If you watch the documentary series The Beatles Anthology you will see some grainy footage of a long-haired young man in a white lab coat in front of a screen showing pulsating psychedelic patterns. “Hello, I’m Alexis, from Apple Electronics. I would like to say hello to all my brothers around the world, and to all the girls around the world, and to all the electronic people around the world.”
It was the late 1960s and a time when every self-respecting rock star had a guru. John Lennon had two, hedging his bets between the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who offered spiritual guidance, and “Magic Alex” Mardas, who he lauded as his scientific guru.
To Lennon, Mardas was an electronic genius to rival Marconi and Edison. To others, he was a sham. At the very least he was a visionary. The truth is that he was probably a bit of both.
As the head of the electronics division of the Beatles’ Apple empire, Mardas promised to deliver paint that would change colour at the flick of a switch; an invisible force field that would shield the Beatles’ homes from fans; wallpaper loudspeakers; and a telephone that responded to its owner’s voice and could identify callers. There was also a vague plan to build a flying saucer.
Little was delivered, including Mardas’s pledge to create a futuristic studio far superior to EMI’s Abbey Road. The equipment he built was scrapped as a disaster after a single session.
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The group’s producer, George Martin (obituary, March 10, 2016), complained that Mardas was an unwelcome presence at Abbey Road recording sessions: “I found it very difficult to chuck him out, because the boys liked him so much. Since it was very obvious that I didn’t, a schism developed.”
When Allen Klein took over as the Beatles manager in 1969 and was tasked with sorting out the chaos of Apple, he closed its electronics division and Mardas’s involvement ended. His projects had cost the Beatles an estimated £4 million in today’s money.
“Because John had introduced him as a guru, there was perhaps a little pressure on him to try and behave as a guru,” Paul McCartney recalled. His words were perhaps carefully chosen because in later years Mardas won several libel actions against those who accused him of conning the Beatles. “I invented a large number of electronic devices, none of which had anything to do with music or the business of the Beatles,” Mardas said in 2010. “Most of them are now in common use.”
Mardas often travelled with the Beatles and was part of the entourage when Lennon and George Harrison stayed at the Maharishi’s meditation centre in India in 1968. Mardas told the two Beatles that their spiritual guru was a sexual predator and urged them to leave before the Maharishi invoked a “black magic” spell. Cynthia Lennon later suggested that in a fit of jealousy Mardas had invented the story to undermine the Maharishi’s influence. Lennon believed Mardas and alluded to the Maharishi’s supposed transgressions in the song Sexy Sadie.
Lennon was the best man when Maras married Eufrosyne Doxiades, the daughter of the celebrated architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis.
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At Lennon’s suggestion Mardas took Cynthia Lennon on holiday to Greece. When they returned, Cynthia found Yoko Ono ensconced in the marital home and asked Mardas if she could spend the night at his apartment, where he got her drunk, joined her in the spare bedroom and, according to Cynthia, attempted to kiss her until she “pushed him away”. She later suspected that Mardas had been set up by Lennon so that the Beatle could accuse her of adultery in divorce proceedings.
For all his intriguing and failed experiments, Mardas did mastermind one of the rare non-musical ventures from which the Beatles made any money after Lennon persuaded his colleagues to buy a Greek island.
Mardas used connections with the Greek government to broker the deal. The Beatles swiftly lost interest in owning an island retreat and a year later sold their purchase at an estimated profit of £11,000. “It was about the only time the Beatles ever made any money on a business venture,” Harrison noted.
Born Yanni Alexis Mardas in 1942 in Athens, the son of a major in the Greek secret police, he arrived in London on a student visa in 1965. He found work as a TV repairman and became flatmates with John Dunbar, the founder of the Indica Gallery and Marianne Faithfull’s first husband.
Through Dunbar and Faithfull he got to know the Rolling Stones, for whom he built a “psychedelic light box”. After Brian Jones had introduced him to Lennon, Mardas then built a similar machine dubbed “the nothing box”, which he filled with Christmas tree lights and which emitted random flashes that the Beatle spent endless hours staring at while “tripping” on LSD.
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After the dissolution of Apple, Mardas went into partnership with ex-King Constantine II of Greece, selling bulletproof cars to clients who included the Shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan, Prince Juan Carlos of Spain and the Sultan of Oman.
By the 1990s he had returned to Greece. He married for a second time to a local actress with whom he had a daughter in 1993.
The tale of “Magic Alex” remains one of the bizarrest episodes in the Beatles story. “I’m only a little embarrassed to say that it all seemed like a great idea at the time,” McCartney noted years later. “He’d promised faithfully he could do it, so you had to give him a chance.”
“Magic Alex” Mardas, inventor, was born on May 2, 1942. He died of pneumonia on January 13, 2017, aged 74