Anyone who’s been in the music industry as long as Paul McCartney tends to have a musical sixth sense.
Even if everything is lined up for a project to go well, there are bound to be a few red flags that make people question whether they’re making the right call when they decide to devote themselves to an album. And while Macca did have a few spotty records in his arsenal back in the day, he almost missed out on making one of his finest moments with The Beatles.
Then again, it’s not like McCartney was looking to live in the Fab Four’s shadow by the time he found his feet in his solo career. He had moved on and managed to carve out a new place for himself as a pop star, and even if that involved a few embarrassing moments here and there, it was much better for him to live in the present than constantly reliving the life had in his 20s. But as he would find out, those melodies never truly go away.
What he had with his old mates was pure magic, and the Anthology was one of the first times where people felt that kind of nostalgia all over again. It felt like they were doing the impossible by resurrecting one of John Lennon’s demos, and if the rest of the world were interested in hearing what any Beatles material sounded like, McCartney felt it was time to right some wrongs as well.
Let It Be…Nakedwas the first time people got to hear a version of their swan song that Macca approved of, but it’s not nearly as exciting when correcting some of the old music. People want to hear music that changed the way they thought about their favourite songs, and by the time that Cirque de Soleil came to them with the idea of interpreting Beatles songs, it felt like a bold new idea.
For McCartney, though, he admitted that he needed a little bit of convincing before jumping headfirst into anything, saying, “George [Martin] knew this Cirque du Soleil guy and took me to see a show. I was blown away. I was sold on the idea of a Beatles production. But the climate was, ‘No, it’s sacrosanct. You can’t do this. You must not.’ I went, ‘Hang on, it’s not your music.’”
And even if people turned their noses up at it, the show presented a much greater opportunity for the band. Not only would George Martin help oversee a lot of the arrangements of the tunes with his son, Giles, but the overlapping tapestry of sound that unfolds throughout the record is the perfect example of the kind of psychedelia that The Beatles had always wanted to make but didn’t have the technology to achieve at the time.
Think about a song like ‘Within You Without You’ on its own. The track itself is among the most spiritual pieces that George Harrison ever came up with, but when given the propulsion of the drum beat from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, it has a lot more momentum to it. The same could be said for the other mashups on the record, like combining the riff from ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and the screams of ‘Helter Skelter’ to create the ultimate metallic Beatles song.
Were all the purists going to be happy? Hardly, but the number-one rule of creativity is to never make music thinking about the critics. It’s all about what pleases you before anyone else, and if the band could be happy seeing their songs in a different light, there were bound to be fans out there willing to take a chance on something unconventional. After all, ‘unconventional’ was always how The Beatles approached their songs, so why stop now?
