048: Yellow Submarine, by The Beatles and George Martin

The Beatles and George Martin (United Kingdom)
Yellow Submarine (1969)
13 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Like the Rage Against the Machine album last month, Yellow Submarine was a contractual obligation dun good. The Beatles had signed a three-film contract, but after A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, they figured that an animated film would be the easiest way to fulfil their contract with minimal input on their part. They licensed some of their well-known songs from recent years and chucked in a handful of originals that were deemed not good enough to put on any albums. The film company hired a bunch of actors to play the fabulous foursome, and that was that. In the end, though, with its distinctive surreal and psychedelic art style and its charming and silly plot, the film turned out to be a classic, and hugely influential in its way.

And with the film came the obligatory soundtrack album, featuring all of the film’s original songs as well as the title track. But that’s not all it included. It’s officially credited to The Beatles, of course, but I feel like that diminishes too much the contributions of producer George Martin: the whole of Side B is made up of the orchestral score of the film, which was written by Martin himself. These pieces present a much different flavour than you’d normally get on a Beatles album: they are heavily rooted in classical sounds, from Stravinsky to the scores of golden age Hollywood. Martin keeps the Beatles very present in the music, though. He worked so closely with them as to understand their artistry perfectly, and so their sound is evoked often in the orchestra, even without any direct musical quotes (well, not many). The piece ‘The Sea of Time’ even shows Martin getting into the spirit of the other George’s Indian adventures.

Back to the Beatles themselves. Remember that the original songs on the film were already written, but weren’t considered good enough for an ‘official’ album release? It’s madness, really, when you look at some of the songs discarded into Yellow Submarine. ‘Hey Bulldog’ is, in my opinion, one of the best Beatles songs ever, it rocks so hard! It starts with the meanest piano riff, which is then joined by acidic guitar and machine-gun snare; already four bars in, you’ve lost me. It’s too late, I’m already fist pumping and howling at the moon. And then you remember that the other original songs include ‘Only a Northern Song’ and the perfect kid’s song ‘All Together Now’…the quality of the ‘second tier’ songs that are included on this album just go to show the utmost quality of the rest of the Beatles’ work.