Geoff Emerick

The phone rings. I pick it up.

“Paul?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Paul. It’s George Martin.”

Gulp.

I’m 25 years old. There aren’t many people who can make me feel like a slavering child. But on the top 10 list of those who could, George Martin holds at least three of the places.

“Hallo George. How are you?”

Oh, come on! Did you expect Oscar Wilde?

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you Paul. I need a favour from you.”

Double gulp.

George Martin. Needs A Favour. From Me.

George left EMI after having it thrust in his face that a) he was just an employee and b) that he was responsible for a huge percentage of the company’s profits.

The employee thing came up because he had tried to persuade the management that the farthing a record they were paying The Beatles was, in the circumstances (world domination), perhaps a little too parsimonious?

He was made to feel he was being disloyal, and should be a good soldier.

The final straw came over lunch with head of the company Sir Joseph Lockwood. George thought he deserved a rise.

I’m not going to re-read the whole of his autobiography, All You Need Is Ears, for confirmation of this (go read it yourself) but as I remember it Lockwood agreed to only a part of the rise George thought he was due.

And in doing so, he tried to pep George up by telling him what a great job he was doing. All those hits. All those albums on the chart. All that lovely money rolling into EMI.

As a motivational talk it ranks up there with the very best, don’t you think?

So in 1965, George left EMI, taking with him his colleagues John Burgess and Ron Richards. Together with Peter Sullivan from Decca they built AIR Studios. They also managed to keep most of the acts they were producing for their previous employers – most notably, of course, The Beatles for George Martin.

Now it’s 1974 and I have a session booked in at AIR Studio One with CBS signing Asha Puthli, the only woman I’ve ever known who mistook rudeness for desire.

“Dahlinng. I know why you insult me so. You want to FUCK me.”

I digress. Here’s George’s problem. At the same time I’m booked in with Asha, he now has a session booked with The Mahavishnu Orchestra, jazz guitarist John McLaughlin’s ambitious multi-ethnic and cross-genre project.

Trouble is, as well as the members of The Mahavishni Orchestra, McLaughlin wants to get the London Symphony Orchestra involved. Suddenly, a session that would comfortably fit onto 24 tracks in Studio Two, requires Studios One and Two, and 48 tracks. George is going to sync the equipment in both studios and make the first 48-track recording I’ve heard of. Didn’t know such a thing was possible.

On top of all that, to pull it off he needs Geoff Emerick to engineer, and I’ve specifically booked Geoff on my session, in Studio One.

“So, Paul. Is there any way you could move your session to another day?”

This is tougher than it sounds. I’ve booked my favourite band, Kokomo, to lay down the backing tracks, and Kokomo has some busy session musicians among its nine members.

To add to the logistical problems, Asha Puthli is struggling with work permits and may, at any time, be asked to leave the country.

On the other hand, George Martin is asking for a favour. So it takes me about 30 seconds to pretend I’m really struggling with it, and, gosh, this is hard. But, “Yes, I can do that, George”.

“Paul, thank you so much!”

And then he says: “I owe you one.” Gentleman George, as always.

The Mahavishnu recordings, released as Apocalypse, made history. My recordings with Asha Puthli, not so much.

But those sessions did go ahead a week later, with Kokomo and Geoff Emerick. Geoff took such pride in setting the studio up for a nine-piece band, who were going to play live. He was thrilled. So thrilled, he thanked me for booking him!

You have no idea, he said, what a pleasure it is to hear musicians playing together like this, rather than building the tracks one or two instruments at a time (which had become the norm as producers sought more ways of taking the ‘room’ out of recording, separating each instrument completely from its bandmates).

They were a joy those sessions. As for Asha Puthli, her work permit failed to materialise, so I took her to a studio in Cologne, West Germany for some of the most miserable vocal overdubs I’ve ever been involved with.

By this time I think she detested me, and I can’t say I blamed her. We simply couldn’t establish any rapport, and having had to drag myself to Germany, I just wanted to get it over with.

Still, the four songs we recorded made it onto an album that was released as She Loves To Hear The Music, where my name appears alongside the producer legends that are Teo Macero and Del Newman.

And to give her credit, the song I’m putting up this week is Asha’s own, You’ve Been Loud Too Long. Listening to the track, Kokomo’s fabulous funk and John Barham’s trademark strings combine to great effect.

Asha’s vocals, after all this time, bear testament to her professionalism. She could have phoned it in, but she didn’t. At one point, during the German sessions, she was struggling with Neil Sedaka’s Laughter In The Rain. “I hate this song! I never want to hear it again”, she said. Amen to that, I thought. And then on we went, two stubborn pros, looking for magic and refusing to be defeated.

Forty years later, despite its tortuous genesis, the album, I’m astonished to discover, is available on iTunes. And it’s ok.

And George Martin? He never did repay that favour.

Well, unless you count the kudos every time I tell this story.

Actually, yes. That’s payment enough.

George, you’re off the hook.

And Kokomo? More about them in another post.

One of the great things about getting into record production in the mid-70s was that, with the exception of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, most of your heroes were still around.

Some of my heroes were likely the same as yours. But there was a second tier of people to whom you might not give a second thought. For me they were fascinating.

So it was, for instance, that I booked David Mason, the guy who played piccolo trumpet on Penny Lane, to come and work his magic on a track I was producing, the Mister Men theme song as performed by a duo with the unlikely name Bugatti & Musker.

On the same session I had Captain Mainwaring, disguised as Arthur Lowe. I stood by his side as he listened back to his contribution. He muttered to himself: “Silly old c***”, before turning his head slightly sideways, giving me a knowing smile.

Or you could book Tommy Reilly, the harmonica player you’d known all your life – the man who played the theme tune to Dixon Of Dock Green.

Amazingly, you could also call on the services of Geoff Emerick, who won a Grammy for his engineering work on Sgt Pepper.

As a journalist, I’d known Geoff for a while. He was a quiet, gentle and unassuming guy – excellent credentials for an engineer, a job that required the patience of Job whilst employing deep knowledge of all that was required to create sound out of thin air.

It probably never occurred to you – did it? – that while The Beatles were spending six months (an unprecedented amount of time back then) creating Sgt Pepper, there were people up in the control room, spending hours, days, weeks, months of their lives waiting to turn on the red light; having to remain focused for take after take after take of songs we now regard as classics; but which for them became like Chinese water torture.

There’s a track on Revolver, the Beatles’ seventh album, called Tomorrow Never Knows. It sounds like an engineer’s nightmare. For starters, John Lennon wanted a sound like “a thousand Tibetan monks chanting on a mountain-top”. This was Geoff Emerick’s first song as engineer on a Beatles track. By George Martin’s account, Geoff got stuck in, and was specifically responsible for the, at the time, very strange sound of John Lennon’s vocal.

If you were paying proper attention to The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows was the final confirmation that the Mop Tops had gone, to be replaced by an exciting enigma that was exploring music and recording in ways that no-one had ever done before.

Geoff Emerick made a massive contribution to that. You don’t win Grammys for just turning up. I’ll talk about working with Geoff in a future post.

But all this Beatle talk, and Revolver in particular, reminds me that when I first heard Yellow Submarine it struck me with a sense of profound melancholy. I didn’t hear it as a singalong, but as an other-worldly excursion into all sorts of sub-conscious emotions that I couldn’t put my finger on.

I know what you’re thinking. Oh yes I do.

But in 1966, in Wolverhampton, we didn’t even know drugs existed. We could just about afford three pints of scrumpy on a Saturday night.

Fast forward eight years, and my next appointment walks in. He’s a guy named Pete Bennett, and he records under the name Rhys Eye.

Usually, in these situations, you were handed a tape, or a cassette, and you’d listen and then say “No”. Very, very occasionally you would say “Yes”.

But Pete Bennett was extraordinarily nervous. “I’ve got this brilliant idea.”

“Well, let’s hear it then”.

“Trouble is, it’s so simple, if I let you hear it, you’ll nick it”.

To cut a long story short, we finally agreed that he would come back the next day and I would present him with a signed statement to the effect that, whether I liked it or not, his idea was his idea and I would do nothing to compromise his ownership.

Which is how I came to record a cover version of Yellow Submarine that exactly fit with my own emotional reading of the song.

This is a version which might never have seen the light of day. I made the mistake of giving a copy to my contact at ATV Music, which by then owned the Lennon-McCartney publishing rights. I calculated that they would love this new lease of life for a song that was hardly built for cover versions, and would add their weight to promoting it.

How wrong I was. A few days later, he called me and asked me not to release it. “Why on earth not?” I asked. “Well, I’ve played it to John and he doesn’t feel it truly represents the song he wrote.”

To this day, I have no idea what this sham was about. Here was a publisher turning down a cover version and – get this – lying to me! No way had he played Rhys Eye’s version to John Lennon. (In any event, it was Paul McCartney who wrote the song, as John related in a 1980 interview).

But at the time, I had to make a decision. Effectively I was being told I would be defying John Lennon’s express wishes. In other words I would be upsetting one of my greatest heroes, and one of the world’s biggest and most revered stars.

Well, obviously, I released the record. I loved it; still do.

But no-one need have worried. It really didn’t see the light of day. Never got a play on Radio One, died the proverbial. If you’re still out there, Pete Bennett/Rhys Eye, I kept the faith.

DRIVER 67

George Martin STILL owes me that favour

Saying ‘no’ to John Lennon – not sure about that!