Magic Alex
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Yanni ("John") Alexis Mardas, better known as Magic Alex (born May 5, 1942, Athens, Greece), a self-styled electronics wizard, was the head of The Beatles' Apple Electronics. He became one of the principal hangers-on of the Beatles' burgeoning entourage, and broke the news from John Lennon to his first wife Cynthia that John wanted a divorce.
Mardas was introduced to Lennon by Brian Jones. Impressing Lennon with his "nothing box", a small plastic box with randomly blinking lights, and his ideas for futuristic electronic devices, he became one of the first employees of the newly formed Apple Corps, who fitted him out with his own laboratory and helped him to obtain a British work visa. His main job was to create sellable and innovative products and techniques that Apple could market.
He also became a friend of Lennon's, visiting him at home and at Abbey Road, whose "out-of-date" equipment and methods drew his constant criticism, to producer George Martin's annoyance. (Martin had always campaigned for better equipment, and he noted that "Magic Alex" nonetheless studied Abbey Road closely whenever he visited.) The Beatles were interested in buying or leasing a Greek island to move to, and Alex claimed to have government connections through his family, who could help with the deal.
Along with appearing (uncredited) in the Beatles' TV movie Magical Mystery Tour, he accompanied them to India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the spring of 1968. When he suggested to Lennon and George Harrison that the Maharishi had been making sexual advances toward Mia Farrow and other women at the camp (a suggestion not fully supported in Farrow's autobiography What Falls Away), they took the suggestion seriously enough to confront him. When the startled Maharishi's answers didn't satisfy them, they and their wives departed the camp. (McCartney and Starr had already left, for other reasons.)
After returning to England, Lennon's wife Cynthia accompanied Mardas and his flatmate Jenny Boyd on a vacation trip to his native Greece (the island deal had been abandoned), while Lennon remained at home. Coming back early, Cynthia discovered her husband sitting at breakfast with Japanese artist Yoko Ono, both clad in bathrobes, and all the signs the two had been cohabitating for several days. She left with Alex and Jenny, staying with them overnight and resisting Mardas repeated advances.[1]
Mardas was ultimately given the job of designing the Beatles' new recording studio in the basement at Apple headquarters in Savile Row, after boasting of his plans to create the world's first 72-track tape machine. He gave the Beatles regular reports of his progress, but when they required their new studio in January 1969, during the Get Back project that became Let It Be, they discovered not a state-of-the-art facility, but a poorly planned, unusable, cramped set of rooms, with no 72-track tape deck, no soundproofing, no talkback (intercom) system, and not even a patch bay to run the wiring between the control room and the studio. The only new piece of sound equipment present was a crude mixing console Mardas had built, that was consigned to the scrapheap after one session.
One of Mardas's more outrageous plans was to replace the acoustic baffles (sound insulators, used to prevent leakage) around Ringo Starr's drums with an invisible sonic force field. That didn't happen. George Harrison's suspicions of Mardas's competence were raised when he saw him wandering around in a white coat, with a clipboard, muttering as he placed tiny loudspeakers around the studio — one for each track. When "Magic Alex" failed to deliver, the Beatles had to wait until George Martin came to the rescue, working around the studio's technical problems, and borrowing a pair of four-track recorders from EMI, to continue the project. Long time Beatle engineer Geoff Emerick was given the task of building and setting up a new studio with new equipment.
Mardas was fired from Apple by Allen Klein in 1969, and every British patent he applied for on Apple's behalf was turned down on the grounds that he had invented nothing new, but had only built modified versions of products already under patent. It was later revealed that Mardas's main electronic experience had been as a TV repairman. In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison considered the possibility that "Alex just read the latest version of Science Weekly, and used its ideas."
Later media stories showed Mardas partnering with the former King of Greece, in a company marketing bulletproof cars to royalty and VIPs.[2]
[edit] In popular culture
When witnessing the disparity between a designer's intentions and what is actually produced, UK lecturer and architectural design guru, Sam Jacob, has labelled this phenomenon the "Mardas gap".[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Cynthia Lennon – “John” 2006. pp288-289
- ^ http://www.injustice.org/nemo/newsfile/ns790703.html
- ^ http://www.strangeharvest.com/mt/archive/the_harvest/the_mardas_touch.php
[edit] Books and published articles
- John by Cynthia Lennon (Hodder & Stoughton)
- The Sunday Times, 18 September, 2005
- George Harrison: The Quiet One by Alan Clayson (Sanctuary Publishing)
- The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines
- Shout! by Philip Norman (Warner Books)
- All You Need is Ears by George Martin (St. Martin's Press)
- "Hawkers by Appointment", New Statesman, 3 August 1979
- Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles by Geoff Emerick (Gotham Books)
