Sir George Martin, The 'Fifth Beatle,' Is Dead At 90
by Douglas Wolk
March 09, 2016
Sir George Martin, the music producer who signed the Beatles to a recording contract in 1962 and was their intimate collaborator as they together transformed popular music, died Tuesday at the age of 90.
Martin's death was confirmed by Adam Sharp, his manager in the U.K. In a statement, Sharp said:
Sir George Martin passed away peacefully at home yesterday evening, Tuesday March 8th. The family would like to thank everyone for their thoughts, prayers and messages of support.
Martin was often referred to as the "Fifth Beatle." He scoffed, but the band wouldn't have been the Beatles we know without him.
Martin's 1979 memoir (co-authored with Jeremy Hornsby) was titled All You Need Is Ears -- but his ears, and his instincts as a music producer, were extraordinary.
A classically trained composer, George Martin began to work for the British record label EMI's imprint Parlophone Records in 1950, overseeing classical recordings as well as comedy records by the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Bernard Cribbins.
By 1962, when Cribbins' song "Right Said Fred" became a hit in the U.K., George Martin was running Parlophone Records and looking to sign up a rock 'n' roll band. The Beatles auditioned for him in June of 1962.
In a 2011 BBC interview, Martin said: "They had this wonderful charisma. They made you feel good to be with them. And I thought their music was rubbish."
Martin signed the Beatles anyway, and came to love their songs. For the rest of the 1960s, he was their closest collaborator, producing almost all of the band's music, playing piano with them, writing their orchestral arrangements and figuring out how to turn John Lennon and Paul McCartney's wilder ideas into records.
In 2011, Martin described how he'd produced one of Lennon's signature songs:
"There was one time on 'Rain' when I decided to play around with tapes, and I took John's voice off as a separate item and put it on a quarter-inch tape and turned it back to front and slid it around a bit and then put it in on the end of the song. And I played it to John when he came back and he said, 'That's gear! What is it?' And I said, 'It's you!' And I explained to him what I'd done. And from that moment he wanted everything backward."
When he wasn't in the studio with the Beatles, George Martin produced records by British pop acts like Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Shirley Bassey.
In 1977, while visiting the West Indies, Martin fell in love with the island of Montserrat. He built a recording complex for his company AIR Studios there with the money he'd made producing post-Beatles hits like the band America's "Sister Golden Hair."
AIR Studios Montserrat was destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and Martin gradually retired from recording as hearing loss robbed him of his golden ears. His final hit song was the best-selling single of all time: a year after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, he produced Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997."
"As a whole, I've had a wonderful life," Martin told the BBC in 1995. "I've met the most wonderful people, worked with the greatest of artists. I'm very fortunate. I've got no gripes at all."
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