Giles Martin Interview: “It’s Kind Of Penning A Moustache On The Mona Lisa”

“We’re celebrating the album,” Giles Martin says in an interview on the YouTube channel of the Abbey Road Studios. The son of former Beatles producer George Martin has been working for months with a small team to create a new remix and to compile the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Beatles last recorded album Abbey Road.

It takes a long time to do these things, it takes quite a few months. We’re going through all of the tapes and what you get is, you get something where you feel closer to the album. And it’s also for a new generation as well, you know. The album is fifty years old and we mix it for a new generation too.”

It's the third time, Giles Martin is remixing a Beatles album for its 50th anniversary, starting with Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in 2017 and followed by the White Album last year. Every album needed a different approach while remixing it, and the difficulty with working on Abbey Road was that the album already sounded very modern. 

The technology from 1967 to 1969, actually things moved very quickly. The desk changed, the tape machine changed, you’d go from four-track to eight-track. And actually, Abbey Road is quite a modern album, it’s quite a modern sounding album. It’s almost like a template for albums in the seventies where opposed albums in the sixties. And so therefor, the challenge with Abbey Road is, it’s sounds so well to begin with, why remix it? And that in a way is always our approach of how we... it’s kind of penning a moustache on the Mona Lisa… So we are very careful. And at the same time, we’re trying to push boundaries, to take risks. That’s the way we work.”

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The team is myself and Sam Okell and Stef (Civetta) who is based here at Abbey Road. The way it works really is that Sam does a lot of work. Sam sort of replicates all the mixes as it was originally. And then I’ll come and tweak it, work through it. And we’re almost like a tag team, in a way. Each one of us takes over and the we sort of criticize each other’s work. Sam and I having a long time doing this. And it’s good. If it’s just one of us doing it, we would be too isolated. It’s funny, remixing a Beatles album is a way different project than anything else I’ve ever done, because people are listening to the work as well as the music; if that makes sense. You got to be judge by what you’re doing. The actual team doing it is very, very small, so we tend to bounce off to each other and we revisit a lot. And we criticize each other’s work, that’s very important for us. So that’s the way we do it. I guess, I suppose I get final say because I’m marginally the tallest.”

For Giles Martin, working on the Abbey Road album meant a personal wish came true:

It’s really hard to choose a favorite track, but I love the whole medley section at the end which the band called the ‘long one’, which starts with I Never Give Me Your Money and ends with The End. I always wanted to get a chance to mix that or to look at it, because I think it’s my favorite section of Beatles music. So the easy answer is that section of songs.

Watch the entire interview here:

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André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

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