“I once had a flirtation with heavy metal, and I regretted it very much. It didn’t seem to have any sense”: The British hellraisers who put legendary Beatles producer George Martin off working with hard rock bands

George Martin is one of the all-time great producers. His groundbreaking work with The Beatles shaped modern music, and he went on to produce albums and singles by everyone from Elton John, Jeff Beck and Mahavishnu Orchestra to Kenny Rogers, Jimmy Webb and Tommy Steele.

But there was one type of music that bamboozled Martin: hard rock. Across his illustrious career, he worked with just two bands from the harder and heavier end of the spectrum. One was Cheap Trick, whose 1980 album All Shook Up was produced by Martin. The other were British rock linchpins and noted party animals UFO.

In the brand new issue of Classic Rock, we look at the story of the British rock veterans’ 1980 album No Place To Run, recorded at Martin’s AIR studio on the Caribbean island of Montserrat – an experience that prompted the producer to reveal that he rued his “flirtation with heavy metal”.

Speaking to Classic Rock’s Dave Ling, longtime UFO drummer Andy Parker reveals that the band only ended up working with Martin because AIR was available.

“The place wasn’t being used as much as George had hoped, so there was an arrangement where if you booked it, he would produce your album,” Parker says.

While the man who produced Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had little in common with the band who wrote Doctor Doctor and Rock Bottom, the two parties got on on a personal level.

“George was like one of the boys, really,” late bassist Pete Way told Classic Rock in 2016. “He never threw his weight about or reminded you of his reputation. He was very interested in the way that we liked to work, because it really was an experiment on both sides of the equation.”

UFO were surprised to discover that Martin worked to a very strict timetable.

“You’d start recording at around eleven o’clock [am] and at six [pm] there’d be a break,” Way told Classic Rock. “A gentleman in a white jacket would bring him a gin and tonic, and we’d head into the main house for a meal. It was all very colonial and civilised – though it didn’t stay that way when Martin retired for the evening.”

Martin was equally surprised by the band’s approach to recording – specifically singer Phil Mogg’s refusal to write lyrics until the last moment.

As Way recalled: “Sometimes he would ask: ‘Is Phil coming in today?’ because he was used to John Lennon and Paul McCartney having their lyrics ready. George became anxious about the [lack of] words, and we’d have to placate him: ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’re done,’ when we all knew very well that Phil was down at the beach waterskiing.”

“George would sometimes read out my lyrics,” Mogg tells Classic Rock, mimicking Martin’s upper-crust accent as he intones the opening lines of No Place To Run’s title track: “‘Joey rides the subway, fast from east to west, on the streets he’s number one, some say that he’s the best’. And he’d ask: ‘Who is this Joey? And what was he doing on the subway?’ There was a bit of a culture clash.”

It wasn’t just Martin who was mystified by UFO. The band were left equally puzzled by the quietness of Martin’s studio playbacks.

“They sounded like a transistor radio,” Way told Classic Rock. “After George had left on an evening, [guitarist/keyboard player] Paul Chapman and I would rachet up the volume to the point where I’m surprised the place still had a roof.”

No Place To Run was released in January 1980. While Mogg tells Classic Rock that he thinks his band “made a good album”, he concedes that “sometimes it does come across as a little polite”. The singer adds that the union with Martin as “a bit of a mismatch”.

“He must have wondered what he was doing there,” says Mogg. “I don’t think he was that into us, it was probably just another job, though it was obvious he enjoyed recording.”

Martin himself didn’t disagree. “I once had a flirtation with heavy metal, and I regretted it very much,” Martin later told an interviewer. “It [the genre] didn’t seem to have any sense.”

It’s not clear whether it was UFO or Cheap Trick who broke him, but the smart money is on the former. Pete Way certainly thought so. “George was probably talking about us,” the bassist admitted to Classic Rock.

Either way Martin, who died in 2016 aged 90, was true to his word. He never produced anything remotely heavy again, preferring to stick to less chaotic artists such as Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers and Paul McCartney.

Read the full interview with UFO about the making of No Place To Run in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, onsale now. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.