Quotes by George Martin

And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

But when Brian committed them to the picture and he said that they would provide new songs, they said, Well, we're not going to write any decent songs, we'll give them all the rejects we didn't really want.

I mean there were tambourines, and a gong and that kind of thing. And all sorts of weird things, whistles and even a little cupboard with a door that opened and shut so you could get the noise of a door opening if you wanted to have someone coming in and out of a room. And it was really a junkyard more than anything else.

I think that one of the nice things about the Yellow Submarine movie is that it seems to be perennial. People enjoy watching from each generation. And it was like the Beatles themselves. You know the Beatles seem to find new audience each time another generation comes along.

I was asked to do score by the Director, who was a charming Canadian, a really nice guy, George Dunning was his name. He's dead now, unfortunately.

In Yellow Submarine, we used chains that were there and all sorts of bowls and things. And of course, we used bowls of water too. And bottles with straws, blowing them into the water, to get the effect of submarines surfacing, that kind of thing. It was nice to do because it, we were all being very inventive. And it was fun, it was like a party almost.

It sounds all very sort of technical, but in fact it was very much a kind of bootlace affair. I mean, in the Abbey Road in those days was a fairly primitive place by today's standards.

So, I had a moviola installed in my office, my studio. And I made my own measurements. They gave me the reels as they came along. They were all higgeldy piggeldy, all over the place. I'd have reel 4 one week, and reel 7 the next, and then reel 6 and so on. And I would look at each reel, I knew which reels were which, and I had my script, and I knew what we were doing.

Well, again working strictly to the film, where you had this lovely, lovely land of brightness and color. And everybody is smiling and happy and butterflies flitting around and it was that kind of image that, it was like a dream world, really.

Well, I think, I certainly used backward music in Sea of Monsters. I can't remember in the Sea of Time. I would tend to do that all the time, you know? I tended to do all sorts of weird things. Just to get effects.

What I was trying to convey there was the kind of waste land that was left after the war. It was a bit like one always thinks of war, you know, stark scenery and no birds, no trees, no leaves, nothing living. And just emptiness.

You'd use recorded effects and then they'd have to come off discs. So we tried to make our own, and we used to have all sorts of things. We used to have roller skates for making train noises over rails and I remember once trying to effect the noise of someone's head being chopped off. I used a cabbage for that, it was very effective.