‘I once saw a film of Picasso at work. He starts with an idea, then he overlays it with something else. He still has the same basic idea, but he changes it by putting something else over it. Sometimes the original idea can get obliterated.’
Complications arise when it’s not just a matter of adding something to an existing track, but taking bits out of two separate tracks. ‘Strawberry Fields’ was one of the more complicated creations, in a technical sense. They did the usual basic tracks, then John, playing it at home, decided it wasn’t what he’d wanted.
‘He’d wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous. He said could I do him a new line-up with the strings. So I wrote a new score and we recorded that. But he didn’t like it. It still wasn’t right. What he would now like was the first half from the early recording, plus the second half of the new recording. Would I put them together for him? I said it was impossible. They were in different keys and different tempos.’
While George Martin was trying to puzzle out a way of getting round this, without having to do the whole recording session all over again, he noticed that by speeding up the slower tempo recording by five per cent, it not only brought it to the same tempo as the other one, it brought it in the same key. By chance, he was able to join both together, without too much trouble.
The Beatles have never worried about being told things were impossible, nor have they worried when George has told them that new ideas they’ve thought of were very old hat. They got an idea at the end of ‘She Loves You’, which they thought was really new. This was to go down on the last yeh yeh to an added sixth. ‘I told them it was corny. Glenn Miller was doing it 20 years ago. They said so what. That was what they wanted.’
George Martin sees his work with them as having been in two stages. ‘At first, they needed me enormously. They knew nothing and they relied on me to produce their sound, the deafening sound they’d produced in the Cavern, but which nobody was doing on record. People like Cliff and the Shadows were very quiet and subdued.
‘The second stage is now, when they know what they want to put in a record, but they rely on me to arrange it for them.
‘In between, I’ve changed from being the gaffer to four Herberts from Liverpool to what I am now, clinging on to the last vestiges of recording power.’
This is a half joke, he hopes. There is a bit of teasing on both sides. The Beatles tend to mock him slightly. He in turn is slightly amused by their innocence and naivety. He is worried that it might one day make them go too far, not in music, but in films perhaps, refusing to rely on anyone experienced, such as himself. He did think they were taking on too much with their TV film. From the response of the British TV critics, he was right.
He thinks Paul has the most all-round musical talent, with an ability to turn out tunes almost to order. ‘He’s the sort of Rodgers and Hart of the two. He can turn out excellent potboilers. I don’t think he’s particularly proud of this. All the time he’s trying to do better, especially trying to equal John’s talent for words. Meeting John has made him try for deeper lyrics. But for meeting John, I doubt if Paul could have written “Eleanor Rigby”.
‘Paul needs an audience, but John doesn’t. John is very lazy, unlike Paul. Without Paul he would often give up. John writes for his own amusement. He would be content to play his tunes to Cyn. Paul likes a public.
‘John’s concept of music is very interesting. I was once playing Ravel’s “Daphne and Chloë” to him. He said he couldn’t grasp it because the melodic lines were too long. He said he looked upon writing music as doing little bits, which you then join up.’
Both Paul and John do have natural musical talent and originality, but they both have it in different ways. Paul can produce easy, sweet music, like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’, while John’s music is much bumpier and more aggressive, like ‘I Am The Walrus’. In a way, it comes out of their personalities. As people, long before they started writing songs, John was always the rough, aggressive one and Paul the sweeter and the smoother.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about them as composers is that despite writing so closely together for over ten years they are still strong individuals. Each has retained his own flavour.
If anything, their individuality has got stronger over the years. In their rock and roll days, both were writing the same sort of songs, but since ‘Yesterday’, a Paul or a John song is fairly easily identifiable. They’ve influenced each other, in that Paul has been spurred on to try harder with his lyrics, while John has been spurred on by Paul’s keenness and dedication. But they are still very different.
Their music has been constantly analysed and praised and interpreted, right from the beginning in 1963, when The Times music man had admired their ‘pandiatonic clusters’. They are said to have been influenced by everything, from Negro blues to Magyar dances.
References to drugs have been seen everywhere, once it was known they took drugs. Even the ‘help’ in Ringo’s ‘A Little Help From My Friends’ was said to mean pot. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was said to stand for LSD, which was just a coincidence. John’s son Julian had drawn a picture for John showing Lucy, a girl in his class, in the sky. In America it was said that ‘meeting a man from the motor trade’ obviously meant an abortionist. It was in fact a joke reference to their friend Terry Doran, who used to be a car salesman.
They have used drug slang in their songs, but not as much as people have said. Strangely enough, several deliberate slang obscenities have gone unnoticed. In ‘Penny Lane’, for example, the finger pie referred to is an old Liverpool obscenity, used by Liverpool lads about Liverpool lasses.
They are amused by all the interpretations. John deliberately let all the verbal jokes and stream-of-consciousness nonsense stuff stay as they had come out of his head in ‘I Am The Walrus’, knowing a lot of people would have fun trying to analyse them.
But whether they are the greatest songwriters in the world today, as some have said, or even better than Schubert, doesn’t interest them. They never discuss or try to evaluate or appreciate their music. When forced to talk about it, Paul says simply that it must obviously get better all the time.
‘Each time we just want to do something different. After “Please Please Me”, we decided we must do something different for the next song. We’d put on one funny hat, so we took it off and looked for another one to put on.
‘Why should we ever want to go back? That would be soft. It would be like sticking to grey suits all your life.
‘I suppose everybody would like to do this, try something different every time they do any work. We do, because it’s just a hobby, that’s all. We put our feet up and enjoy it all the time.’
George doesn’t think they’ve done many songs worth talking about yet (his songwriting is discussed separately later).
But now and again George does yearn for the old days. ‘I often think it would be nice to play together again. We’ve never done it since we stopped touring. Perhaps one day we might hire a studio, just to play in for ourselves.’
‘They’re good songs,’ says John, ‘but nothing brilliant. I just feel indifferent when I hear them on the radio. I never listen to them properly. Maybe if someone was attacking them, saying they were rotten, then maybe I’d work up some reaction to them.’
They never play their own records, except perhaps when they’re about to start a new album. Then they might play the previous one through, just to see where they got up to last time. None of them sings their own songs, either before they’ve recorded them or afterwards. When John or the others break into a chorus of ‘She Loves You’, it’s as if they’re ridiculing a corny song written by someone else.