Philip Norman on George Martin: ‘It could easily have been Lennon, McCartney and Martin’

The acclaimed Beatles biographer recalls his encounters with the studio genius who helped the band achieve ‘delirium in sound’

I first met George Martin in 1979, when I began researching my Beatles biography, Shout!. Friends and journalistic colleagues had done their best to talk me out of the project. “You’re wasting your time,” they said. “Everyone knows everything about the Beatles that there is to know.” Indeed, at the start I positively shrank from mentioning the B-word, claiming merely to be writing about popular culture in the 1960s. How different from today, when the appetite for Fab Four trivia seems inexhaustible; if I proposed a book of Ringo’s collected laundry lists, publishers would form a queue.

Martin by then was long past his Beatle-producing days – with him, unlike them, there were no lasting scars – and had become a recording mogul with his independent AIR studios in London and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. Even his famously straight and suave persona had become a bit rock’n’roll at the edges, the suits giving way to cardigans, the Brylcreem to sideburns, the elegant voice letting out an occasional “fuck”. But the overall impression was still (to quote the Beatles’ first manager, Brian Epstein) that of “a stern but fair-minded schoolmaster”. What a schoolmaster, what pupils – and what results!

He sought no reward but the satisfaction of turning raw talent into polished hits