Friday, January 18, 2013

Cover sludge: recreating The Beatles

Here's a headline to chill the blood:

Mick Hucknall and Stereophonics to re-record first Beatles album
Obviously it's not just those two; War and Famine will be also be taking part in the project to complete the team.

It's apparently a project designed by Radio 2 to celebrate "the golden age of the album" - so Kelly Jones must be on board to remind us how far we've fallen since then.

The idea is that Please Please Me will be recreated in twelve hours, thereby proving... something. That musicians can still work at the pace The Beatles did, presumably. But it's actually going to take about three hours longer than the original did.

Unconfirmed at present are rumours that 6Music is going to try and recreate The Spaghetti Incident sessions over a similar period taken by Axl.


3 comments:

Justin Fun said...

Even if you did subscribe to the idea of a 'golden age of the album', who would suggest it was 1963? That was more the age of 'rush an album out to capitalise on the recent hit single', wasn't it?

Not saying there weren't great albums made in the early 60s, but they were more often collections of songs than a single work.

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

I agree; even amongst Beatles albums, 1963 was hardly the peak year...

Chris Brown said...

I agree too - whilst Please Please Me is one of my favourite Beatles albums, it's very much a set of songs they knew well bashed out quickly rather than any sort of considered piece of work. If there's such a thing as a Golden Age Of The Album you might want to set the start at a time when record companies started allowing more than a day's studio time to make them.

Another point you might not have noticed as you're not a Beatles fan: the famous one-day recording only relates to the ten new tracks on the album, as it also included four tracks from singles that were already in the can. If they were going to recreate the thing in real time, they'd have had to start in September.

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