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""From the New York Times:

Norman Smith, Engineer for the Beatles, Dies at 85


By DOUGLAS SCHORZMAN
Published: March 7, 2008

Norman Smith, who was the lead recording engineerfor every Beatles song
through 1965 and who as a producer helped usher inan era of psychedelic
rock when he discovered the band Pink Floyd, diedTuesday in East Sussex ,
England. He was 85.


The cause was cancer, his wife, Eileen, said. Mr.Smith, originally a
dance-hall and jazz musician, came to therecording business relatively
late, taking an entry-level job at EMI RecordingStudios on Abbey Road in
London in 1959, when he was 36. But within a few years heplayed critical
roles for two of the biggest-selling bands inhistory.

Later, in the early 1970s, he had a moment in thespotlight himself, scoring
a Top 5 hit in the United States with his ³Oh Babe,What Would You Say,²
singing under the name Hurricane Smith.

Mr. Smith worked his way through the EMI hierarchyat a time when there was
a division between technical personnel andfrontline engineers, who were
required to wear ties and jackets. (Reacting inpart to this buttoned-down
style, the Beatles nicknamed him ³Normal.²) In hisrole, Mr. Smith was more
focused on capturing performances than on fiddlingwith tubes and wires.

³I was such an admirer of his musical prowess,²said Malcolm Addey, a
recording engineer and colleague of Mr. Smith¹s atEMI. ³He really knew it
inside out, as a player and arranger.²

Mr. Smith was the engineer on duty when theBeatles came into EMI studios
for their first sound test, in 1962. Therelationship would become very
close, but it did not start so smoothly.

³First impressions of the group coming into thestudio were not very great,
in point of fact,² Mr. Smith said in an interviewin³Recording the Beatles,²
the definitive studio history of the group, byBrian Kehew and Kevin Ryan.
³I mean, ŒHere comes another scrappy group.¹ But Imust say that I was taken
with their hairdos because we hadn¹t seen anythingquite like them.²

Under the producer George Martin, it was Mr.Smith¹s role to choose the
equipment and techniques used to captureindividual sounds in the studio and
then to weave them into a finished recording. Inthe Beatles¹ case, he
favored sounds that were more stark than thosetypically heard in the
ornamented and reverberation- drenched songson popular radio.

³Norman thought the actual Beatles¹ sound, playingtogether in the room, was
great, and he wanted to preserve that,² Mr. Kehewsaid. ³And that was really
different from other records at the time.²

His approach made its mark on a remarkable stretchof hit songs from 1962
until early 1966. They included ³I Want to HoldYour Hand,² ³A Hard Day¹s
Night,² ³Help!² ³Day Tripper² and ³We Can Work ItOut² ‹ all crisp and
energetic recordings that were increasinglyexperimental.

In the last full album he worked on with theBeatles, ³Rubber Soul,² in
1965, Mr. Smith helped the band members lay thegroundwork for the
increasingly radical studio performances theywould feature on later LPs
like ³Revolver² (1966) and ³Sgt. Pepper¹s LonelyHearts Club Band² (1967).
One ³Rubber Soul² breakthrough was the use of asitar on the song ³Norwegian
Wood.²

After Mr. Martin left EMI in 1966, Mr. Smithsucceeded him as a senior
producer. He scouted and immediately signed theexperimental group Pink
Floyd to a contract and produced its first twoalbums, ³Piper at the Gates
of Dawn² and ³Saucerful of Secrets,² bothrecognized as definitive works of
psychedelic rock. Mr. Smith also produced another art-rockband, the Pretty
Things.

Norman A. Smith was born on Feb. 22, 1923, andreared in Edmonton ,North
London. He was trained as a glider pilot in the Royal AirForce during World
War II but did not see combat. Afterward, heworked day jobs and formed a
band, the Bobby Arnold Quintet, in which he playedmostly drums and vibes
and performed in local clubs and dance halls, apractice he continued in his
early years at EMI, Mr. Addey said.

At age 50, Mr. Smith embarked on a solo singingcareer, taking the stage
name Hurricane from a movie title. His hit, ³OhBabe, What Would You Say,²
was a song he had written and hoped to sell butended up recording himself
at the urging of a producer, Mr. Addey said.

Besides his wife of 62 years, Mr. Smith issurvived by his son, Nick, also a
recording engineer; his daughter, Dee Smith, adancer and dance instructor;
and a grandson.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Smith wasgratified to be getting attention
from new generations of Beatles fans, Mrs. Smithsaid. Mr. Kehew traced much
of this renewed attention to a fascination with³the scene behind the making
of the record.²

³The record itself has become more important than,say, the Maharishi or
dogs or wives,² Mr. Kehew said. ³And the peoplebehind the scenes had almost
as much a hand in creating those sounds as theBeatles themselves.²""