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   CLUB SANDWICH 68

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1969 + 24 - 4 +1 + a dog = 1993

That Was The New World Tour, That Was - and now, after ten months of the star's trek, in which he boldly went...etc etc etc, it's over, finished, ended. Also now, as a lasting memento, there's Paul Is Live

            Paul Is Live is not the first time that Paul has issued a live album, witness Wings Over America and Tripping The Live Fantastic. Like those illustrious predecessors, this new one is crammed with white hot music from the first optical bit to the last.
            And also, like those previous albums, this has Beatles, Wings and Solo Paul tracks delivered with all the guile, expertise, rawness and fluidity that you'd expect from a McCartney concert recording.
            So we're all agreed that Paul Is Live is an outstanding album. Outstanding.
            But it also out stands for another, very different reason, for something beyond the music. What also helps to mark it out as an album of note and merit is a very special and undeniably clever title and piece of cover art. Even before the album's release, these alone were garnering hefty quantities of Press column inches and drawing considerable approving comment from Macca fans.
            You'll doubtless know what we're talking about. [Not least because you can't have missed seeing the cover of this very Sandwich issue.] The artwork for Paul Is Live is a lovingly attentive parody of the Beatles' Abbey Road sleeve from 1969; and the title Paul Is Live is the perfect pun pooper on all those very silly stories of the same period which pointed out that Paul McCartney was dead. Except, of course, that he wasn't. Isn't, still.
            Twenty-four years after the birth of the ludicrous 'Paul Is Dead' myth, Paul not only, once and for all, sledgehammers it to smithereens but also scores the last laugh and makes constructive use of the nonsense to promote a new album. It's no wonder, when they're as clever as this one, that "creative" people often stand slackjawed in admiration at Paul's ideas.
            But while the idea itself was the product of a moment's inspiration, its execution took a little longer. Cosmetic surgery? The expression might have been invented just for the sleeve of this album. Club Sandwich 68
            It wasn't intended to be nearly so labour intensive. Indeed the concept was straightforward: Paul would return to the zebra crossing outside EMI's Abbey Road Studios and have a new photograph taken by the original Abbey Road lensman, Iain Macmillan - once he had been tracked down to his home in Scotland, that is. The photo session took place on 22 July...
            ...but this, as Roger Huggett, Club Sandwich designer and Paul Is Live art director, recalls, was just the beginning of a saga that quickly reached Icelandic proportions.
            "The original concept," he explains, "was to photograph Paul anew and keep everything else from 1993 in the background of the photo - except maybe to drop in the Volkswagen and a few other details from the 1969 picture. But when we saw the new transparencies, and the zigzag lines which are now a statutory requirement around all zebra crossings, it was obvious to all that it just didn't look good.
            "So after a very long meeting with a retouching house we came up with a proposal to drop the 1993 photo of Paul onto the 1969 version, omitting the other Beatles and changing one or two other elements. When Paul saw that it could work he agreed to it and we got moving."
            If you weren't paying attention during that last paragraph, what Roger was saying, in effect, was that Paul Is Live doesn't feature a 1993 McCartney photograph onto which certain elements have been pasted out or in, but a 1969 Beatles photograph onto which the 1993 Paul has been pasted in, while the 1969 John, Paul, George and Ringo have been surgically removed by means of computer retouching.
            And that's not all, because, as Roger Huggett continues, "Iain's original 1969 transparency was not the same colour as it was reproduced on the Abbey Road sleeve. Adjustments had already been made to the sky, and to its general warmth, so we had to make those adjustments too."
            But what else was changed? Well there's the dog (taken along by Paul simply because he and Iain thought it would be a good idea). The dog's name is Arrow and she belongs to Paul's son, James. Says Roger, "In the best photo of Paul from the new 1993 session Arrow happened to be facing forward, so that you couldn't see her face at all, just white fluff. It made more sense to replace this with the image from the picture three frames along, where her head was pointed toward the camera. Fortunately, being shaggy fur, it was relatively easy for us to retouch."
            And the shadows? "The new photographs were taken on a very grey day. There were no shadows at all, so we had to add them ourselves to make it look like a sunny day."
            The trees? "We trimmed them back. Also, so that the artwork would work on the upright format of the cassette, we made the avenue of trees in Abbey Road look more like a Parisian boulevard by adding a whole lot more foliage on top."
            The Volkswagen Beetle? "The Beetle was covered by a Beatle in every one of the six original 1969 transparencies. But there was one outtake where the car was only partially obscured, so we used that as the 'master', cloning the missing bits of the car from different shots. That's why there's no Black Maria police van from the Abbey Road sleeve on the Paul Is Live photo: it wasn't in the 1969 outtake that we used as our 'master'."
            The number plate on the Volkswagen Beetle? "We had to computer-create the '51 IS' number plate and stitch it in over the old 'LMW 28IF' version."
            The sky? "It's now more uniformly blue."
            Paul's suit? "Paul's very proud of the fact that it was made for him, especially for the new photo session, by Edward Sexton - the same tailor who made the suit he wore on the Abbey Road sleeve. It's an identical re-creation, and we toyed with the tailoring on the computer to get it looking even better."
            Taking out the four Beatles from the original photograph? "This was done by computer-cloning the texture of the background around them and stitching it in to cover where they were."
            Anything else? "Well, I think if you studied the Paul Is Live photo for three months with a microscope you could say, 'Yes, this bit's from there, that bit's from here, and so on', but you'd have to analyse it very, very carefully to see all the work that's gone into it."
            [Please! Let's not start that again - Ed.]
            To his great credit, by choosing to include an unretouched picture amid the album's collage artwork, Paul is not bothering to hide the fact that the sleeve of his new album shows a photo that couldn't actually have been taken in 1993, that it's an example of a camera most definitely lying.
            Roger Huggett concurs, but qualifies the semantics by saying, "The new sleeve photo isn't actually a lie, it's semi-reality. Everything in the picture has really existed, at one time or another, just not at the same time.
            "The really interesting thing for me is that there was actually no need for Paul to go up to Abbey Road for the new photos because the new elements of the 1993 sleeve could easily have been taken in a studio somewhere. But in terms of historical correctness the fact that it was taken on that zebra crossing is appropriate and a good thing."