Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






Hard Days and Nights

 

IT WAS in April 1962 that I got the phone call from Syd Coleman, a friend and one of the music industry’s nice guys, who was head of Ardmore & Beechwood, the EMI publishing company with offices above the HMV shop in Oxford Street.

 

‘George,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if you’d be interested, but there’s a chap who’s come in with a tape of a group he runs. They haven’t got a recording contract, and I wonder if you’d like to see him and listen to what he’s got?’

 

‘Certainly,’ I said. I’m willing to listen to anything. Ask him to come and see me.’

 

‘O.K., I will. His name’s Brian Epstein.’

 

When I said that I was willing to listen to anything, it was absolutely true. The comedy records had been fine, and had begun to put Parlophone on the map. But I was looking, with something close to desperation, for an act from the pop world. I was frankly jealous of the seemingly easy success other people were having with such acts, in particular Norrie Paramor, my opposite number on Col­umbia, whose artist Cliff Richard was on an apparently automatic ride to stardom.

 

It seemed to me that all that was needed, in producing someone like that, was a good song - whereas, with the comedy records, every one was a major production. For instance, I recorded ‘Hole in the Ground’ with Bernard Cribbins; but there was no automatic follow-up to a record like that. I had to search until we found ‘Right Said Fred’. To maintain that sort of standard meant a completely new set of ideas each time, because Bernard Cribbins didn’t sell just because he was Bernard Cribbins. It was the combination of Bernard Cribbins and a very amusing song which sold, while to a certain extent someone like Cliff Richard would sell whatever he recorded. What I wanted was a ‘fireproof act like that.

 

The day after Syd’s call, Brian Epstein came to see me - a well-spoken, smartly turned out, engagingly amiable, ‘clean’ young man. What I didn’t realise at the time was that he was in London for his final, desperate attempt to get someone interested in his group, the Beatles.

 

Decca had turned them down, after at least giving them two auditions. Pye, Phillips and everyone else had turned them down out of hand. He had even been to EMI, through the good offices of Ron White of the EMI sales team, whom Brian and his father knew through NEMS, the large music shop they ran in Liverpool. Ron White says that two of the four EMI heads of label heard Beatles tapes before I did. The other three were Norman Newell, Walter Ridley, and Norrie Paramor. Two out of those three must have been at least as guilty as poor old Dick Rowe of Decca, who got all the public ‘stick’.

 

For his final effort, Brian had decided that he should have some discs cut from the tape he had with him, because they would be easier to play to people. That was what took him to the HMV shop in Oxford Street, in one of whose departments, for a fee of something like £1 10s, anyone could get a disc cut privately. The engineer who cut the discs for him was Ted Huntley, who used to work at EMI studios, and who I believe is now successfully retired and running a hotel in Jersey. Ted thought that the sound he was hearing was rather good, and while Brian was still with him he rang Syd Coleman on the floor above. ‘I think you might be interested in this group,’ he said, ‘because I don’t think they have a publisher at the moment.’



 

So upstairs went Brian with his newly cut discs. But he told Syd: ‘I don’t think I want a publisher until I get a record deal.’

 

Syd asked: ‘Well, what kind of dealings have you had with the record people?’

 

Brian had to confess that he had already been to most of the record companies.

 

‘Why don’t you go round and see George Martin at Parlophone?’ said Syd. ‘He deals in unusual things. He’s had a big success with the most unlikely recording acts. I’ll give him a ring and make an appointment, if you like.’

 

That was how Brian came to arrive in my new office in Manchester Square, to which we had moved from Great Castle Street. To start with, he gave me a big ‘hype’ about this marvellous group who were doing such great things in Liverpool. He told me how everybody up there thought they were the bee’s knees. He even expressed surprise that I hadn’t heard of them - which, in the circumstances, was pretty bold. I almost asked him in reply where Liverpool was. The thought of anything coming out of the provinces was extraordinary at that time. Then he played me his disc, and I first heard the sound of the Beatles.

 

The recording, to put it kindly, was by no means a knock-out. I could well understand that people had turned it down. The material was either old stuff, like Fats Waller’s ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’, or very mediocre songs they had written themselves. But . . . there was an unusual quality of sound, a certain roughness that I hadn’t encoun­tered before. There was also the fact that more than one person was singing, which in itself was unusual. There was something tangible that made me want to hear more, meet them and see what they could do. I thought as I listened: Well, there just might be something here. At least it’s worth following up. I did not do handstands against the wall and say: ‘This is the greatest thing ever!’ I simply thought it was worth a shot.

 

I suggested to Brian that he should bring the boys, who at that time were performing at the Star Club in Hamburg, to Abbey Road studios for a recording test. Unknown to me at the time, he groaned inwardly. It seemed to him that he had heard that sort of song before. But we went ahead and fixed a date for 6 June.

 

It was love at first sight. That may seem exaggerated, but the fact is that we hit it off straight away. I met them at Abbey Road’s Number Three studio, where we were to do the test - John, Paul, George, and Pete Best, their drummer, with all their gear. My first impression was that they were all quite clean. That was obviously Brian’s influence. Their haircuts were fairly shocking for that time, of course, though compared with today’s styles they were almost short-back-and-sides. But the most impres­sive thing was their engaging personalities. They were just great people to be with.

 

From their point of view, I suppose I was fairly famous. They were great fans of Peter Sellers, and knew that I had been making his and the other comedy records, and they were obviously prepared to like me from knowing what I’d done.

 

I remember George Harrison being the most talkative at that first meeting, and Pete Best not saying a word throughout the whole afternoon. But he did have the advantage of being the handsomest of the group, very sullen, and rather like James Dean. His drumming, on the other hand, was not good. At the end of the test I took Brian to one side and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do with the group as such, but this drumming isn’t good enough for what I want. It isn’t regular enough. It doesn’t give the right kind of sound. If we do make a record, I’d much prefer to have my own drummer - which won’t make any difference to you, because no one will know who’s on the record anyway.’ What I didn’t realise at the time was that the group already wanted Pete Best out and Ringo Starr in, and that my remarks were something in the nature of a last straw.

 

The group as a whole confirmed by their playing my earlier feeling that we might be able to do something together. But what that something would be was the big question. At the test they played a few of their own numbers, like ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Hello Little Girl’, ‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Ask Me Why’. The rest was mostly old stuff, like ‘Besame Mucho’, as it had been on the discs Brian had played me. Frankly, the material didn’t impress me, least of all their own songs. I felt that I was going to have to find suitable material for them, and was quite certain that their songwriting ability had no saleable future!

 

By July, I had made up my mind, and told Brian that I wanted to sign a contract with the Beatles. It was a tough contract. It lasted for a year in the first instance, during which I guaranteed to record four titles. In return, they, the four of them and Brian, would receive a total of one penny per double-sided record sold - a grand sum to share between the five of them! Then there were four further options of a year each, and with extreme generosity I included a yearly rise in royalties in stages of one farthing. In the second year they would get a penny farthing, and so on up to the princely sum of twopence in the fifth year. What that meant, if I chose to exercise those options, was that they were bound to EMI for five years, during which I was not forced to record more than two singles per year. In retrospect, it was a good indication of the EMI train­ing/brainwashing to which I had been subjected.

 

But at least they had been given a recording contract. There’s no doubt that as things had worked out for them, I was the last chance. At that time I was very much the joker in the music-business pack, and if I, too, had turned them down, it’s very hard to guess what would have happened. Possibly they would just have broken up, and never have been heard of again.

 

And even I hadn’t got it right to start with. When I first met them, there was no obvious leader. They all spoke in turn, and I went home wondering which one of them was going to be the star. My thinking was so coloured by the success of people like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard that I couldn’t imagine a group being successful as a group. I felt that one of them was bound to come out as having a better voice than the others. Whoever that was would be the one, and the rest would become like Cliff Richard’s backing group, the Shadows. I was quite wrong.

 

I put them all on test individually, getting them to sing numbers in turn, and my original feeling was the Paul had a sweeter voice, John’s had more character, and George was generally not so good. I was thinking, on balance, that I should make Paul the leader. Then, after some thought, I realised that if I did so I would be changing the nature of the group. Why do that? Why not keep them as they were? It hadn’t been done before - but then, I’d made a lot of records that hadn’t been ‘done before’. Why not experiment in pop as I had in comedy?

 

The idea was reinforced when I decided, before we made a record, to go up to Liverpool with Judy to see ‘on the ground’ what all the fuss was about. The Cavern was a sweaty little railway-arch kind of place. It was literally like a dungeon. There were arched brick walls, and the boys were playing in one of the caverns. Some of the audience were in the adjoining arches, so that they couldn’t even see the group. But they could hear them. How they could hear them! A lot of people could hear them from Liverpool docks.

 

The place was crammed full of teenagers sitting on bare benches, with no room to dance. The story has often been put around that as we came into the place, our hats and coats were taken by a hat-check girl named Cilla Black -but she hotly denies it, and I certainly don’t remember it. But I do remember that they tried to make room for us, which was impossible, since there wasn’t any, and that meant that some of the kids had to be removed. In one case it was an involuntary removal, when a girl fainted and had to be brought out in the only possible way, passed from arm to outstretched arm, supine above the heads of all the others.

 

The walls were streaming with condensation. It was amazing that the boys didn’t get electrocuted, because there was water everywhere - a combination of general dampness and sweat, evaporated and re-condensed upon the walls. The atmosphere too was what is frequently, though often inaccurately, known as ‘electric’. They sang all the rock-and-roll numbers that they’d copied from American records, and it was very raucous, and the kids loved every minute of it. Up till then there had been nothing to involve young people to quite the same extent. The rock-and-roll gyrations of Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard were clinical, anaemic, even anaesthetic, com­pared with the total commitment of the Beatles, which somehow got down to the very roots of what the kids wanted.

 

A group they were, and a group they had to stay, and on 11 September 1962 we finally got together to make their first record. Since they were obviously very keen on their own songs, I asked them to give me a selection. From that selection we decided on ‘Love Me Do’, backed by ‘P.S. I Love You’.

 

I wanted to get them involved from the start in the techniques of recording, so after the first run-through I called them out to the control room to hear a playback. ‘This is what you’ve been doing,’ I said. ‘You must listen to it, and if there’s anything you don’t like, tell me, and we’ll try and do something about it.’

 

That was when George Harrison, the smart-ass, replied, ‘Well, for a start, I don’t like your tie.’ Everyone fell about with hoots of laughter, and the others were hitting him playfully, as schoolboys do when one of them has been cheeky to teacher. I learned later that when they were out of my hearing they got on to him about it again and told him: ‘You mustn’t say things like that to him. He’s very touchy.’ The fact is that I too thought it was funny. As I was to learn, it was typical Beatle humour.

 

But there was a problem to go with the humour of that first session. They had told me that they had found a great drummer from another group, whose name was Ringo Starr and who would be replacing Pete Best. I had said, ‘Fine. Bring him along and let him see what we’re doing, and next time he’ll have a go.’ When they turned up, however, Ringo and all, they were fully expecting him to participate straight away. I wouldn’t have it, especially since I had engaged a very experienced and good session musician named Andy White to play the drums. So I told them: ‘This is nonsense. I’ve been bitten once. I’m giving you a very good drummer, who’s probably better than Ringo Starr, and that’s who’s going to play the drums.’ Ringo was obviously very upset. I learned later that he was very depressed about it, and thought I was trying to put him down. But I wasn’t. I simply didn’t know what he was like, and wasn’t prepared to take risks.

In the end we worked out a compromise. We made two versions of ‘Love Me Do’. On one of them Andy played drums and

Ringo played the tambourine. On the other, Ringo played drums. I think that in the end we issued the one with Ringo playing drums, but what happened to the version with him on tambourine I just don’t know. It didn’t matter to me then, and it doesn’t now, though I know that all the Beatle maniacs will scream: ‘God! Such an important historical fact. You should have made a note of it!’

 

But I did quickly realise that Ringo was an excellent drummer for what was required. He’s not a ‘technical’ drummer. Men like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa would run rings round him. But he’s a good solid rock drummer with a super steady beat, and he knows how to get the right sound out of his drums. Above all, he does have an individual sound. You can tell Ringo’s drums from anyone else’s, and that character was a definite asset to the Beatles’ early recordings.

 

We released ‘Love Me Do’ on 4 October, and I began the process of trying to get it plugged. Not that EMI were much help. I was already treated with some scepticism because of the oddball recordings I had made, and when I announced that I was issuing a record by a group called the Beatles, everyone at the monthly supplement meeting fell about laughing. ‘Is this another of George’s gimmicks?’ someone asked. ‘Is it really Spike Milligan disguised?’

 

I told them: ‘I’m serious. This is a great group, and we’re going to hear a lot more from them.’ But no one took much notice. They were too busy laughing. And Ardmore & Beechwood, the EMI publishers, whose Syd Coleman had first put Brian Epstein on to me, did virtually nothing about getting the record played.

 

But I was determined. I was by now absolutely convinced that I had a hit group on my hands - though I knew that I hadn’t got it with the first record, feeling the quality of the song wasn’t really up to it. In the end it only got to number seventeen in the charts, in spite of Brian Epstein’s efforts to push it through his family’s store. I remember Brian phoning me up to tell me he couldn’t get fresh supplies of the record - which was sad, since I suppose that most of the sales which pushed it even as far as seventeen were in Liverpool. ‘What on earth is happening with EMI?’ Brian demanded. I knew damn well what was happening, or rather what wasn’t. The people down south simply didn’t have confidence in the record, although at least number seventeen was a start. Brian wasn’t happy. ‘Ardmore & Beechwood didn’t help us very much over that record. When the next one comes out I don’t want to give the publishing to them.’

 

‘That may be so,’ I said, ‘but the first priority is to find a hit song for the boys to sing.’ I set about the task. I knew I had it when Dick James brought me a number written by Mitch Murray called ‘How Do You Do It?1 After he’d played it to me I jumped up and said, ‘That’s it. We’ve got it. This is the song that’s going to make the Beatles a household name, like Harpic.’

 

Brian pressed on with his search for a new publisher. Finally he came to me and said that he was going to give the publishing to an American company called Hill & Range.

 

‘Why an American company?’ I asked.

 

‘Because they’re jolly good publishers, and besides, they do all the Elvis Presley stuff.’

 

‘Well, it doesn’t really make sense, Brian,’ I said, ‘because what you really want is someone who’s going to work flat out for you, someone who’s going to give us that extra push I need to plug the records. In other words, someone who’s hungry.’

 

‘So, who shall I go to?’ he asked.

 

‘As I said, someone who’s hungry, and above all someone who’s very straight.’

 

I gave him the names of three very good friends, all of whom I knew to be honest people, all very hard-working publishers - David Platz, Alan Holmes, and Dick James. The only problem with David and Alan was that, like Hill & Range, they were American-owned. Nor were they as hungry as Dick, who had just left Sidney Bron to set up his own publishing company. He needed work, he needed money, he badly needed a hit. So I suggested that Brian see him first of all.

 

Dick had been the first person I had recorded on my own initiative in the early days of working under Oscar Preuss. Isobel Burdett, a contact of mine at the BBC, had told me: ‘Dick’s unhappy with his present recording arrangements. Why don’t you meet up with him? You’d get on well together.’ And so it proved. We made some fair records. One of them was ‘Tenderly’, on which I used for the first time a young arranger named Ron Goodwin who had been working with Petula Clark. That was the start of my long association with Ron.

 

Dick was delighted. Straight away he agreed to take the publishing, and in so doing made a very clever deal. He suggested to Brian that a new company, to be called Northern Songs, should be started, of which he would own 50%, and the Beatles and Brian the other 50%. It was clever because in offering as large a slice as 50% he ensured that they would sign a contract for a long period of time, during which all their works would go to that company, exclusively. He wouldn’t have got a deal like that had he offered them a smaller share. In addition, as I later learned, he made it a condition that Northern Songs would be handled and managed by Dick James Music, which took a 10% handling fee off the top. In effect, of every £100 that came in royalties, Dick James Music took £10, and the remaining £90 was split 50-50.

 

Generously, he then came to me and offered me a share in the company. I couldn’t accept. ‘It’s very kind of you to think of me like that,’ I said. ‘But on the other hand, it isn’t ethical. I’m working for EMI. I’m an employee of EMI, and I’m engaging an act, and therefore, in a way, I’m engaging you. I think it would be wrong to split my interests.’

 

I couldn’t know at the time that saying those few words was the equivalent of turning down millions of pounds. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m certainly not a millionaire, but I can say with my hand on my heart that I have no regrets about turning down the offer. I’ve been very lucky with what I went on to do. And I sleep well at nights.

 

With the publishing arranged, the immediate job was to get the next record out, and when the Beatles and I next got together I played them ‘How Do You Do It?’. There were not very impressed. They said they wanted to record their own material, and I read the riot act. ‘When you can write material as good as this, then I’ll record it,’ I told them. ‘But right now we’re going to record this.’ And record it we did, with John doing the solo part. It was a very good record indeed, and is still in the archives of EMI. I heard it recently, and it sounds quite good even today. But it was never issued. The boys came back to me and said: ‘We’ve nothing against that song, George, and you’re probably right. But we want to record our own song.’

 

Somewhat testily I asked them: ‘Have you got anything that’s any good?’

 

‘Well, listen to this, George. You’ve heard it before -‘Please Please Me’ - but we’ve revamped it, and we’ve done it this way ...”

 

I listened. It was great. ‘Yeah, that’s good,’ I said. ‘Let’s try that one.’ I told them what beginning and what ending to put on it, and they went into Number Two studio to record. It went beautifully. The whole session was a joy. At the end of it, I pressed the intercom button in the control room and said, ‘Gentlemen, you’ve just made your first number-one record.’

 

They had. Dick worked like a demon after the record was released in January 1963. He managed to get hold of Philip Jones, who was head of light entertainment for one of the commercial TV stations, and persuaded him to put the Beatles on ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’. It was a tre­mendous coup. On top of that, EMI finally got off their backsides, and realised that George wasn’t quite so crazy and that this was something worth backing. They actually played the record on their Radio Luxemburg programme, which was jolly decent of them. It reached the number one spot very quickly, and suddenly the whole thing snowballed and mushroomed and any other mixed meta­phor you care to think of. From that moment, we simply never stood still.

 

After the success of ‘Please Please Me’ I realised that we had to act very fast to get a long-playing album on the market if we were to cash in on what we had already achieved. Because, while a single which sells half a million doesn’t reap all that great a reward, half a million albums is big business. I knew their repertoire from the Cavern, and I called the boys down to the studio and said: ‘Right, what you’re going to do now, today, straight away, is play me this selection of things I’ve chosen from what you do in the Cavern.’ There were fourteen songs in all, some by the Beatles, some by the American artists whom they liked to copy. We started at ten that morning, with Norman Smith as the balance engineer, and recorded straight on to twin-track mono. By eleven o’clock at night we had recorded the lot, thirteen new tracks, to which we added the existing recording of ‘Please Please Me’.

 

All we did really was to reproduce the Cavern perfor­mance in the comparative calm of the studio. I say ‘com­parative’, because there was one number which always caused a furore in the Cavern - ‘Twist and Shout’. John absolutely screamed it. God alone knows what he did to his larynx each time he performed it, because he made a sound rather like tearing flesh. That had to be right on the first take, because I knew perfectly well that if we had to do it a second time it would never be as good.

 

Like its namesake single, the album rapidly went to number one, and because of the popularity of ‘Twist and Shout’ (which was not actually a Beatles song) we issued an EP with that and three other titles. It too went to number one in the singles charts, the first time an EP had done so. The boys were elated with their success. I asked them for another song as good as ‘Please Please Me’, and they brought me one - ‘From Me to You’. I said, I want more.’ Along came ‘She Loves You’.

There seemed to be a bottomless well of songs, and people have often asked me where that well was dug. Who knows? To begin with, they’d been playing about at writing songs since they were kids, and had a large amount of raw material which simply needed shaping. A lot of the songs we made into hits started life as not very good embryos. When they had first played me ‘Please Please Me’, it had been in a very different form.

 

The way that Lennon and McCartney worked together wasn’t the Rodgers-and-Hart kind of collaboration. It was more a question of one of them trying to write a song, getting stuck, and asking the other: ‘I need a middle eight. What have you got?’ They were both tunesmiths in their own right, and would help each other out as the need arose. In the early days, that was a matter of necessity. But as they developed their art, each moved on to writing songs entirely on his own. Collaboration became rare, apart from the odd word or line: it was either a John Lennon song or a Paul McCartney song. We established the work­ing format that whoever wrote the song generally sang it, and the others would join in. If it were John’s song, he would sing it, and when we came to the middle eight - the section in the middle of a song where the tune changes – Paul would sing thirds above or below, or whatever; if a third part were needed, George would join in. It was a very simple formula.

 

I would meet them in the studio to hear a new number. I would perch myself on a high stool, and John and Paul would stand around me with their acoustic guitars and play and sing it - usually without Ringo or George, unless George joined in the harmony. Then I would make sug­gestions to improve it, and we’d try it again. That’s what is known in the business as a ‘head arrangement’, and we didn’t move out of that pattern until the end of what I call the first era. That was the era which lasted through ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’, ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, and I Want to Hold Your Hand’, which were the first batch of recordings.

 

At that point there wasn’t much arranging to do. My function as producer was not what it is today. After all, I was a mixture of many things. I was an executive running a record label. I was organising the artists and the reper­toire. And on top of that, I actually supervised the record­ing sessions, looking after what both the engineer and the artist were doing. Certainly I would manipulate the record to the way I wanted it, but there was no arrangement in the sense of orchestration. They were four musicians -three guitarists and a drummer - and my role was to make sure that they made a concise, commercial statement. I would make sure that the song ran for approximately two and a half minutes, that it was in the right key for their voices, and that it was tidy, with the right proportion and form.

 

At the beginning, my speciality was the introductions and the endings, and any instrumental passages in the middle. I might say, for instance: ‘”Please Please Me” only lasts a minute and ten seconds, so you’ll have to do two choruses, and in the second chorus we’ll have to do such-and-such.’ That was the extent of the arranging. Again, the way they first sang ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was by starting on the verse, but I said: ‘We’ve got to have an introduction, something that catches the ear immediately, a hook. So let’s start off with the chorus.’ It was all really a matter of tidying things up. But that record was the point of departure for something rather more sophis­ticated.

 

With ‘Yesterday’ we used orchestration for the first time; and from then on, we moved into whole new areas. The curious thing is that our relationship moved in two different directions at once. On the one hand, the increas­ing sophistication of the records meant that I was having a greater and greater influence on the music. But the personal relationship moved in the other direction. At the start, I was like a master with his pupils, and they did what I said. They knew nothing about recording, but heaven knows they learned quickly: and by the end, of course, I was to be the servant while they were the masters. They would say, ‘Right, we’re starting tonight at eight o’clock,’ and I would be there. It was a gradual change of power, and of responsibility in a way, because although at the end I still clung to putting in my two cents’ worth, all I could do was influence. I couldn’t direct.

 

But that was later. Now we were in 1963, surely the busiest year of my life. I was totally caught up in the excitement of it all, and Brian Epstein was working round the clock. Naturally we had to spend a lot of time together, and we became very firm friends. I remember his telling me, ‘We’re going to have a tremendous partnership, George. With you recording my acts, we’re unbeatable. And with Dick publishing them, we’re an unbeatable trio.’

 

It certainly seemed that way. The next group he brought me was Gerry and the Pacemakers. For them, I dipped into my song-bag and once more produced ‘How Do You Do It?’, the song that the Beatles hadn’t wanted to issue. Gerry recorded it, and it went to number one. But if that was a little personal vindication of my faith in the song, a more interesting recording Gerry made was of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the old American standard. He always got a great reaction from audiences when he performed it, and it was Brian’s idea to record it. For the first time, I backed Gerry with a large string orchestra, which was a great departure for him. He had been a very jolly rock-and-roll star, doing little two-beat songs, and suddenly here was this big ballad with which his voice could hardly cope. All the same, I think it was largely that record which was responsible for the song becoming the universal foot­ball-crowd song it is today.

 

Not content with two successful groups, Brian now brought me a third, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. Billy was certainly a very good-looking boy, but when 1 listened to him I was forced to the conclusion that his was not the greatest voice in the world. ‘I’ve got so much on my plate, Brian,’ I said, ‘and I don’t think that Billy has really got the voice that will do what we need.’

 

But Brian had an enormously persuasive way about him. ‘George, you know perfectly well that you and I and Dick can make it work. You can produce a record with Billy that will make the grade - I know you can.’

 

‘That’s all very well, Brian, but you can’t make great things when the raw material isn’t up to scratch.’

 

‘You listen again,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll find Billy’s voice isn’t as bad as all that.’

 

It wasn’t all that good, either; but Brian was so keen that I agreed. I decided the only way I could ever make a hit out of him was always to double-track his voice - in other words, to record the song once and then have him sing it a second time, following his own voice. There were places where even the double-tracking didn’t work too well, and to cover these I invented what I called the wind-up piano. After I’d done my basic track, I overlaid piano, which I played myself- recording it at half speed and then doubling it to normal speed to give a kind of harpsichord effect. Where there was any offending phrase from the Kramer tonsils, I put in a bit of this piano and mixed it a bit louder. For the inquisitive, I may add that I didn’t pay myself for these pieces of gratuitous musicianship, since I reckoned that if I did so, I would be getting money that a musician should be getting.

 

For Billy’s first record we chose ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’, a song from the Beatles’ first album. In those days we had a policy that anything the Beatles recorded as an album title was not issued by them as a single, and vice versa. The song had been on the Please Please Me album (we’d obviously made an exception in the case of ‘Please Please Me’ itself, to cash in on their new popu­larity), and the Beatles didn’t want to issue it as a single. In any case, they could already see the advantage of having their songs covered by other people, and since it suited Billy down to the ground, we decided to make it with him. It was issued on 26 April 1963. It went to number one. The process was starting to seem almost inevitable.

 

Then we had what appeared at first to be a setback. Brian brought me a girl singer named Priscilla White. All her friends called her Cilla, and Brian, for some reason best known to himself, didn’t like the idea of Cilla White, so he’d gone to the other end of the spectrum and called her Cilla Black. For me, she was even more of a problem child than Billy had been. Although she had a good, if thin, voice, she was a rock-and-roll screecher in the true Cavern tradition, with a piercing nasal sound. That was all right in itself, but finding songs for her was clearly going to be very difficult.

 

On the other hand, the Beatles by this time were bub­bling over with enthusiasm for their own works - and rightly so. We had opened the vent, the oil had started gushing up, and the well, which I had originally thought might soon dry up, simply kept on producing more and more. Cilla had been singing a song of theirs at the Cavern called ‘Love of the Loved’, and we decided to record that, with a special arrangement I had written for trumpets. It didn’t sell well at all. It was not a number one.

 

Then Brian went to America, to try to get people over there interested in his stable of artists. When he returned he brought me a song he had heard over there by a young man named Burt Bacharach. It was called ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. I absolutely flipped. I thought it was mar­vellous. ‘Brian,’ I said, ‘what a lovely song. Thank you so much for bringing it over. It’s absolutely ideal for Shirley.’ By whom I meant Shirley Bassey, whom I was recording at this time.

 

Brian looked askance. ‘I wasn’t thinking of her, I was thinking of Cilla.’

 

‘Really? Do you think Cilla could sing a song like this?’ I asked, doubtfully.

 

‘I know my Cilla. She can do it.’

 

‘O.K., let’s have a go, then,’ I said, still not convinced.

 

By now I was so busy that I didn’t have the time to score the song myself; besides, although I had done the trumpets on her first record, I wasn’t then known as an orchestrator, and with others around who had big repu­tations it would have been cheeky of me to assert myself too much. So I brought in Johnny Pearson, who did a marvellous score for the song. Cilla recorded it, and it did go to number one, making her a star in the process.

 

I heard that Dionne Warwick, who recorded the song in America, was furious because we had pinched her version. Well, yes and no. Most songs have something inherent about the way they’re done which is in itself an arrange­ment. What Johnny did was to retain that part, which was absolutely right for the song, and then orchestrate it. The two records sounded similar, but I am sure that ours was better than the American one. Certainly from an orchestral point of view we had a much better sound, and it deserved to be number one.

 

With all this talent on the move, Brian and I had to establish a working formula. For the Beatles, we agreed that if possible we would release a single every three months and a long-playing record every year. Having Gerry, and Billy, and Cilla as well, we had to stagger the issue of their singles too, so that as far as possible there was an overlap but no clash. It seemed to work. Out of the fifty-two weeks of 1963, we topped the charts no less than thirty-seven times.

 

Sleep was something of a luxury that year, because in addition to the Epstein stable I was still recording a lot of my earlier artists, like Ron Goodwin, Matt Monro, and dear old Jimmy Shand. But the year belonged to the Beatles, and the search for talent from the north became a kind of Klondike gold rush. Record companies are noto­rious for trying to hop on a bandwagon, and if there’s a smell of anything new happening they all rush after it, even if it’s something as tasteless as punk rock. After the Beatles had struck gold, every record company sent men up to Liverpool to find a group - and they all came back with one! Some made it, many didn’t. Pye had the Search­ers, who had a big hit with ‘Needles and Pins’. Even my own assistant, Ron Richards, went north in search of musical nuggets, and found, not in Liverpool but in Man­chester, a group called the Hollies. He came back and said; ‘I’ve got this group. What shall I do with them?’

 

‘Sign them up,’ I said, wondering where this bonanza was going to stop. ‘But I can’t cope with them. You’ll have to record them yourself.1 Of course they proved to be immensely successful, with one of them, Graham Nash, going on to become an American superstar with Crosby, Stills and Nash.

 

The flood of adulation that greeted this music from the north broke open another dam. Northern became chic. Northern writers and comedians became the ‘in’ thing. It was the beginning of decentralisation from London, which had always been the Mecca of the entertainment business, monopolising television, radio and records. Suddenly we found that there were other people out there.

 

By the same token, 1 think it’s rather sad that recently there has been a reaction from people in Liverpool who have almost rejected the Beatles because they ‘deserted’ their home town. There was a lot of hostility to a plan to erect a statue to them. The feeling was: ‘Why the hell should we? They left us anyway, and they don’t give a damn about Liverpool any more.’ That’s very unfair. They had to leave Liverpool; they couldn’t stay there all their lives. Why should they be singled out as deserting the city, when there are almost no world entertainers who have stayed in their home towns? And they have never denied their background - a background that gave the world two tunesmiths of genius.

 

I have often been asked if I could have written any of the Beatles’ tunes, and the answer is definitely no: for one basic reason. I didn’t have their simple approach to music. Of the four, Paul was the one most likely to be a profes­sional musician, in the sense of learning the trade, learning about notation and harmony and counterpoint. At that time he was friendly with Jane Asher, who came from a musical family. Her mother was a fine musician, a freelance teacher who by sheer coincidence had taught me the oboe when I was at the Guildhall. I think that that family must have had quite an influence on Paul.

 

Soon after we got together he started taking piano lessons. I, on the other hand, bought myself a guitar and started to teach myself that. There was good reason for both: in the early stages there was a certain lack of communication, and we had to find common ground in which to talk about music. If I suggested a particular complicated chord or harmony to them, and they didn’t know it, I would go and play it on the piano and say: ‘Look, this kind of thing.’ Then they would get their guitars and start trying to find the same notes on them. But they wouldn’t get it very readily, because although they could see my fingers on the piano, that didn’t mean much to them. All they could try to work out was the sounds they were hearing. But if I played the chord on the guitar myself, they would be able to look at my fingers and say: ‘Oh, yes. (t’s that kind of shape.’ With both the guitar and the piano you can learn a great deal from the shape of the player’s fingers. But the two instruments are very different, and there’s no way of extrapolating from one to the other - which is why I started the guitar. John and Paul, however, learned the piano far more quickly than I could master their instrument. So I dropped the guitar.

 

But at least we now had a rapport, and could talk to each other about particular notes. There’s no doubt that Lennon and McCartney were good musicians. They had good musical brains, and the brain is where music origi­nates—it has nothing to do with your fingers. As it happened, they could also play their own instruments very well. And since those early days they’ve all improved, especially Paul- He’s an excellent musical all-rounder, probably the best bass-guitar player there is, a first-class drummer, brilliant guitarist and competent piano-player.

 

But those accomplishments didn’t affect their extremely practical approach to music. They simply couldn’t under­stand the need for complication. For example, John once came to me while I was working in the studio with a saxophone section, overdubbing one of his tunes. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I like what you’ve done there, but I think it would be a good idea if the saxes did such-and-such . . .’, and with that he picked up his guitar and played me some notes.

 

‘Yes, that’s quite easy,’ I said. ‘It’ll be a good idea for the saxes to reinforce that.’ I quickly wrote out the notes, turned to the saxophone players and said, ‘O.K., chaps, these are the notes you play.’

 

‘No,’ said John, ‘they’re not those notes. These are the notes they play - look . . .’ and he proceeded to play them to me all over again.

 

‘I know, John,’ I explained. ‘They’re the notes that you’re playing. But I’m giving them the notes for their instruments that will correspond to what you’re playing.’

 

‘But you’ve given them the wrong names of the notes!’

 

‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Because their instruments are in different keys. That’s an E flat saxophone, and that’s a B flat saxophone. When you play a C on that one, it sounds in B flat. When you play a C on the other saxophone it plays an E fiat. So I’ve got to work out other notes to compensate for that. Do you see?’

 

‘That’s bloody silly, isn’t it?’ he said in disgust.

 

‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

 

He turned and walked away and left me to it. He just couldn’t understand one of those silly little facts of life. Equally, I think that if Paul, for instance, had learned music ‘properly’ - not just the piano, but correct notation for writing and reading music, all the harmony and coun­terpoint that 1 had to go through, and techniques of orchestration—it might well have inhibited him. He thought so too. (And after all, why should he bother, when he had someone around who could do it for him?) Once you start being taught things, your mind is channelled in a particular way. Paul didn’t have that channelling, so he had freedom, and could think of things that I would have considered outrageous. I could admire them, but my mus­ical training would have prevented me from thinking of them myself. I think, too, that the ability to write good tunes often comes when someone is not fettered by the rules and regulations of harmony and counterpoint. A tune is a one-fingered thing, something that you can whistle in the street; it doesn’t depend upon great harmonies. The ability to create them is simply a gift.

 

There have been many great musicians who couldn’t write a pop tune to save their lives. Equally, the pop world in particular has seen many who have known nothing of music but could write great tunes. Lionel Bart, for exam­ple, can’t play an instrument. I believe he just whistles his tunes as he thinks of them. Irving Berlin couldn’t read music, and could only play the piano in the key of G flat, which is all the black notes. He only played on the black notes. It was the only way he knew. Once he had some success, he could afford to have a special piano built for him. It had a lever at the side, like a fruit-machine, and if he wanted to change key while keeping his fingers on the same notes, he just pulled that.

 

Wherever the genius came from, the Beatles could cer­tainly write great tunes. Of course, they were already idols in Liverpool, but that was a long way away. By the middle of the year we had screaming kids outside the Abbey Road studios from the moment they heard the Beatles were coming. Their information grapevine was amazing. We tried to keep the session times secret, because the kids became a real problem, and it became harder and harder just to get into the studios. Even so, it was still a fairly local phenomenon - a private English pleasure.

 

That was before America.

 

 


Date: 2015-02-28; view: 800


<== previous page | next page ==>
Two Heads Are Better Than One | Layering the Cake
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.027 sec.)