Magic Alex: the inventor who drove a wedge between George Martin and The Beatles
Emerging from their loved-up pop-rock origins, the latter part of The Beatles’ career was punctuated by trailblazing experimentation and innovations. For a band of such intense popularity, the Fab Four’s decision to abandon live performance and spend their days locked away in studios was both unheard of and incredibly brave. However, it must be remembered that The Beatles’ inventive genius was not limited to the four band members; they had a whole team of people working to achieve this bold new vision of pop.
Producer George Martin was an essential figure on that team. Famed for his various studio innovations, Martin had been with the band since their very early days and so was effective in carving out the inherent sound of the Fab Four. What’s more, Martin’s innovative approach to music production and engineering was key in allowing The Beatles to develop into the diverse and pioneering sounds of albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
As the band grew increasingly popular, however, more and more con artists and ‘yes men’ started to exploit the group for personal gain. Enter Alexis Mardas. As part of The Beatles’ Apple Corps company, the band set up Apple Electronics and placed Yanni Alexis Mardas as its head. Mardas, nicknamed Magic Alex by the band, was tasked with inventing technological innovations both for the consumer market and to aid in the creation of Beatles records.
Promising products like solar-powered guitars, paint that changes colour, and an artificial sun – which, you would assume, already exists in the form of a big lightbulb – Magic Alex rarely, if ever, made good on these promises. As George Harrison later explained, “What Magic Alex did was pick up on the latest inventions, show them to us, and we’d think he’d invented them. We were naïve to the teeth.” Nevertheless, the ‘inventor’ continued to be bankrolled by the Apple Corps gravy train.
For the most part, the band were fooled by Magic Alex’s grandiose promises. George Martin, on the other hand, became increasingly frustrated with this charlatan infecting recording sessions and studio equipment. Reportedly, the inventor would travel through Martin’s studio, dismissing all the top-of-the-range equipment as outdated. So, for the Get Back sessions, he promised to construct the world’s first 72-track recording studio facility.
In reality, when the band arrived to record the album, they found a badly designed mixing desk, no soundproofing, no talk-back, and not even a working tape recorder. This disastrous session, which produced one track dominated by tape hiss and distortion, was a wake-up call for the band that Magic Alex might not be as magic as once thought. For Martin, however, the primitive mixing desk was the last straw.
“I found it very difficult to chuck him out because the boys liked him so much,” he later recalled. “Since it was very obvious that I didn’t, a minor schism developed.” This schism, along with Magic Alex’s failed promises of a 72-track studio, led Martin to distance himself from the Get Back sessions, with engineer Glyn Johns completing much of the album’s production work in Martin’s absence.
Luckily, Magic Alex did not last very long after those doomed sessions. When formidable music industry executive Allen Klein took over Apple Corps in 1969, the electronics department was disbanded as part of his clean-up operations. Seemingly, in the years that followed Mardas’ sacking from Apple Corps, the band started to realise that Martin may have been correct in his assumptions about the so-called inventor.
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