Today is the 37th anniversary of the release of Wonderwall. Has anyone else got this? I was disappointed to see that George doesn't perform on any of it. some Beatles-esque music, and mostly Indian music. It's OK, but a great pity George didn't commit instruments or vocals.
George's soundtrack to the trippy and seldom-seen Jack MacGowran / Jane Birkin movie (it appears that only Beatle fans ever made an effort to view it) was the first solo album by any Beatle, and the very first album ever released on Apple Records. George himself doesn't play on any of the music, but composed, produced and directed the musicians, both at the late 1967 London sessions, which yielded the more rock-based music (using his Liverpool friends The Remo Four for the bulk of the work), and the early 1968 India sessions, from which, naturally, the Eastern flavored portions of the score came. While the album itself may not be a masterpiece (though it comes a closer than the movie does), it does have several notable moments. From the London sessions, "Party Seacombe" is very similar to The Beatles' "Flying," and the psychedelic "Skiing," though based on one guitar riff played over and over, could have easily been worked into an A1 song. "Drilling A Hole" is an interesting creation, in which George apparently took a tape of an old 78 of ragtime music, chopped it up and pasted it back together to make a new chord progression (isolate the channel without the piano and listen closely to how every time it changes chords, it's a splice), onto which he had a new saloon style piano part dubbed. All in all, a decent enough effort for a first-time movie scorer, especially for such an archaic movie. (Footnote: Perhaps the best product of these sessions was eventually left out of the original film. George had the Remo Four record a fully fledged song of their own composition entitled "In The First Place," the only 'song' recorded for the movie. Though the light psychedelic gem (imagine "Party Seacombe" in a minor key) was left out of the 1968 print, recent rereleases of the movie reinsert it as the opening and closing song.)
It sounds great, however I bought Electronic Sound (69), don't ask me...
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