The Beatles - Lovely Rita (retouched version)

Here's a version of Lovely Rita which i made using entirely the original version from the Sgt Pepper's album. Hope you enjoy. I took advantage of the hard panned stereo in the original to come up with a slightly different mx than you'll have heard before.

It's from my reorganised version of the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP which you can listen to by downloading it from this link:


I had some fun with this one. The actual Sgt Pepper's song i always felt had too much going on, so i was pleased to find a pre-brass mix of the song, and i have used that. I have also selected various other mixes for one or two of the songs, which have cropped up elsewhere over the years, like the remixes by George Martin from the Cirque de Soleil show "Love".

Also i was really irritated at how everything on the original LP was either hard panned left or right, or (in the case of most of the vocals) dead center. Not very good stereo, in my view, so i brought the left and right sounds in a bit in a lot of cases, but i also used it to play around with what instruments you can hear in various sections of each song. If the bass and drums are in one ear, and the guitars are in the other ear, it stands to reason you can have a bit with only bass and drums in it and no guitar.

One controversial thing i did was just to drop in the Joe Cocker version of With A Little Help, rather than the Ringo version. Sorry Ringo! I couldn't get the segue to be exactly to my satisfaction but you can spend too long worrying about these things if you're not careful, i find.

Copyright obviously still subsists with EMI and the original content owners.

01 Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - RM1 plus overdubs
02 With A Little Help From My Friends - by Joe Cocker and the Grease Band - BBC July 1968
03 Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - Love mix
04 Getting Better - remastered
05 Fixing A Hole - remastered
06 She's Leaving Home
07 Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite - Love mix

08 Within You Without You
09 When I'm Sixty Four - remastered
10 Lovely Rita - remastered
11 Good Morning, Good Morning - remastered
12 Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Reprise - take 5 plus overdubs
13 A Day In The Life - remastered

extra tracks:
14 I've Got A Feeling - GB 22.71
15 Dig A Pony - 22 January 1969
16 Get Back Reprise - Glyn Johns Mix
17 Good Morning, Good Morning - take 8 Anthology 2 remix
18 Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Reprise
19 A Day In The Life - Anthology 2 remix