All You Need Is Love
In 1967, the BBC began to organise a live television broadcast via a world-wide satellite link-up. The programme, with a potential global audience estimated at half a billion, was entitled Our World, and the Beatles were chosen as Britain's representatives. Once All You Need Is Love was settled upon as the Beatles' musical contribution, George Martin decided to play the basic rhythm track through a four-track machine into Abbey Road’s Studio One, while The Beatles overlaid vocals and instruments in a live performance, supported by the assembled orchestra. While the lyrics of the song underlined the theme of international unity, George Martin added an orchestral arrangement which had the piece open with bars from the French national anthem, La Marsellaise, and he closed the final choruses with glimpses of Bach, Greensleeves, and Glenn Miller's In The Mood.

I Am The Walrus
To complement John's extraordinary imagery and swirling lyrical flow in I Am The Walrus, George Martin created an imaginative score involving eight violins, four cellos, three horns, a clarinet and a sixteen-voice choir in the guise of the Mike Sammes Singers. The eight female, eight male chorus was asked to sing nonsense phrases such as "Ho-ho-ho, hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha," "Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper," and "Got one, got one, everybody’s got one," to accentuate the half-dignified, half-chaotic music. Days later, during an especially active and innovative mix session at Abbey Road Studios, parts of Shakespeare's King Lear (Act IV, Scene VI) were fed live into the song from a BBC radio broadcast.

In My Life
In October 1965, the poignant lyrics of In My Life were embellished by the addition of George Martin's piano solo to the middle of the otherwise complete track. According to Steve Turner, when George Martin played the piece back at double-speed, to achieve a baroque-style sound, it marked the first time that the Beatles had deliberately tampered with tapes to create a special effect.

Yesterday
Since 1965, when this world-famous ballad was first released, there have been as many as 2500 versions of Yesterday made, but The Beatles' original recording involved a complex and imaginative process. On the evening of 14 June 1965, Paul McCartney’s haunting vocal was recorded in two solo takes, as he sang to his own acoustic guitar accompaniment. But George Martin had a further suggestion: "Why don’t we get some strings, a violin, a cello...perhaps we could go for a very different sound. It sounds very nice, but perhaps it needs something." Here began the relationship which the Beatles and their producer would carry to greater lengths as they progressed into even more innovative musical and recording techniques. McCartney recalls their partnership: "He would sit at the piano and say: 'OK, now what are the chords?' And then he'd say: 'Normal string quartet voicing would be like this...' and I would ask for something different. My big inclusion was the cello bit at the seventh, in the middle. George said: 'Mozart wouldn’t have done that!'" But Martin was as receptive to the Beatles' ideas as they were to his, and Sir George later affectionately remarked of the "blue" cello note, "It's a minor against a major. Paul thought of that, and I wished it had been me." In fact, years afterwards, Paul praised George Martin's eagerness to experiment despite his classical training: "George was very good at breaking the rules of music. He couldn't have produced the Beatles if he hadn't been willing to do those things." As Beatles biographer Ray Coleman described, "for a twenty-two-year-old international pop idol to be immersing himself in violin and cello sounds in mid-1965 was unheard of," but Paul threw himself into the project, while George Martin transcribed the score. And Paul autographed the musical annotation: "'YESTERDAY,' written by Paul McCartney, Mozart and George Martin."

A Day In The Life
This monumental piece, which served as the climax to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and arguably marked a pinnacle of The Beatles' career, is a fine example of the tremendous rapport between the band and their producer. The song originated with John, who was inspired by curious newspaper clippings, and came to be furnished with Paul's suitably dream-like sequence, but then a question of how to fill the middle section of the track arose. It was Paul who eventually suggested filling the 24-bar gap with the bizarre sounds of a symphony orchestra gone haywire, but the translation of this idea from imagination to reality fell to George Martin, who set about how to encourage the classically-trained musicians to realise Paul's plans. His instruction to each of the forty members of the orchestra involved moving from a pre-selected note low in pitch to the highest their respective instrument could reach, at the same time starting very softly and finishing very loud, and all the while playing independently of their neighbours, taking their own time to work their way up the scales. On 10 February, 1967, in Abbey Road's Studio One, Paul and George Martin took turns conducting the assembled orchestra, while engineer Geoff Emerick manned the control room, to capture the classic crescendo. The performance was recorded four times, onto each track of a four-track tape, giving the illusion of 160 musicians in all, and indeed accomplishing the Beatles' aims to evoke a sense of "the end of the world."

Strawberry Fields Forever
This track originated as a gentle, dreamy number, but on composer John's intuition was remade into a more intense piece with a George Martin score supplying a distinctive brass and string sound. When the new version still did not fit John's vision for the song, he posed George Martin with a technical challenge: he preferred the first minute of the original, lighter version, but favoured the remainder of the second, orchestrated recording. Lennon asked him to somehow merge the two, but as Sir George remembers, "I said it was impossible. They were in different keys and different tempos." "Well," John replied assuredly, "you can fix it!" Lennon's faith in his producer was not misplaced, for, rather than having to re-record the entire piece from scratch, George Martin found that slowing down the faster version to match (and perhaps speeding up the slower recording, though this is unconfirmed), also brought the two into exactly the same key.

Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite
John's lyrics for this evocative track were taken almost verbatim from a Victorian poster printed in 1843 to promote Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal. To enhance the fairground atmosphere of the piece, John had hoped to track down an authentic hand-operated steam organ, but as none was available, George Martin saw that the desired effect would have to be achieved by other means. He collated a tape of traditional steam organ recordings, such as old Sousa marches, and instructed engineer Geoff Emerick to cut the tape into sections around a foot in length. The sixty or so fragments were flung into the air, and then reassembled at random, as Sir George recalls: "Any that sounded too much like the original were turned around and added backwards until finally I arrived at a whole amalgam of carousel noises which we used as a background 'wash' to give the impression of a circus."