Machine London on Recreating 'Oh Yeah' for McDonald’s #RaiseYourArches

The iconic golden arches become raised eyebrows and inspire an office full of workers to hit up McDonald’s for lunch - 'Raise Your Arches' is the new campaign created by Leo Burnett UK and directed by Edgar Wright with Moxie Pictures, featuring the unmistakable rallying cry of Yello’s 'Oh Yeah.” 

Machine’s head of music Brice Cagan sheds some light on how the team recreated the legendary eighties track for this celebrated spot: 

When Yello created their iconic track they did it in one of the most creative and unique ways of the time. They created samples, and then placed them randomly over a beat and a baseline. Then selected the best parts for their track. Because of this method, isolated parts of the song weren’t available. 

We were however able to get part of the original samples they used, as well as the isolated vocal parts (which are fantastic on their own!). 

This gave us an opportunity to recreate the track as if it were 1985. 

We hunted down some of the original hardware they would have used at the time and recreated the missing parts. We had to emulate the original mix and arrangements with all of its wonderful chaos, without losing any of the original character of the bass and drum tones. 

We then had to arrange this seamlessly to fit the narrative. We added a touch of modern production elements to the master and mix to emphasise some key moments and the story. 

The track is already great, but we were still excited to put ourselves in Yello’s shoes for a few weeks to add our own stamp too.

Check out the film here.