Giles Martin: The Beatles “wouldn’t have made ‘Sgt Pepper'” without The Beach Boys
Producer Giles Martin has claimed a direct connection between The Beach Boys‘ 1966 album Pet Sounds and The Beatles’ 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin, has recently completed a Dolby Atmos remix of Pet Sounds. Martin has implemented the same process for a number of Beatles albums, including the 2022 remix of Revolver.
“I was with my dad on a plane once, and I just suddenly realised how awesome he was,” Martin said in an interview with MusicRadar. “I said to him ‘Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it’ and he looked at me and said: ‘Not as amazing as Brian Wilson’.
“He explained to me that The Beatles always had him, and he had The Beatles. But Brian Wilson didn’t have anyone, and he went and made this record,” Martin added. “Without this record, The Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt Pepper.”
“’Pet Sounds’ by The Beach Boys is a game-changing, iconic album that changed the face of popular music,” Martin claimed in a statement to go along with the Dolby Atmos release of Pet Sounds. “It influenced The Beatles to go and make Sgt. Pepper’s, Sgt. Pepper’s then influenced Pink Floyd to go and make The Dark Side of the Moon.”
“It’s a fascinating record because it’s really the workings of a genius, Brian Wilson, that sort of had boundless enthusiasm for ideas and textures,” Martin added. “Moving Pet Sounds to Dolby Atmos means those worlds can be fully immersive, you can be surrounded by them, you can hear instruments that you never heard before, that are on the record, but they are now in a space where you can identify them.”
“I kind of like the idea of imagine getting an old vinyl record, like Alice In Wonderland, and slowly start falling through the hole,” Martin concludes. “That’s what immersive audio should do, you are literally surrounded by the records you love, and Pet Sounds is perfect for this. It’s an album of so much colour and texture and imagination and the imagination becomes realised much more in the spatial realm. For me to be asked by The Beach Boys to work on this album was a huge honour, I was surprised and excited to get a chance to work on one of the most iconic albums of all time.”
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