George Martin, The Fifth Beatle

The death has been announced of George Martin, the producer and creative conduit for the uniquely influential sound of the Beatles.  His input to their success was such that he has been dubbed 'The Fifth Beatle'.

Here's Martin with the boys, second from right.

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Which is all a bit confusing, because I wrote a blog some time ago called Stuart Sutcliffe: Artist and Fifth Beatle.  Scottish-born Sutcliffe was actually a fifth person in the Beatles, being the original bass player when the band was a five piece.  Maybe that makes him the First Beatle, not the Fifth?

 Photograph by Peter Bruchmann of George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe in Hamburg

Or what about Brian Epstein?  

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He was their manager and mentor, and Paul McCartney summarised the huge importance of Epstein in a 1997 interview for a BBC documentary about Epstein, saying, "If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian"  Or does that actually make him the Sixth or Seventh Beatle?

And then there's Pete Best, the original drummer, whom Epstein sacked a couple of months after their first recording session. 

                                                                             Pete Best, 1961 (Photo by Albert Marrion)

Or what about Johnny Hutchinson (of The Big Three)?  He played as drummer for three gigs in between Best and Ringo Starr. 

And then there's Andy White, a session drummer who played on two songs of the first recording session Ringo did with the band.  Ringo didn't play the drum for two songs of his first recording session with the Beatles (just other percussion). 

Then Ringo fell ill with tonsillitis just before the 1964 tour of Europe and Australasia, and was replaced by Jimmie Nicol.  Nicol, who had handily made an album of cover versions of Beatles songs and so knew all the arrangements, was phoned the same day that Starr became ill, and was called to the Abbey Road studios to rehearse.

27 hours later, he had completely mastered the full dazzling complexity of Starr's parts, and was on stage in Copenhagen.

Ten days and eight shows later, and he was out of the band again, but got (it's rumoured) the modern day equivalent of half a million dollars for his trouble.  Nine months later he was bankrupt, and later became a recluse.

Then there's Colin Hanton who was the drummer before Best, Mike McCartney (apparently), Tommy Moore (1960 tour of Scotland), and Norman Chapman who left to do his National Service.

How many Beatles is that we're up to? 

And to confuse things further, in the frame there's also Derek Taylor (the Beatles' public relations manager) and Neil Aspinall (their road manager, pictured below). 

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I'm not sure how many Fifth Beatles that makes, and there's possibly a whole lot more who are contenders.

But what it all goes to say is that, in fact, the Beatles weren't just  four people.  They were the core nugget of creativity, the people who had the vision and the raw ideas, but they also needed a creative team around them who could act as conduits, and who could crystallise and bring to fruition those ideas, and those sometimes tiny little seeds of something bigger (Lennon apparently once came to Martin with a single note as the basis for a song, which Martin then had to interpret and turn into musical gold-dust) . 

The creativity of the Beatles, therefore, relied upon building up a close and trusted group of people around them, a whole group ot 'Fifth Beatles', who not only had the technical knowledge, but also the necessary organisational, mentoring and pastoral skills as well, a whole range of people who could nurture and interpret and facilitate and focus the genius.

Stuart Sutcliffe Poster - Barbizon Gallery 1990

I've just wobbled up a ladder and sorted through a tsunami of posters to find this.... it's the Stuart Sutcliffe poster that I got from his exhibition at the Barbizon Gallery in Glasgow as part of Mayfest in 1990.

What an image.  It shows Stuart in a conscientiously bohemian pose, in a decadently silver-lined studio with ornately rococco table groaning with alcohol.  It's a scene that's funkier and artier than Andy Warhol's Factory, and says 'Look at me - I'm light years away from my working class roots - I escaped!'.

Hope you like it!

Stuart Sutcliffe: Artist and Fifth Beatle

Seeing a 22 year-old painting of mine come up for sale on Ebay got me thinking back to 1990, and the events that were held during Glasgow's year as City of Culture.

One of the most memorable events was a show of Stuart Sutcliffe's work at the Barbizon Gallery.  The exhibition blew me away, and looking back now, I realise that there is a lot in his work with textures and collage that is of interest in my own work.

Stuart Sutcliffe: Untitled, 1961-62 (Oil on canvas, The Stuart Sutcliffe Estate)

 Stuart Sutcliffe, The Building Site 1957 (Ink and Watercolour on paper,The Stuart Sutcliffe Estate)

Stuart Sutcliffe: Untitled, 1961-62 (Mixed Media and Collage, The Stuart Sutcliffe Estate)

Then, I had only vaguely heard of Stuart Sutcliffe as 'the fifth Beatle' - not that I was really keen on the Beatles (too young when they were around), but when I saw the work, the exhibition made a really big impact on me.

This is Stuart Sutcliffe, photographed by his fiancee, photographer Astrid Kirchherr in 1961.  It's her favourite photo of him.

Stuart Sutcliffe (Astrid Kirchherr, 1961)

It's a very powerful image.  He has a very modern, almost androgenous look about him, and his eyes look confidently straight at you, no matter which angle you look at the photo from.  It's like he's almost glowing with an inner energy.  

This is him again, also photographed by Astrid.

Stuart Sutcliffe (Astrid Kirchherr, 1961)

It's a very potent and modern image, the sort that you could imagine opening a magazine today and seeing, with a timeless, ethereal white background.  It's Astrid's jacket that he's wearing, a softer leather jacket than the sort men wore in the 60s, so he's at once feminised, but also very masculine.  Take it from me - he's hot.

It's all about contradictions, and the energy and tension between those contradictions; masculine and feminine, confident yet with vulnerability, over half a century old but still bang up to date.

Stuart Sutcliffe was Scottish, born in Edinburgh in 1940.  His family moved to Liverpool in 1943, and, gifted artistically, Stuart entered Liverpool Regional College of Art at 16.  

There he received, by all accounts, a tremendous grounding in art as a craft, with the emphasis on life drawing and observation.  His tutor was Arthur Ballard, a skilled practitioner of non-figurative (not abstract) painting who encouraged promising students through extra drawing classes and tutorials.  He knew the London art scene and members of the St Ives School who were abstracting from landscape; Roger Hylton, Patrick Heron, William Scott and also Peter Lanyon (read more about him in my blog here), whom Ballard knew well.  Here's a drawing of Peter Lanyon's....

Peter Lanyon, Venice 1948

..and a page from one of Stuart's sketchbooks at art school....

In 1959, aged 19, Stuart entered a picture, Summer Painting, into the John Moores Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.  Apparently, he only entered half of the intended diptych, the other half getting left in his studio.  No matter - the painting not only got into the prestigious exhibition, but was purchased by John Moores, an incredible achievement for an artist who was still a student.  With the money, Sutcliffe was persuaded by fellow art student John Lennon to buy a Hofner President bass guitar, and to join John's rock 'n' roll group, the Quarry Men, as bass guitarist.

In 1960, the group toured Scotland, and Stuart graduated from art school.  In 1961, the group, now called the Beatles, visited Hamburg for the second time, and Stuart decided to enrol at the city's State School of Art, at the invitation of Eduardo Paolozzi.

Paolozzi was a Scots-Italian sculptor (see more about him in my blog here), and there is certainly a very sculptural quality to Sutcliffe's drawings.  His drawings, with their expoloration of form and texture, often resemble Henry Moore's sculpture studies, or Paolozzi's in their reference to mechanical structures. 

Drawing, especially life drawing, had been central to his Liverpool studies. In Hamburg, his painting style remained abstract, but became more atmospheric and textural, combining drawing, calligraphic marks, collage, different substrate supports, and monotype and lithographic printing.  The work has a more emotional intensity.

Stuart Sutcliffe, Untitled (Mixed media, paint and collage, 1962, The Stuart Sutcliffe Estate)

Stuart Sutcliffe, Untitled (Monoprint, 1962, The Stuart Sutcliffe Estate)

In this outpouring of art, he left the Beatles to concentrate on his painting.

It was in Hamburg that Stuart fell down the stairs from the attic flat in Eimsbutteler Strasse, where Astrid lived with her mother.  Afterwards, he suffered headaches, nausea and depression.  On 10 April 1962, aged just 21, he died of a brain haemorrhage.

When someone talented dies young, the question is always, 'what if...?'.  There are many artists who have died young, and they leave a sad, tangible ball of potential energy hanging in the ether.  Where was all this talent going?  Would Sutcliffe have been noticed if he wasn't connected to the Beatles?  Were there great things ahead?  The answer is, we'll never know.  

Astrid says she still thinks about him every day.

Stuart in the Attic Studio in Astrid Kirchherr's house, 1961 (Astrid Kirchherr)