“PAUL will say to me, ‘There’s only four of us – now sadly two of us – who know what it’s like to be in The Beatles’.”
So says Giles Martin, producer son of late producer, Sir George Martin, who some call “The Fifth Beatle”.
For the past 20 years, Giles has been one of the chief keepers of The Beatles flame, involved in myriad releases from the band’s archive.
For these, he maintains regular contact with those “two” — Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
The latest project to summon his skills is the one which, arguably, gets to the beating heart of The Fab Four more than any other — The Beatles Anthology.
We’ll hear much more from Giles later but, to set the scene, let’s wind back to 1995 and catch what drummer Ringo has to say with his usual cheery charm.
“Now you can hear it from us,” he affirms. “Paul, George and myself — and old footage of John, of course — telling what it felt like to be a Beatle.”
In 1995, it is 25 years after The Beatles split and 15 since the shocking assassination of John Lennon, and it is time for the world’s most famous band to tell their story.
Over the previous four years, Macca, Ringo and George Harrison have been busy masterminding Anthology, a wildly ambitious, groundbreaking (you wouldn’t expect anything less) multimedia project.
By using their own words, film and, of course, their immortal songs, they are in a unique position to reveal all — from the horse’s mouth.
Here’s their chance to revisit their humble origins in Liverpool, cutting their teeth at the city’s Cavern Club and in the music dives of Hamburg.
They can relive having a first hit single, Love Me Do, Beatlemania, leading the British Invasion of the US, making madcap films like Help! and their eventual retreat from the live arena.
They can share views on creating their psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the spiritual quest which leads them to India, their final studio hurrah, Abbey Road, and the various reasons behind them going their separate ways in 1970.
This all results in an eight-episode documentary series filled with archive footage and candid interviews, three double albums of demos, alternate takes and snatches of spoken word and, later, an illuminating book.
Now, in 2025 to mark the project’s 30th anniversary, we are being treated to an additional ninth episode of the series and a fourth volume of music.
For his part, Giles Martin has created new audio mixes for most of the music featured on film, remastered the original LPs and curated the new album of 36 songs (13 previously unreleased).
Episode 9 presents unseen glimpses of Paul, George and Ringo coming together in 1994 and ’95 to reflect on life as members of the Fab Four.
Time, they say, is a great healer and the atmosphere is relaxed and friendly, the three clearly enjoying each other’s company with some of the old banter returning.
We’ve heard from Ringo but what does Macca have to say about it?
“We decided we might try to do the definitive story of The Beatles, seeing as other people had had a go at it.
“We thought it might be good from the inside out rather than from the outside in.”
Harrison, who died aged 58 six years later, gives this telling perspective: “I’m glad it didn’t get made until now.
The good thing about Anthology is that it’s four of us, even though John’s not here, he is here. He’s represented, he talks — it’s old interviews and stuff.
Paul McCartney
“I think it’s been nice for us and the public just to forget about The Beatles for a while, let the dust settle, and now come back to it with a fresh point of view.”
And it’s up to the “quiet” Beatle, not so quiet in this setting, to sum up the band’s immortality.
“We’ll go on and on,” continues Harrison, “on those records and films and videos and books and in people’s memories and minds.
“The Beatles have just become their own thing now. The Beatles, I think, exist without us.”
Of course it was all done with a gaping Lennon-shaped hole but Paul, George and Ringo are hugely mindful of their fallen comrade who they clearly miss very much.
“The good thing about Anthology is that it’s four of us,” says McCartney. “Even though John’s not here, he is here. He’s represented, he talks — it’s old interviews and stuff.”
Harrison adds: “I feel sorry for John because the Beatles went through a lot of good times but also went through some turbulent times.
“And, as everybody knows, when we split up, everybody was a bit fed up with each other.
“But for Ringo, Paul and I, we’ve had the opportunity to have all that go down the river and under the bridge and to get together again in a new light. I feel sorry that John wasn’t able to do that.”
‘Unfinished business’
One of the key elements of Episode 9 is how the three Beatles make new music together under the watchful eye of the Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne, a fellow member of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup with Harrison.
Using Lennon demos from the 1970s, given to them by his partner Yoko Ono, they finish Free As A Bird and Real Love, employing John’s vocals backed by their vibrant new arrangements.
Quite simply, it’s the nearest thing we’ll ever get to a full Beatles reunion.
Another song, Now And Then, gets mentioned as “unfinished business” but, as you may remember, it finally saw the light of day in 2023 thanks to technological wizardry.
Watching Paul, George and Ringo playing and singing along to John’s vocals is captivating, some of the old spark clearly etched on their faces.
The affable Giles Martin, who I meet in Leicester Square this week and not at his usual stomping ground, Abbey Road Studios, has this take on the Anthology footage.
“From talking to Paul and knowing him as much as I do, and from talking to Ringo, I know that the other Beatles were the favourite musicians that they ever played with.
“Forget personalities, it was purely about being in a band — the best band they’d ever been in.
“After they broke up, and I include my dad in this, they were looking for each other the whole time.
“That’s the truth of the matter. I know that Paul misses my dad, and I know that Paul misses John.”
So, in approaching Anthology, he clearly wanted to show how songs evolved. A bit of studio banter, all that kind of stuff
Giles Martin on his father George
This brings Giles to a significant moment during the completion of Now And Then, The Beatles’ final single.
“I remember doing the string parts, and being with Paul,” he recalls. “He said, ‘That’s George playing the guitar again. Let’s listen to that because I want to respect what he’s doing, because he’s got great ideas’.”
The original Anthology project wasn’t just a reunion for three Beatles but also for George Martin who came back into the fold to curate the double albums released on three separate dates between late ’95 and late ’96.
Giles says: “My dad loved The Beatles — and he loved spending more time with them.
“What I find interesting is the vulnerability on display, my dad included. Because no one else talked to them like that.”
Being a Beatle or even The Beatles’ revered producer means that, out of respect, us mere mortals are not given to taking the p*ss. Seeing Harrison’s quip to McCartney, “Hello mate, vegetarian leather jacket?”, is a laugh-out-loud moment.
Paul, with his famously meat-free diet, replies: “Yes it is. And my boots are vegetarian leather boots!”
There’s a great scene where the band describe putting “uppers” in a teapot to get George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to keep going and stay late into the evening for a session at Abbey Road.
“My dad always denied it but he wouldn’t have known,” says Giles. “It was probably some sort of amphetamine or caffeine.
“He used to say that, with each passing year, The Beatles started work an hour later.”
You might imagine that the producer, with his schoolmasterly image and close attention to detail, was a perfectionist.
But Giles says: “I don’t think he was a perfectionist — although he was upset at me once for not measuring out Pimm’s properly!
“The music wouldn’t have sounded like it did, fresh and alive, if he had been one.
“So, in approaching Anthology, he clearly wanted to show how songs evolved. A bit of studio banter, all that kind of stuff.”
Giles adds that The Beatles were on board with this, seeing it rather like “a trawl through the photographs that don’t make it into the family album”.
‘Close to John’
“A good example is [the early version of] Yellow Submarine with John originally coming up with the idea and singing, ‘In the town where I was born, no one cared, no one cared’.
“Obviously, that was not right for Ringo to sing so Paul got involved and they changed it, developing it into the Yellow Submarine that children sang in schoolyards.”
I ask Giles to describe his father’s relationship with each of the four Beatles and he begins with Lennon.
“He was very close to John to begin with, because John was perceived as leader of the band.
My dad and Ringo always loved each other. Ringo was an ardent fan and he was also the glue which kept things together.
Giles on his father’s relationship with Ringo Starr
“He was the older one out of Lennon and McCartney and they were like the two favourite children which George felt rather bitter about.”
On Anthology Vol. 4, you hear the producer calmly encouraging Lennon to sing rehearsals of the White Album song Julia, about his mother who died when he was just 17. Both agree that it’s a “very hard” song to sing.
Giles maintains that, as The Beatles’ journey progressed, his dad’s dealings with Lennon changed.
“John wanted things to be immediate, to be rock and roll, but my dad’s process was different. Then it annoyed him when John went with Phil Spector [for Let It Be] and all that multi-layered stuff.”
If Lennon made wayward comments after the band split up, an encounter just before he died helped heal the wounds.
Giles says: “In 1980, John contacted my dad, who went to see him at the Dakota Building in New York.
“Yoko went out, and John admitted he’d said loose-tongued things in the past, when he ‘was high’.
“John told my dad, ‘I wish we could record everything again, properly this time’. Dad goes, ‘How about Strawberry Fields?’. And he replies, ‘Especially Strawberry Fields!’.
But they talked about working together again. Then my dad flew back to England and John was shot, yet there was a weird kind of redemption to the whole thing.”
As for McCartney and George Martin, Giles says: “Paul always maintained a very close relationship with my dad.
“Towards the end of The Beatles, Paul was the one trying to keep the band going, but with his vision. Then, as we know, he went off to Scotland and decided to make it on his own.
“But he got back with my dad for Live And Let Die [in 1973] and they had an ongoing friendship.”
And what about Starr? “My dad and Ringo always loved each other. Ringo was an ardent fan and he was also the glue which kept things together.”
There’s a wonderful scene in Anthology’s Episode 9 when McCartney and Harrison joke about doing a stadium “mud-wrestling” contest and Ringo interjects with, “I’ll be the ref!”.
And finally, we arrive at George Martin’s association with George Harrison.
Giles says: “My dad always felt guilty that he didn’t give George the attention he deserved — but he couldn’t do it all.
“So George would go off and do his own thing, like Savoy Truffle. He could be quite stubborn and driven, like they all were.”
But Giles remembers the abiding affection Harrison had for his father, first encountering him at a Simon & Garfunkel concert in 1982 at Wembley Stadium “when I was very young”.
“I went to the loo and this man said, ‘Are you all right?’. I was a bit embarrassed but I said, ‘Yeah’.
“When I went back out, he was standing with my parents. It was George.
“My dad said, ‘This is my son, Giles’. And he said, ‘We just met having a p*ss’. I remember thinking that he was really nice.
“When my father became ill the first time around, with prostate cancer, George was the one who went to see him and sat by his bed.”
As we prepare to go our separate ways on this cold November day, I can’t help thinking how Giles Martin has inherited a deep affection for The Beatles from his illustrious father.
He’s currently working on the FOUR Sam Mendes-directed biopics, each one presented from a different band member’s point of view.
Following in the footsteps of Dad, it’s a long and winding road that won’t end any day soon.