Posted: 09 May 2010 05:25 AM PDT

Liam Gallagher will unveil a new film project about the final years of the Beatles at this month's Cannes Film Festival in France, according to new reports. Skip related content

The Oasis frontman has been a longtime fan of the Fab Four and has reportedly acquired the film rights to the band's party-loving pal Richard DiLello's memoirs.

The Daily Mail reports Gallagher will announce a film project based on the book The Longest Cocktail Party: An Insider's Diary Of The Beatles, Their Million Dollar Apple Empire And Its Wild Rise And Fall at Cannes.

The singer has called DiLello's book "f**king brilliant".

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Geek The Beatles: 'Let It Be' Recombined Reality Bites

Posted: 08 May 2010 09:08 PM PDT

Let It Be

Forty years ago, Let It Be closed out a decade of The Beatles' artistic and technological influence. It's a period that has yet to be matched in popular culture. Wired.com will explore the band's lasting impact in a new occasional series called Geek The Beatles, anchored to the band's momentous anniversaries in 2010.

Let It Be, released May 8, 1970, shortly after the band members called it quits, transformed The Beatles from a functioning band into a dysfunctional multimedia brand. The songs on what became the group's last official full-length album were vault-raided and controversially remixed by mad producer Phil Spector from a heap of discarded and bitterly divided sessions, and featured little to no input from band members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

A Beatles documentary, released a week after the album, was similarly retconned, conceived as a "bioscopic experience" that would help sequence the genes for the intrusive reality television we take for granted in the 21st century. In the last gasp of the optimistic but lethal '60s, however, reality film killed the pop radio stars.

"By the time we got to Let It Be, we couldn't play the game anymore," Lennon said in the exhaustive biographical series The Beatles Anthology. "We'd come to a point where it was no longer creating magic, and the camera being in the room with us made us aware of that. It was a phony situation."

The original concept for the Let It Be film would sell instantly today: Inconspicuous but ever-present cameras document the greatest pop band of all time as it composes, rehearses and then performs and records its next album in front of a live audience. "You can glide in with your cameras," an earnest but frustrated McCartney said in the film. "Go places that TV cameras don't go."

But the film bowed to the Beatles' momentous reality: The band, like the decade that it so thoroughly informed, was finished.

What remained after The Beatles' recombined Let It Be killed on the charts but flopped in theaters was not a band, but a brand. That evolution heralded a coming, contentious age of creator-owned businesses, increasing copyfight litigation, remix culture, band-brand revolutions, crappy tech and more.

Here are nine — number nine, number nine — ways the breakup of The Beatles, as well as the twin iterations of Let It Be, hallmarked tectonic shifts in media culture, using the album's song titles as points of departure. You know, just to twist the anniversary knife a little.

Furious at Phil Spector's orchestrated remix of Let It Be, McCartney remixed his own with Let It Be... Naked in 2003.
Images courtesy Apple

Dig It:
For all its uneven moments, Let It Be is a pioneering example of remix culture at work. Producer Phil Spector went crate-digging through The Beatles' sonic back pages, with the permission of Lennon, who called the turbulent recording sessions the "shittiest load of badly recorded shit" the band ever dropped.

Spector recombined what he found and heard, and produced a hit album. But Let It Be's overwrought orchestration, spliced in by Spector, so angered McCartney that the bass player eventually remixed his own version of the sessions, resulting in the stripped-down 2003 release, Let It Be… Naked.

The Long and Winding Road: Spector's orchestration on the piano ballad "The Long and Winding Road" particularly pissed off McCartney. The swollen strings and choral accompaniments marred The Beatles' musical style so egregiously, McCartney argued, that he cited Spector's "intolerable interference" as one of six reasons he gave Apple Corps. for dissolving the band shortly after the album and film's release. Nevertheless, the single sold more than a million copies in a few days, and eventually topped the charts in May.

Let It Be: Like the rest of The Beatles' immeasurably influential catalog, the songs from Let It Be have been covered by more bands than you would probably want to count, unless you were a serious Beatles geek.

Bands like The Replacements and Green Jello released their own albums called Let It Be, while Laibach covered The Beatles' final album in its entirety. Julie Taymor anchored her periodic musical drama of the same name to Lennon's philosophical chant "Across the Universe," one of Let It Be's finest songs. Let It Be's title track alone has been revised by a score of artists as different as Nick Cave and Chevy Chase. And what looks like a chorus of Russian sailors simply murder the tune in what YouTube user Attmay calls the "worst cover of a Beatles song ever" (embedded right).

The song — a woeful tale of anxiety over the Beatles' breakup — has also become a convenient regular on reality-programming phenomenon American Idol. Kris Allen performed "Let It Be" on the show's ninth inexplicable season, and the song was later ported to iTunes, with proceeds going to the disaster-relief effort following Haiti's catastrophic earthquake. Oscar-winning singer Jennifer Hudson did the same thing with the same song. Instant karma is going to get somebody.

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LIAM GALLAGHER TO UNVEIL BEATLES FILM PROJECT PLANS AT CANNES?

Posted: 08 May 2010 10:50 AM PDT

LIAM GALLAGHER will unveil a new film project about the final years of the BEATLES at this month's (May10) Cannes Film Festival in France, according to new reports.

The Oasis frontman has been a longtime fan of the Fab Four and has reportedly acquired the film rights to the band's party-loving pal Richard DiLello's memoirs.

Britain's Daily Mail reports Gallagher will announce a film project based on the book The Longest Cocktail Party: An Insider's Diary Of The Beatles, Their Million Dollar Apple Empire And Its Wild Rise And Fall at Cannes.

The singer has called DiLello's book "f**king brilliant".

--IANS-WENN

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