(Credit: Alamy)
When celebrating The Beatles‘ sonic innovations during their psychedelic era, it’s easy to lapse into marvelling at the group’s evolving conceptual maverickism. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, keen students of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s musique concrète and electro-acoustic work, the Fab Four fatigue wrought by incessant touring, saw the band turn their backs on live performances to commit themselves to a purely studio project.
Free to craft songs without the concern of live reproduction, producer George Martin was presented with the task of realising the band’s increasingly lysergic visions—’Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ psychedelic gems that still electrify with otherwordly energy.
While never immersed in the 1960s counterculture—let alone indulging in LSD with the band—the suit-and-tie EMI professional was immensely creative and instrumental in overseeing the novel and complex studio techniques that imbued Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s and Magical Mystery Tour‘s surrealist magic. Managing EMI’s Parlophone label and ushering great commercial success from his classical, jazz, and skiffle recordings, his experience working with The Goon Show radio trio and later producing Peter Sellers‘ 1958 comedy LP would stand Martin in good stead when assembling similar bizarre collages for The Beatles.
Weeks before finally meeting The Beatles after lengthy negotiations with their manager, Brian Epstein, Martin had lent his growing studio skills to the world of early electronic music. Working a stone’s throw away from the BBC’s mysterious Radiophonic Workshop department—the sound effects unit responsible for the alien sounds heard on The Quatermass Experiment and Doctor Who—Martin became acquainted with Workshop artist and sound technician Maddalena Fagandini.
Initially working in the BBC’s Italian Service, her recruitment in the Workshop led her to create jingles and sci-fi sound design along with electronic pioneers Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and John Baker.
Wishing to expand an interval signal she’d been working on toward a musical direction, Fagandini enlisted Martin’s production and arrangement help under the joint moniker Ray Cathode to cut the Workshop’s first commercial single. Fagandini handled the electronics and Martin the melody, and 1962’s ‘Time Beat’ veered toward the eccentric end of experimental music at the time, a Western-style soundtrack coated in the bizarre sonic stylings made famous by the Workshop. Roles were swapped for its B-side ‘Waltz in Orbit’, a strange samba number smattered with warped guitars and pianos unlike anything else in pop’s proximity at the time.
The legends of reel tapes spooled across the entire Workshop studio with their primitive oscillators came to a close as synthesizers became widely available. Working extensively with the EMS VCS 3 and the EMS Synthi 100, some of the mystique had ebbed, the public aware of the emerging keyboard technology and the tonalities they created. Fagandini had left before the synth era in 1966, becoming a successful TV director and producer within the BBC and beyond.
Martin’s dally in the avant-garde would prove to be as seismic as his work with the Merseybeat scene set to introduce him and the world to Liverpool’s greatest cultural export. Featured on the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop – 21 compilation in 1979 and later reissued in 2021 with a bonus remix by Drum & Lace, Ray Cathode’s ‘Time Beat’ still fascinates as a document of unreined creativity and imagination.
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