Love

The songs – part five

‘Lady Madonna’

With ‘Lady Madonna’ I put ‘Hey Bulldog’ in the middle. I remember thinking ‘What’s Paul going to think?’ Because he arranged the song. And he said ‘That’s the single, that’s cool’. We played him stuff loud in the theatre and he said ‘You’ve taken our music and you’ve been so sympathetic with it and yet you’ve added stuff to it that I wouldn’t even think of.’ So we went out and got absolutely hammered. Well, I did, anyway.

The remix also contains Billy Preston’s organ solo from ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, and Eric Clapton’s slowed down guitar solo from ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.

I wanted to get the riff from ‘Hey Bulldog’ in the show somewhere 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.

‘Here Comes The Sun’

With ‘Here Comes The Sun’, I realised that the original was much brighter-sounding, and it’s actually up a quarter tone. So I went back and reimported everything at a quarter tone up in order to make it like the original. So we did actually keep to the originals as much as possible. ‘Here Comes The Sun’ not sped-up sounds like a different record. It makes such a difference, varispeed.

‘Here Comes The Sun’ begins with the sound of Indian instruments: droning tambura and dilruba, and tabla from ‘Within You Without You’.

It’s strange that although George brought a huge Indian influence to the sound of The Beatles, some of his most famous songs have no Indian instruments on them. The tabla and dilruba from ‘Within You Without You’ made a perfect introduction to George’s guitar and we used the chorus vocals from the song to set the scene.

The remix of ‘Here Comes The Sun’ also adds backwards vocals from ‘Oh! Darling’, and a bass guitar part from ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.

I did the intro of ‘Here Comes The Sun’ while in Vegas and I added the bass and backwards vocals from ‘Oh! Darling’ I think. And it was funny, because I was under huge demands from Dominic [Champagne, Cirque du Soleil] to go and rehearse this. I liked it, but unless my dad liked it, they weren’t having it, so that’s the way it was done. He was my brain to a certain extent.

‘The Inner Light’ (Transition)

The third transition track on Love is a remix of ‘The Inner Light’, another George Harrison songs.

‘Here Comes The Sun’ is a great song about enlightenment; it made complete sense then to finish with ‘The Inner Light’.

‘Come Together’/‘Dear Prudence’

The Love remix of ‘Come Together’ is, for the most part, largely unchanged from the 1969 original. It diverges in the extended outro, which adds vocals, tinkling piano and harmonising guitars from ‘Dear Prudence’, before giving way to the fourth and final transition.

This for me is the Beatles playing live at their economical and inspirational best. There’s nothing that can be added to the song as all the parts are so well constructed and yet the song is so sparse. ‘Dear Prudence’ was used to end the song without fading it and I loved the way the vocals and Ringo’s mad drumming add a climax to the end of ‘Come Together’. Dominic Champagne, the show’s director, had wanted something disturbing to bring in ‘Revolution’ and I thought this ending sounded from another world. The strings from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and the climax from ‘A Day In The Life’ provided an edge that isn’t on the original.

‘Cry Baby Cry’ (Transition)

Although listed as ‘Cry Baby Cry’, this is actually ‘Can You Take Me Back?’, which followed ‘Cry Baby Cry’ on the White Album. The Love version also contains strings, seemingly from ‘Eleanor Rigby’. The final drum beats are from ‘Revolution’.