Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  In 1933, Harry married 19-year-old Minnie Hyman, known to all as Queenie; her family were from Russia and she was born and raised comfortably in Sheffield. A lively, intelligent young woman, she had a deep passion for the arts; classical music, theater, dance, literature, paintings, sculpture, antiques and more, Queenie was enraptured by them all.

  Despite the ten-year age gap, the Epstein son and Hyman daughter seemed a perfect fit. The businesses were running well, profits were invested in property, they could always afford luxuries, and they had a dynasty within three years. Brian Samuel Epstein was born on September 19, 1934 in a private nursing home on Rodney Street, the Liverpool equivalent of London’s Harley Street; his brother Clive arrived there twenty-three months later.‡ Home was a detached villa at 197 Queens Drive, in the suburb of Childwall—this is Liverpool’s ring-road, but traffic hum was quelled within a sumptuous house of five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a drawing room, dining room and library. It was a haven for Harry after closing the shops each day, and an idyllic place for Queenie to raise the boys. (She also had mother’s help: a cleaner and live-in nanny.) It was Queenie’s house, everything refined and arranged just so. Brian was already considered special for having been born on Yom Kippur (like a Christian born on Christmas Day), and, being the eldest, he held a position of importance. Queenie thought him the most beautiful boy she’d seen.3 But beyond the paneled doors and willow trees, trouble was brewing.

  Brian was just coming up to five when war began. He and Clive were evacuated—first to Prestatyn, North Wales, and then (along with Harry and Queenie) to Southport, up the coast from Liverpool. They returned home in 1943 and Brian was admitted to Liverpool College, a high-achieving private school in nearby Mossley Hill; what with the war, and other reasons, it was already his sixth place of education—and he didn’t last long here either.

  Brian had become infatuated by theatrical life. It consumed him. On family holidays, he produced, directed and narrated children’s concert parties, with elegantly designed bespoke programs. Art was his one consistent Grade A school subject. The headmaster of Liverpool College sent Harry and Queenie a program, drawn surreptitiously in class, that showed dancing girls—the head said the drawings were “suggestive,” Brian said they were showgirls dressed for the stage. The head also said that Brian needed to sharply improve his standards, and Harry agreed: he wanted a focused son with a thorough, broad education to come into the family business. Brian felt the college was bearing down on him, and the Epsteins suspected anti-Semitism. It was certainly everywhere, and not always subtly expressed. Brian’s most adored book as a child, one he read again and again from the age of seven, was The Swish of the Curtain, Pamela Brown’s tale of six upper-middle-class English children who stage a musical theater show for charity and yearn to go to drama school. At a particular point in the story, one of the girls hits on a money-raising scheme, suggesting that everyone attending a church garden fete be made to buy a program, to which her brother laughs and exclaims, “You little Jew!”

  When Brian’s work didn’t improve, Liverpool College told Harry and Queenie he would have to leave. It was expelling him. Brian had joined with the expectation of staying until 18, but after only a year Harry was sitting him down on one of the sofas at Queens Drive and exclaiming, “I just don’t know what on earth we’re going to do with you.”4

  Which Liverpool homes, and which young ears, were tuned in to the radio on the evening of July 26, 1945? There was a Variety show called Navy Mixture with several star names and one newcomer. Halfway through the forty-five minutes, host Jack Watson advanced to the weighty BBC microphone and cheerily announced:

  Stepping off the Liberty boat this week is a bloke who’s making his first broadcast, and who, incidentally, has just received his commission—and so it’s a double celebration. He’s a pianist, and after a great deal of persuasion—during which he held up our producer at the point of a gun—he’s going to play a composition of his own, which he calls Prelude. His name is Sub Lieutenant George Martin. [applause].

  Born on January 3, 1926, in Holloway, north London, George Henry Martin was the youngest child of Henry Martin, a craftsman carpenter, and Bertha (née Simpson). No one in the family was musical but they had a piano. George took six lessons at the age of eight and then wrote his first composition, “The Spider’s Dance,” a short sweet blend of ragtime and classical.5

  By 1941, the Martins had evacuated to Bromley, in the Kentish southeast suburbs, where George formed his own dance band. First they were the Four Tune Tellers, and then, as a five-piece, George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers—trumpet, sax, double-bass and drums, with an occasional guest vocal by his sister Irene. George played piano. “I wanted to be George Shearing, and I also modeled myself on Meade Lux Lewis,” he explains.6 They played in clubs and schools and did all the latest songs from America’s Tin Pan Alley. A seminal moment then occurred in George’s life when the BBC sent its Symphony Orchestra, under Sir Adrian Boult, to give a concert at his school. He was 15 when he witnessed Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and was wafted to paradise. “I thought it was absolutely heavenly,” he says. “I couldn’t believe human beings made that sound.”

  George left school soon after with distinctions in French and Maths (his ability at the latter was exceptional) and an ambition to design aircraft. He went into the War Office as a clerk, bought himself more piano lessons and began to add to his cache of compositions: “I was writing imitations of Rachmaninov and Chopin and that kind of stuff.” Then, at 17, knowing that he was about to be called up, he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm.

  George Martin had “a good war.” He saw no action, he spent time in Jamaica and New York (seeing Cab Calloway and Gene Krupa perform on Broadway), he flew planes as an “observer”—the captain on three-man practice sorties—and, at its end, he became an officer. To blend with his fellow officers, George consciously sharpened his blunt north London tones and tried to adopt the crisp, cut-glass accent of a young English flying ace. This didn’t only serve a purpose in the Fleet Air Arm, it would be useful in civilian life: in an ultra-class-conscious Britain, to speak like a gent would boost his chances of “getting on,” and he had the gentility, civility, good humor, height (6ft 2in) and dashing looks—sweeping fair hair and finely carved features—to carry it off.

  The armed forces also provided opportunities to continue his piano playing, which is how the 19-year-old Sub Lieutenant Martin found himself playing “Prelude” (one of those new compositions) before a London audience—and the BBC microphone—in July 1945.

  He demobbed in 1947 with no career qualifications or money to fall back on. During military service, George had corresponded with Sidney Harrison, piano teacher of renown, regular BBC broadcaster, and member of the professorial staff at the Guildhall School of Music in London. Harrison was a great encourager, and arranged an audition for him; George played a few of his compositions, was accepted, and signed up to a three-year teaching course. At home, however, all was suddenly discord. George’s mother—in his later words, “the person to whom I had always been so close”—strongly disapproved of his girlfriend, a 26-year-old from Aberdeen, Jean “Sheena” Chisholm. She was a leading soprano, and they’d met and sung together while he was stationed in Scotland. Defying his mother’s censure, George married Sheena on his 22nd birthday, January 3, 1948; Aberdeen newspaper photos show the groom crisp but solemn in his Fleet Air Arm uniform. His mother traveled up for the wedding, but died of a brain hemorrhage three weeks later, aged 53. George felt responsible and was racked with guilt, and the shadow this threw over his marriage remained long after he and Sheena settled in rented rooms in Acton, west London.7

  The Guildhall classes were difficult. Piano was George’s chosen instrument, oboe his second—and his oboe professor, Margaret Eliot, provided additional tutoring at her apartment on Great Portland Street. As owners of a substantial land estate in Cornwall and members of the House of Lords, her family had an illustri
ous and centuries-old history; her husband was a brilliant and literate doctor of medicine, Richard Asher. They had three children: Peter (born 1944), Jane (1946) and Clare (1948), all with vivid flame-red hair and showing signs of artistic gifts. The Asher home echoed to the clink of intellectual upper-middle-class culture, with a strong dash of erudite eccentricity, and these visits left a marked impression on George Martin, as they would another young man who followed him fifteen years later. They gave a glimpse of possibilities, stimulating a greater sense of ambition and encouraging a further polish of his adopted cut-glass voice. Then the clock would chime and he’d be off home—not, like some of his fellow students, to a bijou residence in Chelsea, but to his financially straitened and already stricken marriage.

  Elegance filled and fueled the expectations of Brian Epstein, the Liverpool boy whose schooling was deeply troubled and who daydreamed of costume designs, music and the stage. After expulsion from Liverpool College, he carried on piling up problems. He went to a Jewish school in Kent, and then left; to a small public school in Dorset, and then left; and finally, at the age of 14, he landed up at Wrekin, a minor public school in Shropshire, where he loathed the harsh procedures and continued to excel at Art.

  Brian later wrote that it was after Wrekin he found out he was homosexual, but he was certainly exposed to it here, at 15.§ All public schools had some activity, boys feeling the stirrings of sexual interest while ganged together in dormitories, no girls in sight. But these conditions surely didn’t fashion Brian’s inclination: it seems to have been latent, at the root of so much unhappiness and unease. It was just his bad timing that what he’d need-loathe-crave in his life was illegal and taboo. When chasing pleasure, which Brian often would, prison was just one of the constant dangers; ahead lay years of fear and veiled behavior, risking the courts, blackmailers and roaming “queer bashers.” Brian tried to shut it out, but who knows what was shaking his mind when, here at Wrekin, he inked this dramatic howl of pain in his 1949 pocket diary:

  Help me. I am lost. Help me. I am lost. Help me [if] I am to stop. Give me peace, rest. That world, it’s too big for me. O Lord God, I’ve asked these questions before. Where is the answer? Why am I here? Help me. What am I to do? O Lord God tell me where is my faith? Give guidance. This is a hell. A hell of madness.8

  George Martin’s three Guildhall years ended in July 1950 and that was it—his student record card mentions no final examination pass. A month later, he took a clerical job in the BBC’s music library, earning extra on the side by playing oboe on a London park bandstand and in the pit orchestra at Sadler’s Wells. Then, out of a clear blue sky, fell a job offer from The Parlophone Company Ltd.

  Founded in Germany by the Swedish-born Carl Lindström, Parlophone was one of the three big record labels owned by the British conglomerate Electric & Musical Industries, known as EMI. Each had its own marque and Parlophone’s was a fancy L (for Lindström), forever to be mistaken for the pound sign, £. The letter to George Martin was sent by its manager, O. C. Preuss, from an address in the St. John’s Wood district, 3 Abbey Road.

  In the 1830s, a luxury private house was built here, complete with bathroom and wine cellar; a century later, EMI bought the property and turned it into recording studios. The old house became the front offices, while the studios—three of them—were built in the spacious back garden. The new facility opened in November 1931 with Sir Edward Elgar conducting the London Symphony Orchestra through his patriotic Land of Hope and Glory. EMI’s studio at Abbey Road would always be the best of British institutions.

  Oscar Preuss had run Parlophone since 1924, his greatest discovery being the bandleader and dance instructor Victor Silvester. The label had so much work that Preuss needed an assistant—and with retirement approaching, he’d also want a successor. It was only later that George discovered Sidney Harrison’s hand in his advancement once more; in the meantime, he grasped the opportunity of an unconsidered new career. On November 28, 1950, wearing his beret, bicycle clips and Fleet Air Arm greatcoat, this rangy 24-year-old cycled through wind and rain from his gloomy Acton bedsit to very nice St. John’s Wood and reported for duty.

  The world he entered was like an old gentlemen’s club. The office of Mr. Preuss—he was “Mr. Preuss” to all—was at the front of the old house, with flames crackling in the fireplace, a grand piano, thick-pile carpet, easy chairs, a walnut-veneered radiogram and, sitting behind a rolltop desk, the well-regarded gent himself. Facing him was a Miss Lockhart Smith, his elegant young secretary, who looked like Katharine Hepburn and coolly greeted the newcomer in a voice like Princess Elizabeth’s. Across the corridor were the offices of EMI’s other main labels, Columbia and HMV (the august His Master’s Voice), staffed by George Martin’s colleagues and rivals, all older. He was very much the new boy.

  These other labels had binding, decades-old connections to the major US record companies. It was virtually a one-way street—the British took plenty of American product, the US had little or no need of the British—but it meant HMV and Columbia had most of the big-selling American artists, and Parlophone didn’t. Oscar Preuss was a maverick, though, and sharp with it—he licensed relevance and credibility instead, striking deals with the smaller, independent companies across the States, whose ears were closer to the ground. Parlophone was the first British label to issue America’s so-called “Race records,” the authentic early stirrings of rhythm and blues. The most exciting and vibrant label in Britain from the 1930s to the ’50s was the Parlophone Super Rhythm-Style Series, 78rpm discs with a distinctive deep blue label, that “£” logo and “R” numerical sequence. Meade Lux Lewis, the boogie-woogie pianist who strongly influenced George’s style, was on Parlophone.

  Notionally EMI’s “third” record label perhaps, Parlophone was certainly its most diverse and interesting. Preuss had all the funds he needed, he could sign whoever he liked, and he had EMI’s extensive (even global) organization, promotion and distribution behind whatever he issued … and George arrived out of nowhere to be second-in-command. On the downside, his wage was the not-so-grand £7 4s a week. On the up, again, he’d be working closely with bands and musicians of every kind, stripe and nationality, from orchestral players to accordionists, from Latin-American rumba musicians to Scottish players by the bagpipe-full (every spring, a team from Parlophone ventured north to record reels, jigs, ballads and pipe bands). It was a mind-boggling learning curve, but these experiences took a bright, gauche young man and produced someone intimate with every instrument and style of music, who could understand, and work comfortably with, singers and musicians of all ages, creeds, colors and personalities (especially the personalities). Mr. Preuss’s Parlophone handed George Martin a palette of colors with which to paint a career.

  He slipped easily into the working ways at Abbey Road, where it was always suit-and-tie, except for the occasional Sunday session when sports jacket and slacks were permitted. The times of recording sessions (three a day, 10AM–1PM, 2–5, 7–10) and their output (maximum twenty minutes of completed recordings per session) were regulated by the mighty Musicians’ Union, a “closed-shop” organization, membership compulsory if you were a jobbing player. The term “record producer” didn’t exist—George was an “A&R manager” (short for “artists & repertoire”), a “recording manager,” an “artiste manager” or “artist manager.” The title varied, but other things didn’t: it wasn’t practice to be credited anywhere, and there was no question of any royalty payments. As George mostly worked with small bands and orchestras, he generally used Number 2, the medium-sized studio: smaller than 1 but bigger than 3. He moved between the studio floor, where technical engineers in white lab coats pre-positioned the equipment, and the control room, where a balance engineer operated the knobs, buttons and levers on the recording console, and an assistant handled the physical recording.‖

  George timed his arrival to perfection. When Oscar Preuss had entered the business, in 1904, flat shellac discs had just been introduced as an altern
ative to cylinders; now two technological revolutions were happening. One was the manufacture of records from a vinyl compound—lighter, more durable and less breakable than shellac—pressed either as seven-inch single-play discs to revolve at 45, or as ten- or twelve-inch “microgroove” discs to spin at 33⅓. They’d come to be called “albums” but at this point (even in America) were long-playing records, long-players, LPs.

  The second revolution was the arrival of tape as the optimum medium for recording. It had long been done straight to wax, which meant the sound couldn’t be changed once it passed from the microphone through the engineer’s console. Tape was an interim process—it could be edited or electronically manipulated before going to disc. Until now, the sole purpose of recording had been to capture the sound of a live performance as faithfully as possible; tape could do this too, but also, if desired, it could create a different sound altogether. Some clever minds were already pushing the possibilities: in America, husband-and-wife musical duo Les Paul and Mary Ford were releasing what would come to be called multitrack recordings, Paul playing up to eight different parts on electric guitar, overdubbing layer on layer, and Ford singing several parts with herself. Such wizardry wasn’t going to sit well with everyone; musicians said it cheapened the art of performance, making singers and players seem more accomplished than they really were, as well as giving them a sound they couldn’t necessarily produce on stage. In the Musical Express, pianist-journalist Steve Race railed bitterly against “devices in the recording studio which make something that isn’t.”9 But such purist objections were too late, because the genie was out of the bottle.