How much does Beatle music - as heard on record - owe to the quartet of performers, how much to George Martin, their recording manager, their arranger, their technical expert, their musical mentor? Are they mere puppets for a “pop” Svengali? Are they really as imaginative musically as they often seem, or is this another instance of the medium being the message?

After all the highbrow hot-air that has been breathed about the Beatles phenomenon, it is refreshing to have George Martin’s own view. He talks very much as a practical musician, not in generalities but specifically of his own part in the Beatles’ success. When he first met them - they were then doing arrangements of such songs as “Over the Rainbow” and Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big” he found that “their own compositions weren’t very good at all.” They would come to him with a song, which consisted simply of a conventional chorus. “They’d be puzzled how to begin the thing, how to end the thing and what to do in the middle.” Martin, having timed the chorus, would for his part point out (obviously enough) that they needed more than 70 seconds. “I used to be the specialist in beginnings, endings, and solos.”

But then as their musical imagination started developing, so they started thinking up their own ways of beginning, ending, and putting in solos. “I was the natural person they turned to, being on hand and being a musician, and they would ask, ‘Can we do such-and-such?’” In this way Martin was “very much part of them in the writing field.”

It is at this point that Martin will remind you of one of the comic records he made with Peter Sellers - a sketch about a horse-dealing major who ran an academy for rock-and-roll singers. Of young Twit Conway, the major says to the woman reporter: “You’ve seen for yourself: he’s just as normal and well-balanced as any other 17-year-old ex-plasterer’s mate suddenly earning a thousand quid a week.” The Beatles, Martin admits, have indeed changed, personally as well as musically. “’It would have affected Winston Churchill, let alone four 22-year-olds.”

Whatever the stresses, Martin’s own relationship with the group has remained firm, even though his function has continually been modified from record to record, even number to number.” I’m rather amazed that I am still with them,” he says bluntly, “and not because we’re having difficulties. We still get on frightfully well, but I’m surprised that after all the changes they still want me.”

Just how they still want him comes out in many different ways. There is no fixed formula for the generation of a Beatles track. It depends very much on what kind of number it is, and who has written it. If Paul McCartney is the composer, and it is a “sweet” song not intended to be performed by the group as a whole, then as a rule, Martin reports, “he would play it to me on my piano over there or on his in St John’s Wood, when we’d be meeting purely socially. He would ask what I thought of it, and we’d have an exchange of ideas. I would get his ideas, and put ideas into him.”

Paul, as Martin sees it, is the most practical music man of the four, the one most likely to turn into a stage-composer, to become a Richard Rodgers. John Lennon, on the other hand, is not so articulate in musical terms.

Martin did the score of Lennon’s “I am the Walrus.” He went round to see Martin in his expensive modern terrace house in the new-Forsyte land north of the Bayswater Road. “He tried to tell me what he wanted, but an hour was not really enough. I did the score more or less by myself, and he was very pleased with it, but I am still not sure that it is really what he wanted, whereas if I do something with Paul I’m much more sure that it’s the way he’s thinking.”

Martin has all along taken control of the technical side of the Beatles’ records. His influence there came to a peak with “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” as he says “a postgraduate exercise after Sellers.” There were pointers before that to the Beatles’ developing interest in sophisticated tape techniques - in “Tomorrow Never Knows” from “Revolver,” for example, and “Strawberry Fields” on the single that came between “Revolver” and “Sergeant Pepper.” That last number, Martin feels, was a big signpost. “And the scoring was good too,” he adds, tongue in cheek.

This is an edited extract, click to read more