LONDON: Fans rushed to buy the first "new" Beatles album for a generation -- a radical remixing of some of the group's most famous songs -- more than 35 years after the breakup of the iconic band.
Love, which has the backing of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, comprises 26 of the Fab Four's hit songs, many of them mixed together using previously unheard material from the studio.
"I hope this will help people to hear Beatles music again," said Giles Martin, son of the Beatles' original producer Sir George Martin, often referred to as the fifth Beatle.
Martin and his son both worked for three years on the project, which forms the soundtrack to a Beatles stage show of the same name, put on since June in Las Vegas by Canadian entertainment company Cirque du Soleil.
Using archives and master tapes at the Abbey Road studios in London, they put together songs by a complex mixture of overlaying, dubbing and synchronizing to produce sometimes startlingly new compositions.
Elements of Penny Lane are mixed with Strawberry Fields Forever, while Blackbird is combined with Yesterday in a process called a "mash-up" by sound engineers.
"I think they would have liked it," said the elder Martin at the launch of the album on Monday, which also has the backing of John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia.
"To be honest, I believe they were there with us as we worked on it," he added.
