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Beatles smash hits now a mashup
Published on Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 13:00 in Entertainment section
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New York: It's the Beatles as they never even imagined themselves.
The Beatles' Love album being released on Tuesday is a thorough reinterpretation of their work, with familiar sounds in unfamiliar places, primarily created by the son of the man who was in the control room for virtually all of their recording sessions.
It's a mashup, even though Giles Martin said he hates the word. John Lennon sings "he's a real nowhere man" in the background of the instrumental track to Blue Jay Way. The keyboard of Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite dissolves into the plodding guitar of I Want You (She's So Heavy).
Strawberry Fields Forever builds from Lennon's acoustic demo into a psychedelic swirl of sounds that incorporates bits of Hello Goodbye, Baby You're a Rich Man, Penny Lane and Piggies.
The project was created for a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil and has the endorsement of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of Lennon and George Harrison, Martin said.
"I had fresh ears - if you can have fresh ears to the Beatles - and my job was to make things different," said Martin, who was born in 1969 as the band was breaking up.
The rules were simple: Beatles tracks only, no electronic distortion of what they recorded, and no newly recorded music. The single exception was a string arrangement, written by original Beatles producer George Martin, to accompany an acoustic version of Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Of course, the idea for the album itself distorts songs that fans have been familiar with for 40 years, in some cases. "There will be a lot of people pissed off about this," Giles Martin said, "but it was all in fun."
Count Bob Spitz, author of The Beatles: The Biography, among the unhappy fans.
"I'm disappointed," Spitz said. "Not by the end product but by the fact that they are the Beatles' songs and overdubbing them and massaging them allows other people to impose their own creative ideas on something that was so immediate and of a particular time. I thought that legacy was virtually tamper-proof, until now.
"Once you meddle with something so fixed in the public's mind you will risk having a failure on the proportion to Twyla Tharp doing Bob Dylan," Spitz said, in a reference to the musical that is closing Sunday after less than a month on Broadway.
Spitz said the Beatles' company, Apple, has become adept over the past 15 years in putting new twists on the band's catalogue for projects like "Love," which pointedly arrives in stores at the beginning of the holiday shopping season.
At the very least, it's a grand guessing game. Where is that instrumental passage from? What will come next?
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