At the start of his working relationship with the Beatles, Brian sent ‘My Bonnie’ to EMI headquarters in London as a sample of the band’s work, receiving a letter of reply informing him that neither HMV nor the Columbia label wanted to sign his group. It was the first of several slaps in the face, but Brian persisted. He had recently been corresponding with journalist Tony Barrow, who wrote a record review column in the Liverpool Echo as a sideline to composing sleeve-note copy for Britain’s second biggest record company, Decca. This contact led to Brian securing an audition for the Beatles at Decca. It would be in London on New Year’s Day, 1962.
Then, as now, London was more than just the capital of the United Kingdom; the city was the financial, mercantile and creative heart of the nation, to which all roads led. Paul knew that if he meant to make it in show business he had to go ‘down south’, even though southerners had a reputation for being unfriendly and condescending to northerners such as himself. The Beatles’ first professional foray in this direction had been inauspicious. A few weeks before Christmas, Merseyside promoter Sam Leach, having tried and failed to book the band in London proper, got them a gig at the Palais Ballroom in Aldershot, 43 miles west of the capital, but nonetheless ‘a gig down south’. When advertisements for the show failed to appear in the local newspaper, however, a mere 18 people attended. Seeing the funny side, Paul sang ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’. At the end of this absurd evening the boys travelled into the metropolis and took a turn round the clubs of Soho, the bohemian neighbourhood north of Shaftesbury Avenue and south of Oxford Street, a place Paul liked so well he later established his private office there. Three weeks after this first sniff of London air the Beatles headed south again, driven by Neil Aspinall in the band’s newly acquired van. At a time when Britain’s motorway system was only just being constructed, the drive from Liverpool took up to ten hours, made more arduous that New Year’s Eve by snow. The lads arrived in the capital late, checking into the Royal Hotel on Russell Square, sufficiently excited about being in London to rush over to Trafalgar Square where they helped usher in 1962. Hardly had the boys got back to the Royal Hotel than they had to be up again for their audition.
Fifteen songs from the band’s live show had been selected for the Decca audition, including covers and standards such as ‘Three Cool Cats’ and ‘The Sheik of Araby’, which the boys sang with Goon-ish comedic asides. Also showcased were three early and rather weak Lennon-McCartney compositions, including ‘Like Dreamers Do’. Epstein had the say-so in the choice of material and he forbade the boys from playing their usual, much more raucous rock ’n’ roll set (though they did perform one rave-up, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’), and the result was a sadly lacklustre audition, partly because the musicians were nervous and over-tired. Some weeks later Brian went back to Decca to receive the decision. ‘Not to mince words, Mr Epstein, we don’t like your boys’ sound,’ record executive Dick Rowe told Epstein, ensuring his place in history as one of those hapless souls who let the Beatles slip through his hands. Brian gave the Beatles the bad news when he met them on his return at Lime Street station. ‘And Pye have turned us down,’ he added gloomily.
Brian’s family was starting to weary of the Beatles, Mum sighing indulgently when her son insisted that his boys would be ‘bigger than Elvis’, while Dad was concerned that Brian was neglecting his real job running the family’s record outlets. It was therefore with a sense of having one last go that Brian returned to London in February 1962 to have the Decca audition tapes transferred to vinyl, at the HMV shop in Oxford Street, with a view to hawking the discs around town. The technician cutting the discs suggested, in light of the fact Brian’s act wrote their own material, that he might speak to Sid Colman, who worked upstairs for the music publisher Ardmore & Beechwood, itself part of EMI. Brian went to see Colman, explaining that he really needed a record contract before a publishing deal, and Colman suggested Brian contact his friend George Martin at Parlophone. ‘I think he might be very interested indeed.’
Above and beyond talent, timing and luck – three prerequisites in any successful career – a large part of the Beatles’ success, and thereby Paul McCartney’s, can be put down to the fact that the boys worked with first-rate people from the start. Naive though he was, Brian was an honest and devoted manager, while the man who was to become their record producer was an even more impressive fellow without whom the Beatles may not have achieved half of what they did. A tall, lankily handsome man with floppy blond hair, kindly blue eyes and a patient, patrician manner, George Martin was intelligent, sophisticated and cultured. He is the sort of man about whom almost no one has a bad word to say, and indeed almost everybody loves, so we can add that he was also witty, modest, hard-working and dependable, an English gentleman to his fingertips, despite his ordinary background.
Born in 1926, the son of a London carpenter, George transformed himself into ‘an officer and a gentleman’ during the Second World War, in which he served in the Fleet Air Arm. He married shortly after the war and used his serviceman’s grant to study at the Guildhall School of Music. Already a talented pianist, and a composer in the impressionistic style of Debussy, George learned the oboe at the Guildhall. There was a dearth of professional oboists at the time and he hoped proficiency on the instrument would guarantee him a living as a session musician. Playing the oboe proved a thin living, however, and George was employed in the BBC Music Library when he went for a job at EMI in the North London suburb of St John’s Wood.
Back in the 1930s, the Gramophone Company had bought a mansion on the wide residential boulevard of Abbey Road, NW8, building a warren of recording studios behind the stucco façade, the largest of which, Studio One, regularly accommodated Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In fact, countless stars of classical and popular music used the studios, including Sir Edward Elgar, perhaps the greatest British composer of recent times. George became an assistant to the head of Parlophone, originally a small German label that had become part of the EMI empire. His duties varied from producing classical music to making jazz and comedy records for the likes of Spike Milligan, writer and star of the Goons, who became a personal friend of George’s and, later, Paul’s. Martin was promoted to head of Parlophone in 1955, by which time he was known in the industry as the Comedy King. It was not a moniker he relished. Success with comedy records was all very well, but they didn’t lend themselves to follow-ups, and Martin badly wanted to sign a pop act that would enjoy longevity. He put the word out to friends like Sid Colman that he was willing to listen to almost anything, which is what brought Brian Epstein to his door.
Epstein gave Martin a passionate sales pitch about his wonderful young band and the exciting musical renaissance taking place in Liverpool. ‘I almost asked him in reply where Liverpool was,’ Martin later noted, displaying typical London snobbery. ‘The thought of anything coming out of the provinces was extraordinary at that time.’ The men hit it off nonetheless. Although Martin was eight years the senior, Brian’s mature manner made him appear to be of an age with the producer. Moreover both seemed to belong to an older, more formal Britain where men were seldom seen without a jacket and tie, and placed great significance on speaking properly and having good manners. Brian noted that when George Martin listened to the Beatles’ demo disc he rocked gently to and fro to the beat of the music, smiling polite encouragement. Martin wasn’t particularly impressed by what he heard, but he was intrigued by the fact that more than one person was singing, concluding that Paul had the ‘most commercial voice’, and the producer was reassuringly pleasant and polite to everyone. At the end of this cordial meeting, Martin suggested that Brian Epstein bring his group into the studio for an audition when convenient.
AUF WIEDERSEHEN, STU
Before they could audition for EMI, the Beatles had to return to Hamburg to fulfil an engagement at the newly opened Star-Club on Grosse Freiheit. John, Paul and Pete travelled to Hamburg together by plane on 11 April 1962, George, who had been unwell, being due to follow on with Brian. Part of the fun of going back to Germany was seeing Stuart Sutcliffe and his fiancée Astrid