(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL / George Martin)
Sat 27 December 2025 14:00, UK
George Martin was no stranger to a great melody throughout every phase of his career.
While everyone knows him for being one of the single greatest assets to The Beatles during their rise to the top, Martin was the one keeping his ears open to everything he could, whether that was working with America later, masterminding Blow by Blow with Jeff Beck, or providing his final arrangement for the re-recording of Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’. Making classics was practically second nature to him, but he could tell when someone was creating pure beauty right in front of him as well.
Then again, it’s not like he had an ear for every single classic when he first worked with The Beatles. He was convinced that Ringo Starr wasn’t the guy for the job when first testing them out on ‘Love Me Do’, and even after working with them for years, it was bound to be a tough sell for John Lennon and Paul McCartney to convince Martin to go for the one-chord drone of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Martin clearly came from a much different world, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t some middle ground in rock and roll. He could expose the Fab Four to new sounds that wouldn’t have been considered “cool” by rock and roll standards, but when he brought in orchestrations for tunes like ‘Yesterday’, he created the kind of musical heartache that none of the band could have ever achieved on their own.
It’s one thing to have that kind of producer in your corner, but across the pond, The Beach Boys were a much different story. Murry Wilson clearly had a plan for his kids to be one of the biggest names in music, but outside of the mindless songs about surfing and fun in the sun, Brian Wilson had both the classical knowledge of Martin and the songwriting genius of Lennon and McCartney all rolled up into one person.
He wanted to take The Beach Boys further the same way that he saw his British friends going, and when listening to Pet Sounds or even Smiley Smile, he was redefining what a rock and roll songwriter could be. This was what rock and roll could sound like if it had Mozart’s ear for production, and that kind of genius wasn’t lost on Martin when he got the chance to see what Brian could do up close.
Despite Wilson being one of the most humble men in the music industry all through his life, Martin was the first to say that he created something otherworldly when he made records, saying, “All the records that I consider to be great, I like unqualifiedly. It would be very arrogant to say if I’d done that it would be much better. Some of the early Beach Boys records are still to me absolute bloody magic; I couldn’t fault them and I wouldn’t want to change them.”
That’s not to say that he couldn’t take a crack at remixing tunes from time to time. Wilson was open to see what Martin could do with the tracks, and when he first listened to him balancing the tracks for tunes like ‘God Only Knows’, Wilson admitted that Martin was close to making a better version of the classic than he did when he first came up with the idea.
But even if Martin could sprinkle a bit of musical magic on almost anything he touched, there’s nothing that Wilson ever made that can really be equalled by another producer. He was put on this Earth to bring joy to the world, and whether it was listening to his surf songs or his pop masterpieces, there’s hardly any note on those records that are out of place.
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