Making their way to the studio in a state of shock, George and Paul could barely keep it together, too besotted with grief to do much else but apply a few overdubs to “Rainclouds.” Emerick was there, too, whiling away that awful day in the control booth. Finally, all three old friends stood together, struggling to come to terms with their despair. “For a few moments,” Geoff later wrote, “the three of us stood there numbly, reminiscing about the impact John Winston Ono Lennon had had on our lives, focusing on the positive, the lighthearted, the absurd. We smiled as we conjured up pleasant memories, but there were tears behind our laughter. Somehow none of us could seem to come up with the right words to say. There probably were no right words to say.” For McCartney, this last aspect would become horribly true as he walked away from the studio that evening. Confronted by reporters, he could barely muster a response to John’s untimely death, remarking, “It’s a drag, innit?” He was subsequently pilloried in the British press, but for his part, George understood implicitly the sense of shocked detachment that Paul was feeling in that moment. During an interview with the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt, George described the rage that was boiling up inside of him. “I feel frightfully sorry for Yoko and Sean,” he said, “and all the people who loved him so much. But I also feel very angry that it’s such a senseless thing to happen. That one of the great people that happened this century was just wiped out by madness. I’m very angry about it.”9
For a week, the studio remained dark, with George and Paul huddling with family and friends to take stock of the tragedy. But by Sunday, December 14, they were back at Oxford Street, where they recorded a demo for a new tune titled “Ebony and Ivory,” a composition about striving for racial equality. With the image of a piano keyboard in mind, McCartney had been inspired by an old line from Spike Milligan, who was known to say, “Black notes, white notes, and you have to play the two to make harmony, folks!” After the holiday break, Martin and McCartney took their recording sessions to Montserrat, where they were joined by Laine and drummer Dave Mattacks. Over the next several days, Martin supervised rehearsals of new McCartney compositions such as “Average Person,” “Dress Me Up as a Robber,” and “The Pound Is Sinking.” Stanley Clarke and Steve Gadd showed up not long afterward, with Mattacks taking a backseat as the bandmates plowed through several other tunes, including “Somebody Who Cares,” “No Values,” “Give My Regards to Broad Street,” and “Hey Hey.” George and Paul’s new approach to the studio was elevated further still when Ringo Starr joined his old friends at Montserrat on February 15, 1981. Working alongside Gadd, he played on “Take It Away,” with Martin sitting in on electric piano. For the producer, the combination of Starr and Gadd made for a unique, complementary sound: “Steve is a really versatile drummer,” George wrote, “and he’s meticulous with his timing. On the other hand, Ringo isn’t one of those technical drummers, but he has a most distinctive sound, and you always know it’s him. He’s got a great beat, and flows with the beat, too, which is terribly important. So we had very, very contrasting types of talent, and when they played together you could tell it most acutely. It was a good sound.”10
Soon, they were joined by rockabilly legend Carl Perkins, with whom McCartney performed a duet titled “Get It,” along with “My Old Friend,” Perkins’s tribute to the ex-Beatle. For Paul, it was one of the great highlights of the Tug of War sessions. “I wanted to play with Carl Perkins,” he later remarked. “I have loved him since I was a boy. His songs were the first blues I ever listened to. ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ for example. We didn’t cast him in a track, I just rang him up and asked if he fancied getting involved. He said, ‘Why, Paul, I sure do,’ and he came down to Montserrat.” George was rightly chuffed when Carl woke up on his first day on the island. “This morning, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Perkins exclaimed. “It’s so pretty here and so beautiful.” The Montserrat sessions concluded with Stevie Wonder’s arrival on February 26, 1981, to record “Ebony and Ivory” as a duet with McCartney, along with “What’s That You’re Doing?” an upbeat power-groove that McCartney and Wonder perfected in the studio. For “Ebony and Ivory,” they rehearsed with a drum machine that Wonder had brought with him from California but that had broken in transit. For his part, Stevie made short work in fixing the machine: “He was amazing in his ability to ignore his blindness,” said Martin, and the erratic drum machine was no match for Wonder’s technical smarts. “Stevie said he knew how to fix it, and asked me to get an engineer to take off the cover so he could get to the works. Then he insisted on the current being restored. I was horrified when I saw his fingers wandering over the components. There were 440 volts going through the chassis! He explained that it was the only way to be sure it worked. Of course, he fixed it perfectly. Such blind confidence!”11
For George, watching the two veterans record “Ebony and Ivory” was “a tremendous privilege because they are each multi-talented instrumentalists. For the song, McCartney and Wonder played more than a dozen different instruments ranging from a basic track comprised of guitar, bass, piano, and drums through a wide array of overdubs, including McCartney’s masterful vocoder, which synthesizes the human voice, and Wonder’s innovative percussion and electric piano work. In mid-March, Martin and McCartney returned to Oxford Street, where they worked on Tug of War through December 1981. In the process, they recorded more than two albums’ worth of material, including the moving, introspective title track and a wistful piano ballad, again with Ringo, titled “Wanderlust.” By this point, Laine had exited the production only to be replaced by 10CC mainstay Eric Stewart, who began collaborating with McCartney on a host of new compositions. In May 1982, George and Paul recorded “Say Say Say” with the legendary Michael Jackson, who was riding high after the release of his smash-hit Off the Wall and currently recording a follow-up LP with Quincy Jones. The McCartney-Jackson duet came together rather quickly, with McCartney playing guitar, keyboards, and percussion, which he shared with Jackson. The track was rounded out by a posse of top-flight studio musicians, including harmonica player Chris Smith. With Emerick behind the boards, Martin scored a crisp horn quartet that contributed to the song’s driving funk sound. Working with Jackson was a revelation for Martin, who said that “he actually does radiate an aura when he comes into the studio, there’s no question about it. He’s not a musician in the sense that Paul is,” George added, “but he does know what he wants in music and he has very firm ideas.” During this period, George superimposed a host of orchestral arrangements on the Tug of War tracks, including the high-stepping “Ballroom Dancing,” for which he scored an unusual, soaring clarinet-trumpet figure. As George later recalled, “There’s a clarinet kind of glissando which is a bit like Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ and the clarinet swoops up from its bottom chalumeau register. It’s much wider than the Gershwin one going through two octaves and in fact is almost impossible to do. Jack Brymer played it, but at the very top it isn’t a clarinet any more, it’s a trumpet which finishes his phrase. It was difficult to get the crossover point so that you couldn’t really hear the join, although we did manage it. But that’s the kind of thing I love. Again, it’s painting isn’t it? A little bit of magic.”12
After they returned from Montserrat, Martin and McCartney took time away from the Tug of War sessions to join George Harrison at his Friar Park estate to work on “All Those Years Ago,” a song that Harrison had originally intended for Starr. Together, Harrison and Starr had already recorded a version of the track, but the drummer didn’t think it made sense given his vocal range. With a new set of lyrics memorializing the bandmates’ experiences with Lennon, “All Those Years Ago” began to assume the context of a tribute to their fallen bandmate. “You were the one who imagined it all,” George wrote, “all those years ago.” Retaining Ringo’s drum track, George Harrison invited Paul, Linda McCartney, and Denny Laine to add backing vocals to the song, with George Martin and Geoff chipping in with goodwill and camaraderie. When they had completed the
tracking, Martin, McCartney, and Harrison spent hours reminiscing about Lennon and their years together. The Friar Park session marked the first time that the trio had worked together on a recording, along with Ringo’s prerecorded drum track, since January 3, 1970, when they produced “I Me Mine.” “All Those Years Ago” became an international hit for Harrison, clocking in at number two on the Billboard charts.
That summer, Martin and McCartney worked on several additional tracks at “the Mill,” McCartney’s Sussex home studio. The clear highlight was “Here Today,” the ex-Beatle’s heartrending tribute to his fallen songwriting partner. With McCartney plucking his acoustic guitar along with a plaintive string quartet arranged by Martin, “Here Today” found McCartney engaged in an imaginary conversation with Lennon. Paul later admitted that part of the song found its origins in the Beatles’ 1964 American tour when the songwriters were riding out a hurricane in Key West: “It was during that night, when we’d all stayed up way too late, and we got so pissed that we ended up crying—about, you know, how wonderful we were, and how much we loved each other, even though we’d never said anything. It was a good one: you never say anything like that. Especially if you’re a Northern man.” For George, adorning “Here Today” with a string quartet initially seemed troubling, especially as it might strike listeners as being a not-so-subtle echo of “Yesterday.” But for his part, Paul pressed forward, finally upending their shared concern. “I thought, well, this is stupid, it’s like saying because you’ve used a guitar once in 1980 you should never use a guitar again,” he commented in the liner notes. “It’s silly condemning the format of a string quartet just cause we’d used it once on a famous record—you know, ‘Yesterday.’ So I then said to George, ‘Look, let’s just try a string quartet, let’s get it all worked up, let’s do it. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t keep using string quartets till we drop.”13
With work having been concluded on Tug of War, the album was released in April 1982 and became an international blockbuster for the longtime colleagues. Topping the charts in the United States and United Kingdom alike, Tug of War spawned two hit singles in the number-one “Ebony and Ivory” and top-ten “Take It Away,” with “Say Say Say” being held back for a future release. For McCartney, Tug of War was a spectacular return to form as a solo artist. The album earned a Grammy nod for Album of the Year, as well as a host of rave reviews. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden described the album as “the masterpiece everyone has always known Paul McCartney could make,” adding that together, McCartney and Martin created “a record with a sumptuous aural scope that recalls Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road.” About “Here Today,” Holden writes that “George Martin’s string arrangement is, if anything, even more graceful than the one he did for ‘Eleanor Rigby.’” Holden attributed the album’s overarching success to Martin’s painstaking attention to detail. “It’s in these seemingly lighter moments,” Holden writes, “that George Martin’s studio touches illuminate McCartney’s wistful hominess with exquisite musical details: a brass ensemble in ‘Wanderlust,’ pan pipes in the affably shuffling ‘Somebody Who Cares’ and Beatlesque inner voices in the madcap ‘The Pound Is Sinking.’” As the album soared up the charts, the video for “Take It Away” fell into heavy rotation on the fledgling MTV network and featured Starr and Martin on drums and keyboards, respectively, as well as a cameo by John Hurt, the renowned Oscar-nominated actor who had turned heads with his recent turn in The Elephant Man. For the video’s stage sequence, Martin plays the electric piano while wearing a naval uniform patterned in the style of the producer’s old Fleet Air Arm getup from the 1940s.14
For George, Tug of War had proved to be one of the most rewarding experiences of his career, which was saying something. And working with Paul had been a dream, with the producer and artist working together with unremitting honesty and mutual respect. George’s misgivings about being able to challenge Paul in the studio had been met professionally and then some. “To give Paul his due,” said George, “he accepted my criticisms with remarkable bon-homie, and I guess it’s only because we’ve worked together for so long that he could do it.”15
Although Tug of War had dominated George’s studio work during this period, it was hardly his only project. Throughout his life, George had been blessed, for good or ill, with an agile mind, and he thrived when his life was purring along at its busiest possible clip. In 1981 alone, for example, he had scored the soundtrack for Honky-Tonk Freeway, while recording albums with a diversity of acts including Little River Band and Ultravox—all of which were produced during his collaboration with McCartney on Tug of War.
For George, it was a strange period, indeed. He was working again with Paul, arguably his most successful and talented artist, and trying out a host of new bands from very different generic backgrounds. Yet at the same time, at age fifty-five, he often found himself feted by well-meaning organizations with a nostalgic eye for his otherworldly past achievements. One such opportunity had recently arrived in the form of the popular British television program This Is Your Life. He had long worried that the This Is Your Life production team would attempt to memorialize him, and he purposefully made a pact with Judy to resist their ministrations. Hence, he was “quite shocked” when he learned that she had made secret arrangements with their old friend Ron Goodwin to lure him into a London television studio to record an episode devoted to his life and work. He knew something was up when the taxi pulled out outside the studio, where the Temperance Seven, the band behind his first number-one single, were playing along the curb, with Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer loitering nearby. As the program unfolded, George was bowled over by seeing so many friends and colleagues, including Cilla Black, Rolf Harris, Dudley Moore, Bernard Cribbins, and Matt Monro, among others. The producers had even rounded up the Four Tune Tellers, George’s dance band from his teenage years. George later discovered that Judy had gone ahead with the episode in order to include his older sister, Irene, who was battling cancer at the time. Irene ultimately survived, and George, for his part, understood his wife’s motives implicitly. And besides, he later admitted, his bout with This Is Your Life made for a truly “wonderful night.”16
Having written numerous film scores over the years, George was excited to begin work on Honky-Tonk Freeway, a surefire hit starring the likes of Beau Bridges, Jessica Tandy, and Hume Cronyn. The story about a small southern town being bypassed by a freeway project that promised to change the burg’s fortunes for the better, Honky-Tonk Freeway was being directed by Englishman John Schlesinger, who poked gentle fun at American ways in the film, which George scored along with Elmer Bernstein’s orchestral work. The film proved to be a box office flop, but by that time George was already on to his next gig, which involved working with Little River Band on their latest LP Time Exposure. The Australian bandmates were in a precarious position of sorts, having just released a live album, Backstage Pass, that had failed to capitalize on the success of their platinum-selling First Under the Wire album, which included the hit singles “Lonesome Loser” and “Cool Change.” Little River Band joined George at AIR Montserrat during one of the producer’s breaks from the Tug of War sessions, and the Australians, restless and riddled with anxiety, worked doggedly on their new album, often recording round the clock. When Martin and Emerick arrived in the studio most mornings, they discovered the bandmates still hard at work from the night before. “It was tough,” George later wrote. “It’s not a good way to work at all. We were exhausted by the end.” Perfectionists in the studio, the members of Little River Band conducted numerous instrumental overdubs and endlessly double-tracked vocals. “To be honest,” said George, “it used to drive me up the wall because it was so inhuman.” Released in August 1981, Time Exposure righted Little River Band’s fortunes with a pair of top-ten US singles in “Take It Easy on Me” and “Night Owls.”17
Easily the most unusual line on his résumé, George’s collaboration with British new wave band Ultravox turne
d plenty of heads when the respected producer decided to try his hand at producing the mechanistic, electronically oriented band. For George, Ultravox wasn’t that strange of an assignment. He was eager to work with a younger, cutting-edge group, and Ultravox perfectly fit the bill. As he once remarked, “Today’s market requires something different, and I’m going to come up with instrumental sounds that accent a beat and that highlight the sounds that are now attracting listening interest.” George had become friendly with band leader Midge Ure, and together they hatched the idea of him producing Ultravox’s 1982 album, Quartet. For Ultravox, the collaboration marked a departure from longtime producer Conny Plank, while George couldn’t resist working with the band, who was a favorite of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lucie. “I get on very well with them,” George later recalled about the group. Keyboard player “Billy Currie is very good. He thinks kind of orchestrally with his synthesizer work. I didn’t find it as alien as people would have thought.” For George, the overriding issue involved trying to get the band to think about their music more organically, more humanly. Drummer Warren Cann emerged as a project for the producer, who desperately wanted to liberate the musician from his obsessive reliance on click tracks to maintain a rigid, unrelenting beat. “His beat was metronomic,” George later wrote, “to the extent that before recording he used to spend days programming his computer drum machine.” At one point, Martin suggested that Cann try playing without benefit of his electronic touchstones, but the drummer simply couldn’t do it—“he just fell apart.” Martin’s favorite aspect of the Ultravox production was the song “Hymn,” which required him to score the band’s choral work. Propelled by the success of the hit single “Reap the Wild Wind,” Quartet delivered a strong-selling album for the British band.18
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