Alexis ‘Magic Alex’ Mardas
Friend of The Beatles and self-styled inventor whose studio redesign for the band was a ‘disaster’
ALEXIS MARDAS, who has died aged 74, was an intriguing figure in the story of The Beatles, a self-proclaimed electronic genius and inventor known to his circle as “Magic Alex”.
Mardas had moved to London from his native Greece in 1965 and worked as a television repairman. At a time when almost anything seemed to be possible for someone with the gift of the gab, he went on to exhibit his “kinetic light sculptures” at the Indica Gallery – one of which was bought by the Rolling Stones. The group’s guitarist Brian Jones introduced him to John Lennon.
Lennon was dazzled by Mardas’s patter and when Mardas produced a “Nothing Box” (a small plastic box containing randomly flashing coloured lights), he would stare at it for hours while tripping on LSD. Before long “Magic Alex” had become Lennon’s “guru” and best friend.
Among other claims, Mardas was said to have promised to construct a protective force field around Lennon’s house; he made George Harrison empty boxes supposedly containing mystic light (at great expense), and asked for the engines from Lennon’s Rolls-Royce and Harrison’s Ferrari so that he could build a flying saucer.
In 1968 Mardas became one of the first employees of Apple Corps, as head of Apple Electronics. The Beatles spent thousands on a laboratory in which Mardas, resplendent in a white lab coat, installed an impressivelooking array of pulsating, bleeping electronic gadgetry.
He promised X-ray cameras, houses that floated on air, loudspeakers made of wallpaper and a hovering electric sun. But the sun never shone, and of the 100-odd patents applied for none was accepted and nothing was ever produced.
Lennon served as best man at Mardas’s wedding to Eufrosyne Doxiades in 1968. The same year Mardas accompanied The Beatles and sundry wives and girlfriends when they visited the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Rishikesh in India, where, apparently sensing a rival, he claimed that the Hindu holy man had been getting a little too spiritually intimate with his female followers, causing the band to pack their bags and leave. A few weeks later Lennon encouraged his wife Cynthia to take a holiday in Greece with Mardas and others. On her return she discovered that Yoko Ono had moved in with her husband. She spent the night in a friend’s house fending off Mardas’s advances.
The Beatles’ faith in Magic Alex led them to commission him to design a 72-track studio in the basement of Apple’s Savile Row offices (8-track studios were the norm) which was to be far superior to EMI’s Abbey Road studio. But when The Beatles turned up to record what would be their final album, Get Back (later retitled Let It Be), they found “the biggest disaster of all time”, in George Harrison’s words.
The mixing desk, recalled a recording engineer, “looked like it had been built with a hammer and chisel”; there was no soundproofing, no intercom and no proper wiring between the control room and the 16 speakers that Mardas had fixed higgledy-piggledy to the walls. It had to be stripped and, with the help of George Martin at Abbey Road, new equipment was brought in so that the group could record their album.
“I’m a rock gardener,” Mardas explained in a rambling defence, “and now I’m doing electronics. Maybe next year I make films or poems. I have no formal training in any of these but this is irrelevant. Man is just a small glass, very, very clear with many faces, like a diamond. You just have to find the small door to each face.”
For Mardas, the small door turned out to be marked “Exit”. The following year The Beatles’ new manager Allen Klein closed Apple Electronics.
Mardas vanished from the scene, having cost Apple the equivalent of £4 million in today’s money.
Yanni Alexis Mardas was born on May 2 1942 in Athens. His father was an officer in either the Greek Army or the Greek secret police.
Mardas later went into partnership with ex-King Constantine II of Greece, selling bulletproof cars, bugging and other security devices to VIPs. He continued to benefit from his association with The Beatles, winning several libel actions against those who accused him of conning the group. In 2010 he dropped an action against the New York Times, which had described him as a charlatan, after the paper agreed to make clear that by calling him a charlatan, it did not mean that he was a conman.
He also made money by selling Beatles memorabilia, including a custom-made Vox Kensington guitar with a plaque on the back reading: “To Magic Alex/ Alexi thank you/ for been [sic] a friend/ 2-5-1967 John”. The instrument fetched $408,000 when it was resold at auction in 2013.
By the 1990s Mardas had returned to Greece, where he was married for a second time to an actress with whom he had a daughter.
Alexis Mardas, born May 2 1942, died January 13 2017