“Band On The Run” Dolby Atmos listening sessions

From TechRadar, February 2, 2024:

Full disclosure: I’ve got priors with the album Band on the Run. But haven’t we all, to a degree?

For sure, each and every eager ear that turned up to Dolby’s London HQ on a rainy night just days ago yearned to hear something it had never heard before – and yet had heard a thousand times – in the half-century since Paul McCartney and Wings’ third studio album was released.

And oh, did we get it. On the agenda tonight is hearing Band on the Run in its entirety, remixed for this glorious Dolby Atmos venue (I’ve written odes to it, most recently after watching Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis here) by long-time friend of McCartney and producer of his work, Giles Martin, for its 50th anniversary. We also get an informal Q&A session with Martin.

[…] We revel in his wry anecdotes about the “indefatigable, constantly searching for a new sound” McCartney, now 81 years old. We laugh when Martin quips, “We were working on New in 2013 and Paul had been to the Globe to see some Shakespeare. He came into the studio the next day wanting to record with Sagbutts & Coronetts – particularly the sagbutt. Yes, an early baroque trombone!“

But the music is our master (the McCartneys’, Martin’s, Dolby’s) and that’s what we’re chiefly here to enjoy.

I was able to bag an ideal seat in the middle of the fourth row of Dolby’s elite facility. And the Dolby Atmos remix of this 50-year-old album, released in November 1973, from said seat was remarkable. Backing vocals in the title track (you know them, “If we ever get outta here”) build gradually from the front of the house to either side of my ears. You can hear that each member of Wings felt more than a little trapped at the time of recording. 

Want to latch onto a string-pull or cowbell in Bluebird? Want to hone in on a single saxophone, a jangle of keys in Jet or simply hold hands with a lesser-spotted musical passage until its eventual conclusion? You can – they’re all here and with much more space around them than you’re used to.  

Martin’s favorite track on the album? “Oh, Band on the Run itself. It’s brave – to me it’s Paul’s version of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android“.

The hardest song to approach? He answers without hesitation: “Jet is a tricky track”.

How does the process work? “Paul and I sit with a button to switch between the stereo mix and new mix we’ve got“, Martin answers, “And sometimes Paul says ‘You’ve missed a bit’, or ‘You’ve done it differently but I like it’, and we always have a lovely time. But the stereo version of Jet is really quite gnarly and compressed, so it’s about still respecting that gnarly sound.” […]

From TechRadar, February 2, 2024