SIR PAUL McCARTNEY and Super Furry Animals have collaborated for a Beatles sound collage he created for an exhibition at LIVERPOOL’S TATE GALLERY.
The unlikely union came about after the former Beatle met SFA at the NME Brat Awards earlier this year, and there is now a chance that fans could be able to buy the hour-long piece of music and samples.
The gallery has been inundated with requests from visitors to buy it, and a spokesman for Sir Paul McCartney said that he may release it in some form.
“He has had approaches from people asking whether he would release it, and he is thinking about it at the moment,” the spokesman said, adding that it was likely to be made available through the gallery’s shop.
Tate Gallery press officer Catharine Braithwaite said: “We have had a lot of requests from people wanting to know where they can buy it. Fans of Sir Paul McCartney have been coming specifically to listen to it, and I would expect with there being so many students in Liverpool and nearby places like Manchester that there will be people coming along specifically to hear the Super Furry Animals’ section too. It is a funky bit in the middle, which sounds very dance-influenced. It isn’t particularly ‘indie’, it sounds more like Chemical Brothers,” she said.
SFA contributed a remix of sounds to the middle of the piece, though they were not allowed to add their own sounds.
McCartney put together the hour-long ‘Plastic Beatle’ piece for his artist friend Peter Blake‘s exhibition ‘About Collage’. Blake, who shot to fame when he did The Beatles’ legendary ‘Sergeant Pepper’ album, more recently did the artwork for Paul Weller‘s ‘Stanley Road’ LP, which is also featured in the exhibition.
‘Plastic Beatle’ includes previously unheard out-takes by The Beatles and snatches of conversation among the group from McCartney’s own archives.
SFA electro-boffin Cian Ciaran said on Radio 1 that some sounds were so good “you don’t want to f**k with them, like the drums, lyric lines and stuff. It was The Beatles, it was good enough as it was.”
But he added: “The way you can manipulate sound these days, you can do anything. So you can take one sound and change it into something that’s not recognisable to the source sound.”
The exhibition runs until March 2001.