Not many people can say they’ve been on the Magical Mystery Tour bus and actually recorded with the Beatles. Martin Benge can.
Martin has a few stories. More than a few, actually, enough for a career that took him from a factory in Hayes to Abbey Road to Sydney and eventually to our little community radio studio in Sanctuary Point, where he volunteers his time as co-host of the Strolling Down Memory Lane show on a Wednesday morning.
This year he and his wife Jeannie headed back to the UK for a few weeks, caught up with old friends, and saw a bit of the country. While they were in London, they decided to join a busload of tourists on a Beatle Mystery Bus Tour. Past the famous zebra crossing on Abbey Road, up to Strawberry Fields, and through the streets of a city that somehow produced the most recognisable songs in the world.
What the other passengers didn’t know was that Martin had not only visited all those places long before but had actually worked at Abbey Road for eight years in the 1960s, starting out as a young engineering apprentice who’d had to talk his way into the place and then make himself indispensable once he arrived. One day in 1967 he found himself deputising for regular engineer Ken Scott, who was sick, and ended up recording Across the Universe with John Lennon and the boys in Studio Three. Not a bad day at the office.
He got to know Paul McCartney better than the others – “he’s a good guy,” Martin has said, and later, when he returned to run Abbey Road in the 1990s, he helped bring the surviving Beatles back to the studio for the Anthology project, convinced that it had to be done where the original recordings were made.
But the Beatles were only part of the story. On any given day at Abbey Road you might have the London Symphony Orchestra in the big room, the Beatles in Studio Two recording Sgt. Pepper, and Pink Floyd in Studio Three – all at the same time. Martin worked across all of it. After emigrating to Australia in 1971 he went on to record Slim Dusty, Olivia Newton-John, Chad Morgan and Henry Mancini among many others, eventually becoming studio manager at the legendary 301 in Sydney before heading back to London to run the entire EMI UK Studios group.
These days he brings all of that experience and knowledge with him to the 92.7FM station, where every Wednesday morning he plays music from the 1920s through to the 1960s – big bands, early jazz, a bit of Elvis – for anyone tuning in across the Bay & Basin.
