14 Music Week 15.08.14 REPORT BEATLES REISSUE MONO MANIA
Next month, Universal (on the Parlophone label) will release the first 10 Beatles albums (up to and including The White Album), in glorious mono, on sumptuous vinyl, just as they were meant to be
CATALOGUE n BY DAVE ROBERTS
I
s The Beatles’ story never-ending or done to death? Is there anything new left to say or hear? Universal certainly made damn sure, when
its EMI acquisition had been shaken down by EU rulings and enforced divestitures, that the most successful band of all time remained part of the deal. They were non-negotiable. But now, now that the Fab Four are in the
family, what to do with them? Are the possibilities limitless or limited? One clue lies in the recent publication of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, the first volume of his new Beatles biography that weighs in at 960 pages. That’s right, volume one, ending when they sign to Parlophone. 960 pages. Lewisohn seems to think there’s more to discover and more to tell. And plenty of Beatles experts have reported
enough ‘Well, I never knew that’ moments to suggest he’s right. The Beatles in Mono treads similar turf. It
is a re-presentation of the records as they were designed to be heard and seen on the format (vinyl) for which they were made. These are basically the tablets from the mountain, straight from the Gods into the hands of mortals. They are being released on September 8 as
individual albums, from Please Please Me to The White Album, plus Mono Masters, which rounds up singles and extras. A truly lavish box set will also be available –
currently being listed at £288 on Amazon. Project manager Guy Hayden has worked with
The Beatles since 2007 and moved across with the catalogue following the acquisition. He says: “Coming to Universal is like coming back
to… not old school exactly, but it’s definitely a record business, or, in the wider sense, a music business.
ABOVE
A Fab reissue: (Left) Photo session in EMI House, Manchester Square,
London, 21 January 1963 (Copyright: Calderstone Productions); (Right) A factory worker carefully puts together another unit of the new release
“The initial CD releases of The Beatles records were shocking. Redoing them was us saying to the outside world that this is the most important catalogue in the history of recorded music and we are, now, going to treat it as such” GUY HAYDEN, UNIVERSAL
Everything Universal does, whether it’s for The Beatles or the newest signing, is about connecting fans to music, whereas at EMI, for a while, for reasons everybody knows about, it could have been about connecting a can of beans to a ‘consumer’.” That said, it was in 2007, the year that Terra
Firma took over, that EMI finally started treating the Fabbest catalogue in existence with the love and care it deserved. “As a company, from the late 70s/early 80s to
just after CD came in, the track record wasn’t great. The initial CD releases of The Beatles records were shocking: they were in dodgy jewel cases, they were poor transfers, they didn’t have the right artwork, the booklets were terrible… “So redoing them, starting in ‘07 and eventually
coming out in 2009, was a really crucial point. It was us saying to the band and to the outside world, that this is the most important catalogue in the history of recorded music and we are, now, going to treat it as such.” Since then, the stereos have been released
on vinyl, iTunes has been conquered and there have been two Beatles at the BBC compilations. Hayden mulls over the limited/limitless debate and concludes that it’s “a bit of both”. “The Beatles did Anthology for goodness sake,
they were the first band to dig into their history like that, they did the 1s album, they did the Love show, and how can there ever be better compilations than the original Red and Blue albums anyway?
“So on one level, pretty much everything’s
been done. But on another level, every generation discovers The Beatles for themselves and they get more important, not less, as time goes on. “Formats and technology are just mechanisms
for getting this music to people however they want to receive it. The Monos project, and the whole vinyl revival, is a sub-plot of that ongoing story.” In this case, the sub-plot is simple; between
1963 and 1968, while they were working in Abbey Road, this is what John, Paul, George and Ringo wanted you to hear, how they wanted you to hear it. They were recorded and mastered for mono
(up until The White Album), so this is the truest representation of what they were doing in that five year (five years!!) period – From Them to You. Hayden says: “Anyone who knows about The
Beatles history knows that there’s always been this tension between the mono and the stereo and which one is ‘better’. But to the real, absolute diehard fans, especially those who were around and buying the albums back then, there’s always been something special about the monos – plus, there’s the fact that those are the versions that the band themselves were husbanding through to release. “And it sounds easy: make the records sound
like they used to sound like and look like they used to look like. But, once you get into it, you realise what a damn difficult job it is. For example, the box we’re making, there’s not a machine made part of it; everything is handmade. “On the audio side the job was made easier
by the fact that at Abbey Road, for every recording and mastering session the team made detailed notes which we were able to follow and meant we could do what they did, exactly.” The ‘we’ is a team consisting of, amongst others,
Abbey Road’s Sean McGee, who actually cut the vinyl; Geoff Jones, the Apple CEO who worked for many years at Sony Legacy; and Steve Berkowitz,
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