Ron Richards: record producer who took the Beatles’ first recording session

Following his discharge from the RAF, he drifted into the music industry, taking a job in 1952 with the music publishers Chappell. It was the beginning of the Tin Pan Alley era when most of the important players in the industry were concentrated in Denmark Street, Soho, and Ron Richards — he had shortened his name for professional purposes — became a familiar figure, plugging songs and managing artists such as the popular British crooner Michael Holliday.

In 1958 he joined EMI’s Parlophone label as a promotions manager but was swiftly promoted to a producer and became de facto assistant to the label’s manager, George Martin.

His early charges as a producer included Jerry Lordan, one of his own discoveries, who made the charts in 1960 with I’ll Stay Single and Who Could Be Bluer, Shane Fenton (later to find fame as Alvin Stardust) and Paul Raven (later reinvented as Gary Glitter).

His background in plugging songs meant that he was particularly adept at finding the right song for his artists to record, although his touch proved to be not quite so unerring with the Beatles.

At the Beatles’ first recording session at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in North London on June 6, 1962, Martin left Richards in charge. He produced four tracks with the band — Besame Mucho, Ask Me Why, P.S. I Love You and Love Me Do — and Martin arrived at the session only towards the end after the engineer, Norman Smith, had sent him a message to say they had found something special.

On the strength of what he heard, Martin signed them, although — on Richards’s recommendation — he urged them to replace their drummer, Pete Best. By the time the Beatles returned to Abbey Road three months later to cut their first single, Ringo Starr had been installed as their drummer.

They recorded several takes of the Lennon and McCartney composition Love Me Do, but Richards was convinced that How Do You Do It?, written by Mitch Murray and which had already been turned down by Adam Faith, offered a better prospect of creating a hit and the Beatles were cajoled into recording the song against their wishes.

Unsurprisingly, their reluctant version was so uninspired that it was quietly dropped until it emerged on the Beatles Anthology album more than 30 years later in 1995.

It was agreed that Love Me Do would be the single, although Richards was still unsatisfied with the recording and summoned the group back a week later to re-cut the song with the session drummer Alan White, and Starr relegated to playing tambourine and maracas. Co- produced by Martin and Richards, it was this version that was released as the Beatles’ first single and entered the charts the following month, backed with P.S. I Love You.

Richards, however, had not given up on How Do You Do It? and instead recorded the song with Parlophone’s second Liverpool signing, Gerry and the Pacemakers. With Richards and Martin working in tandem, the song went to number one in 1963 and was followed to the top by I Like It and Martin’s rearrangement of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

As “Merseybeat” took off, Richards returned to the North West to find more groups, and on a visit to Manchester in 1963 he discovered the Hollies. They, too, were swiftly added to Parlophone’s burgeoning roster of beat groups. Determined to make them different from the pack, Richards encouraged them to place their distinctive harmonies at the fore of their sound and produced nearly all of their singles and albums for the next dozen years, and continued working with them until 1979.

Early Hollies hits such as Stay and Just One Look (both 1964) and I’m Alive (1965) were covers of songs chosen by Richards. Looking for more original material, he then recruited songwriters such as Graham Gouldman, who penned the hits Look Through Any Window (1965) and Bus Stop (1966) before the band members began writing their own songs. Eventually the Hollies became the most successful British singles group of the 1960s with 22 UK Top 40 entries between 1964 and 1970.

Richards even took over the Hollies’ management for a time, although he did not always get his own way with the group. He opposed — but lost — their forays into psychedelia in 1967 on songs such as King Midas in Reverse.

Other acts that he produced in the 1960s included P. J. Proby, the Graham Bond Organisation (which included the future Cream members Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker), the Spencer Davis Group and the Paramounts, who became Procol Harum. Yet despite his seminal role in British pop music, he remained proudest of working with the American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, assisting Martin to produce a stirring version of the Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love.

Richards was an astute businessman and it was at his instigation that in 1965 he and Martin, together with John Burgess of EMI and Peter Sullivan of Decca, set up the independent production company AIR, which then hired out the producers’ services to EMI and other labels. It was at the time a radical move that broke with the longstanding practice of the big record companies working exclusively with in-house salaried “yes men”.

AIR eventually merged with Chrysalis in 1974, a move engineered by Martin but opposed by Richards, who left the company as soon as the merger had been completed.

One of his last big hits came with his production of the Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe in 1974. He retired from the record industry after making one final album with the Hollies in 1979.

His wife of 50 years, Ellen, died in 2004 and he is survived by their two sons and one daughter.

Ron Richards, record producer, was born on January 22, 1929. He died on April 30, 2009, aged 80