A collaboration between Paul McCartney and remix producer Roy Kerr (aka The Freelance Hellraiser), Twin Freaks was a low-key release from 2005.
Kerr had made his reputation by creating mash-up remixes, combining vocals and instruments from often greatly different songs. One of his most famous early mixes was 2002’s ‘A Stroke Of Genius’, which took Christina Aguilera’s vocals from ‘Genie In A Bottle’ and added them to The Strokes’ ‘Hard To Explain’.
During the summer of 2004, Kerr accompanied McCartney on his European tour, opening each show with a 25-minute DJ set in which various McCartney tracks were reworked and reinvented. Impressed with the results, McCartney asked Kerr to remix 12 songs for an album.
Those of you who were there for the European Tour will have heard our DJ, Freelance Hellraiser, cooking up some mixes before we came on and people have been enquiring about these mixes ever since. Well the good news is he’s put together an album called ‘Twin Freaks’ using fragments from my original multi-tracks which we hope will rock your little cotton socks!
The first fruits were the ‘Really Love You’ single, in which the Flaming Pie song was converted from a simple jam into a dance-based track. It featured drums from ‘What’s That You’re Doing?’, a collaboration with Stevie Wonder from the Tug Of War album.
The b-side was ‘Lalula’, a new composition which featured the riff from ‘Old Siam, Sir’, from Wings’ 1979 album Back To The Egg, as well as guitars from the 1971 b-side ‘Oh Woman, Oh Why’.
The one-sided 12″ vinyl single was issued in the UK on 6 June 2005, as a limited edition of 2,000 copies. The b-side was an etching of McCartney’s painting Twin Freaks. Due to the limited run it failed to chart.
The album Twin Freaks followed seven days later, on 13 June 2005. Credited simply to Twin Freaks, it was a double-disc vinyl set issued in Europe only by Parlophone/Graze Records. It was available worldwide as a digital download.
Twin Freaks featured a range of disparate McCartney songs, remixed into often unrecognisable forms. Rather than the chill-out sound of the similarly experimental Fireman project, Twin Freaks was full-on dance music, often intense and dark, which was far removed from McCartney’s normally upbeat public persona.
