Beatles revived for kids TV show Beat Bugs by Daniel Johns, Josh Wakely

Daniel Johns and fellow Novocastrian Josh Wakely are bringing the Beatles’ hits to a children’s animated TV garden.

Beat Bugs creators Josh Wakely, left, and Daniel Johns. Picture: Christina House

Throughout his career in Silverchair and beyond Daniel Johns has pushed himself in new directions, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before he became a big blue slug called Walter. That’s the character to which Johns lends his voice in the new animated children’s series Beat Bugs, created by fellow Novocastrian Josh Wakely, but Johns’s speaking role is only a small part of the story.

What the 37-year-old musician is most happy about is that he got to produce and arrange more than 30 songs from the Beatles’ catalogue for the show — and have household names such as Sia, Pink, Eddie Vedder and Robbie Williams sing them.

“It’s a dream job to go into the studio and dissect all of the Beatles’ music,” says the singer, who bought his first Beatles album, The Beatles (also known as the White Album), when he was nine. “That remains one of my favourite pieces of music,” he says “They are responsible for writing some of the greatest songs of all time.”

Spending time with the Beatles catalogue — breaking it down and building it again — was also a learning experience for the Australian star. “That was half the reason I was so excited,” he says. “I had to force myself to pick up a guitar on occasions and figure stuff out.”

VIDEO: Watch Episode 1 of Beat Bugs

That Johns got to rework so many Beatles classics was an incredible coup for writer, director and producer Wakely, who has spent six years bringing Beat Bugs, 52 animated stories about five bugs who live in a suburban back yard, to life.

The first three of those years were spent working on the show without having the rights to the Beatles’ music. All the young director had was a strong belief in what he was doing.

That faith proved worthwhile in early 2014 when publishers Sony/ATV liked Wakely’s vision of bringing the Fabs’ songs to a new audience via stories written around them. They gave Wakely’s GRACE production company licence to use hallowed material such as Magical Mystery Tour, Penny Lane, All You Need is Love and Strawberry Fields Forever in the show.

“It’s pretty incredible that we got the rights,” says Johns. “That’s the thing that always surprises me about Josh. He’s so ambitious and brave. When he told me what he was trying to do I said, ‘I wish you the best of luck, but I don’t fancy your chances.’ I still don’t know how he managed to pull it off. It is such an honour to have a part in it, but of course there’s pressure that comes with that to do a good job.”

The series, which is aimed at five to seven-year-olds, screens on the Seven Network and from August 3 on Netflix. Beat Bugs is the collected adventures of five characters: Jay, a mischievous beetle; a ladybug called Kumi; Crick the cricket; Buzz the fruit fly; and the aforementioned Walter.

“They have lived in my head for so long that I don’t have their date of conception,” says Wakely, taking stock of his achievement while in Sydney for meetings at Seven’s Sydney headquarters. He describes the five bugs as “little bits of me, probably. Even when I’m not writing episodes they occupy a strange corner of my mind”.

Each episode of Beat Bugs is designed to tell a story through a Beatles song, but with simple lessons about life embedded therein.

“The reason those songs have held up is not just the music,” says Wakely. “It’s because there are stories inside them. It’s about teaching kids, but with a bit of humour and not in a patronising way. All You Need is Love was the main message we wanted to put in front of kids.”

For Wakely the completion of the show marks the end of a long and arduous journey. A self-confessed workaholic, he has several projects on the go, including a feature film and a television drama series, Time Out of Mind, based on the songs of Bob Dylan, for which he also has secured the rights. It’s a high point in his career, which has been on an upwards trajectory since he graduated from the Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts. He studied acting but then turned his hand to writing and directing. Wakely was one of the writers on the award-winning Australian children’s series Lockie Leonard.

It was while pitching and selling screenplays in Los Angeles after moving there with his wife that he had the idea of using Beatles songs to tell children’s stories, although he can’t remember how or why he was so inspired.

“When you’ve lived with an idea for so long you can’t really remember its origins,” he says. Wakely is an animated figure when he talks about his work, clearly driven by his vision of and belief in the creatures he created. He is also relieved that after six years of hard work, half of that time not knowing if the series would get made, it finally has come to fruition.

“More than 1000 people were involved in the making of the series, including a team of writers from around the globe and animaters in Los Angeles, Vancouver and Australia,” he says. “It was my full-time job for three years.

“I was living in Los Angeles and I had sold some screenplays. I made the decision that I wanted to do this. I was passionate about bringing the best music in history to children through Pixar-quality animation.

“I asked my wife to give me five months to work on it, then it was eight months, then it was a year. The money I had made from selling screenplays was about to run out.

“Then at about the two-year mark I was obsessed. It started to seem real. I didn’t want to be the guy that nearly got the Beatles’ rights. That’s just a bad story to tell, so that last year was really harrowing. When I thought I might have the rights they suddenly became elusive, but I’d go back and write another script or I’d work up the songs with Daniel.”

Wakeley and Johns didn’t know each other in Newcastle when they were growing up, even though they lived only streets away from each other and Wakely went to the same school as Johns’s brother. They met in 2011 when the pair collaborated on the musical short film My Mind’s Own Melody (2012), with Wakely the writer and director and Johns contributing music. From that experience it became clear to each of them that they worked well together.

“I would get him to read my scripts and he would send me stuff when he was making his last album,” says Wakely, referring to Johns’s solo debut album Talk (2015). Thus a close bond was formed and Johns was the only candidate when the director needed someone to give the Beatles music a new shape.

“It was a real privilege and honour to get asked to do it,” says Johns. “I don’t know any musician who would turn that down.”

It helps in their collaboration that Johns has a wide knowledge of film, while Wakely has a great appreciation of an extensive range of music.

“I work with some extraordinary people,” says Wakely, “but the artistic collaboration and the way we know how to work together at a very intuitive level … I don’t often experience that. He’s able to know what I’m thinking. For a storyteller I think musically. Melody is a type of storytelling. He’s a real cinephile. I come at storytelling from a musical base and he comes at songs in a visual way.”

The two worked together across an 18-month period, primarily in Sydney, recording with a vast number of musicians that included a core band, a few orchestras and a children’s choir. “We were working quite quickly and freely,” says Johns. “I wanted to get it feeling like a band as well. I didn’t want to go in and program stuff and have it come out and be not real. Kids and the Beatles deserve to hear human beings playing their music.”

Johns, who is also splitting his time between Australia and LA where he is working on a new recording project, says the hardest thing about the Sydney sessions was trying to keep his rock ’n’ roll animal in check while recording some of the Beatles’ more experimental offerings.

“My natural inclination, especially with the psychedelic stuff, was I wanted to make it absolutely wild, take it to the next level of weirdness,” he says. “Then Josh would come in and say, ‘No mate, you can’t do that, dude, it’s for kids.’ So for me it was like having to be quite strict about the approach and not do what my natural instincts were telling me to do.”

After the recording beds had been done, the tracks were sent off to the various artists for them to add their vocals. A few years ago Wakely put together a wish list of singers while on a flight from Sydney to LA. He had them on a whiteboard in his office too, never imagining for one minute that all of the people on it would agree to take part, but they did. Rod Stewart, the Shins, Of Monsters and Men, Regina Spektor and James Bay are among the other acts on the roster. Two volumes of the tracks recorded for the series are being released in all formats on August 5.

Sia, who sings the Lennon-McCartney song Blackbird, has a special place in Wakely’s heart for a couple of reasons. The first is for the speed with which she recorded her vocal and sent it back.

Wakely sent the track to her one night and when he got up in the morning the completed work was sitting in his inbox. The clincher was when he played it to his three-year-old son on the veranda of the family’s apartment. “He gave it the thumbs up,” he says. “I always had Sia in mind for Blackbird. It was like working with a genius-meets-a-scientist. She works with such precision. Hers might just be the definitive version of that song.”

Other highlights include Vedder’s reading of Magical Mystery Tour, Chris Cornell doing Drive My Car and Pink’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Those artists and the others in the series may not be the only ones to take up the Beat Bugs baton. There is talk of another season, although nothing is finalised. That could depend on the Novocastrians’ work commitments.

Johns, however, is delighted he got the chance to work on such a distinguished catalogue of songs and to present them to a new, very young audience, although that wasn’t the hard part, he says.

“When Josh came to me with the idea,” he says, “it seemed so obvious that almost the entire Beatles catalogue, with the exception of some of the references in the lyrics, are so child friendly. The reason it was really stressful at times was because I wanted to make sure it was really good.”

Beat Bugs is available on Yahoo 7PLUS and screens on 7TWO from Monday. The Beat Bugs soundtrack will be released by Republic Records/Universal early next month.