Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
The Beatles are getting back to where they once belonged: on a brand-new record.
An album featuring “completely new music” by the Fab Four is to be released this summer, concurrent with a glitzy Las Vegas stage show that will feature the tunes, reps for the legendary band said yesterday.
The album comes 36 years after the rockers broke up, and 25 years after the death of John Lennon and more than four years after the death of George Harrison.
The new tunes will be constructed with a bit of technical wizardry – cobbled together from hundreds of hours of tape of The Beatles’ music, as well as their witty conversations.
Surviving band members Paul McCartney, 63, and Ringo Starr, 65, will help supervise the project and George Martin, 80, who produced most of The Beatles’ albums, will also be on board.
“It involves the creation, by the remixing and remastering of The Beatles’ recorded performances, of completely new music,” said Neil Aspinall, head of the band’s Apple Records.
The new tunes will appear in a 90-minute show by Cirque de Soleil, the famed French troupe of acrobats, at the Mirage on the Las Vegas Strip.
The project was the idea of Harrison, who two years before his 2001 death from cancer became pals with Guy Laliberte, Cirque de Soleil founder.
The combination of acrobats with the “spirit and passion” of The Beatles will create a “single statement of delight,” Laliberte said.
Apple had long rejected the idea of an officially sanctioned show, although musicians imitating John, Paul, George and Ringo in productions such as “Beatlemania” have toured for years.
Aspinall said great care is being taken not to create a nostalgia show, but one that will reflect The Beatles’ “uniqueness.”
This isn’t the first time the surviving Beatles have “reunited.” In 1995, McCartney, Harrison and Starr added new instrumentals and backing vocals to two home-recorded Lennon songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” for their “Anthology” album series.