Geoff Emerick threw himself into the Beatles' experiments

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Whether piping Lennon through an organ or recording Ringo ‘wrongly’, the innovative engineer translated the band’s wildest ideas into timeless sounds
Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick dies age 72

In his later years, Geoff Emerick was fond of claiming that he had merely been in the right place at the right time. His career had begun inauspiciously: a lowly teenaged “button pusher” at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in the early 1960s, his biggest success had been engineering Manfred Mann’s No 1 hit Pretty Flamingo. It’s not a song much remembered these days – one of those lightweight 60s hits recalled fondly by those who were fans at time, but without much of a lasting critical reputation – but its instrumentation was unusual enough to attract attention from within the studio itself.

The Beatles’ previous chief engineer, Norman Smith (like their producer George Martin, a 40-something former RAF man, who John Lennon nicknamed Normal) had been promoted to fully fledged Abbey Road producer’s role. In a wonderful coincidence, Emerick found himself not merely promoted to the job of chief engineer but promoted at exactly the point when the Beatles’ albums became journeys in sound as much as songwriting. While Smith was handed the unenviable task of dealing with EMI’s hot new signing, Pink Floyd, and their increasingly erratic leader, Syd Barrett, Emerick discovered that the duties in his new role stretched to throwing dozens of tiny pieces of tape into the air, then sticking them back together at random, to produce the head-spinning calliope effect on Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!

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