Rob Blackhurst

FT Weekend: April 21, 2007

The legendary producer tells Rob Blackhurst he found freedom when his 'boys' disbanded. But at 81, he is still in many ways the 'fifth Beatle'

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AIR Lyndhurst, the Hampstead church converted into a recording studio by Sir George Martin, hardly reeks of the spirit of rock 'n' roll. Inside the gloomy Victorian building are hanging baskets and a plaque commemorating a visit by the Prince of Wales. The rock musicians who have paused for lunch are not imbibing whisky and cigarettes in a dingy room. They are sitting on church pews in a light-flooded refectory, reading The Times and feasting on buckwheat salad and Shiraz while a genteel Louis Armstrong CD plays.

This, of course, is in keeping with the famously civilised spirit of Sir George. Photographs from Beatles sessions in the 1960s always show their producer looking dapper with a Brylcreemed parting and pressed suit, whatever psychedelic regalia the "boys" (as he still calls them) were wearing. As he greets me in an upstairs mixing room it's clear that, at 81, the fifth Beatle has swapped sartorial elegance for comfort. He is in retirement mode - wearing grey trousers pulled high above his waist and a simple blue shirt - though a tweed jacket lies draped over a chair.

More than 50 years in the recording industry have taken their toll on his ears, and he sits next to me on a sofa so he can hear my questions. "I'm compos mentis but my hearing has gone to pot. It's on a steep downward curve now." There are shades of the boy who grew up in Islington as the son of a wood machinist that seep through his beautifully modulated received pronunciation.

Up until Christmas, Martin was working full-time for three years on one last project for his most famous act. With his record producer son Giles he helped develop Love, the Cirque du Soleil show based loosely around the lyrics to Beatles songs, which opened in November in Las Vegas. Together they trawled the Abbey Road archive to create its soundtrack of remixed and spliced-up Beatles tracks. But, though he's announced his retirement almost as many times as Status Quo, this time he seems to mean it.

"It has to be my last album," he says. "I'm lucky to be alive - let's face it." And, though he likes Coldplay and Radiohead, he seems more interested in his garden and his four children (and growing crop of grandchildren) than the charts.

Since the Beatles split up 37 years ago, Martin has had a comfortable portfolio existence - producing records for Jeff Beck, America and Paul McCartney, writing scores to films such as Live and Let Die and acting as custodian of the Beatles legacy, including overseeing theAnthology collections of out-takes in the mid-1990s. He's also been treated as the unofficial master of ceremonies of the British music industry, leading the "three cheers for Her Majesty" at the Jubilee pop concert five years ago.

Fed up with the Scrooge-like attitude towards producers on a staff salary at EMI, Martin was one of the early pioneers of freelance working - and, from the mid-1960s onwards, hired himself back to the Beatles. (In 1963 his bosses gave him a Christmas bonus of four days' pay, despite the fact that his records had secured the number one slot for 37 weeks of the year.)

The business he established - The Associated Independent Recording (AIR) company - built a series of studios, including one on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1979. It became one of the most prolific studios of the 1980s - playing host to Stevie Wonder, Elton John and the Rolling Stones. But it was destroyed in the volcano eruption of 1995 - since when Martin has devoted himself to fundraising for the 8,000 islanders who lost their homes and their livelihoods. In May, 12 years and Dollars 3m later, he will be attending the opening of the fruits of his labours - a community centre where the population can "meet, play bingo and celebrate bar mitzvahs".

One source of revenue for Martin's Montserrat appeal has been 500 lithographs of his original 1965 string-quartet score for "Yesterday", each signed by himself and Paul McCartney: "You can see the scratches and the rubbing out and the coffee stains - you really cannot tell the difference from the original. I've got the original and it's been valued at Pounds 100,000 by Sotheby's." These days Martin turns down virtually all interview requests but one reason he's speaking to me is that he's keen to sell off the remaining 65 for Pounds 2,800 each.

The accountancy habits of an old record label boss die hard. He's fascinated by the economics of the Love show: "London or Broadway are like mice compared to the scale of Las Vegas. The theatre - which has 6,000 speakers - was specially built for the show and cost Dollars 150m. There are two shows a night five times a week. And the average price of a ticket is Dollars 120." When making the Love album, the experimental boffin in him enjoyed exploring digital technology, which he would have "given his right arm for in the 60s". Sounds that took him hours of Heath Robinson improvisation with the Beatles are now available at the press of a button. His son, well versed in digital manipulation, taught him some new tricks. He is wide-eyed: "You can bring up all the sound on the computer - and stretch them, compress them, bend them, turn them upside down and change keys."

Revisiting the original master tapes and listening again to the studio banter captured between takes was a bittersweet experience now that two of the four Beatles are dead. To end the Love show, Martin uses a poignant piece of this snatched dialogue, John Lennon saying in a thick cod-Scouse accent: "Turn the red light off. This is Johnny Rhythm saying goodnight to yuz all." "Isn't that lovely?" says Martin, smiling with an almost parental affection. "Even now when I listen to that voice I have feelings of shivers down my spine. The funny thing is that John always hated it - and he was always begging me to do things with it."

In view of the album's near-unanimous rave reviews, I ask whether he was disappointed that it peaked at number three in the British charts and then went into freefall. "I was disappointed. But people didn't need to buy it. They could take it off the air. The music industry is facing almost extinction at the moment with downloading. Technology, which was always our great friend, has suddenly turned into an enemy. It's made a world of people who firmly believe that all music should be free."

So what does he think of Paul McCartney's decision to leave EMI after more than 40 years and release his next album through the Starbucks label? "That's pretty smart, I think. Starbucks is where everyone goes - you don't go into an HMV shopto buy a cup of coffee. It sounds radical - but his new stuff didn't sell on the old catalogue anyway."

Though it seems likely that, with the cessation of hostilities between the two corporate Apples, Beatles tracks will soon appear on iTunes, Martin worries that downloads are destroying the concept of the album that, with Sergeant Pepper, the Beatles did so much to pioneer: "One of the sad things about iTunes is that you don't have to buy albums as they are. Now we've got a kind of fragmentation of individual songs that don't belong to each other."

Martin began as a professional musician during the war, aged 15, playing Jerome Kern and Cole Porter songs that he had learnt by ear in pubs with his dance band George Martin and his Four Tune Tellers. Via a combat-free stint as a navigator on fighter planes in the Fleet Air Arm (where he acquired his officer class accent and bearing), he entered the Guildhall School of Music and found himself, in his mid-20s, trying to earn a "not very good living" as a "not very good oboe player". He got an invitation in 1950 to join EMI as an assistant to the head of the Parlophone label. At 29, when he took over Parlophone, he became the youngest ever person to run a record label. He remembers a world that seems closer to Edwardian England than the spirit of the modernising 1950s: "EMI was like the BBC. It was a hallowed institution. So there was a rigid class system."

Martin produced a bewildering array of music - from original recordings of plays such as Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, to Scottish bagpipe music to Humphrey Lyttelton's jazz band. But it was improvising sound effects in comedy recordings - with Flanders and Swann, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan - that later helped him deliver the stunning inventiveness of Beatles records. "Imagery in sound is most important. With Peter Sellers I experimented with musique concrete. It was a great preparation for when the Beatles came along."

Desperate for his own act that would emulate the success of "the English Elvis" Cliff Richard, Martin half-heartedly signed the Beatles after every other big record label in London had rejected them. And here lies one of the great imponderables in pop music industry. If Martin hadn't taken a punt on them in 1962, would they have gone back to Liverpool and given up before they'd even begun to write their canon of classic songs? He is typically modest: "Whatever happened they would have succeeded one way or another. It might have taken a little longer and they might have become solo artists, but they were talented people. They would have made it."

He sighs and, for the thousandth time, sounds almost disbelieving as he tries to pinpoint how the charismatic but, in his eyes, musically undistinguished teenagers managed to achieve so much. "Together they had this magical, almost nuclear fission. They were like the four corners of a tower - and they were impregnable."

Throughout the 1960s, Martin had to be in the studio at any time of day or night that the Beatles demanded - often until 4 or 5am. Physically and creatively, it was exhausting. "You had to use the extremes of your imagination to get what you thought they wanted to hear. It took its toll. I remember I would fall asleep in the middle of the session because I was physically worn out. I was chatting to George many years later. And he said: 'I used to pop a pill in your tea to keep you awake."

When the Beatles finally split up in 1970, Martin felt emancipated: "During the time I was with them my main concern was making them as good as they possibly could be, and to keep them together. When they split up it was a great relief to me because I didn't have responsibility for them."

Martin was the perfect madcap schoolmaster to the Beatles. Even though he'd never taken a drag of a joint, he shared their English eccentricity and love of jabberwocky-inspired fantasy - which influenced the startling scores he wrote to "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I Am the Walrus".

Just as importantly, he kept their huge competing egos in check and tempered the excesses of their "free-form" jamming that, he says, "would bore the pants off you". I ask what he, in turn, learned from his four star pupils. He answers without a second thought. "They gave me the courage to push the boundaries. Without them I don't think I would have done it."

Details of the Yesterday for Montserrat appeal are on www.georgemartinmusic.com

Further extracts from my interview. Here's the stuff i left on the cutting room floor. For Beatles freaks only.

Upbringing:

"I was fifteen and started a band in school. Sixteen. By the time I got to seventeen I'd joined the Fleet Air Arm. But I had a band and amazingly we earned money – more than we would have done if we'd taken a job – it was good".

I've always had catholic taste. I've never pigeon-holed music. There's only two types of music – good and bad. When I was a kid I was very much into jazz – or what I thought was jazz – stuff like Benny Goodman and Woody Herman and Glen Miller – and of course as I grew up all the popular music came from America – it didn't come from here – and I would listen avidly to all the latest tunes as they were composed. I remember hearing All the things you are by Jerome Kern – and I remember hearing that for the first time. That had only just come out. I was in my pre-teens I think. And I remember thinking "What a wonderful melody". By this time – I was kind of self-taught – I learned to play it on the piano by listening to it and the chord structure is very interesting so I found it very interesting to play.

'when I was demobbed from the Fleet Air Arm I had no career and I was twenty-one, I had to do something, and I had a fairy godfather who thought I was brilliant, and he gave me an introduction to the Principal of the guildhall school of music and I went and studied music for three years – which was wonderful really. It was a whole new world and I was being taught properly and I emerged from there being able to play the oboe and writing music and I earned my living by playing the oboe but I wasn't a very good oboe player so I didn't earn a very good living. Right out of the blue I had an invitation to go and visit someone at Abbey Road – and I didn't know what Abbey Road was or what EMI stood for or anything – and this guy said I need an assistant to look after my classical recordings. Can you do this? I said "of course I can" and took up on the job. I joined Parlophone initially as the classical recorder.

"It was unusual to have a classically trained musician in the pop world. Early on, pop music and classical music were kept very much apart – and there was tremendous snobbishness on both sides. The classical people looked down on the rock and rollers and the rock n rollers would say these guys are so out of date they should be consigned to the mausoleum. There was that rigid feeling. And I couldn't understand this. And of course it's different today because classical musicians recognise other forms of music. Rock n Roll people don't really understand classical music – but they try to. Billy Joel tries to write contemporary music with sort of imitations of Mozart and Beethoven – which is fine – Paul McCartney wants to get into the classical scene. There is a kind of cross-over now – which is good for everybody".

Are there any genres that you don't get on with?

The only kind of music I don't like is the stuff which isn't music – and that's rap. I still don't get this – it's a bit like Charlie Chester with his jingles. It's just sort of rhyming couplets, generally with obscene words in them. And I often say to people "when you've done that bit, can you hum me the chorus".

The Future of Music

I was asked my opinion on it. I think we could come into the line with the rest of the world – the trouble is that it hasn't been extended for various reasons. One of the problems is that technology which was always our great friend has suddenly turned into an enemy. The music industry is dying because of it. It's made a nation or a world of people who now firmly believe that all music should be free – it's my inalienable right that I should be able to listen to this and not have to pay for it. That is destroying music.

The whole downloading bit – it's amazing what difference it has made – because most people don't realise what the music business consists of. If you're making music for sale, you've got to have a factory, you've got to have machines which cost a lot of money, you've got to have a whole host of people running them. With the internet it's not necessary – nobody is needed. But then it's an insoluble problem because all that manufacturing capacity was designed to satisfy customers and the prices were accordingly they justified their prices by saying we're making an awful lot of records which don't sell. I think it's true to say that no classical recordings make money – you have your list of good and bad classical recordings – if you decide to go and record something – it's going to cost you a lot of money –and you would not be able to justify the expense of that with the sales that you would get.

I think it's going down the pan. It will be left to a lot individuals to survive it. I've been lucky – I lived at the right time. Looking at a grander view, in classical music, we've had an extraordinary chart. If you look over the years and look at the popularity and the rise of music. In the first millennium we don't know anything about it really. We don't know what there was. A few troubadours going round, and so on. Then the great, great music started with plainsong and Gregorian chants and churches and Palestrina and people like that. That grew into the real classical stuff like Bach and then after Bach came Beethoven and Mozart. It was a gradual rise from Palestrina onwards – when I think Bach and Bethoven were the apogee of that. We went into the romantics – Tchakovsky and Mettina and so on – all the greats – ending up with people like Mendeloson and Delius and Vaughn Williams. They were all writing melodic music of an orchestral state – now the window of opportunity for a composer is very small. Because if he makes stuff which is too tuneful – a la Paul McCartney or someone like that – he will be derided for writing chocolate box music and if he goes the other way and goes avant-garde, as most composers do, then the audience won't turn up for it. The equivalent to Damian Hirst people wouldn't go to a concert of.

The music industry is going through a very difficult time. It's facing almost extinction at the moment with the internet and downloading and so on. I can't blame any of the big companies for running around in Panic – which they are doing. It must be very difficult knowing that people don't want to buy physical things any more – they want to take them out of the air – people expect to get things for nothing anyway. It's really tough – it's like being a dress manufacturer and being told that we can provide them in shops but people want them for nothing.

What's the work you are proudest of?

It's funny that. I never think about that. I'm a working-man in music. It's like someone being given a commission – so that someone might go up to a sculptor and say "will you sculpt me a piece for an opening of Hyde Park next year. What do you have to do? You have to start working on it. I'm in a similar way – I'm a jobbing musician – if someone says to me "I've got this song and I want you to frame it in the best possible way – and so I just put my head to it. And I think "what is this guy wanting?"

On I Am the Walrus

You mention I am the Walrus. I am the Walrus was one of John's most weird songs – when he sang it to me he said I'd like you to do a score for it. I said, ok John, do you want to come back and work with me at my place or go over to Paul's and decide what to do? He said "No. That's your job. Use some cellos – maybe – strings – maybe some brass –you know the kind of thing. That was his contribution to the score. So I went away and thought hard about this – and I thought this is a crazy piece of music, so I'm going to write some crazy stuff. And the thing that shook John most of all was when I booked a choir of twelve singers – six men and six women – and wrote out the parts of them – and had them doing whoops and slides and giggles and ha-ha-has – and they were all orchestrated and came at particular times in the score. And when John first heard it – and I ran the orchestra through with the choir – he fell about laughing. He said "that's fantastic" and he was knocked out by it. So I was very gratified with that particular score because I seemed to get near to what he wanted. But he was a hard taskmaster. Because he had this mind in which everything was much better than anything else. He had a vision of things. I'm sure what he had in his mind could never really be realised. He had much grander dreams than you can think of.

The exhaustion of working with the Beatles:

It took its toll. I remember I would fall asleep in the middle of the session. Because I was physically worn out. I was chatting to George long after it had all finished – we were joking about old times. And George said "I used to pop a pill in your tea to keep you awake". I said "thank you George for spiking my drink". It was tough, but of course it was incredibly important and incredibly exciting too"

"From Pepper onwards – you never knew which way you were jumping. And you had to use the extremes of your imagination to get what you thought they would like to hear. It didn't always work, but mainly it did. Even in songs like Glass Onion – obscure ones –there were things that did happen that were good. There were boring things – sometimes the boys would go on what they called free-form. There is still a piece of music called Carnival of Light – which is thirteen minutes long – and it would bore the pants of you. It don't go in. [to the Anthology series] Over my dead body would it go in"

The biggest problem that came up was a result of them developing so rapidly and developing into their own talents so that they became competitive towards each other. Instead of dealing with the Beatles – which was a thing – I was dealing with John doing his stuff, Paul doing his stuff, and George wanting me to listen to what he was doing with his stuff. Ringo didn't bother much but there were three very talented people. During the white album I had to have people helping me because they were all demanding to be done at once – and I'd be running from one studio to another making sure everyone was ok. Chris Thomas, who was my assistant, would do a lot of work on things and Geoff Emerick was my engineer gave a tremendous amount of help with things.

On George Harrison:

Lennon and McCartney were the prime force. George to begin with would offer songs and you'd put them in because you tolerated them, you didn't put them in because you thought they were great. When we got to Sergeant Pepper I had to turn him down – I said "George, this is going to be a great album, and what you're doing is not good enough. And he was really hurt by that. The song I turned down was "It's only a Northern song" – which went into Yellow Submarine. And he came back with "Within you, Without you" which was a bit of a dirge but was much more interesting. Here comes the Sun knocked my socks off and Something.

If people as talented as the Beatles came along today would they do as well?

I don't honestly know the answer to that one. It's a bit like asking if Hitler hadn't invaded Poland what would have happened.

If you hadn't signed them would they have gone back to Liverpool and given up?

They might have broken up. But whatever would have happened to them they would have succeeded in one way or another. Because they were so talented within themselves. It might have taken them a little longer and they might have become solo artists but they were talented people, they would have made it. Together they combined to have this magical, almost nuclear fission type of thing. There was a combustion between those four guys. Ringo shouldn't be left out –because he was the catalyst for the other three. And he was the cement that bound them together.

Beatles solo careers:

Well all the stuff they did since they disbanded has been as good as other people. But it's not the great stuff that we did as the Beatles. I think they all know that. Still not as good as the Beatles. One of the sad things about i-tunes. One of the good things from the public's point of view is that they don't have to buy albums as they are – they can select titles off albums and make up their own. I always think of albums as albums and I think of the great songs that come out of them. But now we've got a kind fragmentation of individual songs that don't belong to each other. People will be able to buy them and put them in their i-pods. So an awful lot of songs will get wasted because of that, I think.

Is there anyone you wanted to produce who you didn't?

I produced so much that I don't think I would have had time. I came very near to recording Barbara Streisand who I always had the most fantastic voice. We didn't make it – mainly because I wasn't available. I learned afterwards that it would have been a terrible mistake if I had done because she wanted me to record within three weeks of meeting. I said "I can't – I've got other things on". She said "you didn't tell me" and I said "you didn't ask me". She said – who is a good as you – and I said the best person you can get hold of is Phil Ramone – who's an old mate of mine. And I put them in contact –and he did the album. A couple of months after I saw him and he said "boy you don't know what you missed". And I noticed that his hair had gone white. I said what are you on about. He said "she's a control freak". She would ring up the arranger at one in the morning for a ten o clock session that day saying "I'm worried about the cello part – will you sing it to me. I couldn't deal with that?"

I'd already had a number one hit and a few hit records before the Beatles had come on to the scene. And I'd been – by the time the Beatles came along – I'd been in the record business for twelve years. So I was a mature person by this time. Paul was quite right about likening them to the astronauts because the majority of astronauts who went to the moon in Apollo 11 and so on were all of the age of thirty eight to forty and when they came back and were very famous none of them knew what to do. I think when the Beatles disbanded they weren't quite sure what they wanted to do. I knew what I wanted to do. Because during the time I was with them my main concern was to keep making them as good as they possibly could be, and to keep them together. And when they eventually split up it was a great relief to me because I didn't have responsibility for them. I was in demand, people would ask me to do an album for them. And if I liked their music I'd so – ok, I'll do that. Not having to commit myself to another one or another one. They would be one offs. So I'd do a couple of records with Jeff Beck. I'd do five records with America.

The Love album:

It was a labour of love the whole thing. That's why it's called love. For me it was wonderful because it was such a challenge. When they gave me the brief to do this one and a half hour's music with a carte-blanche – I could do what I wanted. For me I knew that physically I wasn't what I used to be. Mentally I'm all there – I'm compis mentis – but my hearing had gone to pot and it's deteriorated even since then. I'm going on a steep downward curve now and of course I did need help. This is where my son comes into the equation. He's upstairs now and he had two things which I don't have. He had a good pair of ears and an ability to cope with the modern form of recording – digital – and he's brilliant at manipulating digital sounds. There's no tape – everything's on hard disc and you bring up all the sound on computer – and you can stretch them, you can compress them, you can bend them, turn upside down and change keys. The things you can do with music nowadays – I would have given my right arm for it in the sixties. This was fun – playing with music. Particularly working with my son. I enjoyed that very much.

The fact that John's dead makes a hell of difference too. Paul and Ringo feel a bit left out – that George and John have gone. John did have a great voice but he always hated it- he was always begging me to do things with it. I thought it was so…. Even now when I listen to him I great feelings of shivers down my spine.

Will the whole archive be put online?

"I think that is going to happen. Everything will be available I'm sure. In a kind of way – I was talking about the rise and fall of classical music. In a funny way what we've been doing is music of our time. And it will be looked back upon as the equivalent of classical music – because it's music that touches the people – that's the essential thing- I think we will be hearing this stuff in forty or fifty years.

The costs of fame for the Beatles:

John's thing was bizarre because he was just murdered unnecessarily by this goon who was obviously off his head. George had a similar thing in a way – he died of cancer – but I'm absolutely sure that the break in into his house in the middle of the night had an enormous traumatic effect on him. I've spoken to Olivia about this and not many people realise that George –when he woke up to find out what was going on – he met this guy on the staircase with a knife and this guy stabbed him, and George fought for his life and fought for twelve minutes. Can you imagine? It's a long time when you've got a bloke you're grappling with. It's not until Olivia came out and grabbed a heavy brass stand and hit the fellow over the head – she saved George's life – and she nearly killed this guy. He was in intensive care. It took a while for George to recover physically but I think the trauma of that must have affected his cancer. I think stress does this"

Are there artists recording now that you really like?

"Not a lot. Oasis are ok. They're alright. I'd rather have Coldplay, I'd rather have Radiohead. Oasis are very much in the imitating Beatles mood – and I'm all for people being original. Trouble is I don't listen anyway. There are people now who I don't listen to because I'm out of touch. I'm eighty-one now and you can't expected to be at the cutting edge of music. When I did the music hall of fame last year and I was inducted into it – they asked me to conduct the music at the end. And I chose the end of Abbey Road as a suitable bit to do. The only problem is I said who will sing it – because Paul can't. And they said we'd get a couple of contemporary singers – and they gave me two people I'd never heard of. Now I know who are they are because Corrine Bailey Rae is a big name in America – she's had a big record there – and Johnny Borrell – they were just people to me. I should have been aware of them but I wasn't.

Working for EMI:

Of course. EMI was like the BBC. You had to behave properly. It was a hallowed institution – the greatest records in the world had been made there. So there was rigid class system. There were the guys in the brown coats who used to be the cleaners and sweeper-uppers, there were the guys in the white coats who used to be the engineers, and there were the guys in the ordinary business suits who were the producers. You wouldn't wear flannels even – you would wear a suit and a tie. If you see me in one of those early shots, I'm always wearing a tie. People say to me were you ever induced to let your hair grow? And I said all the time I was with the Beatles I resisted that even though later on I let it grow. But not when I was with them.

Did you socialise with the other Beatles?

No, we used to go and have dinner together. And I went on holiday with John. We went on a skiing holiday together. I never really thought of myself as being that different. But I kept my own personality. They – the four of them – were like the four corners of a tower – and they were impregnable. Not even Brian Epstein or Neil Aspinall were part of them. Because they'd been through so much – because they'd been together living in hotel rooms with the world at their feet they became something different, and you had to respect that.

They had an affect on me. I'd always been a bit of a maverick although I still wore a tie. With them, they confirmed what I'd always believed, and they gave me the courage to push the boundaries. Without them I don't think I would have done it. I did learn from it.

Did they appreciate you?

I've got George, Paul and Ringo saying he's the best producer in the world and that kind of stuff. I don't think they thought much about it. I was part of the scenery"

How good were Lennon/McCartney?

Up there with them. They're in the holy of holies. Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irvine Berlin, Jerome Kern, all those great writers. But there are others that come close to the Beatles but are not as prolific – the fact that there was more than one of the Beatles was a great help. Elton John's been bloody good, Burt Bacharach is fantastic – there are some great people.

Relationships with the Beatles:

Paul and George were nineteen when I first met them. Ringo was the oldest – he was about twenty-two. They had lived a lot of lives before I'd met them. They'd had their training ground in Hamburg. And that had revealed a side of life that I never saw – and I'm quite glad I didn't too – a field of playing through the night, drugs, women, all sorts of things. They grew up very quickly.

I had the same kind of education they had. All this business about me being the toff and they being working class was rubbish. I think when I went to school we had the ethos – my parents were working class – but they said you will do better George than we did. They gave me that urge to try and impress them. I think that even though – and I think Paul and John – John less so – but Paul had a good father who would say to him "you're doing a great job and you're going to be very successful" but nowadays people are namby-pamby – they're frightened of giving too much competition to children. I think it's a good idea – there is talent around and I think talent reacts to a certain amount of pressure. If you are a sportsman, you are competitive. If you are going to be a high-jumper you are going to want to jump higher than the other guy. People don't complain about that, so why should they children about being competitive.

John Lennon's criticisms of Martin after the Beatles:

He was on drugs. He went through a very bad spot. He nearly split up with Yoko – she sent him away for a bit. He behaved badly for a long time. Long time after he'd got through it – and Yoko had Sean – John became a house-husband and Yoko went out to work and he stayed at home and made bread and looked after the kid. Yoko went out to work in an office n the floor below. After that period, I spent an evening him in his house in the Dakota. And we racked about old times. I hauled him over the coals. I said "you know, John. You said an awful lot of bollocks really – publicly – and you've gone on record and it was very hurtful. He looked at me and said "well, I was out of it wasn't I?" And that was as far of an apology as I would get.

Lennon and McCartney's relationship:

He was scathing to Paul. Paul was quite nasty to him sometimes. The funny thing is it's a bit like two brothers separating and talking about each other. But still loving each other. And I really believe that John and Paul did love each other as brothers. And they were competitive, both had big egos and wanted to be the top man and that's what made John so scathing in his comments. John did have – delusions of grandeur is too strong a word – but he did think of himself in a way as being the best thing since sliced bread. That was supported by the tremendous adulation he got from around the world. How can anyone resist that? If you are always told what a fantastic God you are, it is very difficult to resist that.

Do you worry about the dominance of X-factor in music?

It's trivial. It is rubbish. But unfortunately people want rubbish. And it's the lowest common denominator. It's a great shame really because television is a wonderful medium. But it's driven by money. And the people who have the stations have to turn out stuff that has higher ratings than anyone else – because it brings in the money with the adverts and so on. In the commercial world, if you're running a television

If you could look back and give yourself advice?

My circumstances were that I was given a label with no stars and had to build it from scratch. I had to do things that other people didn't do. But if you're given labels where you've already got stars, it's a different thing. My advice would be to trust your own judgement and go for it and don't be swayed by people saying that will never work. That's what people said to me at EMI when they heard my first Peter Ustinov record. That will never sell. I only pressed 250 copies. With Peter Sellers they said, that will never sell, make it a 10inch album – so I called it the best of Sellers just to spite them.

It helped in many ways because I was making sound-pictures long before the Beatle's came along. In a way, the imagery in sound is most important. The stuff I did with Peter Sellers – I experimented with music concrete, I got to know the people at the BBC radio-phonics workshop down in Maida Vale. We worked together – we collaborated. I would play around with tape speeds and turn them back to front. I actually made a record – a single called Ray Cathode time-beat. It was playing around and experiment – it was a great preparation for when the Beatles came along.

Up till the show last year – for three years I was working full-time. Pretty well. Not just in the studio every day but all the things associated with it. Because the whole point about that – we weren't making a record. We were making music for a show – a big, big show – the scale of which people can't imagine here. So it was constantly going to Montreal or those guys coming here and going through story boards and designs that you have to do. All the while this theatre was being built – we couldn't wait to get into it – and when we did get into it we had to spend an awful lot of time there working out the sound to be as good as possible. We finished up with 6 000 speakers. The scale of it – when you think of London orBroadway – they are like mice compared with the scale of Las Vegas. Because the theatre – which was specially built for the show – cost 150 million dollars. The show itself cost thirty million dollars. There are sixty-five people in the cast, eight-five people backstage. There are ten shows a week, two shows a night five times a week. And the average price of a ticket is $120 dollars. Multiply it by ten per week per two thousand and thirteen people – because it's playing to near capacity – and you end up with 2.2 million dollars a week turnover. You couldn't imagine this in London – it's a different scale.

It got wonderful reviews. I was disappointed. But people didn't need to buy it - they could take it off the air. That's what destroyed it. Earlier this year – or late last year –t here was a number one album in the states by the dreamgirls – that album created a new record – the new record was it was the first album to sell so little to reach the number one spot. It sold sixty thousand albums to get to the number one slot. We would have to sell millions before we did that.

McCartney signing to Starbucks

"That's pretty smart, I think. Because Starbucks is where everybody goes. You don't go into a HMV shop to get a cup of coffee. I think it sounds radical – but he doesn't need to worry about the past catalogue – he wants to sell his new stuff. And his new stuff didn't sell on the old catalogue anyway"

Chaos and Creation In the Backyard?

"That was best he'd done for a long-time"