20. He’s no stranger to mixing family with business. In 2006, Martin and his son, Giles Martin, remixed 80 minutes of Beatles music for the Las Vegas stage performance Love, a joint venture between Cirque du Soleil and the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd.
21. He thinks The Beatles will be remembered in the next century, but he won’t be. “They’re just great musicians and great writers, like Gershwin or Rodgers and Hammerstein. They are there in history, and the Beatles are there in history, too. They’ll be there in 100 years, too. But I won’t be.”
22. He’s wrong.
23. Some of Martin’s earliest work included including producing albums for comedy greats like Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore and Sir Peter Ustinov in the 1950s.
24. His first music hit was actually an electronic music song called “Time Beat,” just months before meeting the Beatles in 1962, which he produced under the assumed name “Ray Cathode.”
25. Beatles manager Brian Epstein introduced Martin to the Beatles. However, the first time Martin heard their music, he was not impressed. As the BBC notes, “Martin walked out of the band’s first recording session at Abbey Road, leaving his engineers to supervise the recording of Besame Mucho while he went to the canteen.”
26. It was a clever quip from George Harrison that helped endear the Fab Four to Martin. After a session in the studio Martin asked if there was anything the bad didn’t like. The quiet Beatle spoke up: “Well, for a start, I don’t like your tie.”
27. Of the many artists that Martin has worked with in multiple musical genres — from Pete Townsend to Celine Dion to the Dire Straits — perhaps the most famous non-Beatles song he produced was “Candle in the Wind 1997,” Elton John’s tribute to the late Princess Diana and the all-time best-selling single. He also produced Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” and Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die,” both legendary James Bond themes.
28. Martin helmed the production of the Beatles Anthology in the mid-1990s, but he was still working on the Fab Four’s music a decade later when he and his son Giles arranged the music for Cirque Du Soleil’s Beatles-inspired show Love.
29. Perhaps appropriately, the news of his passing was broken to the world by a Beatle. Ringo Starr announced that Martin had died on his Twitter account and then paid tribute to him with a vintage shot of all five Beatles.
[wp_ad_camp_2]
RIP SIR George Martin
