fan.

Then, when Arthur Sullivan’s music came out of copy-right, he made the brilliant move of assembling various pieces from the different operas, arranging them for orchestra, and co-operating on the production of a ballet based on Sullivan’s music. Its name was Pineapple Poll; it was a tremendous hit, and was promptly recorded by Len Smith on Columbia, using the Covent Garden orchestra.

Oscar was furious. ‘You knew Charles Mackerras,’ he told me accusingly. ‘Why didn’t you get Pineapple Po//?’

Lamely I replied: ‘I knew he was doing something, but 1 didn’t think twice about it.’

Oscar tried to recover the situation by recording it with the Sadler’s Wells orchestra, also conducted by Charles Mackerras, but it wasn’t nearly so good a recording.

The fact that we were allowed to do it at all was typical of EMI. Although we were all in the same building - Len Smith actually had the office opposite us - the different labels were still rivals. Every month, these rivals would meet at what was called a ‘supplement meeting’, to discuss what they were going to record the following month. The meetings were so called because the titles in question would be included in a supplement to the catalogue. Oscar was terribly suspicious of Columbia’s Walter Legge, and would never reveal at these meetings what he was going to record on the classical side, until Walter had said his bit. He had good reason. If he chose to say: Tm going to record the Sinfonia Concertante by Dittersdorf next month,’ then as likely as not Walter Legge would say: Tm awfully sorry, old chap. I did that last month. I haven’t issued it yet because I’ve been keeping a stockpile of that and a couple of other pieces.1 It would be rubbish, of course, but Legge would have thought that it was a good idea to record the piece, and he would walk out of the room and make a couple of quick telephone calls, and the whole thing would be fixed up. Eventually, Oscar got wise to this trick.

In addition to this, each label would have a monthly publishers’ meeting. That was how we got to hear most of the new songs. They didn’t have facilities for home recording then, of course, and it was generally their pluggers who came to see us, booked by Judy at fifteen-minute intervals, and sang and banged out their latest numbers on the grand piano in our office in the old Tin Pan Alley style. We would make notes and keep copies of the songs. It was great fun, like the old music hall, and was in the tradition of George Gershwin, who had done the same thing when he had been a song-plugger - not like the highly polished demo-tapes you get today.

These meetings would take place in the morning, and in the afternoon I would hold recording tests in Studio Two. Every half-hour there would be someone new to test - and in those days Judy knew much more about pop and jazz than I did. She used to take herself off to Paris and go to the Blue Note club, and was really into the whole scene.

But for most of the time, the business was far less dramatic than it is today. It was just another job, though an interesting enough one, and people outside didn’t know or hear much about it. Certainly there was no feeling, as there is now, that everyone wanted to he a record producer.

Even the rivalry between the different EMI labels was usually pretty gentlemanly. We didn’t go snooping into each other’s liles to find out what was happening. There was more of a parallel with British Ley land, where you might find someone who felt that he was ‘once an Austin man, always an Austin man’. It was ‘once a Columbia man, always a Columbia man’.

Oscar guarded his pigeon, Parlophone, like a mother hen, if that’s not mixing the ornithology. No one could touch Oscar’s Parlophone. On the other hand, there were some people who had been shoved around from label to label, and, since Parlophone had lost so many artists during the war, Oscar would still record for Columbia (hose he had handled in the past. Robert Wilson, for example, whom he recorded, was actually an HMV artist.

But there were certain fixed rules. For example, Parlophone would never record a musical show. That had to be on HMV. This differentiation between the labels extended into the shops. Today, records can be sold anywhere. Then, they could only be sold in record shops, and those shops had separate dealerships, one HMV, one Columbia, and so on. What’s more, HMV were incredibly proud of their dealerships. They were so restrictive that HMV records - could only be sold by HMV-accredited dealers, and they should only allow one in each town. They dished them out is sparingly as Rolls-Royce dealerships, and it was felt that you were highly honoured if you were allowed to put the sign of the dog and gramophone above your shop.

But it was stupid, because they were deliberately restricting their own trade, and in the end it broke down and they started selling HMV records through other outlets. That led to a huge row within EMI, and one man, who wanted to stick to the old ways, felt strongly enough about it to resign over the issue. It may seem silly in retrospect, but it emphasises the strength of feeling that people had in wanting to maintain their own individuality.

One of my first essays in this search for identity came in 1952, when I suggested to Peter Ustinov, my colleague in the London Baroque Society, that we make a record together. At that time, Peter was the enfant terrible, of British actors, our answer to Orson Wells. Because he was always amusing people with his funny little pieces of mouth-music and so on, we decided to make a double-sided single, ‘Mock Mozart’ and ‘Phoney Folk Lore’. The first was a rnini-opera done in three minutes by Peter, and I labeled it’ The voices and noises of Peter Ustinov’. There was a harpsichord accompaniment by Anthony Hopkins, and Peter himself sang all the parts - the sopranos, the altos and the tenors.

For those days, that was pretty adventurous. We didn’t have multi-track recording, of course, so in order to produce the four-part ensemble he had to sing with himself. We did that by dubbing from one tape on to another, mixing as we went. And of course it was all mono. Technically, it meant that we lost generations, the geometric quantities by which the signal-to-noise ratio rises. Perhaps I should explain at this point, for the non-technical, that the quality of recording on a tape is determined by the fineness of the molecules on the tape coating itself. The signal-to-noise ratio is the amount of good recording you get on a tape, compared with the background noise - the hiss, the rumble, the crackles - which derives from the sheer physical passing of the tape across the recording head.

That ratio deteriorates as you do more and more recording. So, while on the first recording the noise, let’s say the hiss, may be perfectly tolerable, it becomes worse if you then re-record that on to a second tape. And so on. In fact, each time you do it, you worsen the signal-to-noise ratio to the power of two; you square it each time. If you do two recordings, the noise is four times louder. If you do three, it’s nine times louder. In the case of the Ustinov record we made four recordings, and therefore it was sixteen times louder. But most people aren’t aware of that noise, and I don’t suppose those who bought the record even knew it was so high - though today’s hi-fi maniacs certainly would.

The other big problem was that, although the idea of singing with himself was fine in theory, when I got Peter into the studio I found that he couldn’t sing against another line, even his own. He was a ‘follower’, as many people are. The whole point of singing the parts in sync with himself was that he had to hear the previous voices he’d done and then sing a different line - but he would start ‘following’ himself on the previous lines.

So we had to do it in little bits. I would rush back and forth from the control room into the studio, saying things like: ‘Now look, Peter, sing this bit - te dum te dum te dum - and start when I give you a hand signal like this.’ That way he would remember it; I would give him the signal, and it would fit in.

It was a complicated, and long, and tedious process, but in the end it worked well. And the other side was far simpler, with Peter doing his standard ‘party pieces’ of imaginary folk songs. But then it came to the monthly supplement meeting at EMI, and when we arrived at ‘Mock Mozart’ every eye turned towards me in something akin to horror.

‘What’s this, George?’

‘Peter Ustinov!!??’

‘What do you think you’re up to, George?’

‘It doesn’t make sense. No one’s ever made a recording like this before.’

Oscar backed me up, but they all clearly thought I was mad, and I had to argue with everyone there to convince them the record had a chance. It was touch and go whether it would be released at all; but happily I had my pay-off. A week after it was issued, the manager of the Oxford Street shop rang me up and said: ‘That Peter Ustinov record - did you make it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, wondering what new attack I would have to face.

Instead he said, ‘Can you help me get some new supplies?

I’ve already sold two hundred, and I can’t get any more.’ (That manager, incidentally, was Ron White, now managing director of EMI’s publishing house.)

So I was able with great glee to go back to my masters and tell them: ‘You didn’t press enough records.’ I think they had originally only pressed three hundred. But by the time they had pressed more, the demand had dropped anyway. That was another lesson well learnt. Of course, by today’s standards, three hundred records sounds pitifully few. But a lot of records then only sold perhaps a hundred and eighty; that was still an economically viable number since the costs of recording were not high, while the retail prices of the records were very high indeed.

On top of that, we wouldn’t actually pay someone like Peter an advance. He, in fact, got a royalty of 5rr, which was the highest we ever paid in those days. Then again, the studio costs were negligible, since the studios were there anyway. The largest expenses on that recording were the hire of the harpsichord, at about fifteen pounds and a similar fee to Anthony Hopkins for playing it. So one only needed to sell two or three hundred records at seven shillings each in order to break even.

Making a record with someone like Peter was an exception anyway, since most artists, especially singers, were under exclusive contracts to the record companies. Important artists would have contracts for about two years, with probably an option for a further three. What they got out of it was a guarantee that they would have records out every so often. Some would get an advance on royalties, but they would have to be pretty good to get that, since EMI was as mean with its artists as with its permanent staff. The average royalty was a penny a record, for a single, with a top royalty of 5 %. So the artists’ commitment to the company was pretty low.

The variety of those artists was enormous. In the same week I might be recording Bob and Alf Pearson, of ‘My Brother and I’ fame, Dick Bentley and Joy Nichols from ‘Take It from Here’, the Covent Garden orchestra, Tommy Heilly and his harmonica, Eve Boswell, and Charles Williams, who conducted the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra as well as Sidney Torch.

Charles, who wrote ‘The Dream of Olwen’, I remember particularly for the windfall he once had. He wrote a number of pieces for background music, and got regular payments for his compositions through the Performing Right Society. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, one of these payments was a vast sum, something like £5000. It turned out that one of his pieces, a semi-religious kind of tune, had been picked up by a television station in America for use as their signature tune. No one had told him!

Or I might be recording Freddie Randall and his Jazz Band, because, far from the hallowed halls of classicism, I now found myself recording all Parlophone’s jazz artists, despite my early contretemps with Humph. There was Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band, Joe Daniels and his Hotshots, Jack Parnell - and Johnny Dankworth and his Seven.

In fact, one of the first hit records I ever made was with John. It was called ‘Experiments with Mice’, and was based on the ‘Three Blind Mice’ tune. He and Cleo Laine were to become very close friends of mine, and I did a lot of recordings with him. Cleo, who wasn’t married to him at that time, was the singer in the band. The nice thing about John and Cleo is that they’ve been in the business as long as I have. They, like me, have seen all the rough ends of it. They’ve done a lot of touring, have been through all the financial ups and downs, and now have emerged as great artists on the world stage. A delightful irony is that in the early days Cleo was always considered to have too good a voice to be successful; it’s a double pleasure to see that sort of talent winning through.

John was a fanatically hard worker, but that could have funny consequences. He was once preparing some sort of jazz concerto for Matyas Seiber at the Festival Hall, and working with Dave Lindup, his arranger, who always went with the band on tour. Because they had this work to complete, John booked into a hotel room, and asked specially if he and Dave could share a room, so that they could work overnight. The clerk looked slightly doubtful, probably nursing private suspicions about the lives of musicians, but they went upstairs and thought no more about it.

That night they started work as soon as they got back from the gig, and at about four or five in the morning Dave turned to John and said: ‘I’m falling asleep. I can’t do any more. I’ve just got to have some sleep.’ So he undressed and fell into one of the room’s twin beds, while John went on working.

By about seven in the morning John, too, started to feel a bit tired, but it was too late to go to bed, so he just packed it in, showered, dressed, and went down to breakfast. It was only when he got to the toast and marmalade that he realised that not only had he asked to share a room with Dave, but also, as the staff would quickly notice, only one bed had been slept in. They got some very odd looks as they left that morning.

John, for obvious reasons, was always very upset by racialist remarks, and would lay into anyone who made them. But he can still laugh at the day he went to a local greengrocer’s to buy some fruit. He saw some nice-looking grapes, and told the man: ‘I’ll have a couple of pounds of those grapes. They look jolly good.’

But when the crate was taken out, he noticed ‘South African’ on the side, and thought to himself: Why should I have those? So he said: ‘No, hang on a minute. Those grapes come from South Africa, don’t they? On second thoughts, I don’t think I’ll have them.’

The man looked at him coolly and replied: ‘Well, perhaps you’re right, sir. You never know what nig-nog’s been handling them, do you?’

Following ‘Experiments with Mice’, the next big record we had with John was ‘African Waltz’. It was written by a budding young songwriter, of whom nobody was taking a great deal of notice, called Gait McDermott. We were to do a number of his other songs, including ‘I Know a Man’ with Rolf Harris. This, of course, was long before he wrote the show which made him a millionaire - Hair. He was just one of the people who were always hanging round publishers’ offices in Denmark Street, trying to sell their songs.

In those days, this was literally what happened. Today, everything is controlled by the record companies, and even the publishers are owned by them. But then, the publishers were a very strong force. If they took up a songwriter, or accepted one of his songs, it was their plugging, to the record companies and the radio people, which gave it a chance of heingahit. If you didn’t have a publisher behind you, you might as well not bother to write at all. So songwriters would literally hang around the publishers’ doors, hoping for an interview with the people running them, as in later years they did with the record companies. I was continually fending off people - I still do, I suppose - because if you listened to absolutely everything that people brought to you, there wouldn’t be any time to make records. Today, what we generally do is to have a lot of people who listen to the stuff and recommend it if they like it. And if it’s something very special, we listen to it all ourselves.

Another reason why the publishers were so strong was that there was not a rash of singer-songwriters as there is today. The writers and the performers were two different types of people. The performers were always looking out for good material, and the writers were always trying to get their songs played by great performers. So a songwriter would try to get himself accepted by a publisher who had the necessary clout to go to a big artist.

In turn, the artists were desperate for number-one songs, and they would blame us if they heard about someone else getting one which they felt they should have had. For example, Norman Newell, who handled the pop side of Columbia, made a hit record of ‘Moon River’ with Danny Williams. We on Parlophone didn’t record it at all, so it would have been quite possible for Eve Boswell, one of our artists, to round on me and demand: ‘Why didn’t I see “Moon River”? Why haven’t I recorded that?’ And she would have had every justification for doing so.

In fact, ‘Moon River’ was the subject of a great gaffe on the part of my assistant, Ron Richards. I sent him .to see the film to report if there was any good music in it. He sat all through it, and then sent me a memo saying that ‘there was some incidental music, but nothing worthwhile’!

But we all make those mistakes. As I became more entrenched in the business, I started to get to know the journalists, disc jockeys and so on, and one I was particularly friendly with was Noel Whitcomb of the Daily Mirror. A buzz had started going round the business about some kids playing in coffee bars, and Noel and I decided to go and have a look. So, one evening in 1957, we went to the Two Ts coffee bar in Soho, to see a new act, Tommy Steele and the Vipers Skiffle Group. We sat with our coffee and watched this genial young man bounce on to the stage with his guitar over his pelvis, and my immediate impression was that he was a blond cardboard imitation of Elvis Presley. Noel thought the same. Tommy had a lot of energy, but his voice didn’t sound too great - what little I could hear of it: for the Vipers were extremely loud and he wasn’t.

By today’s standards the act was positively matronly, but for those days it was quite shocking, rather like musical masturbation; the pelvic gyrations quite turned me off, especially as I was still thinking only in terms of voices. Noel agreed ‘There’s nothing there’, so I let Tommy Steele pass.

On the other hand, I liked the group, and thought they had great guts, so I signed them to a recording contract, and made a lot of successful records with them. But passing over Tommy Steele was obviously a big goof, especially since Decca came down the following day, signed him up, and made a great star out of him. I remember confessing to Sir Joseph Lockwood, who by then had taken over EMI, that I had turned down Tommy Steele, and he was clearly very upset by the revelation. I should have kept quiet. In fact, I have recorded Tommy since then, and we became good friends, but that doesn’t wipe out the original mistake.

On the other hand, people can get blamed unfairly. The classic example is Dick Rowe, of Decca. He became known as ‘the man who turned down the Beatles’, and he carries that cross to his grave. But it is quite unfair, because in fact everyone in England had turned down the Beatles. The only difference with Dick Rowe was that he had enough nous to give them not one, but two recording tests, He really was considering taking them. So instead of being indicted for turning them down, he should be praised forgiving them such serious consideration when others were turning them down out of hand.

By about 1954 I was doing virtually everything on Parlophone, and Oscar was doing very little. Lockwood had become chairman of EMI, and that was like a breath of fresh air in the company. For a while he was terribly unpopular, because he was a ruthless man. But he certainly pulled EMI up by its bootlaces and made it work.

In July of that year I passed my driving test and launched into the four-wheeled world. The vehicle in question was a 1935 Austin Ten Cambridge saloon, which cost me a whole sixty pounds. It was hardly immaculate, but in those days it was good enough to take the test in, and I was so elated about passing, that, when I got back to the office, I offered to drive Oscar home to Arkwright Road in Hampstead, not far from the studios.

He graciously accepted and, at six o’clock we set off. We were driving happily along the Finchley Road, and approaching the traffic lights by the John Barnes department store, when, like the good driver I was now proud to be, I changed down from top gear into third. As I did so, the gear lever, which was floor-mounted and quite long, with a spherical knob on top, came completely away in my hand.

With some aplomb, I trust, I handed Oscar the amputated limb of my new toy and said: ‘Would you mind holding that for a moment?’ Then I steered gently into the kerb. I was irretrievably stuck in third gear. I was humiliated. And Oscar went home by taxi.

If I was unhappy with that early motoring experience, I was even less content with the way things were going at EMI. For a start, there was the question of wages, or the lack of them. After three years, my pay had risen to a pauperly £13 9s 3d, which meant that after deductions I took home £12 6s 8d. EMI always paid very badly, believing that because they were giving you an interesting job you should subsidise them. Even Oscar was never well paid, and after fifty years’ service with them, during which he had invented a number of things they used, his pay-off was an Encyclopaedia Britannica. That was all he had to show for it.

So it wasn’t surprising that when, during iyo4, rraim Lee of Decca offered me a job at £1200 a year, I was only too keen to accept. My first daughter, Alexis, known as ‘Bundy’, had been born the year before, and my economic life was so tight I had real cash-trickle problems. I went to C. H. Thomas, the managing director of EMI Records and said: ‘I’ve enjoyed working here, thank you very much, but the money just isn’t good enough. So I’ve accepted another post.’

Now, I said this with no feeling at all that I was laying the basis for a haggle. I didn’t see it as a way of screwing more money out of them. In those days I had a rather scrupulous moral attitude to that sort of thing, which, on reflection, may have been a bit naive on my part.

But Thomas, worldly-wise, clearly saw it otherwise. ‘Don’t you think you’re being rather unfair?’ he asked.

‘How?’

‘In not allowing us to compete,’ he said.

‘I don’t think that comes into it,’ I said, determined to allow my naivety to show. ‘If you wanted to pay me more money, you would’ve done.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to lose you, so I’ll match the offer.’

In fact, I think he only gave me £1100 in the end, which didn’t quite match it, but it did go with a promise that when Oscar retired I would take over Parlophone, if Thomas had his way. I think this is what tipped the scales for me, since it was by no means certain what would happen after Oscar departed, and I had told Thomas that I didn’t want to become some old fuddy-duddy, a mere cog, and that I wanted to do something while I was still young. So I accepted, and had to ring Frank Lee at Decca to tell him 1 wasn’t coming after all. Not surprisingly, he was rather upset.

But although I stayed at EMI, there were other reasons for my not being too happy with them. My diary for that time contains a note for a memo I was sending to the management. It says: ‘The first concrete case is that of our last year’s best-seller, Ron Goodwin. He is particularly bitter about the exploitation, in that to date, of his last three records we issued - and he’s only made six in all -only one has ever been heard on the air.

‘This factor, coupled with the unfortunate representation of Parlophone in America, which to British artists is far worse than no representation at all, has made Ron decline to sign the option on his contract, which is due at the end of November. The loss of such an artist would be catastrophic.’

I was doubly upset because Ron had become a good personal friend, so much so that he was later to be the best man at my wedding to Judy. He was an up-and-coming arranger who had been introduced to me by Dick James in 1953, the year after I had started recording Dick. Dick was a band singer, as Eve Boswell was, and was one of the first artists I recorded as my own, rather than Oscar’s. I made some successful records with him, like ‘Robin Hood’, but having a family he didn’t like touring the country, and eventually gave up singing in music halls and became a song-plugger working for the publisher Sidney Bron, father of Eleanor. In 1953, however, he was still singing, and suggested using young Ron Goodwin (now one of our best film composers) as the arranger for his records.

I was equally upset about what happened with another friend, Kenneth McKellar. A similar diary note says: ‘We have lost the services of a brilliant young Scottish tenor, whom we recorded two years ago. I am certain that with the right backing he could have been as big a success as Robert Wilson. I am certain that the company will, in a very short time, be regretting his departure. He prefers the Decca label because they are so much more alive in supporting and publicity.

‘In explanation he complained: “It isn’t so bad on HMV or Columbia, but you never see any evidence of Parlophone in any of the leading record shops.” Although we outwardly deny this, I firmly believe this to be true.’

This note was at the end of 1954, but I had first met Kenneth in 1947, when he was studying forestry at Aberdeen University, where my first wife used to sing in the choir. While I was at the Guildhall he was at the Royal College of Music in London, and often used to come to stay with us in Acton, where I remember him helping me to build a fireplace.

After I joined Parlophone I persuaded him to come and do a recording test at Abbey Road. He had a very fine voice, and between 1951 and 1955 I recorded eight titles with him; none of them was very successful, partly because of general lack of backing, and partly, I suppose, because of Oscar’s ties with Robert Wilson. Wilson was still the king in Oscar’s eyes, and since Parlophone had a virtual monopoly of Scottish music he was the voice of Scotland, a position from which Kenneth was eventually to oust him. But Oscar was about to retire, and if I got his job I was really banking on having Kenneth. So I told him: ‘I’m preparing a contract for you. We’ll go great guns. I’m hoping to use you as a kind of pivot for the plans I have.’

Imagine my disappointment when he told me that he’d had an offer from Decca which he couldn’t refuse, and that he didn’t want to continue with Parlophone. It wasn’t even a question of raising our offer. He had made up his mind. He’d had a firm offer from a very good and powerful label, Decca, whereas Parlophone was a tinpot little label, which in any case was about to lose its chief, with the prospect of being run by a man who was little more than a music student. So I couldn’t blame him.

Then, in the spring of 1955, Oscar finally retired and went off with his encyclopedia, and Sir Joseph Lockwood confirmed that I was to be the new head of Parlophone. It was quite adventurous of him. I was a fairly brash young man, without much experience in the record business. But for me, it was an unbelievable chance. I was boss of a whole record label. I was on my own.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 744