Cirque du Soleil's Beatles-inspired stage show, Love, required George and Giles Martin to rework the Fab Four's back catalogue. They tell Kevin Courtney how.
I'm sitting in Studio 3 of Abbey Road Studios, listening to the brand new Beatles album. That's right - a new Beatles album. The freshly minted sounds of Eleanor Rigby, I Am the Walrus, Help!, Lady Madonna and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are pouring out of five giant Bowers & Wilkins speakers, rocking my brainy head and creating a psychedelic rush of poptastic bliss. Is this a dream? Have I been granted my greatest wish and been whisked back in time to the heyday of the Fab Four? Has somebody put something in my cornflakes? As I listen, eyes closed in concentration, I hear the music do some weird twists and contortions. I Want to Hold Your Hand segues seamlessly into Drive My Car, then into What You're Doing, and then into The Word; the drums of Tomorrow Never Knows come thundering in, but they're topped by the serene vocals of George Harrison singing Within You Without You. The Lennon-penned Sun King is played backwards, but there's no secret "Paul is dead" message. And Strawberry Fields Forever blossoms into a kaleidoscopic swirl filled with fragments of Penny Lane, In My Life, Piggies and Hello Goodbye. That's it - I'm giving up the hard stuff.
The new Beatles album is not a greatest hits collection, nor an Anthology-style selection of outtakes, but a soundtrack for a theatrical show by world-renowned troupe Cirque du Soleil. Cirque's founder, Guy Laliberté, a close friend of the late George Harrison, and writer- director Dominic Champagne wanted to put on a unique stage show that captured the "spirit and passion" of the Beatles, a kind of magical mystery tour through the band's back catalogue. The show, simply titled Love, would be staged at the Mirage theatre in Las Vegas, and would incorporate Beatles music with Cirque's renowned visual dynamics and highly skilled acrobatics. There would be colourful costumes, giant props, elaborate set-pieces and breathtaking displays of gymnastics. Characters such as the Walrus, Dr Robert, the Fool, Sgt Pepper, Mr Piggy, and the Nowhere Men would come to life onstage to entertain. Eighty minutes of wild, marvellous, non-stop Beatles action.
And Messrs L and C would assure the public their production would be second to none.
But first, they had to get permission from Apple Corps to use Beatles music, and get their approval to "adjust" it to fit the requirements of a continuous stage production. And there was only one man who could be allowed to tinker with the Beatles treasure trove and muck about with the most iconic music of the 20th century - Sir George Martin.
As in a dream, the Beatles producer himself arrives at Abbey Road Studios, accompanied by his son and co-producer, Giles Martin, to tell us all we need to know about Love. Martin snr is tall, dapper and alert at 80, looking smart in his freshly-ironed shirt, slacks, loafers and argyle socks, his hearing aid the real giveaway that he's not so young any more. Martin jnr is his youthful doppelganger, and an experienced producer in his own right, who has done the bulk of the work on Love under the guidance of his dad.
When Apple Corps asked the Martin boys to create the soundtrack for Love, they put in a number of strict stipulations for the producers to follow. Nothing was to be added to the music that wasn't already there in the first place - no beats, no extra guitars, no guest vocals from Bono. The only added sound you hear is on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, in which the original backing - including Eric Clapton's guitar solo - is replaced by a brand new orchestral arrangement by George Martin. Everything had to be run by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison before it could make the final cut. ("When Ringo heard Octopus's Garden, he thought it was the most wonderful thing he'd ever heard," says George). They could take songs apart and put songs together, and even stack songs on top of one another, as long as the end result (a) sounded good, and (b) sounded like the Beatles. This was not going to be a "megamix" of Beatles tunes, nor was it going to be a Grey Album-style mash-up (the notorious bootleg in which Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse mashed up rapper Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles White Album). This was to be a show, and it was going to sound as live and kicking as a Beatles show in heaven.
HOW DID GEORGE feel when he had to go back into the sacred vault that contained the Beatles' master tapes? "Well, I did all that with the Anthology. I went back for the Anthology and listened to everything, which was quite traumatic. But I think this was another anthology in a way, but it was a different task, because here we were asked to provide the music to a big show, and it was rather like being asked to write the music for a film. It was a different thing altogether. And it's been a fascinating project, because my brief was to use anything I wanted of any of the material I'd recorded with the Beatles since 1962, literally anything. But we had to put it together in such a way that it would make up 95 minutes of great, continuous sound, that would thrill an audience of 2,000. And Giles will tell you that one of our first aims when we were working on the music for this show was to make it a live sound, make it sound as though the people in the theatre were listening to the Beatles performing. We didn't want to have a playback of CDs - 'Oh, yeah, I know that one' - we wanted to be a live, vibrant performance, so that if you shut your eyes, you could see that they were playing."
George Martin was 36 when he first started working with the Beatles; at 36, his son Giles now had the opportunity to hear the original master tapes - and he was blown away by the crisp, clear sound of a band at their peak.
"Listening to the tapes was a privileged position to be in," says Giles. "If you get old four-tracks from the vault, put them on the old tape machines and press play, the weird thing that struck me from the word go was that it doesn't sound old.
"When we've done playback sessions, and I went round with the 5.1 rough mixes, people heard it and were going, 'Wow, how did you make them sound so live?' Well, because that's what it sounds like. It's just a really good band at the top of their game, and that's what you're hearing. It's as simple as that. There's no tricks. Maybe we've layered something over the top of something, but we haven't done anything with the time or swapped sounds or mucked about with any sounds. That's exactly what's on the tape."
WHEN A PRODUCER is remixing a record, he might want to, say, take a piano line out and leave the drums in, or separate two vocals, or drop the bass out, but on many Beatles songs he can't do that, because often the drums, piano and other instruments share the same track.
"In those days, life was pretty primitive," says George. "We started off in mono, then stereo - when we got to four-track we thought we were being really spoiled. Wonderful! Having four tracks instead of two! And that lasted right up to The White Album, when we got eight, which was ridiculous." But, working within the constraints of the technology, the two Martins were able to do some interesting things with the tunes. The album opens with Because, from Abbey Road, but all you hear is the band's bare vocal harmonies echoing through an empty space. The effect is powerful and a little eerie. Then, a backwards piano line leads into the chords of A Hard Day's Night, and the trundling drums from Get Back come in from the middle distance. Around it all comes the sound of the screaming audience at the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert in 1965, and you are plunged headlong into the phantasmagorical world of the Beatles. All that's left to do is sit back, enjoy the ride, and hope you don't encounter any Blue Meanies along the way.
"There was a tricky moment when we met up with the Cirque people for the first time," recalls George. "And they were charming people, really nice. And the first person we met up with was Gilles Ste-Croix - who is kind of overall head of all the stuff that is done - and we had to gently inform him that the most important thing in this new show was the music. Up to then, Cirque shows had always been Cirque. Wonderful flowery things. The music's been in the background, and no one really listens to it. And suddenly they were being told that the music's more important than are, really."
"We were making a Beatles record," Giles says, emphatically. "Not an anthology, but sort of an ultimate compilation of songs, of styles, of sounds. There's indie and there's rock. It was like doing a 90-minute compilation, and then they put a show to it. And so the hardest thing was having to make that work in a theatre, not make it work as a record.
"By the time you get to All You Need Is Love, people feel quite emotional, and it's not just because All You Need Is Love is a great song, it's because you've been through all the periods in one go. It's like an injection of Beatles in 78 minutes."
THE REMAINING BEATLES and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, have, says Giles, been impressed with the results; if they hadn't been, reasons Giles, then it wouldn't have made the final cut. "It's their band, their project, and they have to answer for it. Paul might be getting into a taxi in six weeks' time, and someone might go, what do you think of Lady Madonna with Hey Bulldog in it? And he has to be aware of it, and he has to like it, 'cos if he doesn't like it, it wouldn't be on the record."
And what of the toughest judges of all - the fans who have grown up with the Beatles, and who consider the original music to be sacrosanct? Should they feel apprehensive about what they are going to hear? "There's absolutely nothing to be scared of. If we were wiping out an entire catalogue, absolutely right, that would be frightening, but all we've done, the great thing about this, is we are not saying this is a better version of Here Comes the Sun than the one on Abbey Road, it's just we've done this because we needed to create something for the theatre, and the end product is that you listen to it, and the Beatles are so ubiquitous, they're on everywhere, and Paperback Writer comes on and you go, 'Oh, I know Paperback Writer. With this, when you're in the room, you suddenly start hearing things in the songs that weren't there. Whether we put them on or they're there originally, you start hearing stuff, because there's something slightly different about it. I think it's an album that people will listen to instead of just put on in the background. If people go, 'Do you know what, I'm gonna go and listen to the original of this, because it's much better', then great. It's still the Beatles. We don't mind. That's the point. It's not like, 'Oh, this is how it really should have been done'. That's never been the case. It's just another interesting take on things."
And if anyone takes issue with the tracklist, wondering why, say, Let it Be is not included, Giles and George are resigned to the fact that, when it comes to the Beatles, you can't please everybody in the allotted time.
"If you were to stop anyone on the street and say, 'Give me your 10 favourite Beatles songs'," says George, "you'll get 20 different answers. Everybody has their own thoughts. And here we were trying to make a really good show, not of what we thought people would want, but what we think would make the best music for the show. And of course there were agonising moments, a bit like being in a lifeboat and having to throw your friends overboard to keep floating. We were throwing a lot of friends overboard, but we had to do it."
The Beatles album, Love, is out on Apple Corps/EMI on Nov 17. The Cirque du Soleil show, Love, is running at the Mirage in Las Vegas