HELP!

In 1967 the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love. In 2006 do we really need another Beatles album called Love? A new Beatles album? Of course it isn’t! More accurately it’s a CD containing 21 of their songs in their entirety, however Sir George Martin, their famous producer-arranger, has amused himself by deconstructing and filleting them and inserting bits of other songs from the Beatles’ repertoire. He attempts this strange tactic a total of 26 times in all. You may wonder at his reasons for putting in all this effort as the conundrum he has produced is equally baffling, the resulting sound deceives the ear and leaves the listener perplexed if not actually ill at ease. Once you have tired of the game of trying to spot where the different sequences come from, the listener remains bewildered by what quickly reveals itself to be a musical rigmarole. You may think at first that you are entering a dreamworld, however this is swiftly transformed into something more like a nightmare. Everything has been distorted for no apparent reason (except that is to fulfil the requirements of the sound track for the performances of the Cirque du Soleil, which is where the CD originated). The result is a sort of compilation of ghosts from the past. Was it really necessary? The Beatles in their day released a primitive force of positive creativity. In the CD all this energy seems to be muted, as if it had been swamped by the passage of time. Only audio freaks who obtained their highs by identifying the slightest difference in the mix from one country to another as they used to in the days of vinyl will find here something to satisfy their mind-numbing searches. However the CD poses a further serious risk - namely that modern-day listeners, who have probably never encountered the original Beatles recordings, on hearing this CD won’t be able to understand why audiences found the group so fantastic. In 1963 the Beatles sang Money, That’s What I Want: the meaning of these lyrics has clearly not been lost on their manufacturers and distributors.

by Jacques Volcouve, President, Le Club des 4 de Liverpool
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