The Beatles Acted Like ‘Guilty Schoolboys’ When Their Bad Behavior Made an Engineer Quit His Job

During recording sessions for The Beatles’ White Album, the band’s behavior was so terrible that audio engineer Geoff Emerick quit. He had worked with The Beatles on multiple albums but concluded he could no longer take their fights. When he told the band he was leaving, they were clearly guilty. Emerick said The Beatles’ behavior reminded him of school children.

The Beatles’ behavior was childish, according to an engineer

During sessions for the White Album, The Beatles bickered, rolled their eyes at each other’s music, and worked long, arduous hours. After witnessing a shouting match between Paul McCartney and producer George Martin, Emerick decided he’d had enough. Martin and studio manager Alan Stagge begged him to stay for another week while they found a replacement, but he refused. 

“At the conclusion of my meeting with Stagge, only one task remained, and that was to tell the band,” Emerick wrote in his book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. “In the thirty minutes or so since I’d stormed out, they had been waiting quietly at the bottom of the steps of Studio Two to find out what had transpired.”

While they didn’t know Emerick had quit, they could tell he wasn’t happy. Emerick said McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison looked incredibly guilty.

“As I headed down to face them, I could see George Harrison, Ringo, and, surprisingly, even Paul all staring down at the ground like guilty schoolboys,” Emerick wrote. “Only John Lennon had the courage to look me in the eye, and what he said really surprised me.”

Lennon told Emerick that he did good work, even if Lennon himself didn’t always like the albums he worked on. The tactic, unsurprisingly, didn’t work on Emerick. He walked out in the middle of the session with no plans to return.

This wasn’t the only time The Beatles’ behavior reminded Geoff Emerick of schoolboys

The Beatles reminded Emerick of schoolboys at other, more positive times. While working on Revolver, for example, the band let their immaturity run free when Martin was out of the studio.

“As it happened, George Martin was out sick with food poisoning the night we began work on [‘Yellow Submarine’]; he sent his secretary, Judy, along to keep an eye on things while I took the helm,” Emerick wrote. “George’s absence clearly had a liberating effect on the four Beatles — silliness that George Martin would not have tolerated — so rehearsals took up a lot more time than the session itself.”

As would happen in the White Album sessions, Lennon snapped out of the schoolboy behavior before his bandmates.

“It was Lennon who finally got over his attack of the giggles and took on the role of responsible adult, admonishing the others, ‘Come on, it’s getting late and we still haven’t made us a record!'” Emerick recalled. “This, of course, only had the effect of sending everyone into another fit of laughter. But eventually they settled down and began recording the backing track.”

Some of their childish behavior helped them create ‘Yellow Submarine’

This behavior was, ultimately, helpful in recording a song like “Yellow Submarine.” When McCartney first began to think about the song, he knew he wanted to write it with children in mind. 

“I remember thinking that a children’s song would be quite a good idea,” he said, per Ultimate Classic Rock, “and I thought of images, and the color yellow came to me, and a submarine came to me, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of nice, like a toy, very childish yellow submarine.'”

The song was simple with a cheerful tune and they used a number of background noises to make it even more playful.