The Beatles' greatest album? It's not the one you think
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. The Beatles’ greatest album of all (we think) is up for a remix. Art by Aresna Villanueva
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.
“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.
Giles Martin.Alex Lake/C A Management
“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.
Source: smh.com.au/Michael Dwyer
