Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a musician, a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music, he began his career as a professional oboist, but soon moved from playing to producing.

He joined EMI, where in 1962 he made a decision which was to change his and many other people's lives.

He signed up a group called The Beatles and went on to produce every record they made until they disbanded eight years later.

The Beatles may no longer be in business, but my castaway certainly is.

In the 25 years since, he's written the music for many films and produced recordings with performers as

Diverse as Sting, Jose Carreras and Stan gets.

Rock and Roll, he says, has the same function as classical music, to make sounds that are appealing to a mass of people

and are of some worth. He is George Martin. How do you judge the worth of a piece of music George surely it's a completely subjective

business oh absolutely everyone's got their own ideas about what good and bad but do you know

when you hear a piece of pop music can you listen to it today and say that's

really good that's good quality or that's a load of old rubbish I can but of course

one of the problems of getting old is you get slightly less tolerant of bad stuff so of

bad stuff so I don't honestly hear an awful lot of good stuff. I think technology

has made things a bit worse too. It's a little bit too easy to make sounds now. I use synthesizers and computers as well as everybody else.

And at my home on a very small amount of apparatus I can actually make orchestral sounds.

I think that's terribly unfair.

I don't think you should, you know, someone who spends their entire life learning how to play the oboe or the violin

suddenly find themselves supplanted by a sampler.

But can you hear the difference?

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