Geoff Emerick
Recording engineer who played a central role in bringing to life the musical visions of the Beatles
GEOFF EMERICK, who has died aged 72, was a recording engineer who was right-hand man to the producer, George Martin, on many of the Beatles’ best-loved records. While Martin could lay rightful claim to be the “fifth Beatle”, Emerick also played a key role in realising the musical visions of the Fab Four.
His first solo engineering session for the Beatles was in April 1966, for the Revolver album; the track was Tomorrow Never Knows, John Lennon’s song based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Nothing like it had ever been heard in popular music: Lennon wanted his voice, he said, to sound like “the Dalai Lama singing from the top of a mountain”.
Emerick had the idea of recording him through a Leslie rotating speaker (which gives the Hammond organ its distinctive swirling effect) to distort his vocal. “I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker,” Emerick recalled in his memoir. “It was just one of sheer amazement.”
To create Ringo Starr’s unusual drum sound on the track, Emerick broke the Abbey Road studio rule book by stuffing a blanket inside the bass drum and bringing the microphone in close. It was a technique that was banned at stuffy EMI – where, at the time Emerick joined, technicians had still been required to wear white coats.
The following year, for Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon wanted the first half of one take to be spliced to the second half of another – which was in a different key. Emerick used the varispeed button to meld the two together. And to achieve the unearthly spiralling sounds of Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite on the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, he chopped up tapes of fairground organ recordings then threw them up into the air and reassembled them.
“Geoff Emerick used to do things for the Beatles and be scared that the people above would find out,” George Martin recalled. “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.”
The son of a butcher and a dressmaker, Geoffrey Emerick was born in north London on December 5 1945 and brought up in Crouch End.
He left school at 15 and joined
EMI as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road. On his second day in the job he sat in on the
Beatles’ first studio session, in which they recorded their debut single, Love Me Do.
He was involved with several early Beatles records, including She Loves You and
Hard Day’s Night; he also worked with Judy Garland, and engineered Manfred Mann’s No 1 single, Pretty Flamingo.
In 1966, when the Beatles’ regular engineer Norman Smith moved on to become a producer, Emerick took the chair for Revolver. He explained: “John came into the control room on that first day and said: ‘We’re never gonna tour again and we’re gonna make an album that’s gonna have sounds on it and things on it that no one has ever heard before.’ And everyone looked at me.” Emerick received a Grammy award for his work on Sgt Pepper, and a second for Abbey Road. There would be a third in 1974 for Band on the Run by Paul Mccartney’s Wings, and in 2003 he received a Technical Award for his overall contribution to recorded music.
Emerick – who always maintained that the other three Beatles saw him as “Mccartney’s man” – had a ringside seat as the band fell apart, and during the fraught sessions for The Beatles, the double LP better known as “the White Album”, Emerick walked out. “It was something like the eighth attempt at Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da,” he recalled. “They were arguing, and I could see the whole thing disintegrating.” The experience left its mark, and he would later dismiss the album, considered a masterpiece by many fans, as “virtually unlistenable”.
He came back on board, however, when Mccartney asked him to design a studio at their Apple headquarters, and he engineered the single The Ballad of John and Yoko.
After the bellicose experience of making their album Let it Be, the Beatles took George Martin by surprise when they told him they wanted to make another album. Its working title was “Everest”, after Emerick’s favoured brand of cigarettes. Although Abbey Road, as it became, was the Beatles’ swansong, the sessions were largely completed in a spirit of cooperation.
During the 1970s Emerick worked on further Mccartney albums, as well as Robin Trower’s hit album Bridge of Sighs. In 1984 he moved to Los Angeles. He worked with other artists including Elvis Costello, Art Garfunkel, Kate Bush, Supertramp, Badfinger and Cheap Trick, and helped George Martin to build a studio in Montserrat (later destroyed in a hurricane).
In 2006 he published an autobiography, Here, There and Everywhere, which was generally well-received but criticised by some for its factual errors: Ken Scott (who had also engineered many Beatles recordings) claimed to have found at least 100. Emerick’s disparagement of the musical talents of George Harrison and Ringo Starr also proved contentious.
In 2007 Emerick led a 40th anniversary celebration of Sgt Pepper for the BBC, producing cover versions of the album’s songs – on the original equipment – by such bands as Oasis and the Killers.
Geoff Emerick married Nicole Graham in 1989, with Mccartney as his best man. She died in 1993.
Geoff Emerick, born December 5 1945, died October 2 2018