I’m annoyed with myself that the first thing I’ve felt moved enough to blog about comes as a response to someone dying. Other feelings are more important than getting wound-up about your own laziness and the sadness I feel having heard the news of George Martin’s death is certainly one of them. The other is, well, not anger, but frustration at the poor obituaries that have already started and will continue to follow – I read The Guardian’s obit. and it could have been cribbed from Baby’s First Beatles Book, with the bits about George Martin copied and pasted. Believe me, I’ve read a lot of very bad books about the Beatles and, of course, that is where much of GM’s story takes place, but there’s a lot more to him than that.

The fact that anyone cares, or knows anything, about producers is thanks to men like George Martin…

For my dissertation, the final piece of work for my Masters in Popular Music Studies at the University of Liverpool, I explored the significance of music biopics – how they created or perpetuated certain versions of music history and why they were generally regarded in a negative light. I tried to focus not on film-making aspects of the productions but on the selection and arrangement of the material used in the stories and the industrial, commercial and creative influences and decisions that affected the final outcomes. I’m not going to go into detail about that now, save to say I selected as examples that enabled me to explore how legal aspects could affect the story, how mythology is woven into the histories and how what I called ‘location veracity’ is sometimes seen as important as the story itself.

For the purposes of a post-postgrad catharsis, clearing my mind of these…