Beatles News

The official website of The Beatles has been teasing a big announcement since Saturday (Sept 12).

As you can watch below, a video shows a countdown from ’10’ to ‘1’. 1 is the name of the Fab Four’s best-selling hits collection.

Originally released in November, 2000, it has sold more than 30m copies. The official Twitter account for the estate of George Harrison retweeted the countdown video over the weekend, teasing “a major announcement!”. Beatles fans on Twitter and YouTube have begun speculating what could be coming; guesses range from a video clip collection on DVD to newly-unearthed material.

But why, then, link the announcement to 1 so specifically? With the official hashtag #thebeatles1?

Perhaps because the album will be the first step onto streaming services for the band, whose music hasn’t appeared on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Google Play to date.

In August, Showbiz411, suggested that a deal had been struck between rights-holders of the Beatles’ music – which include band members and their estates, as well as Apple Corp and Universal Music Group – and streaming services.

A fellow long-term strea details

Over 800 items owned by Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach, are going to auction, including rare Beatles memorabilia like his three-piece drum kit used in over 200 performances and a Rickenbacker guitar known as the "Beatle-Backer" that John Lennon owned and later gave to Ringo.

The unprecedented number of Beatles-owned objects will be offered Dec. 4-5 at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, California.

"We have so much stuff and a lot of it we haven't seen in 20 to 30 years," Starr, 75, said in a phone interview with Bach from London.

He said the idea for the auction came after The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles asked to do an exhibition about his life and music in 2013-2014.

"It started with me looking at storage units we have all around the world it seems. ... We found we had so much stuff," he said.

Then another project - an upcoming book and an exhibition currently at London's National Portrait Gallery of photographs Starr took of his former bandmates - turned up "boxes of negatives from the '60s onward," he said.

On top of that, the couple sold their country house in England and closed down their apartment in Monte Carlo.

"We thought, `What are we going to do with a details

A legendary producer-engineer for artists including The Beatles and David Bowie will be passing on his expertise to students at Leeds Beckett University.

Ken Scott has been appointed Visiting Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts.

His 50-year career in the recording industry began when he got a job in the tape library at Abbey Road studios in London aged 16. He quickly worked his way up to the position of assistant engineer, where his first session was on side two of Beatles album A Hard Day’s Night and eventually became recording engineer on Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album.

Ken said: “I was lucky enough to start in the recording business by getting what I consider to be the best training ever and because of that I feel it essential for me to bring at least some of what I learned to the young and upcoming engineers and producers in this fast-changing world of music.

“It is with this in mind that I am pleased and extremely proud to be given this opportunity to be able to bring my experience to the students of Leeds Beckett University.”

Ken worked with a host of other big names in popular music including Pink Floyd and the Hollies details

Hollywood Vampires is a group of rock legends—with Johnny Depp on guitar—that pay tribute to their fallen hard-partying friends through rock ’n’ roll.

“We’re doing a Pink Floyd song today that I don’t know at all, ‘Welcome to the Machine,’” Alice Cooper tells me almost immediately after we say hello, with a hint of fear in his voice. “They’re doing some kind of a tribute album and they said, ‘We want you to do this song,’ and I'm thinking, ‘The timing on these lyrics is so wacky and the melody line just kind of lays there,’ and the more I listened to it the more worried I got. So this is going to be a nightmare today.”

When I tell Cooper that it took Pink Floyd friend Roy Harper to nail the vocal he’s instantly relieved. “Oh, good! Honestly that makes me feel better,” Cooper says, loosening up visibly. “Now I can walk in and feel OK. I have so little ammunition.”

Cooper is in New York with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry to promote their new album, Hollywood Vampires, named for the legendary mid-’70s Los Angeles nightly drinking club that included Cooper, John Lennon, Ke details

Today, the most covered song in history, Lennon-McCartney’s famous love song, ‘Yesterday’ turns 50 years old. Where has the time gone, and what impact did this raw, beautiful melody have on the musical and social structures of the 20th Century and even today?

When the single of ‘Yesterday’ was released on September 13, 1965, it is all but likely that The Beatles, Apple Records and indeed EMI would have totally, undeniably underestimated the success and significance of this one simple, four-chord pop song. Yesterday topped the American chat in 1965 after its’ release as both a single and on the album Help! in August and September of 1965.

What’s unique about this single is the complete and seismic departure of the group from the then-high energy, simple love songs associated with that of the Beatlemania period and the large stadium tours that the group embarked on in the early 1960s. However, here, the single is so melodic, yet so simple. McCartney’s lead vocal is accompanied with a solo acoustic guitar and a string quartet, written by producer, George Martin.

Yesterday was voted best song of the 20th Century by the BBC Radio in 1999, in the following year, details

Abbey Road Studios will host a new series of public lecture events this November entitled ‘Sleeve Notes: From Mono to Infinity,’ and presented by music producer and recording engineer Alan Parsons. Parsons is indelibly linked to Abbey Road – most notably for his work with Pink Floyd, The Beatles and his own music with The Alan Parsons Project. The ex-Abbey Road staffer, now resident in California, will chart the development of his own skills and experience as an engineer, producer and recording artist alongside the developments in music technology at Abbey Road

He will share his first hand experiences – both anecdotal and educational - of his time working with the iconic artists who passed through the Studios’ doors. The talks will incorporate audio recordings, video footage, photos and vintage studio equipment used to create classic tracks. ‘Sleeve Notes’ will include an audience Q&A with Alan, which will be co-hosted by David Hepworth, whose journalistic and TV credentials including The Guardian, NME, Q, Mojo, and The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Alan’s long career at Abbey Road began when he was a young trainee engineer working on The Beatles final two landmark al details

To celebrate the 75th birthday of John Lennon, Yoko Ono is inviting the general public once again to give peace a chance: in the form of a giant, human peace sign in New York's Central Park.

Having recently concluded the run of her solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Ono is taking on as her next major project an attempt to create the world's largest human peace sign on Oct. 6, three days before the date that would have been the late former Beatle's 75th birthday.

Organizers announced Friday that the general public is invited to participate in the event on the East Meadow of Central Park in New York. The gathering is scheduled to take place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., near the park entrance on 99th Street and 5th Avenue.

Participants are required to register online, but the event is free and open to all ages. The event, titled "Imagine Peace," is organized by the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, a traveling, nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing hands-on music education to students.

On Friday, Ono officially brought the Tour Bus to New York to commemorate her late husband's birthday in a public event attended by local officials. She was joined by former "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark" details

In honor of his late mother, Julian Lennon's White Feather Foundation has announced it will establish The Cynthia Lennon Scholarship For Girls

The initial funding will be in partnership with Connect To Learn, a global education initiative of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Ericsson and Millennium Promise. With a focus on Africa, scholarships will be provided to ten girls, covering a full four years of educational support for each recipient. In total, The White Feather Foundation is committing to multiple scholarships (in Cynthia Lennon’s name) over the course of five years.

For Julian Lennon, the scholarship arose from two events. The first: the April 2015 passing of his mother, a woman who aimed to live life as fully as possible, despite her hardships. Foremost, Cynthia Lennon was an artist and poet her entire life, as well as a published writer/author; a clever, wry woman with a heart of gold, yet nobody’s fool. The second was Julian’s visit to Kenya and Ethiopia in 2014 to witness the positive effects of clean water and education initiatives funded by The White Feather Foundation. An acclaimed photographer, Julian also captured images of local people and landscapes that were subs details

The English designer has enlisted fellow Brit Cara Delevingne to star in the campaign. Taking time out of her busy acting career, Cara stuns in the underwear shots. "[Cara] represents a generation of young women that we are really trying to reach,” Stella said in a statement.

Cara takes over from Kate Moss, who fronted the ads in its inaugural year in 2014.

Stella also spoke of her desire for the social media and web launch of the ads to “inspire all generations of women to be aware of breast cancer and be aware that preventing it is the most positive approach.”

The photos were shot by Sean Thomas, and in one image Cara is wearing a pretty pink lace set, making a heart shape with her fingers over her left breast.

The collection is called the Alina Playing range, and is made up of a balconette bra, a soft-cup bra and a bikini brief. All three are the same shade of pink.

A percentage of profits will be donated to three breast cancer charities, including Linda McCartney Centre in Liverpool, England, part of the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, which is the boyhood hometown of her Beatles legend father Paul.

Stella's mother Linda died of breast and liver cancer i details

In the decades since the arrival of John Lennon’s Imagine on September 9, 1971, most of its legacy has telescoped around the title track. But, as members of those sessions reminded us in this Something Else! Sitdown, thete is more to this album than “Imagine.”

“Jealous Guy,” for instance, has become one of the most covered of John Lennon’s solo tracks — with more than 100 reinterpretations, and counting. (Roxy Music had a memorable hit with it just after Lennon passed.) And yet, “Jealous Guy” still belongs completely to its author, as Lennon sings with an unmatched fragility over an atmospheric track that included Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner, Joey Molland, Tom Evans and John Barham.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?,” says Molland, who had recently worked with his late Badfinger bandmate Evans on George Harrison’s post-Beatles solo debut, as well. “They just called up and invited us down there. John wanted to try out some things with acoustic guitars, and George had just come off All Things Must Pass. Phil Spector was also producing John’s record, so they asked us to play a bit. We went down and it was a great evening &mdash details