Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith

Mar 11 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith

IF YOU wanted a name which celebrated the steady British bloke, tending his garden on a Sunday, you could do no better than Norman Smith.

This did not escape the bespectacled gaze of John Lennon, the word-player and Beatle, who called him Normal Smith.

But the man himself remembered a movie about a rodeo rider wrongly convicted of murder called Hurricane Smith (1941).

And that was the name known to the millions, who admired his long-haired hippie looks and jaunty, tuneful songs.

But most of those fans didn’t realise that he was already an important figure in EMI’s Abbey Road studio, London, engineering all the Beatles’ records, with producer George Martin, up to and including Rubber Soul.

Although he had served as a glider pilot with the RAF during the war and came from an earlier generation, Smith sashayed with consummate ease into the world of pop music, particularly at its more adventurous level, producing the Pink Floyd albums The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma.

He was accepted by the musicians, who were then almost revered by a large section of society, not because he was a father figure in the style of George Martin, but because he was like them. Furthermore, his background in jazz gave him a cool status.

He applied for a job as an apprentice engineer at EMI, advertised in The Times in 1959. Strictly speaking, Smith was too old, but his humorous observations about chart-topping Cliff Richard endeared him to the interviewer.

Before long, he was engineering records for the high parade of pop talent – the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans and Billy J Kramer (all from Merseyside), as well as Helen Shapiro and Manfred Mann.

On Floyd’s Remember A Day, he played the drums, replacing Nick Mason who was having trouble with the piece.

Few would have guessed his age in 1971, when he launched his own career as the pop singer, Hurricane Smith, scoring a UK number two with Don’t Let It Die. He followed this with the trans-Atlantic hit, Oh Babe What You Say.

His last big-seller was Who Was It? (1972). Smith, married with a son, remained in music until he retired to Sussex, writing a memoir, John Lennon Called Me Normal.

Norman “Hurricane” Smith, musician, born February 22, 1923; died march 3, 2008.