Love

The songs – part two

‘I Am The Walrus’

The original stereo mix reverted to mono with the introduction of the radio noises and King Lear speech. This was a direct feed from a 1967 BBC broadcast, and was added ‘live’ during a mono mix. As a result, the second half of the original stereo mix was in ‘fake stereo’, with the treble cut from one side and the bass from the other.

George and Giles Martin acquired a recording of the original broadcast, and were able to reconstruct the multitrack files and create the first true stereo mix of ‘I Am The Walrus’.

For ‘Walrus’ we could suddenly open it out – we had nine tracks or something to play around with – there’s two drum kits. I think the original is really nicely claustrophobic and ours is more of an in-your-face rock number.

The end of ‘I Am The Walrus’ contains crowd noise and the compere announcement from their first Hollywood Bowl concert: “Here they are: The Beatles!”

‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’

We were always under pressure to present the songs in a different way and with the early material this was always more difficult as there’s no separation between tracks. My dad came with an idea of using the three track tapes from Live At The Hollywood Bowl and combining the performances with the original masters. Surprisingly, both versions were perfectly in tune with each other, so what you’re listening to here is both the live and studio versions of the song edited together.

Love contains relatively few early Beatles songs. The earliest is ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, recorded on 17 October 1963.

The Love mix is actually two performances of the song played simultaneously: the EMI studio version, and a live recording from their first Hollywood Bowl show in August 1964.

I wanted to use the Hollywood Bowl recordings, the atmosphere of the Beatles live in the early days, but they weren’t awfully good from the point of view of the technology. So we overlaid the studio recording on top of the Hollywood Bowl recordings, which meant matching every beat so that you couldn’t tell the difference. Giles painstakingly plastered in each beat, and the result was that we got the Hollywood Bowl recording with all the tremendous screams in the audience and these great sounds.

‘Drive My Car’/’The Word’/‘What You’re Doing’

The only true medley on Love was a mixture of ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘The Word’ from Rubber Soul, and ‘What You’re Doing’ from Beatles For Sale.

‘Drive My Car’ was the opening track of a great album – Rubber Soul — and was recorded remarkably quickly – between 7 pm and midnight on an evening in October 1965. Great rhythm that was just right for a dance sequence in the show. ‘The Word’, recorded a couple of weeks later, had an almost identical beat and was also completed in a few hours. ‘What You’re Doing’ was recorded a year earlier, with a similar driving rhythm. They certainly worked hard and did not waste any time in those halcyon days.

The remix also contains the guitar solo from ‘Taxman’, saxophones from ‘Savoy Truffle’, organ from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, and backing vocals from ‘Helter Skelter’.

The Beatles came up with some of pop music’s most iconic riffs, none more so than ‘Drive My Car’. This era of Beatles music symbolises London at the peak of the swinging sixties. ‘The Word’ and ‘Taxman’ have such great grooves, we tried to blend as much of the band at their vibrant best in this, the only medley on the album.

‘Gnik Nus’

In the show we needed a sound to set the scene, a prelude to establish a mood, and a never-heard-before chorale by the Beatles does just that. It is pretty obvious where ‘Gnik Nus’ came from, but I make no apologies, because for me it is absolutely lovely and it works well in the performance.

‘Gnik Nus’ contains the vocals from Sun King, reversed with echo applied, and with a tambura drone underneath.

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 heard what I’d done and loved it and said that it’s exactly the sort of thing that John would have gone for.