Sir George Martin(1926–2016)

George Henry Martin was born at 64 Drayton Park in Holloway, north London, on the third of January 1926, son of Henry Martin, a carpenter in the building trade, and Bertha Simpson. The family lived through the Depression years in two rooms above a Holloway dairy. He was schooled at St Joseph's Catholic School in Highgate and at St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill, taught himself the piano in his teens from a small upright at home, served in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy 1944 to 1947 (he reached the rank of acting Sub-Lieutenant), and on demobilisation in 1947 took the place the ex-servicemen's bursary scheme had funded for him at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, taking the LRAM (piano) and the LGSM (composition) in 1950.

He joined EMI's Parlophone Records as a junior recording assistant in November 1950 at twenty-four, the smallest of EMI's three labels (HMV and Columbia were the senior pair), and on the retirement of the Parlophone Head Oscar Preuss in 1955 was appointed Head of Label in his twenty-ninth year, the youngest record-label head in the British industry. He produced through the 1950s the Parlophone comedy records that became the central popular comedy series of the period: the Goon Show records of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, Bernard Cribbins, Bea Lillie, the Sellers solo records, the original cast recording of Beyond the Fringe (1961), and the Flanders and Swann records. He had no experience of rock and roll and no interest in it; Parlophone in 1961 was the comedy-and-light-music label of EMI.

On the sixth of June 1962, on the advice of his EMI publishing colleague Sid Colman, he auditioned a four-piece Liverpool rock band Brian Epstein had been touting unsuccessfully around the London record companies for the past nine months. The audition was at EMI's Abbey Road Studio Three; the band played four songs, including Besame Mucho and the early Lennon and McCartney composition Love Me Do. Martin signed the Beatles to Parlophone on the strength of the audition and recorded with them across the next eight years (June 1962 to April 1970) the body of work that became the central single popular-music recording catalogue of the twentieth century: twelve studio albums, thirteen number-one UK singles, twenty number-one US singles, and the four soundtrack albums (A Hard Day's Night 1964, Help! 1965, Magical Mystery Tour 1967, Yellow Submarine 1969).

The records he made with the Beatles re-defined the technical possibilities of the popular-music recording studio. He commissioned the Mellotron tape-frame, the orchestral string-section overdubs on Eleanor Rigby (1966) and Yesterday (1965), the backwards-tape and varispeed pioneering on Tomorrow Never Knows (1966), the symphonic orchestral arrangement of A Day in the Life (1967) (the long crescendo of the orchestra ending the song, the central single technical innovation of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band of 1967), the harpsichord chamber orchestra of In My Life (1965), and the long medley-arrangement of the Abbey Road album side two (1969). Sgt. Pepper's is on every modern list of the central single popular-music albums of the twentieth century, and is, by general agreement of the production literature, the producer-led record of its decade.

He left EMI in 1965 to set up Associated Independent Recording (AIR), the independent record-production company that took him through the next forty years working with America (Holiday, 1975), Cheap Trick, Elton John (Candle in the Wind 1997 became the best-selling single in the history of the UK Singles Chart on his production for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales), Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney's solo records, and the production of the Sting Symphony albums of the 1990s. He was knighted in 1996, was awarded six Grammy Awards across his career, and died at his home at Wiltshire on the eighth of March 2016 in his ninetieth year. The Martin name in modern English-language popular music carries the weight of the Abbey Road Studio Three audition of the sixth of June 1962 and the eight years that followed.