It’s another day at the office for Time Lord Giles Martin. He takes in his stride the one true crossing outside Abbey Road Studios and then its stairs, laid by Alexander the Great in 320BC. He leans against the oak door hewn from the Ark of the Covenant and lowers his eye to the laser scanner. The airlock sighs and sucks him inside.
This, give or take some overexcited fictional details, is the daily grind for the son of the Beatles’ record producer George Martin: the man who helped design the world as we hear it with its vastly expanded pop vocabulary, its studio-as-instrument concept and album-as-art-form culture.
Giles Martin’s digital remixes of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road, the White Album, Let It Be and Revolver are history now, too. This year, the mission he has chosen to accept leads him down these storied corridors to The Greatest Beatles Album Ever.
Rubber Soul.
“I’m probably the wrong person for this job,” he demurs as we settle in to dissect my possibly spurious claim. “I don’t really think about the whole thing when I’m working on it. I’ll listen to something like Norwegian Wood and, to be honest, I’ll just be thinking about the sound of that acoustic guitar and the voice.
“I think I’m fairly singular-minded and I don’t really have the processing ability to go bigger. So I’m not thinking about the legacy. It’s just, ‘how do I make this sound …’”
He doesn’t want to say “better”, so I will — as contentious as that may be to what Martin calls “the socks-and-sandals brigade”, soon to be howling on Reddit about the amount of reverb on the opening a cappella bit of Nowhere Man.
Rubber Soul was made on four-track tape in 1965, with instruments and voices often locked together on the same track. The new mix relies on technology developed by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films team for Get Back, which can separate those elements and allow Martin and engineer Sam Okell to reposition and rebalance them individually.
The results, as with 2022’s Revolver reissue, are often stunning. The point is to keep the Beatles’ music sounding natural to modern ears, conditioned as they are to earbuds, streaming and other listening habits unknown to 1960s audio engineers.
Apart from giving Martin’s studio partner Okell his due, that’s as technical as this conversation needs to get.
“It’s a bit like time travel,” Martin says. “You open up the session and you’re basically opening up a diary of a day’s recording. So it always feels a bit like you’re walking into a room uninvited.”
That includes being privy to lots of studio chat, laughter, frustration and song evolution, as sampled in the abundance of out-take material on the new release.
“You’re never beyond being surprised,” he says, 20 years after his first Beatles remix project, with his father, Love. The Las Vegas show ran for 18 years. The album established the younger Martin as the new custodian of the Beatles’ catalogue.
This time, “I was surprised by the John Lennon song Little Girl. I didn’t know that existed. That was Sean [Lennon] finding tapes at home. I’m always slightly in awe because even when they’re bad they’re good.
“You hear a rough demo and it’s so easy, in today’s world of Logic audio and 400 tracks and people autotuning everything, to forget that this would be the sound you’d get if you just had an iPhone in the room. There’s not a huge amount of trickery going on here. It’s just a band playing live in a room.”
Which leads back to the idea of Rubber Soul as a pinnacle in The Beatles’ adventure. Recorded just months after Help!, this is a key moment in the pop LP’s evolution from a collection of tracks gathered for marketing purposes to the cohesive “album” artists still aspire to make.
Beach Boy Brian Wilson was still marvelling at that in 1999. “The unity … it felt like it all belonged together.” He was listening to the slightly different US version, also remixed for this new set, but the revelation famously led to his escalation of the ’60s art-pop experiment with Pet Sounds.
Fans wearing socks, sandals and all manner of other footwear will argue that Revolver and Sgt Pepper took that impulse to greater heights, but with its more modest adornments of sitar, distortion and tape manipulation, Rubber Soul is the album that captures that thrill of future possibility.
“It does sound like that,” Martin says. “It sounds like that mixture between potential and kinetic energy. It’s the spark in the chamber, if you like, and you can really feel that. There’s that crossover from the edge of innocence.”
He won’t be drawn into my Best Beatles Album claim – absurd as the argument obviously is. Songs endure because of where they figure in people’s lives, not what went on in the studio. His own favourite on Rubber Soul is a good illustration.
“I actually like Take 1 of In My Life. It has such gravitas. Such poignancy for a man that was shot at the age of 40. It was a song that was too old for John.
“When my father died [aged 90, in 2016], he wanted me to recite In My Life at his funeral. So when I’m reciting In My Life for my father I’m not thinking about whether the vocal should have 1½ or two seconds of plate on the reverb.”
It’s apt perspective, whatever mix you happen to cherish. “Our job,” says Martin, “is really just to remind people that if you’ve got a spare 30 minutes in your life, listen to Rubber Soul. It’s not a bad thing to do.”
Rubber Soul special editions on vinyl, CD and Blu-ray are out on October 2.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
