Except *HARRISONGS Ltd.
and **STARTLING MUSIC Ltd.
Introductions by George Martin & Giles Martin
In june 2006 the show "Love" opened to a wonderful
reception in the Mirage in Las Vegas. Years before,
the original idea was born in the most unlikely of
places. George Harrison and Guy laiiberte, the
founder of Cirque du Soleil, were both enormous
fans of motor racing and when they met they
became firm friends. As a consequence a unique
collaboration was formed between the fantastic
world of Cirque du Soles! and the brilliance of BEATLES music,
Guy discussed the concept with
Giiles Ste-Croix, his HEAD OF CREATION, and plans were laid,
negotiations commenced and eventually 1 was
approached to work on the music. My brief was to
create a soundscape of around one and a half hour's
length using any sound 1 needed from the original
BEATLES multi-track recordings. It was an offer one
could hardly refuse, and i asked my son Giles if he
would work with me on this project.
5o we embarked on a unique odyssey, travelling
with some great artistes and designers from
CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. A gifted director, Dominic Champagne, was
appointed, heading a team of prodigious creativity.
Giles and I were lucky: not only were they all talented
in their respective roles, they were extremely nice
people to work with and we ail became firm friends.
We started as we meant to continue by pushing the
musical boundaries, it was a risky strategy considering
the material we were experimenting with, but it
started to pay dividends immediateiy. It was Giles
who suggested that we utilise that marvelous and
hypnotic drum beat from Ringo to combine
"Within You Without You" with
"Tomorrow Never Knows".
It worked brilliantly and set us on our way.
It took over two years for us to bring the rest of our
work to its final form, but it proyed to be a fascinating
journey for
Dominic, Giles and me. Our collaboration
worked well.
Dominic would listen to our
experimental mixes and design his scenes around
them and conversely he would describe an Idea he
had and ask us for a particular realisation of a song.
It was a two-way creation and for us similar to
writing music for a film.
Listening again to all these great tracks in such detail
you can't help but be knocked out by the band's
writing and performances.
"Come Together" is such
a simple song but it stands out because of the sheer
brilliance of the performers. Paul's bass riff makes a
fantastic foundation for
Ringo's imaginative
drumming, and John's vocal with heavy tape echo
has a marvellous effect when he claps his hands and
hisses into the microphone. Georges guitar is
equally distinctive, and altogether I believe this is
one of the BEATLES greatest tracks.
We agonised over the inclusion of
"Yesterday" in the
show. St is such a famous song, the icon of an era,
but had it been heard too much? The story of the
addition of the original string quartet is well known,
however few people know how limited the recording
was technically, and so the case for not including It was strong, but how could anyone ignore such a
marvellous work? We introduce it with some of
Pauls guitar work from
"Blackbird" and hearing it
now, i know that it was right to Include it. its
simplicity is so direct; it tugs at the heartstrings.
During the process I was asked to write a string
score for an early take of George's poignant
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I was aware of such a
responsibility, but thankfully everyone approved of
the result.
"Yesterday" was the first score I had written
for a BEATLE song way back in 1365 and this score,
forty-one years later, is the last It wraps up an
incredible period of my life with those four amazing
men who changed the world.
Of course, nothing could happen without the
endorsement of
Paul, Ringo, Yoko and
Olivia, and
we would arrange for them to hear what we were
doing as we went along. Their support, advice and
encouragement was invaluable and a marvellous spur to our efforts.
- George Martin
Our work on the music for Love first started in
2003. APPLE decided from the outset that
be a project where all the music heard was to be
from original BEATLES recordings.
We began by producing a demo behind closed
doors in a small room above Studio 1 at
ABBEY ROAD. As soon as ! heard the original master tapes I
realised 1 had been given the best job in the world,
the energy of a young band burst out of the speakers.
From then on it was obvious that there was no need
to be retrospective in our approach. All the music
was so well recorded fay the EMI engineers that the
attitude and the passion were frozen in time. Had the
music not been so familiar, the tapes sounded like
they'd been recorded yesterday. The guitar sound on
"Revolution" for example rips your head off, even
today it defines the word "distortion'. Tape after tape,
I was expecting hiss and crackle and all I heard was
the energy of a group of twenty year olds at the top
of their game.
Everything they had done was recorded live, without a
click and often all on one track, so the best approach
was to recreate a performance that had only
happened in the studio but present it to an audience
as though it were live. A good start would be using a
drum solo, so the band could come in one at a time.
Apparently Ringo hated doing solos but the one he
played on "The End" sounds great, and it's in stereo! t
found that the solo was the same speed as "Get Back"
and so that became the song that started the show, it
really was as simple as that As the drum solo comes
from a section of a song we had to disguise the cut so
we used the opening chord from "A Hard Days Night"
to hide the edit. And working backwards, to build into
the chords we turned around the end piano from
"A Day In The Life" I guess we thought that as it
made such a great ending, turned around it was
bound to make a great beginning.
So in true Beatie tradition, tracks were reversed, sped
up and slowed down. Early on in the project I had
turned the cymbal backwards on "Sun King" for an
effect for "Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows"
and I realised I'd turned the vocals around as well.
My dad loved the melody line that this created and said that it's exactly the sort of thing that John would have gone for. From this "Gnik Nus" was born!
The only new recordings are the strings on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps",
I was surprised to find that my
dad was apprehensive about doing it, there's no one
in the world better at this kind of thing, and even after
all this time he still arranges with the same vitality and
empathy that has made his work legendary.
At the beginning of the project, I knew that no one
would ever hear my mistakes as we'd been secretively
shut away, so I thought I'd start by trying to combine
a few tracks to see what the result would be. Feeling
like I was painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa I
started work mixing the bass and drums of 'Tomorrow Never Knows"
with George's track "Within You Without You".
The end result is what you hear on the album
today, and it is the Beatles open-mlndedness and
support combined with my dad's great musical
insight that has made "Love" possible.
- Giles Martin
www.thebeatles.com
APPLE and 
PARLOPHONE
"BEATLES", "APPLE" and the APPLE Logos are Trademarks of APPLE Corps Ltd.
®2006 The Copyright in this sound recording is owned by EMI RECORDS Ltd. / APPLE Corps Ltd.
5.1 SURROUND SOUND MUSIC
