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‘What sort of sounds?’ asked Ed, very slowly, as if addressing a madman.
‘You know the sort of thing,’ I said. ‘The sound the fire makes when it starts roaring up the chimney, the noise of wind and rain outside at night when you’re tucked up nice and warm in bed, the coo of wood pigeons, the hoot of the owl, waves breaking on Chesil Beach.’ Even as I spoke, I realised that all this sounded pretty yucky.
‘That’s the sort of thing I had to write about in the third year at prep school,’ said Ed, contemptuously.
‘And you know how cross Liz the arts editor was when you wrote that ridiculous column about pets,’ added my wife, determined to put the boot in. Back to the drawing board.
And then I belatedly realised I actually did have something to write about. Back in June I was lucky enough to go to Las Vegas for the Daily Telegraph to review the £75-million Cirque du Soleil show, Love. It’s a beautifully designed, thrillingly acrobatic evocation of the Beatles and the swinging Sixties, staged in a custom-built theatre at the Mirage Casino. But the chief glory is the music and it’s now coming out on CD.
For those of us who grew up with the Beatles, the big problem is that we’ve worn the records out. We know every lyric, every note, and there’s nothing left to take us by surprise. We don’t need to play the Beatles any more because they are stored in our brains as if on an iPod.
The Beatles’ now octogenarian producer George Martin and his son Giles have obviously realised the same thing. Their thrilling soundtrack to the show, using extracts from more than 100 Beatles songs, offers the band thrillingly remixed and restored to freshness. The opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, which seems to capture the precise moment when the Sixties started to swing, sounds joyously, before seguing into the terrifying orchestral crescendo of ‘A Day in the Life’, which then moves through frenzied percussion into the rocking ‘Get Back’.
The mystical Indian drone of Harrison’s ‘Within You, Without You’ is accompanied by the drum track of Lennon’s spacy ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, and throughout this extraordinary score invention never flags. The two Martins have achieved the apparently impossible, allowing us to hear the Beatles with fresh ears. It’s like being granted a ticket back to the lost domain of childhood.
As the horribly compelling McCartney divorce case rages bitterly on, how good it is to be allowed to rediscover the glory of the Beatles in their prime. Love is released on Monday, 20 November. It is indispensable to anyone who loves pop music, and as you play it for the first time I have little doubt that you will find yourself unexpectedly ambushed by tears.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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