The Beatles' chief recording engineer
Born: December 5, 1945;
Died: October 2, 2018
GEOFF Emerick, who has died aged 72, worked on, and helped shape the sound of, some of the Beatles’ best-known albums, including Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road.
Among those playing tribute was Sir Paul McCartney, who met Emerick in Los Angeles earlier this year when he was putting the finishing touches to his latest album, Egypt Station. McCartney said in a statement that he first met Emerick when the latter was a young engineer working at the fabled Abbey Road Studios in London.
“He would grow to be the main engineer that we worked with on many of our Beatles tracks. He had a sense of humour that fitted well with our own attitude to work in the studio and was always open to the many new ideas that we threw at him.
“He grew to understand what we liked to hear and developed all sorts of techniques to achieve this,” McCartney added. “We spent many exciting hours in the studio and he never failed to come up with the goods.”
Sir George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, once recalled that Emerick had once had “a good idea” in the studio, coming to the rescue when John Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop.
Interviewed for the Beatles’ Anthology project, Martin added that Emerick “used to do things for The Beatles and be scared that the people above would find out. Engineers then weren’t supposed to play about with microphones and things like that. But he used to do really weird things that were slightly illegitimate, with our support and approval.”
Emerick grew up in Crouch End, London, and discovered a musical talent when young. He was just 15 when he landed a job as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road. On June 6, 1962, only his second day at work, a raw and exciting new group called The Beatles had their first recording session there. Emerick would recall that the four musicians’ “skinny white ties” were what had struck him most about them.
Emerick was an assistant engineer on many of The Beatles’ early hits, including Love Me Do, She Loves You, and A Hard Day’s Night. He also worked with such stars as Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and the Goons at Abbey Road before being promoted, while still aged 18, to the post of The Beatles’ chief engineer. “That took me a little bit by surprise!” he would later acknowledge. “In fact, it terrified me …The responsibility was enormous but I said yes, thinking that I’d accept the blows as they came.”
His distinctive, offbeat methods won favour with The Beatles at a time when they were experimenting in the studio. Working side-by-side with Martin, Emerick brought his skills to the albums Revolver (1966), Sgt Pepper (1967) and Abbey Road (1969) and to much of Magical Mystery Tour (1967) and part of The White Album (1968). He walked out on the latter after a row with Lennon but was later recruited by McCartney to work at Apple and, subsequently, Abbey Road
McCartney once said that because Emerick smoked Everest cigarettes in the studio, the band was originally going to use Everest as the title for the Abbey Road album before changing their minds.
In an interview with the US magazine Variety in 2007, Emerick said the Beatles’ classic, A Day in the Life, was a high point of his time with the group. “The night we put the orchestra on it, the whole world went from black and white to colour,” he said. Emerick won four Grammy awards, three for Best Engineer on Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road and Band on the Run (the multi-platinum 1973 album made by McCartney and Wings) and the 2003 Technical Grammy.
Post-Beatles, Emerick worked with a roster of well-known artists, from Elvis Costello and Michael Jackson to the Scottish duo of Stealers Wheel, Kate Bush, Jeff Beck and Art Garfunkel. He married the singer and photographer Nicole Graham in 1988. She died of breast cancer in 1993.
Forever self-effacing in the studio, Emerick nevertheless won lasting admiration for his talents. Abbey Road Studios tweeted that he helped transform music recording “with his creative flair, innovation and passion, playing a paramount part not only in Abbey Road Studios’ own history, but in music history itself.”
Giles Martin, son of Sir George, who has worked on numerous Beatles projects in recent years, described him as one of finest and most innovative engineers to have graced a recording studio.
Nick Hayward, the singer and songwriter, added his own heartfelt tribute, saying: “The greatest record producer/sound engineer I’ve ever known has passed. RIP Geoff Emerick. Thank you for achieving the dream. My little songs got to sound vast, magnificent and magical thanks to you. An amazing and humble wizard.”
McCartney said he would always remember Emerick with great fondness and added: “I know his work will be long remembered by connoisseurs of sound.”
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