PRODUCER GILES MARTIN ON SCOURING THE LATE BEATLE'S PRIVATE TAPE VAULTS

George Harrison: 'embroidering a very complex tapestry with a very fine needle'

My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.

One day every last 1/4 inch of this eccentric audio trove may well be exposed to the light, but the first significant retrieval from George Harrison’s voluminous archive is a little more conventional. Released as a companion piece to last year's epic Martin Scorsese documentary, Living in the Material World, Early Takes Volume 1 features 10 unreleased demos and embryonic versions of familiar songs which casts Harrison - the solo artist - in an unfamiliarly intimate light.

He used to wake Olivia up in the middle of the night because he wanted to do an overdub and he had no one to press the record button

The project was handled by Giles Martin (who is, aptly, talking totheartsdesk from Abbey Road.) The son of Beatles producer George Martin has increasingly taken over his father's mantle in recent years: he was music director for Love, the Cirque du Soleil’s lavish Las Vegas production which featured the “reimagined” music of the Beatles, before overseeing the musical details of the Scorsese film. The Early Takes album spins off from that project, which began several years ago.

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