LONDON, Sept. 18 - More than 30 years after they broke up, The Beatles
are to go back to basics with a stripped down version of their classic "Let
It Be" album. 

             
     'This is the noise we made in the studio.' 
      - SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY
             "IT'S ALL EXACTLY as it was in the room. You're right there now,"
Paul McCartney said on Thursday of the album "Let It Be ... Naked."
             After Abbey Road Studios put their 21st century digital technology 
to work on the original 1969 album, McCartney said of the no-frills result: "This
is the noise we made in the studio."
             Ringo Starr, the only other surviving member of the world's most famous
pop group, was equally re-assured by the new-look album.
             "When I first heard it, it was really uplifting," the drummer
said. "It took you back again to the times when we were this band, the Beatle
band."
             A statement from management company Apple Corps said the album will
be released worldwide on November 17.
             It said the group had originally set out to make the 1969 album with
no studio effects and no over-dubbing of voices and instruments. 
             But the album was caught up in the turmoil of the band's break-up. 
It was re-produced by Phil Spector and never released as the Beatles had originally
intended. 
             The track listing for the new album differs from the original with 
"Dig It" and Maggie Mae" taken out and replaced by "Don't Let
Me Down." 
             
      BONUS DISK
             Diehard Beatle fans with an inexhaustible appetite for nostalgic trivia
will also be treated to a 20-minute bonus disc of the Beatles at work in rehearsal
and in the studios.
             As their fame soared, the band stopped playing live and became more
involved in elaborately produced albums that changed the face of pop. 
             But John Lennon, killed by a crazed fan outside his New York apartment
building in 1980, always argued: "In spite of all things, The Beatles could
really play music together." 
             After three decades, Beatlemania shows no signs of fading, with their
compilation album of number one hits selling 24 million copies worldwide.
             BBC viewers will be taken down memory lane on Saturday with the televising
of lost footage that shows Lennon clowning around with his wife Yoko Ono and Rolling
Stones frontman Mick Jagger. 
             The film was discovered in the archives of the Austrian Broadcasting
Corporation (ORF) by a team making a documentary about Lennon.
             The footage was part of a project that Austrian film-maker Hans Preiner
had been working on during the 1960s .
             
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