Simon A
2K Club - QQ Super Nova
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- Jun 13, 2015
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I'd never heard this story before and I love how George Martin reacted in a rebellious fashion.
From this Variety article:
Lewis offers the full backstory from 1967, involving a short but sharp dispute between one of the Beatles and their producer/arranger. “My internal jokey thing was to call this part ‘Fixing a Hole in the Paul McCartney/George Martin Relationship,’ but obviously it didn’t last very long, because they became the best of friends again. McCartney wrote ‘She’s Leaving Home’ [with an assist from Lennon], and in the hotbed of the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ sessions, like any excited artist, especially if you’re a multimillionaire Beatle, he wanted to record it immediately. He knew it needed a string arrangement, so he calls up George Martin and asks him to write a string arrangement immediately, because when you’re 23, everything has to be immediately. I don’t blame McCartney because I remember how impatient I was when I was 23, and I didn’t have a million dollars!
“George was working with another artist, and he said, ‘I’ll do it the day after.’ But Paul said, ‘No, that’s not good enough.’ I mean, it was the only argument they ever had. And in George Martin’s biography, he devotes half a chapter to how hurt he was. If you check history, no one else arranged strings apart from George Martin — apart from later on Phil Spector on the ‘Let It Be’ album. So Paul gets a guy called Mike Leander, a young kid who did arrangements, who later became famous for writing and producing Gary Glitter songs; Paul had met him at a Marianne Faithfull session. Paul gets Mike Leander to write the string arrangement of ‘She’s Leaving Home,’ and it’s a little bit melodramatic and saccharine with the harp and everything. George Martin was very hurt, but he’s game and he conducts the orchestra, and does the recording and producing, even though it bugs him. When you think about ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yesterday’ and those sort of songs, the string arrangements are always very subtle and elegant, or baroque. The only one that was intentionally schlocky was ‘Good Night,’ which Ringo sang, and that was because John Lennon said, ‘Make it like Mantovani.’
“George Martin had just set up his own company called Air London, and he produced other artists. And there was a British duo called David & Jonathan that George had discovered… George is so ticked off, he calls up David and Jonathan,and says, ‘I got a song for you.’ He gets them to record ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as a single to come out the same day as the Beatles’ album. You couldn’t get a license ahead of a Beatles album, but it came out the same day as ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ and it was a cover of ‘She’s Leaving Home.’ And what did he do? He wrote an orchestral arrangement for it, which was the arrangement he’d have written if Paul hadn’t been in such a hurry. And it’s beautiful and it’s baroque. It’s similar, but it’s different. It’s baroque, it’s got an oboe on it. It’s what you’d expect of George Martin, very classy. But the single isn’t a hit, and shortly after that David & Jonathan break up, and go and become successful as songwriters, writing ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’
“So for years, I always thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to get that arrangement, and… I suppose the word is to mash it up, though I hate that bloody expression. Roll along the new technology that we got for ‘Now and Then’ and for the ‘Get Back’ film, and I got an engineer friend of mine and we isolated Lennon and McCartney’s vocals and we isolated this long-lost orchestral arrangement. And we had to make a lot of adjustments because the tempo and key were different. But we’ve managed to create what would’ve been ‘She’s Leaving Home’ had Paul not been in a hurry. I’m not claiming it’s the holy grail. But it’s a curio… the alternate universe version.”
Obviously this version of “She’s Leaving Home” with the Martin orchestral arrangement won’t be coming out through any proper channels, and can only be played for fun, in this kind of non-profit, academic setting. But, says Lewis, probably accurately gauging the fandom’s interest, “For the trainspotter Beatle fans, I think it’ll be kind of fun.”
From this Variety article:
Lewis offers the full backstory from 1967, involving a short but sharp dispute between one of the Beatles and their producer/arranger. “My internal jokey thing was to call this part ‘Fixing a Hole in the Paul McCartney/George Martin Relationship,’ but obviously it didn’t last very long, because they became the best of friends again. McCartney wrote ‘She’s Leaving Home’ [with an assist from Lennon], and in the hotbed of the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ sessions, like any excited artist, especially if you’re a multimillionaire Beatle, he wanted to record it immediately. He knew it needed a string arrangement, so he calls up George Martin and asks him to write a string arrangement immediately, because when you’re 23, everything has to be immediately. I don’t blame McCartney because I remember how impatient I was when I was 23, and I didn’t have a million dollars!
“George was working with another artist, and he said, ‘I’ll do it the day after.’ But Paul said, ‘No, that’s not good enough.’ I mean, it was the only argument they ever had. And in George Martin’s biography, he devotes half a chapter to how hurt he was. If you check history, no one else arranged strings apart from George Martin — apart from later on Phil Spector on the ‘Let It Be’ album. So Paul gets a guy called Mike Leander, a young kid who did arrangements, who later became famous for writing and producing Gary Glitter songs; Paul had met him at a Marianne Faithfull session. Paul gets Mike Leander to write the string arrangement of ‘She’s Leaving Home,’ and it’s a little bit melodramatic and saccharine with the harp and everything. George Martin was very hurt, but he’s game and he conducts the orchestra, and does the recording and producing, even though it bugs him. When you think about ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yesterday’ and those sort of songs, the string arrangements are always very subtle and elegant, or baroque. The only one that was intentionally schlocky was ‘Good Night,’ which Ringo sang, and that was because John Lennon said, ‘Make it like Mantovani.’
“George Martin had just set up his own company called Air London, and he produced other artists. And there was a British duo called David & Jonathan that George had discovered… George is so ticked off, he calls up David and Jonathan,and says, ‘I got a song for you.’ He gets them to record ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as a single to come out the same day as the Beatles’ album. You couldn’t get a license ahead of a Beatles album, but it came out the same day as ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ and it was a cover of ‘She’s Leaving Home.’ And what did he do? He wrote an orchestral arrangement for it, which was the arrangement he’d have written if Paul hadn’t been in such a hurry. And it’s beautiful and it’s baroque. It’s similar, but it’s different. It’s baroque, it’s got an oboe on it. It’s what you’d expect of George Martin, very classy. But the single isn’t a hit, and shortly after that David & Jonathan break up, and go and become successful as songwriters, writing ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’
“So for years, I always thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to get that arrangement, and… I suppose the word is to mash it up, though I hate that bloody expression. Roll along the new technology that we got for ‘Now and Then’ and for the ‘Get Back’ film, and I got an engineer friend of mine and we isolated Lennon and McCartney’s vocals and we isolated this long-lost orchestral arrangement. And we had to make a lot of adjustments because the tempo and key were different. But we’ve managed to create what would’ve been ‘She’s Leaving Home’ had Paul not been in a hurry. I’m not claiming it’s the holy grail. But it’s a curio… the alternate universe version.”
Obviously this version of “She’s Leaving Home” with the Martin orchestral arrangement won’t be coming out through any proper channels, and can only be played for fun, in this kind of non-profit, academic setting. But, says Lewis, probably accurately gauging the fandom’s interest, “For the trainspotter Beatle fans, I think it’ll be kind of fun.”
