Deep within the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel complex as big as a minor town lies the nerve centre of an operation that will soon turn pop-music history on its head. To reach this room, you must first pass through security — and surrender your mobile phone and any electronic equipment you have on your person, sign a precisely worded affidavit that stops just short of stating that you will pay with your life should you disobey its terms and conditions, step through a scanner and then be frisked, twice, the first time manually, the second with a handheld reader that bleeps shrilly at so much as a packet of cigarettes.
This process completed, you walk through several weighty steel doors, each of which has to clunk shut behind you before a security code can be punched in to open the next. What has this to do with pop music, with the heady adrenaline rush of creativity, of spontaneity, innovation and experimentalism that defined the Beatles and resulted in the most famous and celebrated songs that the genre has ever produced? The 80-year-old man who sits inside the citadel looks as if the same thought has occurred to him. It’s an exact replica of the control room at Abbey Road studios where George Martin magicked out of a four-track tape machine some of the most complex pop music the world has witnessed, and it has been home for months past to the knighted fifth Beatle and his son and fellow record producer, Giles. In it, they have been busy creating a soundtrack for a new show by the French-Canadian circus troupe Cirque du Soleil, which began previewing at the Mirage hotel, in Las Vegas, last Friday. LOVE, which joins the four shows Cirque currently has running on the Strip, will, for 90 minutes, deliver a “poetical evocation” of 27 songs from the Beatles catalogue.
Drawing on characters from Beatles songs, including Lady Madonna, Nowhere Man, the Walrus and Eleanor Rigby, the show will use dance, acrobatics, fantasy sequences and magic choreographed to a backdrop of the Beatles. The aim, in the words of its creators, is to “give people the show they’ve always dreamt of”, with lighting and stage effects that strive to match the power of the music.
Surely we’ve had enough of the Beatles? Haven’t the exhaustive Anthology book, CDs and film said all that can, that needs to, be said about the four Liverpudlians and the eight years in which, on vinyl, they made a musical journey whose scope, twists and turns, adventurousness and derring-do have never been equalled? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? A writer from a monthly music magazine, who runs the security gauntlet with me, looks as jaundiced as I feel. Sated, no, bloated, by years of lost-and-found archive recordings, by the marketing machinations of Apple Corps, we enter the room as Fab Fans, certainly, but with the corrosive fluid of cynicism in our veins. George Martin bids us sit in the centre of the mixing desk, and his son presses Play. Two minutes later, we are in a state of shock. After five minutes, we are both in tears.
For what Martin père et fils have done is no mere remix, a twiddle here, a tweak there. They have taken every note the Beatles ever played or sang and — with, astonishingly, the full permission of Paul, Ringo, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — created something new. Within seconds of the tape starting to run, this becomes clear. The harmony vocals from the Abbey Road track Because fill the room, interspersed with birdsong. This gives way to a low rumble, into which A Hard Day’s Night’s opening chord crashes; seconds later, the madcap orchestral ascent from A Day in the Life jockeys with Ringo’s Abbey Road drum solo, before the Get Back riff swaggers into the sound picture, as Sergeant Pepper crowd noises pan from left to right.
Snippets of other songs constantly interject, most shockingly and thrillingly on Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite, which morphs without warning into I Want You (She’s So Heavy), with backing vocals from Helter Skelter. The demo of Strawberry Fields Forever then builds into a track that encompasses the harpsichord from both In My Life and Piggies, and the “hey-la, hey-la, hey-la” outro from Hello Goodbye, in what sounds like an outtake from Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (the collage of the White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album).
By the time the tape gets to the Martins’ masterstroke — George Harrison’s Within You Without You to the drum track from Tomorrow Never Knows — we are laughing out loud. But how on earth will such radical, brutal surgery go down with fans? “A lot of people,” says George, “are going to crucify me.” “I’m going to get slagged,” predicts Giles. “No,” says his father, “I’m going to get it worse than you. It’s a tightrope of taste that I’m walking here — I’m supposed to be the keeper of the holy grail.” The grail is not, though, only his for safekeeping. Looming in the background is the mighty and litigious muscle of Apple Corps and behind that the sensitivities of McCartney, Starr, Ono and Harrison.
It was the late George Harrison’s friendship with Cirque’s founder, Guy Laliberté, that started the process. They met at a Formula One race while the former Beatle was recovering from being stabbed by an intruder at his Berkshire home. “We shared the dream of doing something together,” says Laliberté during a press conference held the day after the listening session. As if infected by the platitudinous smarm and hyperbole of the city he is speaking in, he then adds gooily: “This show was done with love, and will also carry LOVE for a long time in Las Vegas.” Hmmm.
Backstage, a huge digital display counts down to the first preview performance — “10 days, 5 hours, 50 minutes,” it reads.
In the theatre, a quarter-hour excerpt from the show is constantly stalled by a malfunctioning fire alarm. “Somebody won’t be working with us after this,” says a hotel director with ill-concealed menace.
If Laliberté exudes self-satisfaction, LOVE’s writer and director, the splendidly named Dominic Champagne, is more obviously tormented by last-minute nerves. Asked how long a run LOVE is envisaged as having — two years, perhaps? — he replies: “I hope it can last at least a year. If not, I’m going to commit suicide.”
Unexpectedly, it’s the Martins, with the bumbling demeanour of true, self-deprecating Brits, who play the audience most adroitly. “I wanted to see how far I could go before I got fired,” says Giles, and the world’s press chuckle as they scrawl in their notepads (no tape recorders allowed).
Martin Sr, who on television can come across as dry and crabby, is, in person, anything but. A twinkling, avuncular figure, he beams proudly at his son, happy that he has taken up the family trade. He says the key moment in securing the agreement of the four Fab parties was Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows. “It’s the one that gave Giles credibility with the four of them. You know, ‘Wait a minute, he is doing something rather good here.’”
“It opened the door,” agrees his son, “and then they were like, ‘Go to town.’” George says McCartney was constantly pushing for greater boldness. “He kept saying, ‘You could be more far out than that.’” So they devised a version of Hey Jude with a reggae beat and played it to its composer the next time he flew in. He knew in seconds that he was being wound up. “But,” says George, “you should have seen his face.”
An album of these new songs (there’s no other word to describe them) will be released in the autumn and is set to divide fans: many will no doubt be appalled. But two Beatles fanatics who like to think they know every last plucked string, whacked snare and cooed harmony down pat left that mixing room in a state of stunned bewilderment and deepened devotion. The process that began when the Beatles suddenly sang “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” over the closing bars of All You Need Is Love has reached its apogee. The masters of invention have been reinvented. It’s going to be a blast.
As for LOVE, well, as Champagne says: “Even though I’m playing with the bible, I still have to do a show.” He’s acutely aware that he is dealing with fans “with all their expectations, all the love stories they bring into the theatre that are related to the songs”. He adds: “I always have the insurance that if the idea isn’t very good, I can fade the lights to black and let the music talk.”
Backstage, hundreds of costumes, character sketches and props — VW Beetles, Sergeant Pepper drums, stilts made out of trombones, cloud-belching umbrellas, the Eggman, Lady Madonna, Lucy in the Sky’s mirrored mini dress — fight for space with a cast of 60. In the theatre, a new version of Octopus’s Garden bursts into surround-sound, as luminous jellyfish, octopuses and electric eels descend from the flies. Hang on, are those the drums from Lovely Rita? Or Goodnight’s strings? Is that a snatch of Polythene Pam? “Throw everything at it,” commanded Ringo. The Martins and Cirque du Soleil have done just that. What (musically) could have been vandalism and (theatrically) irredeemably naff has instead the makings of something literally tear-jerking and transforming. Have a handkerchief ready. Prepare to be outraged. But prepare, too, to fall in love all over again.
