BBC Radio 4 2016-03-12

I wonder which song you dusted off this week, either in your own mind, or in your record collection, when you heard that George Martin had died.

It might not have been the Goons’ “I’m walking backwards for Christmas ...” though that, too, contains much evidence of Sir George’s musical genius. But it’s been moving to hear so many Beatles tracks in particular played this week; a fab reminder of just how influential their producer was.

The role of producer, which Sir George helped to shape so heavily - is an intriguing one.

I’ve been lucky to interview some of the best who’ve worked with U2, one of them being Steve Lillywhite.

And he described the process of helping to draw alongside a band and turn unformed ideas together into classic songs, as “magical and mystical”.

It’s a deep thing, then, and it’s very personal, too.

Lillywhite told me he set up a ping-pong table for U2 when they got bogged down on one early album, to break through their over earnestness; George Martin confessed in interviews that it wasn’t talent he first spotted in the Beatles, but personality; he liked who they were, and sensed he could do something with them.

Perhaps above all, when it comes to influence as a producer, the guitarist Bernard Butler put it rather well this week when he said that: “What George Martin did was to ask, “What if..?”

“He was like an impressionist painter,” he continued, “squinting his eye and imagining what could be.”

The poet and priest John O’Donohue writes that “The imagination is the great friend of possibility. Where [it’s] awake and alive, [it invites] you to new thresholds of creativity.”

George Martin was most certainly alive to the Beatles, and took them and popular music with him over the threshold. “We were a creative team,” he said, “always looking for something slightly out of reach.”

Alchemy is one word to describe the collaborative result; perichoresis, the Greek word for ‘rotation’ is another; it’s used by theologians to describe the relationship within the Holy Trinity - not Lennon, McCartney and Martin this time, but Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each uniquely and distinctly expressed, yet sharing profoundly, mysteriously in the life of the others, and creating more than the sum of the parts.

It’s communion - and a model of how we all could live and work, at best, together; squinting our eyes, perhaps, asking the question, “What if?” ... and releasing each other to produce more fully imagined expressions of who we can possibly be, beyond the threshold.