George Martin signs the Beatles at EMI Studios

A new art form is rarely christened by the men who invent it. More often it is christened, quietly and without ceremony, by a producer in a control room who has heard enough older music to know when something new has walked in, and enough commercial music to know that the tape in front of him does not yet prove it. The act of faith is small. It is signing the contract anyway.

THE PRODUCER IN THE CONTROL ROOM

George Henry Martin is thirty-six. He was born at Drayton Park, Highbury, on 3 January 1926, son of a carpenter, schooled at St Joseph's in Highgate on a Catholic scholarship, taught oboe and piano at the Guildhall, and given three years in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy to teach him that men are stranger than scores. He has been at EMI's Parlophone label since 1950. When George Lyon retired in 1955 the label fell to him at twenty-nine, the youngest head of any imprint at Manchester Square. Parlophone is the small one, the cousin, the place EMI sends its classical odds and ends and its comedy records. He has produced Peter Sellers, the Goons, Flanders and Swann, the Beyond the Fringe revue. He has a trained ear for the gap between what a performer is doing in a room and what the microphone catches. He has been waiting, without naming the waiting, for a pop act of his own.

THE RECOMMENDATION FROM LIVERPOOL

Brian Epstein, who runs a record counter at NEMS in Whitechapel, Liverpool, has spent five months on trains. He has been to Decca, to Pye, to Philips, to Columbia, to HMV. Decca has turned the boys down in writing. Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr Epstein. The phrase travels around the trade as a joke against Dick Rowe, but Epstein has stopped finding it funny. By spring he is reduced to taking the Decca tape to the HMV shop in Oxford Street to have acetates cut, and from there, by the small charity of a music publisher named Sid Colman, the tape reaches Martin's office at Manchester Square. Martin listens once. He is not overwhelmed. He agrees, on the strength of Epstein's manner more than the tape, to bring the four into Studio Two for what is logged as an artist test on the afternoon of Wednesday, 6 June 1962.

STUDIO TWO, ABBEY ROAD

The afternoon light at 3 Abbey Road comes in high and northern through the clerestory windows of Studio Two, which is a converted Georgian drawing-room the size of a small chapel. Martin sits upstairs in the control room with the engineer Norman Smith and the second engineer Ron Richards. The four boys are arranged on the floor below with their own equipment, which is the first problem: Paul McCartney's bass amplifier is producing a low rattle that no one in Liverpool has ever bothered to diagnose, and Smith ends up dismantling the speaker cabinet and rigging a substitute from the EMI store. The session runs from seven in the evening into the night. They play four numbers onto twin-track tape: Besame Mucho, the Consuelo Velazquez standard the Cavern crowds know; and three Lennon-McCartney originals, Love Me Do, P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why. None of the four, played back at the desk, is what Martin would call a release.

THE SECONDS AT THE DESK

Now the producer's calculation. The material is thin. Love Me Do is a harmonica blues figure stretched over a chord pattern any Hamburg club band could fake by midnight. The drumming is heavy, behind the beat, dragging the others. The bass is unmoored. The singing, divided between Lennon and McCartney, is uncertain whose song is whose. Against this: four young men have come up the stairs to the control room afterwards, and they are, on no evidence the tape can offer, the most quick-witted human beings Martin has met in a Parlophone session in twelve years. He says to them, I don't like your tie, for a start, half teasing, and George Harrison says back, without pause, Well, I don't like your tie either. The room laughs. Martin's training is classical, the Guildhall and the Fleet Air Arm and the comedy records; what the training has given him is the habit of listening, not to a phrase, but to the temperament producing the phrase. The temperament in this room is the thing the tape has not caught. He weighs the two-year option that Parlophone is permitted to issue. The label needs a pop act. Epstein is loyal, and a loyal manager with a difficult act will work harder than a casual one with an easy act. The drummer will have to go. The songs will have to be supervised. The harmonies will have to be re-balanced for the microphone. But the four young men, standing in front of the desk in their dark suits and narrow ties, are something the small Mersey scene is producing that no one in London has yet seen up close. The professional verdict and the human verdict are not in the same place. He signs to the human one.

THE OFFER

That evening Martin telephones Epstein at NEMS in Liverpool and offers a Parlophone contract: one penny per double-sided record sold, a year firm with three one-year options on EMI's side. He tells Epstein the band must change its drummer before the first commercial session. Epstein agrees on the condition that Martin not be the one to tell them: the Liverpool end of the business is his to manage. The contract is countersigned in mid-June 1962. On 16 August, by the four-way decision of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Epstein, Pete Best is dismissed and Ringo Starr is brought down from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The first commercial session, on 4 September, brings them back to Studio Two; Martin, still unconvinced by Starr's metre on first acquaintance, books the session drummer Andy White for the re-take of Love Me Do on 11 September, and Starr is moved to tambourine. It is the only time in seven years he will doubt the drummer. The single is released on Friday, 5 October 1962, on Parlophone R 4949, and climbs to number seventeen on the Record Retailer chart by Christmas week.

THE ROOM WHERE IT IS RATIFIED

Manchester Square, head office of EMI, the boardroom on the top floor. Sir Joseph Lockwood is chairman. The Parlophone label has been, for a decade, the imprint nobody on the board mentions: comedy records, light classical, the German repertoire Oscar Preuss built up before the war. Martin's signing of an unknown Liverpool beat group on a penny royalty has crossed no desks higher than his own. Through the autumn of 1962 the singles chart reads back to the board what the board did not know it had bought. By February 1963 Please Please Me is at number one. The album of the same name is recorded in a single ten-hour session on 11 February 1963 because Martin, conducting from the control room as he once conducted oboe in the pit, has worked out that the way to capture the temperament he heard in June is to let the four play in sequence, live, with the desk catching what the Cavern caught. Lockwood, who had thought the Parlophone label might be quietly absorbed into Columbia, now finds it carrying the company.

THE SEVEN YEARS

From 6 June 1962 to the Abbey Road sessions of summer 1969 the partnership runs without a break. Ten studio albums: Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, Beatles for Sale, Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, Abbey Road. Fifteen British number-one singles. A scoring of strings on Yesterday against McCartney's initial refusal; a backwards-tape edit on Rain; the variable-speed piano on In My Life; two takes of Strawberry Fields Forever in different keys and tempos spliced at a single bar; the forty-piece orchestral ascent of A Day in the Life, scored by Martin on a single sheet of manuscript in a morning. The studio stops being a room where performances are documented and becomes a room where records are composed. Every producer trained in the English-speaking world after 1967 works inside the grammar this partnership writes down. Martin himself, asked again and again across the rest of his life what he had heard on 6 June 1962 that the tape had not, would say only that it had been the people, not the songs. I had to make a decision, he told the journalist Richard Williams long afterwards, and I went with what I felt about the four of them, not what I felt about what they had played.

THE RETURN

The right ear closed in his late seventies; for the last decade of his life he conducted from memory of timbre rather than from hearing. He was knighted in 1996, at seventy. He died at his home in Wiltshire on 8 March 2016, aged ninety. The grammar he set down in Studio Two outlived him by a generation and is still the working orthodoxy of any control room in the English-speaking world where a producer is trying to catch what the microphone keeps missing. The decision was not the tape and not the contract. It was the small, untestable judgement that what walks up the stairs after a poor audition can be worth more than what came out of the speakers, if the producer has the ear to hear it. Studio Two at 3 Abbey Road is still working. The high northern windows are unchanged. The control-room door at the top of the stairs is the one the four young men in narrow ties came through on the evening of 6 June 1962, and it is still the door any new act in the building hopes to be invited up through.