1st Beatles remix album set for Nov. 21

By RANDY LEWIS
Los Angeles Times

Posted: Oct. 22, 2006

The first authorized remix of music by the Beatles, created by the group's longtime producer George Martin and son Giles for the Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas show "Love," is to be released Nov. 21.

The "Love" album encompasses 26 tracks covering all or parts of 37 Beatles songs that are radically dissected and recombined in the Cirque show, which opened in June at the Mirage hotel.

The standard CD version runs 78 minutes, and a DVD surround-sound version contains 81 minutes of Fab Four music but no video.

The Cirque show has received mostly glowing reviews for its theatrical interpretation of the group's music and history.

It is the outgrowth of a friendship that George Harrison developed with Cirque founder Guy Laliberte, and it was Harrison's wish before he died in 2001 that the Cirque collaboration provide a way for the group and its families to work together creatively one more time.

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Harrison's widow, Olivia, agreed to let the Martins revamp dramatically the group's historically tamper-proof music from the original master tapes.

In one number, Harrison's vocal from his "Sgt. Pepper" song "Within You Without You" is heard over the rhythm track from "Tomorrow Never Knows."

In another, the Martins set Starr's vocal in "Octopus's Garden" against the string accompaniment to "Good Night" from the so-called White Album.

"It's really powerful for me," Starr said in a statement last week, "and I even heard things I'd forgotten we'd recorded."

The show is weighted heavily toward the music of "Sgt. Pepper" onward; only seven of the 37 songs were recorded before 1967.

Continuing interest in the Beatles' catalog was demonstrated dramatically when the "1" hits collection from 2000 spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the national sales chart and went on to sell more than 10 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.