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Last update : 13/01/21

Deafness Research UK is the only national charity dedicated to helping deaf and hard of hearing people through medical research. Devoid of government funding, the organisation relies on monetary donations and fund raising events to continue its world-leading research into deafness and hearing loss.

Over the past few years there has been a slew of journalistic and academic articles about the threat to young people of loudness via excessive use of personal stereos. Musicians also, have hardly escaped lightly from the high decibel, ear splitting sound levels regularly generated at rock concerts. An advice booklet produced by a campaign group called HEAR (Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers), maintains that 60% of inductees into the ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ are hearing impaired.

Sir George Martin, the world’s best known record producer, suffered from progressive hearing loss and tinnitus, and wore two hearing aids. By his late 60’s, years of listening to huge monitor speakers in confined spaces had taken its toll. The man who titled his 1979 autobiography “All you need is ears,” had to virtually make do without his two most treasured possessions. Nevertheless, by his own admission, it had been a great life…

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In 2003, Martin published “Playback,” essentially volume two of his memoirs, but few were able to justify the rediculously high asking prive of £234! A touching, affectionate lookback over the producer’s career, it’s never self revalatory, and all rather redundant in view of the excessive cost and few surprises scattered amongst the text. Predictably aimed at the diehards, it’s precisely this group of fanatics who would have been the most disappointed. The initial print run was two thousand, and the occasional copy surfaces at astronomical prices. Whilst reviewers took issue with the text – heavily skewed in favour of his non-Beatle related production work – there’s nevertheless some interesting anedotal material about his early life. Early struggles with scarlet fever and the Luftwaffe; and the internal squabbles with the pennypinching EMI over his salary are mildly intriguing. The fascimiles of office diaries and letters hint at an individual burning the candle at both ends – his production work would spend 37 weeks at number one in 1963 – but there’s little here to suggest anything but a genial and affable man, despite his driven personality.

His most important contribution to popular music has been a sense of adventure, and an awareness of the sonic possibilities of the recording studio as a workshop. In that respect, meeting The Beatles was like a holy summit between kindred spirits.

‘‘When I joined EMI,’‘ he recalls, ‘‘the criterion by which recordings were judged was their faithfulness to the original. If you made a recording that was so good that you couldn’t tell the difference between the recording and the actual performance, that was the acme. And I questioned that. I thought, O.K., we’re all taking photographs of an existing event. But we don’t have to make a photograph; we can paint. And that prompted me to experiment.’‘

Some of his ideas found outlets in the comedy records he made, starting in the late 1950’s, with Peter Sellers, Flanders and Swann, Spike Milligan and Beyond the Fringe (which included Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller).

‘‘Nowadays people don’t think of aural images,’‘ he said, ‘‘because we’re so incredibly conditioned by television and computer screens. But in those days there was no television, or very little, and when people listened to records they could imagine what was going on. So you would create a sound picture by means of — well, if a couple was walking in the park, you’d have a little crunch of gravel, birds in the background, the faint hum of traffic.’‘

:https://americansongwriter.com/just-how-important-was-george-martin-to-the-beatles/

Various aspects of Martin’s life have now come under close scrutiny in recent years. These include the circumstances around which he came to record The Beatles, and how they were inextricably linked to an emotionally turbulent time in his life. Even to admit in future interviews that the decision to sign the group had not been his would have reopened wounds, in addition to prompting further investigation into the actual circumstances of his life at the time. He therefore chose to promulgate a myth in order to safeguard his second family from press intrusion. Yes – he had met Brian Epstein in early ’62, yes – he had listened to the Decca audition tape and yes – he detected a certain ‘something’ in the raw quality of the performances, but no – he did not instigate an audition test for the group on June 6, 1962. Frankly, he would probably have had nothing further to do with the group.

However, by the spring of ’62, Martin was financially maintaining his former matrimonial home, renting an apartment for clandestine meetings with his secretary Judy Lockhart Smith – who would subsequently become his second wife – and ill advisedly antagonizing E.M.I.‘s management with improved pay demands; senior board members who, in fact, were well aware of his contravention of the social mores of the day. So The Beatles ultimately had three men to thank for their E.M.I. contract – Sid Coleman of Ardmore and Beechwood, song plugger Kim bennett, and EMI Managing Director Len Wood. Thanks to the unstinting efforts of the foremost Beatles researcher Mark Lewisohn (who lists his sources), we now know what actually transpired. The Beatles were signed to a recording contract, because Sid Colman wanted the publishing rights to the Lennon & McCartney originals, ‘Love of the Loved,’ ‘Hello Little Girl’ and especially ‘Like Dreamers Do,’ which he had heard on the Decca audition tape, and envisioned a hit single to be paired with another original composition. But since Coleman ran an EMI publishing company, Ardmore and Beechwood, EMI had to sign The Beatles to a recording contract for Colman to secure those copyrights. Right after he met with Epstein, Colman spoke to his right-hand man, a tireless song plugger, Mr. Kim Bennett, who also heard great promise in ‘Like Dreamers Do.’ Colman, and especially the persistent Bennett, lobbied EMI’s A&R men (the men who signed acts to recording contracts) to grab this Liverpool band with the weird name, but nobody cared.

Then, Bennett suggested to Colman, “Why don’t you go across to Len Wood and say that if EMI give us a record, we’ll pay for its cost. Because it’s a group, it’ll be a straightforward musical production. No orchestra. We’ll have got two copyrights for the next 50 years, plus maybe a royalty on the record.”

Len Wood initially demurred, but when Martin subsequently asked his boss for a raise and astoundingly – a royalty of the records he was producing – E.M.I.‘s managing director refused both requests whilst seeking to put this upstart in his place. Despite his huffing and puffing, the beleagured George was compelled to accept a new three year fixed salaried (only) contract.

Coleman would subsequently pitch Wood The Beatles idea again, and this time he said yes. Bennett recalls, “After a short, stunned silence, I said, ‘Oh? Who’s gonna do it, then?’ [And he said,] ‘George Martin.’ “The Beatles record,” Bennett explains, “was going to be made as a gesture to Sid, to give Sid Colman a sop. Len was going to bow to our wishes at last.”

And stick it to George Martin, who had no idea what was going on until Wood ordered him to sign The Beatles. Both Ron Richards, Martin’s assistant, and Norman “Hurricane” Smith, a balance engineer at Abeey Road studios (who would engineer The Beatles’ records through Rubber Soul) corroborate this story. “L.G. Wood didn’t approve of people having affairs,” he says. “L.G. virtually ordered George to record The Beatles.”

None of these revelations detract in any way from Martin’s production work with The Beatles. One can also sympathize with his efforts to secure a royalty rate, whilst equally understanding E.Mi.I.‘s reluctance to open such a “can of worms.” From today’s perspective, the collapse of his first marriage and his subsequent affair would be routine fodder for the tabloid press, but back in the early 60’s this was scandalous behaviour indeed. It is easy therefore, to understand his airbrushing of certain facts, yet over the course of more than half a century, this distortion of the truth would label Decca’s managing Director Dick Rowe, with the unenviable title of “the man who turned down The Beatles.” In reality, George Martin had seen no more in the group than his counterpart.

The following link is further testimony to Martin’s unwavering allegiance to distorted history. With Paul McCartney in attendance at a 2010 live interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, the ever affable Martin would maintain that he granted an audition test out of sympathy for the Beatles’ manager, so crestfallen did Brian Epstein appear after he confessed to finding little of any real merit in the Decca audition tape.

https://www.beatlesbible.com/2010/04/28/george-martin-speaks-in-aid-of-deafness-research-uk/

If George Harrison was heard to say in a London High Court in 1998 that ‘in an effort to tell what they know, people often tell more than they know,’ I might add that ‘individuals who wish history had been different can come to believe that it was different.’

Born in 1926, Martin was part of more than one successive generation for whom divorce was heavily frowned upon. In personally escaping the stigma of being officially classified as a “bastard” by one month only, I had first hand evidence of how uncomfortable a subject like divorce could be amongst my own parents. As an adult, it would never have bothered me anyway, for how can any innocent child be a bastard? But such common knowledge would have marginalised any child of the 60’s at school, and no amount of changes in the law would have dispelled commonly held convictions. Nevertheless, the Royal Commission had been set up in 1951 as a response to pressure both within and outside Parliament for a change to the laws on divorce which, following the implementation of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, permitted divorce only on the grounds of matrimonial fault evidenced by adultery, cruelty and desertion for 3 or more years. The disruptions and social change generated by the second world war, combined with changing attitudes toward the natureof marriage in which it was seen increasingly as a companionate union rather than a binding legal duty, led to the demand that marriages should be terminated if relationships ‘broke down’ rather than as the consequence of a matrimonial offence. Nevertheless, despite this shift in legal due process, Martin’s behaviour towards another E.M.I. employee would have curried precious little favour with a devout churchgoer like Len Wood, quite the contrary in fact. After the publication of Lewisohn’s book “Tune In Vol 1” in the fall of 2013, Martin would remain tight lipped about these revelations for the remainder of his life. Having commended Lewisohn’s tenacity and commitment to ‘the truth’ in previous Beatles book publications by the said author, what else could he possibly have done? But spare a thought for Dick Rowe. The Decca audition tape captured little if anything of the group’s “Cavern on-stage fire,” and the decision to sign the local Dagenham based Tremeloes made sense.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/the-man-who-rejected-the-beatles-6782008.html