(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL / George Martin)
Mon 19 January 2026 16:30, UK
Throughout every era of The Beatles’ history, George Martin was always the unofficial fifth member of the group.
While many people have earned that title over the years, from Brian Epstein to Derek Taylor to Billy Preston, there’s no way to deny the number of little sonic touches that Martin added every single time he arranged one of their tunes. The Fab Four simply wouldn’t have happened without Martin’s help, but while he was able to stick by their side through thick and thin throughout their career, there were bound to be a few songs that didn’t hit him in the right way.
Which is saying a lot, given the number of tracks he didn’t fully understand. The Fab Four didn’t know the first thing about music theory, so when they came to him with songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, it was up to Martin to help make sense of everything. He helped shape their songs into what they were, but don’t mistake that for Martin being the puppetmaster behind every member of the band.
Each of the Fab Four developed into a complex musical thinker, and none of the songs would have had their foundation were it not for John Lennon and Paul McCartney being joined at the hip musically. Even when George Harrison came up with fully formed tunes, hearing him adding the perfect solo to ‘Something’ or bringing in the synthesiser when working on ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was the kind of off-the-wall ideas that Martin would have never thought of on his own.
And looking at where he went after The Beatles, he seemed content to experiment with other artists that had the same mentality that he did. Jeff Beck and the Mahavishnu Orchestra weren’t the kind of bands that wanted simplistic rock and roll, and a lot of the best moments of his later career came from him taking technical wizards and sweetening them up to make records like Blow By Blow.
Then again, The Beatles were always there in the background, and while Martin was there to provide production touches to a few McCartney solo albums, he felt that everything changed when John Lennon was murdered. Lennon was the least knowledgeable about music theory, but there was no doubt that he was the heart of the band, and while Martin was more than happy to provide a string arrangement to the song ‘Grow Old With Me’, he drew the line at working on The Beatles Anthology.
Every one of the Threetles would have been more than happy to jam with their fallen bandmate one more time, but when Martin was floated the idea about producing, he felt that it wasn’t in his nature to resurrect Lennon’s voice for a new generation, saying, “I kind of told them I wasn’t too happy with putting them together with the dead John. I’ve got nothing wrong with dead John but the idea of having dead John with live Paul and Ringo and George to form a group, it didn’t appeal to me too much.”
He wasn’t alone in thinking that it was weird, but you can’t deny that Jeff Lynne did the best job he could bringing back that classic Beatles sound in the 1990s. It didn’t sound exactly like what they had been doing back then, but even Martin had to admire the work that Lynne had done on the record. It seemed impossible to get the tracks separated, but by recording with Lennon’s demo as a guide, ‘Free As A Bird’ felt like one of the last great moments that the band could have captured together.
While the weight of those Anthology songs could be felt all over again when they made ‘Now and Then’ in the 2020s, ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ will be the true farewells from the band. They may not have had their brother there to help them through everything, but even with Lennon gone, the band that reshaped the world was happy to pull off one more miracle when they had the chance.
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