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Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Is Being Re-Recorded














The Beatles' monumental album 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' is being re-recorded by some of the biggest names in pop. Robert Sandall reports

Radio 2, June 16, 8pm Geoff Emerick is recalling the unsettling moment when he and the other two members of the Beatles' recording team - producer George Martin and assistant engineer Richard Lush - sat down with the group in November 1966 to discuss their next album.

The 19-year-old Emerick, who had only previously engineered for the Beatles on Revolver, knew he was about to be severely tested. "The first thing John [Lennon] said was that he was sick of making soft music for soft people, and that this time he wanted to make sounds that nobody had ever heard before. And everybody looked at me."

As he speaks, all eyes in the room are again on Emerick. On this occasion, though, most of them belong to Stereophonics, one of the groups who have been recruited to re-record the songs of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in a 40th-anniversary homage to this most famous album.

Kelly Jones and his band have just knocked off a cracking version of the reprise of the title track, which catches the original so accurately, right down to the whoops at the end, you can barely tell it's a 2007 repro job. Astonishingly, this audio cloning has taken less than four hours, and was done with hardly any re-takes. "The point about this is that you have to really commit to tape. It's more limiting, but it's more fun, too," says Jones.

He is referring to the big idea here, which is to employ, as far as possible, the same studio equipment as the Beatles did. This is why we are gathered today not in Abbey Road, where all the gear has long since been upgraded, but in a spacious recording facility in West London owned by Mark Knopfler. Though he is not personally involved in this project, for the first time since Knopfler bought the four-track mixing desk on which Sgt Pepper was recorded, it's being put to serious use

Emerick loves it. He hankers for the days before 96-channel mixing desks and corrective software, when musicians had to get it right, or play it again. "It used to be all about capturing a moment in time," Emerick says. "Everybody who's come in so far has said, 'We should record like this every time.' The process now is so boring. Everything is done perfectly to time by people standing around looking at a computer screen."

The Pepper re-make is another of Bob Geldof's media-friendly, madly time-pressured initiatives. Hence the presence today of a TV crew from his company Ten Alps, who are filming a two-part documentary, one for each side of the album, the first part of which will go out on BBC 2 on Saturday. An hour-long special will precede it on Radio 2.

This latest wheeze came to Geldof in 2006 after he read the chapter in Emerick's recent autobiography where he described his struggle to make Sgt Pepper sound as special as Lennon had demanded.

It took three months - a very long time to spend on an album in 1967, though nothing much by today's standards. Emerick says he's spent three months this year twiddling his thumbs in Knopfler's place while Ten Alps tried to nail the participants. "The trouble seemed to be that everybody wanted to do Day in the Life," Emerick observes, drily.

Despite rumours that U2 have bagged the top job, a week and a half before the first TV show airs, this key performance has still not been finalised. Also high on the to-do list is Oasis's version of Within You Without You, which the band stipulated they would record only in the Beatles' favorite haunt - studio 2 at Abbey Road. Because Knopfler was unwilling to allow his four-track mixer to travel across London, an identical machine belonging to another of rock's analogue nostalgists, Lenny Kravitz, is being shipped over from America.

So far, Emerick is thrilled with what he has heard. "These modern bands have more energy. They're more aggressive and pushy. When the Beatles were doing Pepper there was a more diffuse kind of energy. Ringo played his heart out, but it was really a John and Paul album."

Emerick has recorded Razorlight (With A Little Help From My Friends), Kaiser Chiefs (It's Getting Better) and The Fray (Fixing a Hole). The Magic Numbers are down for She's Leaving Home. He doesn't know who has taken on the tricky task of recording When I'm 64. It was originally offered to, and declined by, Stereophonics.

Today's session got off to a shaky start when it transpired that the band had turned up expecting to perform the Sgt Pepper that opens the album, rather than the one that segues into the finale, Day in the Life. As soon as Jones learned that Bryan Adams had recorded track one side one last week, he equably changed course. "I used to play both versions in my first covers band. I actually prefer the Beatles' darker stuff."

With the day's work mostly done, Emerick is now sitting behind a squat, grey metal desk, with antique Bakelite knobs and immense fader levers, reminiscing about the 700 working hours he spent battling with its limitations to create the Sergeant. "The only way we could make things sound different then was to abuse the equipment, by wobbling the tape machine, or holding it back to make it go slower."

He recalls late nights when he and McCartney would obsessively overdub his bass parts trying to get the sound punchier, to the point where McCartney's fingers bled. "That was Paul's best playing ever. John wasn't such a perfectionist at that point. He didn't have the patience."

The aspect of Stereophonics' performance that Emerick has most enjoyed, he says, is their vocals. "They have a great sense of fun when they're singing. And that reminds me of how the Beatles were. However tense things would get in the studio, all of that would disappear as soon as they started singing together. Once they gathered round a microphone they would always turn back into a bunch of kids."

With a little help from...

Side one of the new version of Sgt Pepper features:

• Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
by Bryan Adams

• With a Little Help From My Friends
by Razorlight

• Getting Better
by Kaiser Chiefs

• Fixing a Hole
by the Fray

• She's Leaving Home
by the Magic Numbers

Side two is yet to be decided.

Sgt. Pepper's 40th Anniversary - Part 1 - Radio 2, Sat, 8pm
Sgt. Pepper "It Was 40 Years Ago Today..." BBC 2, Sat,10.45pm
Sgt. Pepper's 40th Anniversary - Part 2 - Radio 2, June 16, 8pm

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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