When first rumoured it must have sounded like cultural sacrilege. After forty years of the Beatles’ musical heritage being preserved by the strictest controls, the founder of Cirque du Soleil wanted to plunder Beatle archives to re-edit, remix and generally monkey around with their records for a Las Vegas show called Love.
But then came the real surprise. The venture had the eager approval of the late George Harrison, an attitude endorsed by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
And suddenly three years ago Beatles’ record producer Sir George Martin, was taken back in time nearly four decades, and put back to work at Abbey Road studios in John’s Wood. Accompanied by his son Giles, who is also a producer, he was back on home territory, re-organising a mountain of Beatle music into a new show and a new album. The Beatles’ Love was on its way.
Back in the Sixties when the Beatles were making a new album Abbey Road seemed to me as a young journalist to be the most exciting place in the world. And on first meeting George Martin there he came across as a firm if slightly reserved school teacher.
Watching him work, however, it quickly became clear that he was more than just a manipulator of sound. The Beatles may have written the songs, but George Martin had a voice as loud as any of theirs in getting the best out of those songs.
More than that, by playing various instruments on so many of the tracks, or arranging the strings or brass accompaniments, his talent was the perfect complement to theirs.
They knew everything there was to know about rock and roll, but little else. George, I suspect, didn’t know much about rock then, but he knew an awful lot about many other kinds of music. Together they made a brilliant team. Indeed without him I think it unlikely the Beatles would have become the undisputed musical pioneers of the past half century.
Which is what struck me again most forcibly when, back at Abbey Road this week, I heard a preview of the new album.
Possibly no-one else would have dared take the risks he and Giles Martin have taken in changing such loved music. In fact I think it’s unlikely Paul and Ringo would have trusted anyone else with the project.
Amazingly, knowing some of the egos involved, neither Beatle appears to have interfered other than in an encouraging way. “Ringo said, ‘you’re the boss George, you can do anything you like’,” Giles remembers. “While Paul said ‘you can be more adventurous, you know’. They wanted us to be as far out as we could go. So we tore up the rule book.”
Basically the task given to the father and son producers was to choose seventy minutes of song to best represent the Beatles as a live and living group, but to present it in a different way.
But where to start? Given unlimited access to the band’s canon of work which tracks should they select, because the odds are that, when faced with the complete 250 recordings scarcely any two people would choose the same songs. In the end they selected 27 main songs, but there are fragments from a further 123 edited into the album to create a vast melange of sound.
“We tried to capture the soul of the Beatles,” George said this week. “They were such a great band, but I think people have taken them for granted. You have to remember when they made all his music they were in their twenties, young men.”
Interestingly George’s son Giles wasn’t even a big Beatles fan until he worked on this record. “You can’t be a Beatles fan when your dad is George Martin,” he laughs. “This was Dad’s music, not mine. Before this I would never put on a Beatles album, and actually wasn’t familiar with a lot of their stuff.
“Now I know every single track, of course, and I’m just amazed at the different kinds of music they made, knowing, for instance, that there was just seven months between the recording of Eleanor Rigby and Sergeant Pepper (both of which are on the album in slightly different forms). It’s astonishing”
George, was of course, the boss on the project, but at 80, with his hearing failing, Giles, with his “good pair of ears” and modern digital expertise was essential.
“Giles would spend hours moving bits of music around,” George says, “trial and error, really, building up this new tapestry of sound from the old material.”
“Then,” says Giles, “Dad would come and listen, and suggest something extra. So there we were bit trying to show what we could do. Actually I never thought the project, was going to happen, that it would eventually be put to one side and I’d be fired. So I thought I’d better do something useful and spent the first six months putting all the tracks on to hard disc and cataloguing everything as to what key they were in and what tempo.”
“The result of that,” comes in George, “was that when we came to cut between songs it was a wonderful document to have, to see which one’s fitted together.”
Almost like a couple of boy enthusiasts you sense the shared joy of discovery when chance ideas worked out. But the venture also gave Giles, who wasn’t even born when the Beatles broke up in 1970, a chance to see how his father had worked with the group.
“The original brief was that we could do anything we liked with the tracks but we couldn’t record anything new,” George explains. “But then the director of the show wanted to use a demo George Harrison had made of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and George’s widow Olivia thought it was too raw without some extra accompaniment. So then Giles had his big idea.”
Which was that his father would go away and write a string arrangement, much as he’d done for Yesterday forty years earlier. “It was the only unfinished track we used,” says Giles. “And because Dad works on manuscript paper none of us had actually heard what he’d written until we recorded it.”
“I know I’m going to get slagged off for this,” George laughs. “But I just did the best I could do.”
The best he could do is one of the most exciting moments on the album, a new baroque accompaniment to a well loved song, where violins have replaced electric guitars.
“So to go into the studio that day and hear and really understand what my dad does so well was fantastic for a fan, which I now am, as well as for a son,” Giles admits. “Lots of guys can chop things together like I do. But only Dad can do what he does.”
In that there is, of course, the irony that George Martin, the man who this week was honoured in the UK Music Hall of Fame, cannot now hear certain parts of the music he helped create.
For someone for whom music has been his life he’s amazingly philosophical. “Obviously I miss my hearing desperately, and it’s actually deteriorated while I’ve been working on this show and album. I won’t be doing any more. This is the end of my life in recording.
“But, you know, the human body is an extraordinary thing. You make up for things as you go along. You get compensations all the time.”
“It’s true,” agrees Giles, for a moment not joking with his father. “Sometimes Dad would come into the studio and say he thought we needed a bit more bass or treble or something. And I’d
think we had enough. But then I’d have another listen, and think,
‘My God, he’s right. How did he know that?’ It’s sometimes as though his brain fills in the blanks for what he knows he can’t hear.”
So will Love be another worldwide Beatles number one for Christmas? Or will those who think it sacrilege to even tamper with Beatles’ recordings be proved right? Even worse, what if no-one notices much difference between the original records and the new release, or no-one cares, anyway?
My guess is that despite the title, Love, which suggests to me a soppiness to the Sixties I always thought was bogus, it will be another huge success, with nerdy fans spending years lives trying to find every one of the 150 different records fragmented here.
Inevitably I would have chosen a few different songs. Two thirds of the album is devoted to the last three years of the Beatles’ career, from Sergeant Pepper onwards. But for me the middle period of their career, the time of songs like Here, There and Everywhere, Norwegian Wood and Girl was just as interesting, though probably less elaborate and less easy to visualise in a show.
But as George and Giles agreed, if you’d put those songs in, which would you have taken out? At which point you realise just how much brilliant material the Beatles produced in just seven years, and wonder why no-one does it any more.
