The Big Beatles Sort Out: By George!

British Maid by George Martin And His Orchestra (United Artists, 1968).

While he wasn’t busy working out how to wrangle John Lennon’s request to have it sound like when a nargle is a noogle into something at least halfway approaching a hit single, wrestle Spike Milligan’s tendency to go ‘NYEHGOO!’ a lot into something at least halfway approaching a coherent comedy sketch and contort a BBC Radiophonic Workshop loop of what appeared to be some stairs falling down some stairs into something at least approaching actual recognisable music with a proper tune you could tap your foot to and everything – and when he wasn’t otherwise engaged producing and arranging Gerry And The Pacemakers, Cilla Black, Peter Sellers, the Beyond The Fringe team, Billy J. Kramer, Flanders And Swann, Bernard Cribbins, The Action, Michael Bentine, Ron Goodwin And His Orchestra, The Ivor Cutler Trio, The Fourmost, The Tudor Minstrels, The Temperance Seven, Matt Monro, The Master Singers, David And Jonathan, the original cast and company of Lionel Bart’s Twang! and pretty much anyone and everyone that EMI and its associated labels could somehow find room to spare him for – George Martin, usually with His Orchestra never too far away, had a go at creating a couple of hit top pop discs of his own. Ironically for someone who was considered so pivotal and essential to pop music in the sixties that he was commissioned to compose the launch music for the BBC’s new pop service Radio 1, they are a fascinating combination of solidly arranged commercial clout and a complete absence of any degree of understanding of why the acts he worked with were commercially appealing prospects in the first place, positioned somewhere between a surefire million-selling chart topper and an approximation of ‘beat’ music destined to enjoy no greater exposure than appearing in the background of a couple of party scenes in a handful of films and television shows. It’s perhaps not too surprising then – and especially considering that his utterly splendid side’s worth of abstract orchestral kaleidoscopics, catchy hooks and backward instruments recorded forwards to sound even more backwards however that works exactly that found their way onto the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album, despite being probably his most widely heard work, is roundly disregarded for having the temerity not to be ‘Beatles’; and there’s more about that here incidentally – that most of it is overlooked and ignored now. Perhaps he should have concentrated more on making it sound like when a noogle is a nargle.

1968’s British Maid – released in America as London By George and then reissued in the UK on a budget label as By George!, each time with a different cover- is a collection of George Martin’s instrumental interpretations of a couple of recent pop hits by the likes of Traffic, The Small Faces, Procol Harum, The New Vaudeville Band and a certain quartet of up and coming moptopped hopefuls called The Beatles, along with the themes from recent big screen semi-smashes To Sir, With Love and Alfie, George’s own themes from the Radio 1 launch and David Frost’s new ITV talk show, and a certain piece of music by two up and coming songwriters he had spotted some potential in that didn’t exactly set the charts alight at the time but would later become notorious with anyone who spent the school holidays wondering why their television was telling them off for being bored. Packed with sound effects, exotic arrangements and occasional flashes of outright genius, it somehow went unnoticed at the time even despite featuring a naked redhead brandishing a sitar on the cover and has since been more or less entirely forgotten, to the extent that only two tracks from it have ever appeared on Compact Disc, the Lennon And McCartney numbers find themselves omitted even from exhaustive lists of Beatle covers that somehow also find room for the buskers singing a couple of lines of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in that Ace Of Wands episode, and anyone who wants to illustrate their own ramblings about it with images of at least halfway acceptable quality will have to resort to taking photographs of their own actual literal copies of the album. Handily, it’s also an album that certain individuals just will not stop going on about.

The Big Beatles Sort Out is a podcast in which Paul and Garry Abbott rank all manner of Beatle-related recordings according to their rigidly enforced and frequently mid-show debated criteria – so far they have tackled the full Beatles catalogue, John, Paul, George and Ringo’s solo singles between 1970 and 1980, The Rutles, songs that the various Beatles gave away to other artists, the film soundtracks and the BBC sessions, and are currently making their way through every UK chart-topper of the sixties and finding that the likes of Frank Ifield are more than holding their own against the bigger cultural hitters who arrive further on in the decade – and on this special edition I’m joining them for a chat about By George! as we’ve arbitrarily decided it is officially canonically called. So join us as we discuss who The New Vaudeville Band were and where they came from and why, which theoretical Spike Milligan sketches should probably stay wiped, how to ruin a date by going to see a bloke dressed as a druid playing a Hammond Organ in front of a sine wave, what that schoolboy who went ‘OOOOH yes!’ in the very first episode of Doctor Who did next, whether the theme from The Frost Programme is quantifiably different to the theme from It’s A Tree, why certain individuals might be even less keen to see Why Don’t You…? again than you might have expected anyway and how to do a low budget recreation of the end of I Am The Walrus using whatever is nearest to hand that you can actually be bothered reaching for, and there’s also a very unexpected twist in the Carnival Of Light saga. Plus there’s the excitement of Garry’s never less than controversial scoring system as we find out which track gets the most and least not-liked ties out of ten…

You can listen to The Big Beatles Sort Out: By George! here.

By George! by George Martin And His Orchestra (Sunset, 1970).

Buy A Book!

You can find tons more about George Martin’s various sixties productions, as well as an in-depth look at all of the television programmes that The Beatles are seen chatting about between takes in Get Back, in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. A real coffee, mind, and not whatever nightmarish combination of boiling water and gravy browning they probably showed you how to make under the guise of ‘Granny’s Sewing Cupboard Coffee’ in Why Don’t You…?.

Further Listening

You can also find Tim on The Big Beatles Sort Out chatting to Paul and Garry about the Beatles cartoon, and in particular the episode based around Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, here. You can find more about George Martin’s extensive back catalogue of sixties productions in pop, spoken word, soundtracks and more with Tim talking about Ringing On The Engine Bell by Bernard Cribbins here, Peter And Sophia by Peter Sellers And Sophia Loren here, The Best Of The Goon Shows here and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album here.

You can also find Paul on Looks Unfamiliar talking about The Compleat Beatles, Zeeb And The Martians, Crab E. Crab, Rock Lords: Narlies, the Commodore Plus/4 and The Late Night Funster Show here, Disneytime Rotadraw, What Shall We Do Now?: Fun And Games With The Andrex Puppy, Breaking All The Rules, Tomorrow’s World demonstrating Magic Eye pictures, Kirky The HD Hunter, Frog Dreaming and Waddingtons’ The Vampire Game here and the Christmas Special of The Peter Serafinowicz Show here, and on It’s Good, Except It Sucks talking about Thor: The Dark World here, Iron Fist here and Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 here. You can also find Paul on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV talking about Transformers here.

You can find Garry on It’s Good, Except It Sucks talking about Fantastic Four here, Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer here, X-Men here and Spider-Man 3 here.