For someone who made the best pop music of all time, is it fair to say that George Martin is still underappreciated by the world?
Sure, he didn’t necessarily need to be given the same sort of treatment that the rest of The Beatles got whenever they were hounded by fans, but if it weren’t for his ear for production and finding the right addition to their songs, chances are the Fab Four would have never grown into the band that they would eventually become. He was the one who allowed them to bloom creatively in many respects, but he did feel terrible when he realised that he wasn’t living up to the band’s standards.
Then again, a couple of kids from Liverpool didn’t exactly impress Martin when he first started producing them. They didn’t exactly have the greatest track record for writing fantastic songs, and while they did eventually start giving him music that he could work with, it was going to be an uphill battle for them to convince him that ‘Please Please Me’ was a song that they could have worked with.
But after experimenting with everything under the sun on Revolver, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ felt different. This was the turning point where they were going to become a different band altogether, but John Lennon could be extremely critical of his own work, and even when working on a song that was as perfect as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Martin couldn’t help but blame himself when he heard that Lennon wasn’t as thrilled with what they had done with the song over time.
Which is strange considering that this is one of the most beautiful songs that The Beatles ever made. It’s definitely odd, and there are more than a few moments on the record where they were doing avant-garde experiments, but even after transposing two completely different takes on top of each other, Martin felt that working on some of the other iterations of Beatles material, like the LOVE album, was his excuse to right a few wrongs.
He felt that he needed to sit out The Beatles Anthology thanks to problems with his hearing, but ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ getting a reimagined treatment was his chance to give people another look at what Lennon might have wanted, saying, “The song went through a few changes, and we recorded it more than once, eventually combining two completely different versions, in different keys and different tempos. I love the song to this day, but John told me many years later that he was never really satisfied with it and I felt that in its recording I had let him down. I hope he has forgiven me.”
But in the version that we hear on the remixed version on LOVE, it feels more like a collage of different pieces of history. There’s the version that can be heard at the top of the song, which is Lennon strumming away on the song with an acoustic guitar, but as the tune unfolds, you start hearing different pieces of the original interspersed with the version that we all know and love from back in the 1960s.
And since the whole track is supposed to be a psychedelic deep dive into Lennon’s childhood, this move works perfectly with the modern age of recording. Everyone going into this record already knows what the song is going to sound like, but for all of the great ideas that Lennon had all those years ago, this feels closer to the Alice in Wonderland-style of production that he had always admired when he first started working out the song in the 1960s.
There’s no telling what Lennon would have thought of this version of the song had he lived to hear it, but this kind of production showed the moment where Martin went from the mentor to the pupil. Lennon was the one always looking out for strange ideas, and since he wasn’t around anymore, they could only rely on their memory of what he liked to get the kaleidoscope of sound that they ended up with.
