The silly 1970 Beatles song George Martin couldn’t stand: “Not very good really”
From the beginning, George Martin was there.
Right as The Beatles took the form the world would know them as, adopting Ringo Starr as their drummer and stepping into Abbey Road studios for the first time to record the debut album that would launch them to global fame, George Martin was behind the mixing desk.
When it comes to the band’s artistry and creative experimentation, Martin was just as essential as any of the other members. But that doesn’t mean he loved everything they did.
George Martin took a huge risk on The Beatles. Having only heard the tape from their failed Decca audition, Martin called the recording “lousy” but heard something. He liked George Harrison’s guitar playing and was an early fan of “beat groups” and the sound coming out of cities like Liverpool as young bands adopted rock and roll and made it their own. In short, he heard potential so he signed the band to EMI before he’d ever actually seen or heard them play live.
When he finally did on June 2nd, 1962, Martin and the band had a strange power struggle. The group were nervous and not used to his kind of authority. On Martin’s side, he was confused by Lennon and McCartney’s role as co-leaders and vocalists of the band. But as he watched them perform, something clicked. “Suddenly, it hit me that I had to take them as they were, which was a new thing. I was being too conventional,” he said, and from that moment on, it was a match made in heaven.
The band’s incredible and swift evolution is discussed at length. Within less than ten years, the group morphed from the classic rockers on their debut, through the folkish rock sound of Rubber Soul, into the psychedelia of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and to the final iterations of their broad and bold closing records. But Martin had to morph alongside them. While plenty of producers have one sound they’re great at and work with artists who want that, Martin was committed to and capable of evolving alongside the group at hyper speed.
However, there was a song right at the beginning that he shrugged off. When he first began working with the band for their debut, Lennon and McCartney already had a huge catalogue of songs to sift through to pick out a tracklist. Martin hated a lot of it, stating matter-of-factly, “When I first met them in 1962, their material was terrible.” In particular, one track got on his nerves as he said, “Their songs were… I mean, ‘One After 909’? What the hell was that? It was silly stuff. Not very good, really.”
Martin’s dismissal was rooted in how raw and underdeveloped the track felt compared to what he believed the band were capable of achieving. At that stage, he was looking for material that could stand up in a professional recording environment, and ‘One After 909’ still carried the rough edges of a teenage experiment rather than a fully realised composition.
Even so, its survival says a lot about the band’s instincts. While Martin may not have seen its value early on, Lennon and McCartney held onto it as a reminder of where they started. When it finally resurfaced years later, it did not represent a step forward in sophistication, but it did capture something just as important: the spirit of two young songwriters learning their craft and enjoying the process.
Written back when the boys were only teenagers, it remained a firm favourite of McCartney’s. “It’s not a great song, but it’s a great favourite of mine because it has great memories for me of John and me trying to write a bluesy freight train song,” he said, always holding it dear to him. So, while Martin rejected the track in their early days when the band were working on what would be their final album, the song found its way out of the archive and onto the tracklist of Let It Be. Although, they got Phil Spector to produce the final mix of the song.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.