America Falls

AMERICA mattered. It mattered because, quite simply, it was the biggest record market in the world. In January 1964, when ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ reached number one in the American charts, it opened that market to us.

If our excitement seems over-dramatic in retrospect, it is important to remember that no British artist had got near breaking into that market in the same way. America had always been the Eldorado of the entertainment world. In the glory days of Hollywood we used to worship the British stars who went over there and managed to make it - Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Ronald Colman, C. Aubrey Smith, Gary Grant, Ray Milland and, of course, Charlie Chaplin. To make it big in the world, you had to make it big in America.

In the record business, it seemed to be universally accepted that the Americans held sway. In England, cer­tainly, imported American records dominated the market, and we could never break that stranglehold. If anyone thinks imported Japanese cars are a problem today, it’s worth remembering that American records used to outsell the home product by five to one. It was hardly surprising. After all, the roll-call ran from Sinatra, Presley and Crosby to Mitch Miller, Guy Mitchell and Doris Day. There were scores of huge names, and of course most of the jazz players - Ellington, Armstrong, Basie and the rest.

Against that traditional background, any idea of revers­ing the trend had been almost unthinkable. Vera Lynn made some impact with her record ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, which went high in the charts in America. The only other English person to do that was Little Laurie London with ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’. But these were just one-off successes with single records. No one from the British recording world had achieved a lasting success on both singles and long-players. What the Beatles were about to do was unprecedented and, to us, almost unbelievable. To be there, and to see all those famed American stars queueing up to see the Beatles and pay homage to them, was an extraordinary experience.

It had not been easy, though. From the moment the Beatles broke in England in January 1963 we had tried terribly hard to sell them in America. Everything we attempted seemed to meet a resounding slap in the face. By then, of course, EMI had bought Capitol, so I was naturally enthusiastic about making use of our company in the States. Immediately following the success of ’Please Please Me’ I had said: ‘Right! Let’s ship Beatle records over to the States and get them sold there.’ I got a curt reply from Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol: ‘We don’t think the Beatles will do anything in this market.’

That was rebuff number one. But Brian Epstein and I refused to leave the matter there. We took the view that if Capitol didn’t want them, we’d send them somewhere else. That somewhere else was VJ Records, a tiny label but the only one to accept the record we were offering, ‘She Loves You’. It didn’t sell well, but at least it did something, and at least we had a record on the American market. When we had a second record to offer, we went to Capitol again. Again they turned us down. The results with VJ having been less than spectacular, we went to a second tiny label, Swan records, and waited to see what they could do. The answer was, not much. But again, at least a small impression was made. Then came the third record. A third time we went to Capitol. ‘For God’s sake, do something about this,’ we said. ‘These boys are breaking it, and they’re going to be fantastic throughout the world. So for heaven’s sake, latch on to them.’ For the third time Capitol refused.

But unlike St Peter, they were to get a fourth chance; finally, at the beginning of 1964, they said: ‘We’ll take one record and see how it goes.’ The truth of the matter is that by then so much was happening in England, and so many people were pushing on so many fronts, that even Alan Livingston could see that he wouldn’t be taking any great risk. Of course, anyone at EMI who had had the authority should simply have instructed Capitol to issue the earlier records. But no one did, and I was still a weak force, controlling my little empire at Parlophone but with no say at all in what happened in America.

So when the Beatles first arrived in America, and I with them, the Capitol people were embarrassed to a degree. They had already been implying that the Beatles were their product, and my appearance naturally cast doubt on that point of view. Their reaction was to keep me out of the way. At the Beatles’ first press conference in New York, Alan Livingston ran the whole show- He kept me away from the press, which I must admit seemed a mite peculiar. To top it all, he introduced the Beatles as the Capitol recording artists - words which came ill from the lips of the man who had turned them down three times!

That was not the only crazy thing about the Beatles’ first descent upon New York. There was a complete, collective madness, which it is hard for anyone who was not there to understand. Middle-aged men were walking down Fifth Avenue wearing Beatle wigs, to show how in tune they were. The boys were staying at the Plaza Hotel, at the top of Fifth Avenue on Central Park. There is a sort of pedestrian precinct outside the hotel, and, through­out the time the Beatles were there, this square was jammed solid with people, like Trafalgar Square on elec­tion night.

There were one or two exceptions to the general mania. Judy had paid her own way out to see it all happen. She was staying at the Vassar Women’s Club, since a friend of hers had once attended that upper-crust American ladies’ college. All the ladies staying there spent their time telling Judy the places of cultural interest she might visit while in New York. She didn’t like to reply that she was really there for the Beatles’ concerts.

But that was where most people seemed to want to go. If you switched on the radio at any time of day or night, on any station, you would hear a Beatles song, and New York is certainly not short of radio stations. By then a year of recording had passed, and we had an album out, and EP and five singles. I had recorded about twenty titles, and they played them all, all the time.

Of course it wasn’t the music alone which caused the hysteria, just as the music had not been the sole reason for my signing the Beatles in the first place. That enjoyable charisma came through to the world at large, which was seeing something it had not seen before. It was an expres­sion of youth, a slight kicking-over of the traces, which found a ready response in young people. Curiously, it was a response that the parents, though they might not have liked the music themselves, did not seem to begrudge. At the first concert in Washington many of them came too. It was given in a boxing stadium, so that the boys were completely surrounded by the audience. After about every fourth number they would turn towards the next quarter of the audience and play to them in turn.

The audience, despite the various parental presences, was mostly teenage, and very hot. In the seat next to me,

a little girl was bouncing up and down and saying, ‘Aren’t they just great? Aren’t they just fabulous?’

‘Yes, they are,’ I said, somewhat inadequately for her, I suppose.

‘Do you like them too, sir?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I do rather,’ I said, all too aware that she couldn’t understand what this old man was doing sitting next to her! But

perhaps she was put more at ease when the boys played a song like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and everybody in the audience started singing with them, for then Judy and I just found ourselves standing up and screaming along with the rest.

That may sound daft, but it was exactly the same screaming that adults do at football matches. And for us especially, in the midst of sixty thousand people who were all enjoying themselves to the full, identifying completely with the people who were performing, people we knew intimately, people with whom we had made all the records and every little bit of music - in that situation it was all too easy to scream, to be swept up in that tremendous current of buoyant happiness and exhilaration.

Afterwards, it was not so good. It was snowing and, when Brian Epstein shepherded us outside to a theoretically waiting limousine, we simply couldn’t find the said vehicle in all the pandemonium and we had to walk in search of transport, trudging through what seemed like two feet of slush. Nor were the Beatles too happy with the ensuing party at the British Embassy, whose full quota of chinless wonders behaved abominably. They would approach the boys with an off-hand ‘Oh, which one are you?¹, and one actually got a pair of scissors and snipped off a piece of Ringo’s hair while he was talking to someone else. It almost created a diplomatic incident. It was worse when we finally got back to New York on the train. Grand Central Station was besieged by fans, and at first they had to lock us in the train. In the end they got us out in a lift which was supposed to be used only for parcels and heavy goods.

But the only time I was really frightened was in Denver. Where we had flown from, I forget. Indeed, I probably never knew. An American rock tour is a whistle-stop business, and you literally don’t know which town you are in. You’re whipped into a plane, you land somewhere, give a concert, go back to some hotel, fall into bed again, have a party - and then you’re fed into another plane. The boys would ask, ‘Are we in Oklahoma or Kansas? Are we in New York City or Cincinnati?’ The only way to find out was by asking someone who knew, and such people were hard to find. But I do remember Denver. It lies about seven thousand feet up, and to get into the airport the aeroplane has to do a fairly steep bank before it lands. George Harrison was not prepared for this, and he was scared out of his wits, alternately praying for deliverance and yelling ‘We’re going to crash!’

Five Cadillacs were drawn up on the runway to meet the plane, and we piled in. But instead of going straight to the hotel, the mayor asked us if we would do a tour of the airfield perimeter. The reason was soon obvious. All the way round, it was packed with fans, about ten deep, jammed up against the barbed-wire fence, like Stalag Luft III turned inside-out. We drove round for what seemed miles, about five feet from the fence, five feet from a sea of happy, screaming people all waving frantically.

Once this ‘royal’ procession was complete, we set off for Brown’s Hotel in Denver, which was surrounded by so many people that we needed a diversion. This consisted of a number of people pretending to be Beatles and drawing up in limousines at the front of the hotel, while we went in at the back, through the kitchen entrance. The trouble was that all the photographers and newsmen had tumbled to what we were doing, and they piled in after us. A terrible melee in the kitchen resulted, with pots and pans flying in all directions. Brian, the four boys and I finally made it to a service lift, but before we could shut the doors the reporters, the most ruthless people on earth when it comes to getting a story, simply jammed them­selves in with us.

Even before the doors shut it was like the Black Hole of Calcutta, all pressed tight up against one another. Someone pressed the button to take us to the top floor, but the wretched lift, overloaded beyond endurance, man­aged a mere two and a half floors before deciding to call it a day. It expired between floors. Since we had hardly room, or air, to breathe, it looked distinctly possible that we might go the same way.

Eventually they forced open the gates of the floor above us; we got the top of the lift up, and climbed up one by one. But I had really been quite frightened; and later that evening I was to experience a different kind of fear. The concert was at the Red Rock Stadium, a natural amphi­theatre carved out of rock. It held about twenty thousand people. The seating was in the natural bowl of the rock, with the stage below it; two huge towers on either side of the stage housed all the amplifying equipment and spotlights.

During the concert, Brian and I decided that we would like a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings. So we climbed one of the towers, whose summit was about level with the top of the crowd. Even beyond the amphitheatre we could see people perched on trees and so on, trying to see over. That was the moment when we realised just how vulnerable the boys were. We could see them below as little dots, but one sniper among all those people could have picked them off very simply. Nor is that some wild piece of over-dramatisation. The whole thing was frenetic, fanatic, and slightly unreal, and Brian was already worried for their safety.

After all, President Kennedy had been shot in 1963, and the Denver concert came after John Lennon’s celebrated remarks about the comparative popularity of Jesus Christ and the Beatles. Knowing the religious fanaticism one can find in the States, that didn’t help matters. Of course, like so much that was said and reported at that time, the whole thing was blown up out of all proportion. I can’t remember John’s exact words, not I know his intention. He was slightly bemused by the effect the Beatles were having on the world, and his statement was factual. It was to the effect that ‘When you look at it, we are actually more popular than Jesus’. That was true. Far fewer people went to church than listened to Beatles records and went to Beatles concerts. But he didn’t mean that the Beatles were more important than Christ, which was how most people interpreted the remark. On the contrary, he was deploring the situation, regretting that it was the case.

With the constant over-exposure that they suffered - or enjoyed, depending on one’s view of the matter - this sort of misunderstanding was inevitable. Every little snippet of information about what they ate, what they drank, how they slept, almost whether they breathed, was grist to the media mill. Interviews quickly became tedious, because they would be asked the same old questions again and again. On those rare occasions when a question was out of the ordinary, they would rise to it and try to score off it. For example, they might have been going through a stock run of questions like ‘How do you write your music? Do you write the words as well as the music?’ Then out of the blue some bright spark might suddenly ask, ‘Well, now, do you think cornflakes are affecting the intelligence of the average American male?¹ Off the top of his head John Lennon might come straight back with something like ‘No, but I think cocaine might have done’. The next day the headlines would read john lennon advocates cocaine. Every little thing they said became translated into Beatle instructions as to how we should behave - yet again.

After all, they simply didn’t have the experience of a Jim Callaghan or Harold Wilson at parrying questions and spotting lurking dangers in their replies. So they were constantly being proclaimed as advocating things about which they knew little. Then, once attacked, they would be forced into a corner, and find themselves having to justify what they had said. For inexperienced people, it was a very tough ride.

Nor was it simply a problem with the media. The public were tough on them, too. Whenever the Beatles saw some­thing happening, or someone coming towards them, that seemed a bit dubious, they would give each other a pass­word they had developed among themselves: ‘Cripples!’ That meant they had to take cover. If that seems harsh, the fact is that they were constantly having cripples and others forced upon them. They might be doing a television performance, and during a break would be in their dress­ing-room having a quiet snack. Suddenly the door would open, and in would come the assistant director, wheeling a spastic who wanted to meet the Beatles. They would have to talk to this unfortunate, and try to be pleasant. This was happening all the time. It was almost like going to Lourdes. There were people who actually wanted to touch the hems of the clothes they were wearing. Royalty are trained from birth to cope with that sort of thing; the Beatles were not. They can hardly he blamed for wanting to put up a barrier against the world.

Of course, people may rightly say that the hysteria and the adulation in themselves helped to sell records, and that selling records was what we were trying to do. But somewhere a balance should have been struck - and it never was.

However, the music sold, and sold, and sold. Once the dam had been breached, the sales that first year in America were enormous, though only a drop in the ocean compared with what was to follow. To me, that brought great excite­ment and great pride. It wasn’t a question of the glamour; after all. I had been used to dealing with the Peter Sellers and Sophia Lorens of this world. It was more bound up with the idea that something one had made was being heard in millions and millions of homes throughout the world; that it was, literally, becoming a part of the lan­guage. That thrilled me enormously, and gave me great satisfaction - even if it didn’t bring me any wealth: I was still earning less than £3000 a year with EMI.

In retrospect, I think it more than likely that the Beatles thought that, because of our success, I was doing frightfully well, and that they were responsible for it. But I never discussed it with them, or indeed with Brian. Besides, in those first two years even they weren’t rolling in money. Royalties take a long time to flow in, and Brian certainly wasn’t rushing around ordering Rolls-Royces. Nor was there really time to think about money. We were all simply working frantically hard to build the whole thing up.

In any case, the Beatles were never ones for showing concern about, or gratitude towards, anyone else. Although they obviously did appreciate what I was doing, they were never the kind of people who would go out of their way to say: ‘What a great job you’ve done there, George! Take three weeks off.’ But then, I never expected that of them. They had an independent, cussed streak about them, not giving a damn for anybody, which was one of the things I liked about them in the first place, and one of the factors which made me decide to sign them.

Nor was I really interested, to be truthful, in any grat­itude or appreciation they might show towards me. All I wanted from them was good songs. And those they gave me. At the start I thought: God, this can’t last for ever. They’ve given me so much good stuff that I can’t expect them to keep on doing it. But they did. They amazed me with their fertility. To begin with, the material was fairly crude, but they developed their writing ability very quickly; the harmonies, and the songs themselves, became cleverer throughout 1963. Although one obviously had to be a good producer to make the records commercially viable, there was certainly no genius attached to my role at that early stage. There were probably a number of producers who could have done it just as well. The turning-point probably came with the song ‘Yesterday’, on the Help! album which we issued in 1965. That was when, as I can see in retrospect, I started to leave my hallmark on the music, when a style started to emerge which was partly of my making. It was on ‘Yesterday’ that I started to score their music. It was on ‘Yesterday’ that we first used instruments or musicians other than the Beatles and myself (I had often played the piano where it was neces­sary, as on A Hard Day’s Night). On ‘Yesterday’ the added ingredient was no more nor less than a string quartet; and that, in the pop world of those days, was quite a step to take. It was with ‘Yesterday’ that we started breaking out of the phase of using just four instruments and went into something more experimental, though our initial experi­ments were severely limited by the fairly crude tools at our disposal, and had simply to be moulded out of my recording experience.

As I suggested earlier, a two-way swing developed in our relationship. On the one hand, as the style emerged and the recording techniques developed, so my control - over what the finished product sounded like - increased. Yet at the same time, my need for changing the pure music became less and less. As I could see their talent growing, I could recognise that an idea coming from them was better than an idea coming from me, though it would still be up to me to decide which was the better approach. In a sense, I made a sort of tactical withdrawal, recognising that theirs was the greater talent.

Great talent it was. They were the Cole Porters and George Gershwins of their generation, of that there is no doubt. Somebody compared them to Schubert, which sounds a bit pretentious, but I would go along with that to the extent that their music was perfectly representative of the period in which they were living. Of course there was a certain amount of rubbish, but then that was true of people like Cole Porter too. And while a lyric like ‘A Day in the Life’ may not be exactly Lorenz Hart, it is a very, very good lyric of a very strange nature. It is of its generation. It turned the kids on. It was right for its time.

Besides, of course, hundreds of artists have made cover versions of the Beatles’ songs. Now, many people have felt that that was the criterion of their credibility as composers; that when someone like Ella Fitzgerald sang ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ it gave them an almost royal seal of approval. But I don’t agree with that, because the fact is that an awful lot of people jumped on the bandwagon. Even the Ella Fitzgeralds of this world are not above that when it means increased sales. She didn’t necessarily think it was the greatest song ever. She might well have preferred to record ‘Moonlight in Vermont’, but a Beatles song was a commercial certainty. Again, there is a lot of snobbery in music. Some people might have felt that Ella Fitzgerald was better than the Beatles, and that therefore she was doing them a favour. I don’t think that was necessarily so. She is a great singer, but in terms of sheer artistry I wouldn’t be too certain about the comparison.

What is certain is that their songs were great. Starting with ‘Please Please Me’ we had twelve successive number ones. It was a unique achievement, so perhaps it is worth listing them: ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Ticket to Ride’, ‘Help!’, ‘Day Trip­per’, ‘Paperback Writer’, and ‘Yellow Submarine’. It became almost an accepted fact of nature. The question was not whether a record would get to number one, but how quickly. In the end, it was happening in the first week, with advance sales around the million mark.

Then came number thirteen, unlucky number thirteen. That was quite extraordinary, because in my estimation it was the best record we ever made - ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ (you can hardly use the phrase ‘backed by’ in this context, because it was really a double-A-side record - meaning that the record promoters should regard both sides as being equally important). It only got to number two in the week of issue. The record that kept it out was made by Peter Sullivan, who was to be my partner in later years. It was of a fellow named Engelbert Humperdinck singing ‘Release Me’! With cold and unbiased hindsight I ask: ‘Was that just?’ I still find it absolutely astonishing. Happily, however, it was only a stutter in our progress, and the ‘normal service’ of immediate number ones was resumed immediately afterwards.

Meanwhile, of course, I still had all my other artists to attend to. It was inevitable that with the success of the Beatles, and to a lesser extent the other artists of Brian’s stable, there should be a certain amount of frustration and jealousy, a feeling that some were getting more attention than others. Luckily, the only time that really came to a crunch was with Shirley Bassey.

Shirley had had a pretty chequered career. She was a very volatile person, and had already been with various recording companies including EMI, for whom Norman Newell had recorded her. Finally she came to me, because, I suppose, I was the ‘hot’ one at that time, with the Beatles and so on. She was very emotional, but I liked her very much, and of course she was a tremendous artist. ‘I Who Have Nothing’ was the first big hit I had with her, and later we did ‘Goldfinger’.

We got on fine, until one day she came into my office to ‘routine’ some songs. Routining meant that I would collect a number of songs I thought would be suitable for the artist, in this case Shirley, and then she would come to the office and we would run through them on the piano. Having agreed on the numbers she would sing, we would work out which keys they would be sung in, what the shape of the recording would be, how many choruses they would have, what kind of orchestral backing, what kind of beginning and ending, and so on. She spent the whole afternoon routining these songs with me. When we had finished I said: ‘There’s only one problem, Shirley: we haven’t actually fixed the date for the recording.’

‘Oh, yes, I know when I want to record,’ she said. ‘I’m going away for a holiday, and I’ll be back on the Sunday, so I’d like to record on the Monday, in the evening.’

‘O.K.,’ I said. Then I looked at my diary. ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, Shirley, I can’t do that night. Any other night that week I can do, or during the Monday afternoon is fine, But I can’t do that particular night.’ ‘But I want to record that night.’

‘I’m sorry, Shirley, but I really can’t. I can do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, but not Monday.¹

I’m as sure now as I was then that she knew why I couldn’t do that night. Because she went on to say: ‘If I mean anything to you at all, you will do it when I want to. I want to do it on the Monday night.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated, ‘but I’m not going to work that night, because I’ve got another engagement.’

At that she stalked out of the room, practically smashing the glass in the door, and saying, ‘I’ve lived in the shadow of the Beatles and Cilla Black far too long now, George Martin.’

The fact was that, on the Monday night in question, Cilla was appearing in a Command Performance, and I had promised to be there. I am as sure as I can be that Shirley knew that, and that for her it was just another instance of taking, as she saw it, second place to other people.

In my book, she was just one of a very good roster of artists that I was handling. There’s no doubt that if I had run down the corridor and said, ‘Look, sorry, Shirley, I’m sure Monday will be O.K.,’ she would have been quite happy and gone on recording with me. But I can be a stubborn old goat too, I thought: I like you, Shirley, but I don’t need you that much.

I never recorded her again. It was no loss to either of us. She stayed with EMI, though, and I think Wally Ridley took her over. I’m glad to say that we’ve seen each other many times since, and remain good friends. But it was an example of the way in which the Liverpudlian triumphs could spread ripples to the edge of the Parlophone pond.

I, in turn, found ripples reaching me from quite another direction, the Apple organisation, which the Beatles set up around 1965. A great deal has been written about Apple, but in order to give an idea of what hopes they had for it, one can do no better than quote verbatim from the appendix to Hunter Davies’ authorised biography of the Beatles, written a couple of years later. ‘Apple, at the time of writing, this is still developing and expanding, but this will be the main Beatle business company in the years ahead. Already there is Apple Corps Ltd, Apple Films Ltd, the Apple Publishing Company, Apple Electronics, and Apple Records, These companies run various enter­prises including the Apple Boutique in Baker Street, Lon­don, with a chain of other shops to come throughout the world. Eventually there will be recording and film studios. The Beatles see Apple one day as a giant corporation on the American lines, producing products of all kinds as well as backing other people and firms. It is owned completely by the Beatles, run by people they have personally chosen, and backed by their vast financial resources.’

Apple was a complete fiasco, and it cost them millions. from the start, and this is not speaking with hindsight, I took a jaundiced view of the whole proceedings, because I could see the awful way it was going, and that it was doomed from the outset. But it wasn’t really my concern. It was Brian’s concern, and he was able to cope with it less and less. The trouble was that it was being run by four idealists, with nobody really in control. Ostensibly Neil Aspinall, their road manager, was in charge. He was chair­man, but each one of them would give orders in turn, sometimes conflicting. I remember meeting Sir Joseph Lockwood, head of EMI, and his telling me: ‘You know, Neil Aspinall rang me today and said, “As one chairman to another, can you give me advice on such-and-such?’”!! Neil has quite a good brain, in fact, but he was out of his class in dealing with people like that.

The tragedy was that it was an extremely praiseworthy idea. They wanted to put to a good use all the monies which were coming in. The motivation was, roughly: With these resources we can do anything. We can employ people to build things for us, develop new arts and new sciences, encourage scientific people to develop new inventions, encourage new writers. . . . And so on. It was a marvellous Utopian idea. If it had been handled properly it would have been a great boon to the music business. However it attracted some unusual people and there was very little control over research and development.

Of all the army of hangers-on, the one I recall most vividly, because he impinged on my work and my musical relationship with the boys, was Magic Alex. I can never remember his real name, but he was a Greek who had ingratiated himself with John Lennon, and who was so preposterous that it would have been funny had he not caused so much embarrassment and difficulty with me in the recording studio.

He was one of a group of sycophants who were forever making mischief, telling the boys they weren’t getting the best treatment, telling them they deserved better than the rotten old equipment that everyone else was using. I didn’t need that. I knew better than anyone that we lacked certain facilities which were available in independent American studios. I was still working on four-track machines when I knew that eight-track was already com­mon in America, and that sixteen-track was just around the corner. It annoyed me as much as it did the boys. But I could do without Magic Alex turning up one day and announcing in a supercilious voice: ‘Well, of course, I’m designing a seventy-two-track machine.’

Alex was certainly clever, a good electronic technician; but the boys pandered to his wildest whirls. He would bring little toys into the studio as throwaway gifts, which of course pleased the boys. One day he came in with a little machine about half the size of a cassette, powered by a microcell battery. When it was switched on, it made a series of random bleeps.

‘Fantastic!’ said John. ‘You’ve made that?^’

‘Oh, just a little gadget I knocked up in ten minutes,’ said Magic Alex. Then he would launch into the sales spiel. ‘That’s just to give an idea of the sort of thing we can do. Now, I’ve had an idea for a new invention. It’s a paint that, when I spray it on the wall, and connect it up to two anodes, will make the whole wall glow. You won’t need lights.’

‘Fantastic!’ said John.

‘Mind you,’ said Magic Alex. I’ll need a little backing to set it up.’

‘Fantastic!’ said John.

On another occasion Paul came in to tell me about Magic Alex’s idea for a telephone invention. ‘You know, we’re so out of date with our telephones in this country,’ he said. ‘But Alex is working on something. We won’t even need telephone directories. I’ll be in my drawing-room, and I’ll just say, “Get me George Martin,” and the phone will hear that and be computerised to understand the words. It’ll automatically dial your number, and you’ll be on the other end of the phone, and I won’t have to do anything about it. It’s so simple with computerisation, and Alex has got it all worked out.’

‘Really?’ I said.

I confess that I tended to laugh myself silly when they came and announced the latest brainchild of Alex’s fertile imagination. Their reaction was always the same: ‘You’ll laugh on the other side of your face when Alex comes up with it.’ But of course he never did.

I suppose his prize idea was his sonic screen. I was informed of this work of inventive genius by the boys one day. ‘Why do you have to put Ringo with his drums behind all these terrible screens?’ they asked. ‘We can’t see him. We know it makes a good drum sound, and it cuts out all the spill on to our guitars and things, but damn it, with those bloody great screens locking him in, it makes him feel claustrophobic.’

I waited silently, knowing that the problem would have been solved by a flash of Greek inspiration. And so it had.

‘Alex has got a brilliant idea! He’s come up with some­thing really great: a sonic screen! He’s going to place these ultra-high-frequency beams round Ringo, and when they’re switched on he won’t be able to hear anything, because the beams will form a wall of silence.’

Words, I fully admit, failed me.

The trouble was that Alex was always coming to the studios to see what we were doing and to learn from it, while at the same time saying ‘These people are so out of date’. But I found it very difficult to chuck him out, because the boys liked him so much. Since it was very obvious that I didn’t, a minor schism developed.

The final irony came when the boys decided that they were going to build their own studio in their building in Savile Row, and that it was going to be the best in the world. And who should they turn to for the design of this electronic Mecca? Why, Magic Alex, naturally. Once he had built it, the boys sat down to wait for the installation o^f the famous seventy-two-track machine. They waited. And waited. And finally, when we came to the recording of the album Let it Be, late in 1969, which they wanted to do in their own studio, they had to admit that Alex still hadn’t quite worked his miracle.

‘You’d better put some equipment in, then,’ they told me.

‘O.K., we’ll use mobile equipment,’ I said, and went back to EMI, whom I had left by then, to borrow some. With Keith Slaughter, and Dave Harries who eventually became my studio manager at AIR, I installed at Apple all the multi-track machines and other equipment necessary to make a proper recording - just for the one record. With that done, I examined the Alex-designed studio for its acoustic properties. For a start, there was very nasty ‘twitter¹ in one corner. But our problems didn’t end there. Alex had overlooked one small detail: there was no hole in the wall between the studio and the control rooms. The only way to get the cables through was to open the door and run them along the corridor.

Another thing - the heating plant for the entire building was situated in a little room just off the studio. And since the sound insulation was not exactly magical, every now and then in the middle of recording there carne a sound like a diesel engine starting up.

Apart from these minor points, I suppose, it wasn’t a bad attempt at studio design.

But that was Apple, and I suppose it is ironic that the man brought in to clear up the administrative mess, Allen Klein, who tightened up the control and put things on a proper basis, should also have been the man who because of Paul’s dislike of him was a great factor in the final break-up of the Beatles.

He had come in, of course, because by then Brian Epstein was dead. In the five years that I knew Brian we came to be very good friends. He always did things with great flourish and style, and spent up to the hilt. It was always champagne and smoked salmon, rather than fish and chips.

There is no secret now about the fact that he was a homosexual. Because he rarely had any lady in tow he, Judy and I became a trio of close friends. He was very fond of Judy, and we all used to go racing together. One of the happiest times we had was at Portmeirion, to which he introduced us - knowing it well as he did, coming from Liverpool.

I know that he wasn’t happy at school, and I know that he never managed to form any real relationship with a man or a woman. I think that for these and other reasons, like his unsuccessful desire to be an actor, he had suffered great frustration in life. That frustration was ended by the success of the Beatles, for which he was to a very large extent responsible. What he gave them was complete dedication. Many people would have given up long before he finally came to see me at Parlophone.

He also gave them style. He told them: ‘If you’re going to be successful, you’re going to do it my way.’ It was he who insisted on their hair being a uniform shape and size, and who put them into those collarless suits, which they hated. But of course he was right. The image became a part of the total package. You never saw middle-aged men queuing to buy Rolling Stones wigs!

Later, they broke away from that, and exerted their own taste in clothes and so on. They liked to see how far they could go,

how much people would take. I must say that even I was disconcerted when John acquired his Rolls-Royce, only to paint it matt black all over, chrome and all. I don’t think Rolls-Royce were too pleased, either! On the other hand, these were indulgences which they were entitled to have, and they hurt no one.

But a lot of Brian’s influence rubbed off on them. Paul, for instance, went on a veritable bender of culture; the idea of Apple as their marketing symbol was taken from a Magritte painting he bought.

The fish and chips and jam butties gave way to more elegant foods, and good wines - though there were occa­sional hiccups: on one occasion we were in a restaurant and John was asked if he wanted any mange-touts. ‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘but put them, there on the side. Not near the food.’

Brian’s Diaghilev style was never better illustrated than in June 1966. By then, my first wife and I had been divorced, and Judy and I had decided to get married - something I could never have foreseen from those first frosty encounters when I had joined EMI in 1950. Brian decided to give a special dinner for us to celebrate. As usual, the table at his house was set with lovely silver and glassware. The wine was excellent, as was the food, pre­pared by Lonnie Trimball, his black chef, who was first-class. There were eleven of us there: Paul and Jane, John and Cyn, George and Patti, Ringo and Maureen, Judy and I, and Brian, on his own. As we sat down and took our napkins from their silver holders, Brian said: ‘I’d like you to look at your napkin-rings, because I’m afraid I shan’t see them again after tonight.’ They were solid silver, and each was inscribed with the letter M - a wedding present to Judy and me. Just eleven of them, to commemorate the fact that there were just the eleven of us at dinner. That was his style.

It was mirrored later, after his death, in the amazing fancy-dress party the boys gave to mark the opening of their film Magical Mystery Tour. Since the whole of London knew that a party was going to happen, and wanted to come, security had to be very tight, but the boys still insisted on fancy dress. That had some off-beat results. Cilla Black, for instance, came as a Cockney costermonger, in flat cap and trousers, and her husband, Bobby Willis, came as a nun.

Bobby has a very pale complexion, and in a nun’s habit he looked incredibly authentic. He was in his outfit when he and Cilla drove in their Rolls-Royce Corniche convert­ible to pick up a friend at the Westbury Hotel en route to the party. He could see their friend waiting, and drove straight into the hotel entrance, where the taxis were piling up. In so doing he blocked the way for a moment. A commissionaire immediately pounced. ‘Excuse me, sister,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid we can’t leave our car here. Would you mind putting it round the corner?’

Bobby looked him straight in the eye and replied: ‘Why don’t you piss off?’ The look on the man’s face is said to have been a study in sheer disbelief.

Judy and I went as the Queen and Prince Philip, which was an ‘in’ joke. The boys always thought she sounded just like the Monarch, and whenever they saw her would ask: ‘How’s your husband and you?’ I acquired an Admiral of the Fleet’s uniform from one of the naval outfitters; since they wouldn’t let me have a sword I put my old observer’s wings on the sleeve, out of sheer cussedness. Judy had a lovely tiara and silk ball dress, a blue sash with some star-and-garter type of apparatus draped across her bosom, and a handbag a-dangle from her left wrist. Paul told me afterwards: ‘You know, your entrance was very striking.’ People formed themselves into a line, bowing and curt­seying, while Judy and I gave limp handshakes to one and all. In the background, someone said loudly: ‘My God! I didn’t think they’d get them*.”

That was the fun. But for Brian, life was becoming very difficult. He had an ever-increasing stable of artists. Then he started to bring me acts in which I had little faith, and I had the embarrassing job of telling him that I didn’t rate them. But, persuaded by his charm, I would record them as a favour to him. That was wrong, and I told him so.

He was tending to lose control. When Cilla opened at the Savoy, he upset her greatly by forgetting something or other, and had to make it up by sending her a little television set as a present. He was spreading himself too thinly, and his ever more complicated private life was beginning to intrude. He kept himself going by taking pills, uppers and then downers: sleeping pills at night and waking-up pills in the morning.

The Beatles started to be very critical of his handling of their contract - the one to which I had originally signed them, starting at a penny a record. That had not been his fault. He had been in no position to argue, and he knew it. But once they had tasted blood, they realised that they could get much higher royalties.

There were two sides to this. On the one hand, like many people who eventually make it big, they were very pleased and grateful to get their first break, but ended up not wishing to be reminded of it. On the other hand, EMI were stupid about the whole thing. They were very mean with the Beatles’ contract, and when it ran out, the boys had them over a barrel. EMI ended up having to pay through the nose for the privilege of having the greatest group ever, whereas, if’they had been fairer in the first place, I don’t think they would have been pushed that far. The truth was that the Beatles had no loyalty towards EMI, for the simple reason that they had been given no cause for loyalty.

The whole business led to a revolution in the recording industry. At the time the Beatles first signed, royalties were traditionally low. The highest we ever paid was 5%. When the breakthrough came as a result of what had happened with the Beatles, royalties became astronomical, and the record companies had completely to reverse their policies, charging much higher prices for records.

But that came after Brian’s death. The irony was that even if he had lived he would, I think, have had a very hard time coping with life. Because it was inevitable that he would shortly have lost the Beatles, and to him that would have been like losing his children, his whole reason for living. He could never have parted from them, as I did, with great friendship but no sense of loss. If they had come to him and said, ‘Brian, we don’t want you to manage us any more,’ it would have destroyed him. And they would have: there is absolutely no question about it. On 9 August 1967 Judy had our first child, Lucy. After she came out of hospital, we went down to our cottage in the country. On Sunday, 20 August we went for a drink at the little pub in the village, and the publican came straight over to us.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. Your friend’s died.’

‘Who?’ I asked, having no idea at all.

‘Mr Epstein.’

I believe that what happened was pure accident. He had been drinking, had taken some pills to go to sleep, probably woke in the middle of the night, forgot how many he had taken, took some more and died of an accidental overdose.

Judy and I drove straight back to our house in London. There, waiting for us on our grand piano, was a marvellous bouquet of flowers from Brian, to congratulate Judy on Lucy’s birth. They must have been sent some days before; they were very, very dead. And so was Brian.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 735