Credit: Alamy

Every Beatles song George Martin played on

Sat 11 January 2025 14:45, UK

Of all the people who qualify for the title of ‘Fifth Beatle’, there’s no doubt that George Martin has earned his spot in the Fab Five. While the group were still a scrappy bar band with a lot of potential in their early days, it took Martin to help translate their music into something that was more refined than the typical rock and roll coming over the airwaves. Although Martin didn’t consider himself a musician in the true sense of the word, he did find himself on the studio floor when working on a handful of the band’s greatest tunes.

But Martin was never willing to push himself onto the band in any capacity. He was more than happy to fulfil the role of producer and play whatever the song needed, but if that meant that none of the band members could play it correctly, it was up to him to get behind the piano and perform whatever piece they wanted.

That’s before even getting into his stellar arrangements for the group. Ignoring the syrupy strings that Phil Spector dumped on top of songs on Let It Be, some of Martin’s greatest works with the group came from his arrangements, whether that meant explaining to an orchestra what to play when creating the chaos in ‘A Day in the Life’ or the refined beauty he got out of the string players on ‘Eleanor Rigby.’

The Beatles were still a rock and roll band, though, and Martin was always known to get the most out of them when the time called for it. Even if he wasn’t the most avid fan of rock and roll, his performances proved that he could hang with the best in the business, either playing a softspoken ballad or channelling his inner Little Richard.

So why did George Martin play on Beatles records?

While every member of the Fab Four gelled into complex musical thinkers during their time together, Martin was tasked initially with filling in the gaps they couldn’t play. Since a lot of their material on Please Please Me was recorded live, Martin was the one to lay down different piano lines, like doubling George Harrison’s simple solo on their cover of The Shirelles’ ‘Baby It’s You’ or the original ‘Not A Second Time’ on With The Beatles.

Despite Martin getting the chance to refine his rock and roll chops on their cover of ‘Rock and Roll Music’ on Beatles for Sale, some of his greatest moments came from him being as imaginative as his musical pupils. In a song like ‘In My Life,’ for instance, Martin’s inability to play the song at the correct speed led to him speeding up the tape slightly, giving the tune the sound of a honky tonk piano in certain sections.

That didn’t mean that some of his best moments didn’t come without a fight, either. ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ featured that swirling organ piece that reduced him to an exhausted mess on the studio floor, and when tracking a song like ‘Because’, he mentioned needing to hear Ringo Starr keep time to pay attention to where he was at any point in the piece.

Even if Martin never considered himself a proper musician on the piano the same way the rest of the group was, his contributions are more than enough to give him songwriting credits on their classic material. He may have been diplomatic about his place in the group, but without Martin’s contributions to these tunes, fans would have probably been listening to these tunes a lot differently.