Martin did his best to cast the Liverpool quartet in a more realistic light. In a 1964 interview, he opened up about his fated first meeting with the band: “The first thing that I heard was a recording they’d made, rather a bad one, and I didn’t do a sort of backwards somersault and hit the ceiling and say, ‘God, this is find of the century’ or anything like that.
I just thought they were interesting and thought they had something slightly different and I liked to know something more about them, so I got them in the studio”. (Faroutmagazine)
Martin’s frankness was a useful tool during the creation of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for which George Harrison composed the slinky psychedelic number ‘Only A Northern Song’. In his book A Hard Days Write, Steve Turner sheds light on the bitter origins of the track:
“The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles,” he begins. “Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30% of whose shares belonged to John and Paul with Ringo and George owning only 1.6% each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the group’s main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was merely a contracted writer.”
The Beatles went ahead and recorded the track, but George Martin’s intense dislike of the timpani-coddled number caused him to cut it from Sgt Pepper’s tracklist. The producer would later say that it was the “track he hated most [from Harrison].”
Arguably, Martin’s refusal to take anything less than perfect is why Sgt. Pepper’s remains one of the finest concept albums of all time. ‘Only A Northern Song’ was replaced by Harrison’s crowning glory, ‘Within You Without You’, a track that saw The Beatles pioneer the use of tape loops and cement Indian traditional music as an important feature of ’60s pop. ‘Only A Northern Song’, on the other hand, eventually found its way onto Yellow Submarine.
