Mojo - The Music Magazine

"EMI & MTV Games invite you to Abbey Road Studios on Tuesday 14th July," said the e-mail invite, "for a listening session of the Beatles Remasters. You will also see a preview/demonstration of the Beatles Rock Band Game. Please can you let me know if you would like to attend?"

It was not an exclusive invite. Abbey Road's Studio Two was packed to the back doors with hundreds of media types, keen to hear, after four years of constant priming and promise, just what this much anticipated digital remastering project had done to the sound of the most famous band on the planet. But first...

"Welcome to the Holy Land," announced Jeff Jones, the chief executive of Apple Corps since the retirement of Neil Aspinall in April 2007 (Aspinall died in March, 2008). "I want you to close your eyes," he said, "It's February 11, 1963 and four musicians in this very room are about to make history..."

Then, as if they're there in the room with us (the desired effect, naturally) we hear four urchin Scousers, their voices still in the high register of urban Liverpool, gabbering over the clipped RP tones of George Martin ("Take 4!") and refusing to take any of this seriously ("George has changed guitars..."; "It's theeez damn wirds!"), as Mr Martin becomes more and more riled ("Take 9!") before they pile into the immediate teen rebellion of I Saw Her Standing There.

Then we're shown two examples of the video mini-docs that will feature as bonus tracks on each of the remastered CDs. The Beatles For Sale and "White Album" films didn't delve too deep (well, they are mini-docs), but amount to ingenious cheeseparing of the existing Anthology DVD material, and do feature that groovy 3D "moving still" effect you see so much of these days. They'll look OK on your computer - presumably the point - and provide background for the young Beatles novices presumably drawn into Beatleworld by Rock Band.

[You can see excerpts from two more of these - Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - at the Beatles web site]

Following an admirably low-key introduction from our Apple compere - "hopefully it'll sound like we've taken some lint off the speakers" - we got to the bit that MOJO's drooling audiobuffs were most anticipating. Cue a 13-track blast from the remasters themselves, forensically represented by an extract of the existing CD version followed by a slightly longer segment of the spanking new retread.

We've agreed not to "review" these versions, and in truth we didn't hear enough so to do, but a comparison of MOJO's notebooks this morning revealed a consensus of approval, with words like "crunch", "separation", "handclaps" and "space" hearteningly to the fore. Specifically, the revamps have made Goodnight sound far grander than before, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sound like a rocking beast and - audiowanker alert! - In My Life's stereo balance much less, um, unbalanced.

The Rock Band demo was performed by a quartet of the game's developers and marketeers (John Drake, Kat Burke, and Eric Pope from Harmonix, John Castaneda from MTV Games), toting the new Beatle-specific game controllers, and visibly over-excited by the opportunity to "be" the Beatles on the hallowed turf of Studio 2. As they spanked their pseudo-planks, the fretboards whizzed by on the screen behind them and the Beatles cavorted in CGI. Particularly skilful bits of gameplay (we presume) were rewarded with the screen announcing "Double Fab", and the like.

The Rock Band formula is traditionally based on "the gig", yet some of the Fabs' best tunes were never performed live. The game deals with this by creating fantasy songworlds into which the CGI Beatles are projected. I Am The Walrus was the song we saw dealt with in this way, the on-screen digiBeatles starting the song in the studio before tripping out into a fantasy based on the Magical Mystery Tour.

MOJO noted, however, that our otherwise expert quartet did not attempt any two-into-one-mic "wooo!"s, nor Paul's brain-bending guitar solo in Taxman. Presumably, this awaits Beatle game players when they reach a more advanced stage.

More on the remasters when we hear them, and a report on Rock Band when we get to play the thing.

Andrew Male & Danny Eccleston