Will Beatles mashup album be heresy or just good fun?

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 | 4:48 PM ET

CBC Arts

A new remix of Beatles music created for the Cirque du Soleil show Love is due out Nov. 21 and already some purists are dismissing it as heresy.

The album, also called Love, is based on recordings from the London studios of Apple and was made with the blessings of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as John Lennon's widow,Yoko Ono, and George Harrison's widow, Olivia Harrison.

Giles Martin, left, with his father George, says he brought 'fresh ears' to The Beatles old recordings.
(Jae C. Hong/Associated Press)

But the music is a mashup, patching together studio banter, song snippets and instrumental recordings in a way the Beatles themselves never envisioned.

The fresh take on the Fab Four was greeted warmly in Love, the Cirque du Soleil show that opened in Las Vegas this summer.

Giles Martin, son of George Martin, who produced nearly every Beatles recording, created the new album.

As the launch date approaches, he fears fans will think he's rewritten a holy canon.

"Both myself and my dad really expect to get flayed alive for this," said Martin, who was born in 1969 as the band was breaking up. "I had fresh ears — if you can have fresh ears to the Beatles — and my job was to make things different."

The rules were simple: Beatles tracks only, no electronic distortion of what they recorded and no newly recorded music. The single exception was a string arrangement, written by George Martin, to accompany an acoustic version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

The 26-track collection opens with an a cappella version of Because adorned with birdsong.

Then it has a new version of Get Back, with drums drawn from Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) and the crowd from the Hollywood Bowl.

Throughout the recording are interjections designed to keep music fans pushing repeat on their disc player to decipher the quirky references.

Martin said creating the album was fun. The Beatles themselves often included riffs from one song in creating another, he noted.

"They cross-referenced themselves the whole time," Martin said.

The Beatles as they were. Will fans accept a new Beatles recording that's a mashup of their work?

"If you look at [the 1967 song] All You Need is Love, John Lennon sings 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah' at the end. They like the idea of that, of nicking their own ideas and putting them together."

But while McCartney and Starr expressed support for the project, ardent fans may not be so receptive.

Count Bob Spitz, author of The Beatles: The Biography, said he's disappointed by what Apple is doing with the Beatles' legacy.

"Not by the end product but by the fact that they are the Beatles' songs and overdubbing them and massaging them allows other people to impose their own creative ideas on something that was so immediate and of a particular time," he said.

"I thought that legacy was virtually tamper-proof, until now."