Elvis Presley helped spark the Beatles' 'Love'

John Lennon famously said that without Elvis Presley there'd have been no Beatles. Less well known is that the King was still impacting the group in t he 21st century.

It seems Paul McCartney was listening, and closely, when a Junkie XL remix of Elvis Presley's 'A Little Less Conversation' topped the charts in nine different countries back in 2002. 'I'd been getting a little bit jealous', McCartney tells Steven Van Zandt. 'I was seeing remixes of, like, Elvis' things coming out - and I was thinking: 'That sounds good, man'. You know, it's still Elvis, but they've put a new beat behind it. I thought: 'I kind of like that'.

To this point, however, McCartney didn't have a ready excuse for such an Elvis Presley-style reexamination of the Beatles' music. Then, a few years later, he was approached about doing a Fab Four-themed Cirque du Soleil production, which eventually became 2006's Love. McCartney, no doubt still remembering Elvis Presley, says he jumped at the chance to oversee a series of remixes - hand picking Beatles producer George Martin's son Giles to do the work.

'I remember me and Ringo (Starr), saying to Giles: 'Look, don't be frightened', because everybody is a little frightened to mess with Beatles stuff', McCartney says. The flamboyance of Cirque du Soleil, and the setting at the legendary Mirage, he adds, inspired them too.

'I thought: 'You know what? There's going to be acrobats flying about everywhere. It's going to be in Las Vegas. It's a crazy idea for a show, anyway. It's going to be very surreal. This might be the first opportunity we've got to mess with Beatles stuff,' McCartney says. 'So, we were encouraging Giles to mash it up. … Anybody who's a purist is gonna worry about it, so you say: 'Go back to the original records. They're there anyway'. But for the show, we encouraged him to mash it - and, I must say, he took the ball and ran with it'.

McCartney has since worked with the younger Martin on his 2013 release New (on which Giles produced or co-produced a half dozen tracks including 'On My Way to Work'), as well as McCartney's current single - a video game-themed track titled 'Destiny'. Turns out, it all started (once again) with Elvis Presley.

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