George Martin believed punk changed the music business forever: “We didn’t know that vision was going to dominate sound”
The music world looks a lot different these days than the one that George Martin knew at the start of his career.
The whole idea of someone working away in a studio trying to create high art is much more costly, and even if The Beatles’ producer had been born a few decades earlier, he would have most likely been in a much different position than a simple arranger. But whereas technology has dictated where music goes half the time, Martin knew times were changing thanks to the new music on the horizon.
But when The Beatles first crashlanded in Abbey Road Studios, music was already in a state of change for Martin. He had been used to working on comedy recordings and maybe the occasional classical arrangement, but with the Fab Four coming in, he saw a lot of potential for them to be moulded into a great rock and roll act if they had a little bit more training under their belt.
And while Martin would be considered a co-writer on a lot of their greatest tunes today, his arrangements were all about perfecting the firm foundation that the writers already laid for him. Their ears would guide them to tunes that were a lot more sophisticated, and even if they didn’t know the first thing about music theory, their interest in more avant-garde approaches is what made most of their albums a musical adventure half the time.
Even if the playing was tight and the music was forward-thinking, though, not everyone got into the music industry to change the concept of studio tinkering. There were always going to be artists known to challenge the system when they entered the studio, but when artists like Joe Strummer and John Lydon arrived on the scene, they were all about making music that went against all studio mandates.
By punk standards, any type of strange overdubs would have been considered the height of pretentiousness, and while the Sex Pistols did have a massive sound when Never Mind the Bollocks came out, it wasn’t about them having strange chords in the mix. They simply wanted to assault people’s senses whenever they played, and the classics of the punk genre all prided themselves on turning their audience into a sonic punching bag.
It was certainly novel for the time, given how many prog rock bands were out there, but Martin felt that the tide was turning in a way that the music business had never seen before, saying, “After Abbey Road, the whole movement dropped anyway because along came punk rock and the Sex Pistols singing ‘God Save The Queen’ and music changed enormously. We didn’t know that vision was going to dominate sound as it now does, you can’t sell records without television, and so the vision is more important than the music, and the way people look is more important than the way they sound.”
While having more eye-catching artists wasn’t all that different back in the days of David Bowie and The Rolling Stones, it’s fair to say that punk made everything more prominent. It was a serious style of music, but the idea of imagery being used as a main piece of the musical experience could be traced all the way to the genesis of other cultural touchstones like MTV.
So, really, anytime that people reminisce on how much of a game-changer people like Madonna and Michael Jackson were in their prime, punk did at least have a tertiary effect on that. Because as much as John Lydon wanted to provoke people whenever he had a microphone in front of him, there was a much more powerful ex-factor going on than simply being obnoxious. It was an entirely new generation, realising that they had more than music to work with.
