Giles Martin, son of the band's late original producer George Martin, said it was no surprise that they quickly reached a point where they could no longer inhabit these self-caricatures. (as reported from ultimateclassicroc)
“There was that view in ‘65 and ‘66, and the Beatles were aware of that, that no one really saw that they were this pop band that had taken over the world, and they’d deliberately become this powerhouse, these four guys,”
Martin told Billboard in a new interview. “They’d created these characters for themselves that they couldn’t live up to.
The Help! movie is that; we all live in a house and we’re all from Liverpool!”
: “The world lost that, because the Beatles weren’t that. They weren’t even that when they were being that. There’s a famous shot where the Beatles are waving and they were in their suits, you see that shot?
That’s them taking the piss out of being a boy band. And these stories about John [Lennon] in Hamburg, a guy chatting up Cynthia and he kicked him in the face.
They weren’t exactly an easygoing band. They created this caricature they couldn’t live up to. And when it was successful for them, they knew they had to reject it. They knew that wasn’t them. They had to stop being this four-headed monster and start growing up.”
he added, “But they didn’t record the songs despite each other. That’s what people think. ‘You go and record your song, then I’m going to record my song!’ It didn’t work like that. … You don’t do 107 takes on someone else’s song if you don’t like the song.
If anything, on the outtakes, you hear John saying, ‘It’s getting better, but it’s not getting easier or more fun.’ Then George [Harrison] says, ‘It’s getting better and more fun!’ I don’t get the sense that people think, ‘Yes, they were recording their own songs, but they had the others with them, doing it.’”
“I think what surprised me thath White Album is that it’s only a band-driven album. The band were in control of their own destiny. It’s not as fragmented as people write about, like the four members of the band went off to record their own stuff in different rooms. It just isn’t that. … It just doesn’t feel like that.”
