Posted November 14, 200618 yr George Martin's Beatles finale http://www.musicweek.com/images/features/Beatles_Love_Feature.jpg 31 October 2006 At the age of 80, legendary beatles producer George Martin has united with son Giles to produce a new Beatles album and, with inspiration from the bootlegging scene, had free reign to re-work the catalogue in a previously-unheard way. MW's Paul Williams talks to the pair. Although John, Paul, George and Ringo last gathered together in a recording studio back on August 20 1969, the ensuing years have provided a steady stream of Beatles-related work for their producer Sir George Martin. In the Seventies, he produced the soundtrack for the Bee Gees’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the Eighties he oversaw the transfer of The Beatles’ catalogue to CD. Then, in the Nineties, he worked on six discs’ worth of music for the Anthology project. In this latest decade, Sir George – in tandem with producer son Giles - has spent the past two years masterminding the “soundscape†to the new, long-awaited joint Beatles/Cirque du Soleil production Love, which, since June 30, has been a fixture at The Mirage in Las Vegas. The new production marks the first time Apple Corps has allowed a third party to use The Beatles’ repertoire in such an extensive way. But, with the accompanying album to the show now complete, ready for release through Apple/Parlophone on November 20, the veteran producer believes “the 20th Century’s greatest romance†– as the group’s much-loved late press officer Derek Taylor described his relationship with the legendary band - is now complete. “This is the last time I shall work on any Beatles record,†notes Sir George. “For Christ’s sake, I’m 80.†To create what is considered by Sir George to be a brand new Beatles release, he and his son were given virtually a free reign with The Beatles’ recordings. “I could use anything I liked, any recording I made with The Beatles since we began in ’62,†he says, from Abbey Road Studios’ Room 52, the former stock cupboard which was specially converted into a studio for the father-and-son team to create Love. “But we worked out there would be something in the region of 25 to 30 songs, linked together with whatever we could devise. “At that stage, I’d been to Cirque du Soleil shows, but I hadn’t met any of the people, when I said ‘Okay, sounds like an interesting idea’. It was really an offer you can’t refuse, to pretty well do what you like.†Father “roped in†son Giles – boasting a command of pro-tools and “all the modern digital stuff that is current todayâ€, which Sir George admits he lacked - and they initially put together a 15-minute “demo†to demonstrate to Cirque and the four Apple heads Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison what they had in mind. “The little demo we did was really quite theatrical, because it was our concept of how a show should begin,†says Sir George. “There was the opening, which was this tremendous crescendo, starting from nothing, a rumble, that ends in a splash and goes into a really driving beat, which we assembled through Get Back and also drum solos of Ringo and a pounding uptempo demonstration of what they used to do. What we tried to convey was the essence of a live band actually performing.†Giles says the pair wanted to create something different with the recordings this time, something which is not without its pressures. “The whole idea was, ‘How was it going to sound impressive in a theatre and not sound like we’re playing back CDs?’,†he admits. “That’s the thing; you don’t want people going, ‘This is rubbish. They’re just playing CDs.’ “All the work we did was to be true to The Beatles, but not to give people what they think is the same thing over and over again, a rehash. That fear of cynicism is valid.†With a free rein and the ambition to re-work the catalogue in a previously-unheard way, the pair even took inspiration from the world which produced the likes of Danger Mouse’s controversial The Grey Album, which mashed-up the Martin-produced Beatles “White Album†and Jay-Z’s The Black Album. “We’re completely nicking ideas from that world, bootlegging,†concedes Giles, although he says that they have created something new; with the best “mash-ups†work best in combining works by different, contrasting artists, Love combines different tracks by the same act. Indeed, at one point during Love, for instance, Within You, Without You overlaps Tomorrow Never Knows, with Ringo’s vocals to Octopus’s Garden’s playing over the Ringo-sung Goodnight. “Mash-ups by their nature are forcing the two things together over a beat. You have to have a third thing to do a mash-up,†he says. “Also it’s from two different sources as well. What we’ve done is different because it’s a band sampling themselves, which is a new thing. “With The Beatles it’s valid, because there are so many different sounds going on and it’s funny how it makes sense in a way. But it’s funny if you mash-up a band, say you take Ringo and you put Ringo with Ringo like Octopus’s Garden has drums from Lovely Rita. The groove he plays, because it’s him it works.†Within their loose brief to put together a “soundscapeâ€, the Martins were given certain pointers by the Cirque team, on how the show itself was taking shape. The Cirque team highlighted tracks such as Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, Here Comes The Sun and All You Need Is Love which they wanted incorporated, recalls Giles: “It was kind of like, ‘We’ll work on those, but what are we going to put either side?’ so it was kind of like a 50/50 thing. “They said ‘In this point of the show, we’d love to have song X’, whether it would be Revolution or whatever. In order to make it sound good, we [decided we] should put this either side of it. So it was worked out in that way. They came probably with about 10 set pieces they really wanted to work for the show and then we filled in the blanks, because it had to work musically.†As a result, says Sir George, a close relationship developed between himself, son Giles and the Cirque du Soleil team. “We would go to [Cirque’s headquarters in] Montreal, they would come to us,†he recalls. “We would see what they did, looking at their rehearsal sessions with these acrobats doing all different things and they would come over here listen to our music and talk to us about what they wanted,†he says. “And that went on for two years. “I was enormously impressed by the scale of Cirque du Soleil, I didn’t realise they had something like 1,400 people working in their main base. It was rather like Shepperton, huge with what looked like soundstages, huge buildings, which were buildings really for rehearsals of trapeze people and trampolinists, and all sorts of things. At any one time, there are eight shows touring the world and at that time they had four permanent shows in Las Vegas, so it was a mighty organisation.†While a flood of musicals based around acts’ back catalogues (such as Queen’s We Will Rock You) have hit the stage in recent years, Giles stresses the Love show running in Vegas is a rather different proposition. “There’s a story in the show, but Cirque du Soleil don’t really tell stories per say,†he says. “There’s a feeling and it kind of fits the music, kind of fits a concept album or whatever this is meant to be. There’s a feel of emotion, like a gig, where it starts off rock and goes down. We weren’t trying to do Mamma Mia, thank God – there’s not so much a story per say. Once you get to [the finale], All You Need Is Love, you do feel that’s the end. There’s not a story to say but there is a feel that works.†Despite the initial brief to use whatever Beatles material the Martins wished to, the now-antiquated way the band’s earliest recordings were captured imposed its own restrictions. “When I first started recording The Beatles, we were recording in mono on quarter-inch tape, live performances – that’s what the first album was,†recalls Sir George. Four-track did not arrive for The Beatles until 1963’s I Want To Hold Your Hand, leaving very little scope to take elements of tracks and combine them with other tracks; even the four-track recordings (eight-track did not arrive until “The White Albumâ€) provided disappointingly-limited reworking opportunities for Giles. “The thing is even when they went to four-track they didn’t use all the four tracks,†says Giles. “Actually I found that quite frustrating. I thought ‘Oh great, we’re now on to four tracks’ because you can’t really do much with the two-tracks. That’s why I Want To Hold Your Hand is probably the earliest song we’ve got on the album; we did Twist & Shout as a bonus and, because we couldn’t do anything with [the original tracks], we put Hollywood Bowl [crowd noise] synched at the same time, so Hollywood Bowl was playing at the same time in surround which creates. The usual “politics†which overlay every Beatles project - making sure John and Paul songs are equally represented - also played its part in track selection. And George Harrison is also strongly represented, fittingly perhaps since it was his friendship with Cirque founder and CEO Guy Laliberte which paved the way for the project in the first place. One of Harrison’s song is also the subject of the only brand new recording for the whole album. Sir George has added a new orchestration to an acoustic demo version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, first officially released on the third Anthology album in 1996. “That was the only thing that was really recorded for the show,†says Sir George. “The story of this is, is that [Cirque director] Dominic [Champagne] wanted to use the song, but didn’t want to use the record as we know it. And he fell in love with the demo that George had made in Abbey Road before he did the final version, just a guitar and voice. He wanted to use that and Olivia [Harrison] thought it sounded too rough and too ordinary. She didn’t think it did justice to either George or the song.†However, Sir George says Dominic was insistent and asked him to write a score “to make it sound more like a recordâ€. “I loved what [George Harrison] had done because it’s a lower key, he doesn’t strain so much for the higher notes,†says Sir George. “It’s faster, it’s quite different from the eventual record, but the problem was writing an accompaniment to a man that’s been dead for a while. And it’s the only one of the whole show that has a special re-recording. “Anyway we did it, I had to do it, and we recorded in Air Studios and Olivia came to the session and listened. We went in and she loved it, which was a tremendous relief for me and everybody else loved it. It became part of the show and will be part of the record. It’s the only extra new music that’s in the show. “It’s also rather neat that it’s kind of a beginning and ending. Yesterday (also part of the album) was the very first score that I did with The Beatles and While My Guitar Gently Weeps will be the last.†The whole project, naturally, also needed the approval of the two surviving Beatles, as well as Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono. “Obviously we had to give them everything we did,†says Sir George. “Ringo thought it was fantastic and he said to me, ‘George you can do anything you like as far as I’m concerned.’ Paul said ‘Yeah, really great but you know you can be more adventurous.’ I thought, ‘Blimey.’ I thought we had been pretty adventurous anyway, but he gave us carte blanche to do even more. Olivia liked it, she didn’t make any comments; Yoko liked it, but said she was a little bit concerned what we had done with John’s work wasn’t quite right. “From that moment on they would be interested to come in and say, ‘What have you got for us?’, ‘What haven’t we heard yet?’ and that’s the way it went on. We were left to our own devices, we were given carte blanche, as I say, and we just used it. We were walking a tightrope of taste, but we were very careful not to fall off. We were trying to make things much more adventurous, much more exciting, but at the same time we didn’t want to in any way damage them.†Given their shared histories, it is little wonder so much trust exists between Sir George and the band. It is also hard to imagine anyone else being given permission to get their hands on the precious Beatles master tapes securely housed within Abbey Road. “Even if they had been – this sounds really arrogant, doesn’t it? – I don’t think they would have done it as well as we did,†says Sir George. “I think we’re better at this kind of stuff.†For the Beatles producer himself – who supposedly retired from production after working on Elton John’s Candle In The Wind 1997 nearly a decade ago – he dryly notes he is finally ready for “early†retirement next year when he hits 81. But, with the demands from fans for more Fab Four releases as great as ever, what seems like Sir George’s own last new Beatles project, Love is unlikely to be the last Beatles project altogether.
November 14, 200618 yr If this album sells less than Westlife's LOVE album, I will be very very angry.
November 16, 200618 yr Listened to the 4 tracks on the Beatles official site and they sound fab so will buy this.
November 20, 200618 yr A great review here http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2006140...6530505,00.html It is an simply fantastic album! :D
November 20, 200618 yr I have bought it today & am playing it right now. Not only are the songs (obviously) brilliant, but sonically with all the digital remastering that has been done, it blows any current contemporary rock & pop band away, because it sounds as if it was recorded "yesterday" not 40 years ago, so no longer sounding dated.
November 20, 200618 yr from what ive heard... im unimpressed, being faithful to the sounds i grew up with, the original.
November 30, 200618 yr Beatles to make deal with Apple? Thursday, November 30 2006, 09:04 GMT DigitalSpy.com By David Cribb The Beatles may be on the verge of making a deal with Apple Computers over the sale of their music on the internet, according to Fortune magazine. The band's company Apple Corps have had many legal trists with the iTunes company, with the earliest argument dating back to 1976. Earlier this year a court case was won by Apple Computers, after Apple Corps accused them of breaching a trademark law by selling music online. However, the band's new album Love may be made available on iTunes, with the two companies rumoured to be currently in negotiations. If the deal goes through, the entire Beatles' back-catalogue may also go up for sale on the internet. However, both parties have declined to confirm the negotiations at this time. Well the entire Beatles back catalogue has been digitally remastered (after 20 years) and is ready for reissue.... so I will not be surprised if this news is true.
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