“We found this huge Pandora’s Box, in a good way, of material. I’m so useless I had no idea what the Esher Demos were. Says Giles Martin. (by Mark Beech - Forbes)
I heard a CD bootleg which has been out and it sounds terrible. I said, ‘I’ve heard these, they were at George’s place when I was working with Olivia Harrison on the movie All Things Must Pass.’
I found these tapes. If you are working trying to tell the story of an album and you come across 27 tracks it makes your job a hell of a lot easier. To me it is like the Beatles unplugged.
That meant going through 107 takes of “Sexy Sadie,” dozens of versions of both “I’m So Tired” and “Long, Long, Long” and a 13-minute “Helter Skelter.” It meant hearing the Beatles discuss songs, joke and even order lunch. (You can hear Harrison at one point from the studio order a “cheese, lettuce, Marmite sandwich.”)
They are just meant to be demos, they are not meant to be finished recordings, but the Beatles always double-tracked themselves, so you have acoustic guitar and vocal on four tracks and in the background you can hear other Beatles hitting things. Not people, just things!”
“It’s really where the Beatles are exploring their own individuality and they’re still working off the collective. They’re coming out of Sgt. Pepper’s and they’re coming out of Magical Mystery Tour and they’re coming out of the psychedelia,” Moylan said. “They’re branching out, into popular music, into musical theater, back to rock, even Tin Pan Alley-type pieces.”
The related sessions included some tracks that became singles, such as “Hey Jude” and “Lady Madonna” as well as others that showed up on later Beatles albums, the Anthology series of outtakes and even solo albums of the 1970s. The best are on the new box set.
Tracks featured include “Across the Universe,” “Circles,” “Junk,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Not Guilty,” “Polythene Pam,” “Sour Milk Sea,” “Step Inside Love,” “The Inner Light” and “What’s the New Mary Jane.”
Martin: “They had so much material that a song like ‘Jealous Guy’ (originally ‘Child Of Nature’) would get thrown off because John had so many other songs.”
There were thousands of recordings to go through for the new box set.
Martin: “There are 107 takes of ‘Sexy Sadie’ alone. Unbelievably passionate Beatles experts like Kevin Howlett sat at Abbey Road, listened to everything and made notes. We argued over things that would be interesting to people. You want to tell the story of how an album is made but everything needs to be in balance.”
The White Album proved harder to remix than Sgt. Pepper.
Martin: “It is a very different album, with different processes and different sounds. I always thought that Sgt. Pepper would be a real challenge to remix, which it was to a certain extent, and the White Album would be fairly easy. But it has such a visceral quality, such an immediate record, that it took a while to do and get right.”
The release depended on quality.
Martin: “With Sgt. Pepper, we started doing it with the thought of ‘Is this a good idea?’ We had the license with the Beatles to experiment and come back and say.
It wasn’t because Sgt. Pepper was well received that we took for granted the White Album would go well. They [the record company] said, ‘How many tracks do you want to put on this?’ and I said, ‘How many CDs do you want to make?’
We don’t want to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, it is really important that the quality is there and, in the Beatles’ case, of course it is always there.” The 30-track album now has another 27 acoustic demos and 50 session takes, most of them previously unreleased in any form.
