Released earlier this week was Love, a ‘new’ Beatles album that Sir George Martin describes as more a collection of The Beatles’ ‘greatest sounds’ as opposed to their ‘greatest hits’.

MITCHELL PETERS looks at the making of yet another Fab Four masterpiece.
Derek Taylor once claimed The Beatles as “the greatest romance of the 20th Century.” He might have been in their employment as a publicist, but he was right.

In 2006, The Beatles are part of the cultural fabric. In the 1960s, this was the band that rolled Tin-Pan Alley and revolutionised the way we hear music. As songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney mastered the modern pop song while establishing new rules; rules they then effortlessly dismissed.

With an original team of Abbey Road engineers that included Geoff Emerick and Norman Smith, Messrs Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr re-invented the wheel. You can hear their influence on The Chemical Brothers generation with Tomorrow Never Knows.
Everything you need to know about Oasis can be found on their mesmerizing b-side, Rain.

The Beatles were the musical equivalent of black and white morphing into colour. They scaled Everest and set a course for the future.
Of course, the buck eventually stops somewhere and, after nearly 40 years, you could risk becoming immune to The Beatles’ by virtue of familiarity.

That may well change with the release of the ‘new’ Beatles’ album, Love.
A conceptual piece, Love grew out of a Formula One circuit friendship between George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte. When Harrison passed away, the idea of a collaboration between Cirque du Soleil and The Beatles almost faded.

When The Beatles’ label, Apple, rekindled the idea; the concept was ambitious. Cirque du Soleil were pouring $160 million dollars into a staging a Las Vegas extravaganza that would feature Beatles’ music as we’ve never heard it before. The purpose built venue features 6, 000 speakers, wired into the walls and seating, and the star of the show is the band ‘you’ve known for all these years’ … but somehow different.

George Martin, the group’s producer, was re-engaged to bring the project to life. By his side, and armed with a pro-tools rig, was his son, co-producer, Giles Martin.
It was Giles who first tested the waters with a mix of Tomorrow Never Knows that melds with Harrison’s Sgt.

Pepper tour de force, Within You Without You. As the famous loop starts to rumble, George comes into sonic view singing ‘We were talking/about the space between us …’
‘Mix’ is too soft an option. Possibly taking a nod from Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (where Jay Z’s Black Album was sliced n’ diced with The Beatles’ White Album), the result is a gold-plated mash-up that will set any Fab aficionado’s pulse racing.

Giles describes playing the track to Paul and Ringo as nothing short of, “frightening.”
“They’ve taken Within You Without You and put the Tomorrow Never Knows drums on it,” explains Paul McCartney of the track, “and then started to bring in a guitar from here and another thing from there, and we went, ‘That’s it exactly!’
“I think we were all amazed at how well it worked.

We encouraged them to mess around as much and more than they wanted. I said ‘go farther out’.
It’s a state of mind where Ringo concurs.

“I always said, and you can ask them, ‘Let’s get crazier’. I love that we are re-enhancing the Beatles’ music. I even heard things I’d forgotten we’d recorded.

“On some of the takes they’ve put other tracks that work, so we have like tablas on a track they weren’t on and some of my drum patterns are put on tracks they weren’t on originally.”
McCartney has flirted with the avante garde since The Indica Bookshop days in the mid-’60s. His homemade tape loops were used on Revolver, while John and Paul later dabbled with musique concrete.

In 2000 McCartney released Liverpool Sound Collage and last year he invited DJ Freelance Hellraiser to have his way with numerous multi-tracks from his solo career.
“It’s not like you are taking a Pavarotti and trying to fit him into a Beatles song,” says McCartney of the process. “You are taking The Beatles and trying to fit them back into The Beatles, so we’ve got a lot of things the songs have in common; the musicians for one, the sounds of the guitars and often some of the riffs are kind of similar.

“I would liken it to great people like Churchill and great writers like Tolstoy, where their original papers are in museums and they are only getting browner and more crinkly, but The Beatles’ stuff is getting shinier and newer and cleaner, it’s like magic.”
Though none are more qualified than Martin, the producer describes the experience as akin to “fiddling with ‘the Holy Grail.”
The album features 37 Beatles’ songs.

Some are remixed in their entirety; the likes of I Am The Walrus are almost unscathed, while others are used as transitional pieces. You’ll hear a string line, a previously buried vocal, backwards drums, and a litany of sounds that have been tweaked enough to force you to listen to The Beatles with fresh ears.
A highlight of the record is a haunting Strawberry Fields Forever that grew out of a John Lennon demo.

The new piece emerges from a single strummed guitar into a psychedelic wave of sound that manages to incorporate fragments of Baby You’re a Rich Man, Penny Lane and Piggies.
“I will never forget the first time I heard that song,” explains George Martin. “John began by giving me my usual private performance, standing in front of me, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing those incredible opening lines.

I was absolutely captivated, such different material, almost too tender to be recorded.
“The song went through a few changes, and we recorded it more than once, eventually combining two completely different versions, in different keys and different tempos. I love the song to this day, but John told me many years later that he was never really satisfied with it and I felt that in its recording I had let him down.

I hope he has forgiven me.”
“Dominic Champagne, the Love show director, had wanted us to demonstrate The Beatles experimentation and creativity in the studio,” continues Giles. “Yoko had brought in some early demos of John singing Strawberry Fields Forever so, in the spirit of the original, we decided to combine the very early takes with the final version.

I went on holiday and my poor father spent hours with a vari-speed tape machine putting all the takes in the key of B. I came back and spent about six weeks combining the various tracks to make one long new version of the song. And at the end, with those fantastic drums, we just decided to have a bit of fun…
“We took all The Beatles catalogue from tape, the original Beatles’ four-tracks and the eight-tracks and the two-tracks, and had this sort of palette of sounds and music to create a sort of a sound bed where people are sort of reliving the whole Beatles lifespan as it were in a very condensed period.

”
Love opens with a bare, albeit stunning, vocal track of Abbey Road’s Because. The song fades into the final chord from A Day In The Life, before morphing into Get Back.
A highlight for McCartney is a reworking of Lady Madonna.

“I wanted to get the riff from Hey Bulldog in the show somewhere,” confirms Giles Martin, “and it works great as a middle section to Lady Madonna. It took a while to get the track to sit right, Billy Preston’s organ solo from I Want You/She’s So Heavy provides the glue between the two and Eric Clapton’s guitar solo from While My Guitar Gently Weeps replaces the sax solo.
“Considering that Paul only played guitar when I first knew him,” adds Martin Snr, “his piano work (by 1968), with that rolling boogie piano driving this along like a powerhouse, had become startlingly good.

In the backing we tried using kazoos, but the old comb and paper did just as good a job.
George Martin has described the album as more a collection of The Beatles ‘greatest sounds’ as opposed to ‘greatest hits’. With Love in the can, Martin, almost 81, thinks he’s officially ready to draw stumps.

“This is the last album I will ever make,” he said recently. “When you’re into your ’80s, things start dropping off you as you walk along the street… so this record is rather significant for me.”
Fittingly, Martin’s crowning glory is the only new music added to the project.

Martin has taken an acoustic demo of George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps and added a peerless orchestral score. “Most people remember the heavy version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps (from The White Album),” he explains, “but an earlier version, almost a demo, was recorded at Abbey Road and discarded until we issued the Anthology albums.”
“I was asked to write a string score to make that early take sound more like an issued master.

I was aware of such a responsibility, but thankfully Olivia (Harrison) and everyone approved of the result. Yesterday was the first score I had written for a Beatle song way back in 1965 and this score, 41 years later, is the last.
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