George Martin will forever be the golden example of what the ‘Fifth Beatle’ was supposed to be.
It took a small army to make the Fab Four who they were, but without Martin at the helm, they would have never had the adventurousness or the confidence to evolve past the scruffy bar band they started out as in the Cavern Club. But while Martin could spark their musical imaginations all the time, he knew that the day would come when he would have to gracefully bow out of the Beatles’ world.
That’s not to say that he lived and breathed The Beatles until his untimely passing. He knew rock and roll better than anyone else, thanks to his work with them, but outside of working with the lads, he was always interested in seeing what other creative avenues he could dabble in. He had hard rock under his belt with Cheap Trick, fusion with the Mahavishny Orchestra, and even folksy music like America, but it was always going to be something special when he reunited with his old friends.
Martin may have been like the musical older brother of the group, but every time he turned up in one of their solo careers, he was able to get the best out of them. His string arrangement for John Lennon’s ‘Grow Old With Me’ is one of the most stunning pieces of his solo catalogue, and he helped Paul McCartney get one of the greatest albums of the 1980s in Tug of War, but after the redone version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ for Princess Diana, it felt like Martin had officially fallen silent.
It’s not like he didn’t have a good reason to retire. He had excused himself from working on The Beatles Anthology due to his hearing loss, and even if he had found a way to work in some new arrangements alongside Jeff Lynne, no one wanted to see one of the greatest producers in the world attempt to recapture his old magic. It made sense to stop at the top, but there were always going to be exceptions.
Because when the band unveiled their plans to work on the Love project for Cirque de Soleil, Martin at least had some help from his son, Giles. Both of them served as the producers for the record, and while it did make for some interesting mashups of different Beatles masterpieces, one of the most touching moments came from one of George’s final collaborations with the band on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
George Harrison’s acoustic demo of the tune is already fantastic, but Martin’s string arrangement behind it turned out to be the icing on the cake, saying, “I was asked to write a string score for an early take of George’s poignant ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. I was aware of such a responsibility, but thankfully, everyone approved of the result. ‘Yesterday’ was the first score I had written for a Beatle song way back in 1965, and this score, 41 years later, is the last. It wraps up an incredible period of my life with those four amazing men who changed the world.”
Even if he had been retired for years, hearing those strings is enough to send shivers down your spine. Martin seemed to have a certain sixth sense when working on some of the band’s greatest songs, and even if Harrison’s tune is a lot more musically complex than something like ‘She Loves You’, the former found a way for the strings to take the place of what Eric Clapton’s crying solo did in the recorded version.
Clapton was the one who helped set the tone for the record, but if the version that turned up on The White Album was the definitive version, this is like hearing a version of the tune that’s far more sorrowful. The original had a lot of pent-up anger and sadness, but this one is pure melancholy in the same way that ‘Yesterday’ was pure heartache.
