The Beatles smile for the cameras during an interview for A Hard Day's Night.
Giles Martin has a key to the room every Beatles fan wants:
the climate-controlled vault at Abbey Road Studios in north-west London
where the original tapes that preserve every single session from the
band that revolutionised modern music are stored.
“It’s a plain room,” notes Martin with some understatement,
“but then you can pull out a tape and go, ‘So, this is the first take of
Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The 44-year-old producer and songwriter is a second
generation signatory to the Fab Four’s legacy, working on music that his
father, Sir George Martin, famously recorded with The Beatles
throughout most of the 1960s. The two worked together on 2006’s Love,
a mash-up of the band’s catalogue pegged to a Cirque de Soleil tribute,
and now Giles has overseen the audio restoration and remixing of A Hard Day’s Night, The Beatles inventive 1964 musical comedy.
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Directed by Richard Lester and produced as Beatlemania took
hold of popular culture, the black-and-white film is both a terrific
portrait of a band literally on the run, showcasing their collective
sense of humour and backing it with a soundtrack that includes Can’t Buy Me Love, And I Love Her, and the title track.
“Generally the recordings are pretty fantastic. You put on a
Beatles tape and they’re all in really good condition,” observes Martin.
“They’re amazingly clear and were exceptionally well recorded. The
audio quality of the speech on the film is pretty bad - that was the
hardest work.”
It was the correct choice of magnetic recording tape at Abbey
Road 50 years ago – EMI Music’s Emitape – that makes Martin’s job one
of remodelling as opposed to preservation. With sterling care they’ve
endured without problem, whereas other tape brands have revealed a
troubling working lifespan of little more than two decades.
Martin, who worked with former Beatle Paul McCartney on his 2013 solo album New,
sees his role as working on the Beatles’ music as his father would have
50 years ago if he had a contemporary studio set-up. He wants people to
watch A Hard Day’s Night and not notice how good the sound is.
“You want to feel like you’re in the room with them,” says Martin,
which sounds straightforward for the listener while obscuring the
pressure he’s under.
“You’re retouching up the Mona Lisa,” is his succinct
description of working on the Beatles’ music, but Martin takes comfort
in knowing that he can focus on the four opinions that are crucial: Paul
McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison. The two former
Beatles along with the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison,
control Martin’s employer, Apple Records, and their outlook is hardly
protectionist.
“I remember Paul came in during Love when I’d just done Help
and all I’d done was double up the guitars and make it more
surround-y,” Martin says. “He asked me what I’d actually done, which was
really a way of saying, ‘What are we paying you for?’ And that’s right.
His view was sod that, let’s see what you can do.”
Martin was born in 1969, when his father had stopped spending
his days in the studio with the Beatles, and when he was growing up in
the 1970s the band didn’t have the cultural importance they carry now;
they were a recent memory that had to settle before they became
resonant. His father talked about his revered work casually, caring more
for current projects than former glories, but Martin knew how it would
look to outsiders, having begun a career in music by writing jingles and
serving as the musical director for various British television shows,
when he went to work on the back catalogue of the Beatles.
“I was worried everyone would think I’m the son of George
Martin and that I couldn’t get a proper job, but my friend, also a
record producer, said, ‘Sod it, just enjoy it’,” Martin admits. “And
that’s key. It’s an honour to do this, and I like doing it.”
“But my father and I are more likely to talk about the cricket than the Beatles,” he says. “When I told him that A Hard Day’s Night was being reissued and I was remixing it he asked me, ‘Does anyone really want to watch A Hard Day’s Night?’ He’s just happy that I’m working.”
The 50th anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night is out now on Blu-Ray and DVD
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