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Stories   >   'Yesterday' composer Daniel Pemberton recreated the Beatles as inexactly as possible / Variety

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'Yesterday' composer Daniel Pemberton recreated the Beatles as inexactly as possible / Variety

Posted: July 1, 2019 12:00 AM | By: Admin
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"Yesterday" director Danny Boyle asked composer Daniel Pemberton to help actor Himesh Patel become comfortable with the Beatles material he'd be performing. Pemberton hesitated until Boyle promised the job would only last three or four weeks. So Pemberton said yes, and was on the film for a year and a half.

In the film, Patel plays Jack Malik, a struggling singer who is about to give up on his career when an unexplained phenomenon erases all memory of the Beatles from the entire world - except, amazingly, for him. He starts playing Beatles songs that nobody else knows and is acclaimed as a songwriting genius.

Pemberton recruited a singer-songwriter friend, music supervisor Adem Ilhan, and together they turned the "EastEnders" actor into a credible musical performer who (in the romantic-comedy script by "Love Actually" writer Richard Curtis) turns his memories of Beatles songs into a meteoric rise to pop stardom.

Pemberton, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for scoring Boyle's "Steve Jobs," said those "three or four weeks" turned into a massive job involving musical direction, working with the actors and, finally, scoring the film with a recognizably Beatles-flavored soundscape. "We worked with Himesh on all aspects of performance," Pemberton told Variety. "The idea was to get him comfortable with the songs and getting him to the stage where basically he could play Wembley Stadium."

READ THE FULL Variety ARTICLE