Beatles News

'All the Lonely People ' tribute disappears from Stanley Street bench

Liverpool's Eleanor Rigby statue plaque has been stolen.

The disappearance was spotted on social media after visitors to the iconic character from The Beatles’ 1966 song posted photographs from Stanley Street over the weekend.

The bronze statue of Eleanor Rigby sitting on a stone bench with a shopping bag looking down at a sparrow perched on the Liverpool Echo was sculptured by entertainer Tommy Steele. It was erected in 1982 as a tribute to The Beatles.

The plaque carried the words dedicating the sculpture to “all the lonely people”, and was situated on the wall behind the statue.

A spokesman for the City Council, which is responsible for the statue, said today that the plaque had been stolen. He said: “We are very concerned to see that the plaque has been taken and will be examining CCTV to find out exactly how it happened. Obviously we will aim to replace it as soon as possible.”

By: Eleanor Hayward

Source: Liverpool Echo

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On Sept. 11, 1964, the Beatles played in concert for the first and only time in Florida.

The 37-minute show at Jacksonville’s old Gator Bowl almost didn’t happen.

To set the stage: “A Hard Day’s Night” had premiered in the United States the previous month, and Beatlemania was in full swing.

The Beatles were scheduled to arrive in Jacksonville on Sept. 9 — two days before their show — but Hurricane Dora swept into town and left Jacksonville without power for several days.

The band’s plane was diverted to Key West, where they relaxed at the Key Wester hotel for a couple of days.

Because of storm damage in Jacksonville, almost 30 percent of ticket holders were unable to reach the stadium.

There was also tension between the band and organizers, who had planned to racially segregate the audience. The Beatles refused to play until their promoter assured them that concertgoers would be mixed.

Seats in front of the stage were $5, and bleacher seats were $4.

By: Staci Sturrock

Source: Palm Beach Post

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JOHN LENNON WAS constantly bugged by fans congratulating him for writing The Beatles’ Yesterday, a song he had nothing to do with.

“Yesterday drove him crazy,” veteran New York journo/broadcaster Howard Smith told MOJO. “People would say, ‘Thank you for writing Yesterday, I got married to it, what a beautiful song…’ He was always civil. But it drove him nuts.”

Smith’s intimacy with the Lennons began in 1969, when he first interviewed the couple for the ABC-syndicated radio show he hosted in New York. He was to conduct a number of major interviews between 1969 and 1972. All have been retrieved, collected and made available to buy on CD or download from iTunes and Amazon as The Smith Tapes.

“Once we were in a Mexican restaurant, in a back room,” Smith recalled. “We’d just been to see the musical Lenny, about Lenny Bruce. In the main room John spotted this strolling guitar player, which used to be standard in Mexican restaurants. He turned to me and said, “Howard, in five minutes that guitar player is gonna come in, stand next to me and play Yesterday. And sure enough, it wasn’t even three minutes. We had hardly settl details

By the time The Beatles settled in to write the songs that would make up their legendary 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership had drastically transformed from the early days when they would write songs face-to-face, trading lines. It was now far more common for one of them to write a song on his own and then bring it in so the other could edit, criticize, and maybe embellish upon the raw material provided.

In the case of Pepper’s monumental closing track “A Day In The Life,” the collaboration came from the melding of seemingly disparate parts of songs that the two had written separately. As Lennon told Playboy shortly before his death in 1980, “I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled.”

“Paul’s contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song, ‘I’d love to turn you on,’ that he’d had floating arou details

From November 2014

Last week marked 36 years since the release of the Beatles' 'White Album', a record dogged by rumours of containing subliminal messages that, when played backwards, seemed to suggest Paul McCartney was dead. The cult of myths surrounding the Fab Four goes far beyond 'Paul Is Dead' conspiracy theories, however. Here's that and 14 other strange, suspicious tales about the Beatles blown open...

Paul Is Dead: Rumours Macca was killed in a '67 car crash and replaced with a lookalike had already been doing the rounds before audio of Lennon seeming to say "Paul is dead man, miss him miss him" on 'I'm So Tired' sent the myth into overdrive.

The truth: If true, his imposter at least has Macca's sense of humour - in 1993, he released a live LP cheekily titled 'Paul is Live'.

All the Beatles died and were replaced: See that white VW on the 'Abbey Road' sleeve? Its license plate, '28IF', was interpreted by a legion of paranoid Beatles fans as an allusion to John's age - he'd have been 28 if he'd have lived to the album's release date.

The truth: The group laughed off the suggestion. But then, if they were doubles, they would, wouldn't they?The man in the background of the 'Abbey Ro details

"Sometimes you open your mouth and you don't know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it." Said George about one of his most popular songs, ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)’ that is both the opening track and the lead single from his 1973 album, Living in the Material World.

George had been busy working on the release of the Concert for Bangladesh album and film and so he did not start work on his follow up to All Things Must Pass until midway through 1972. Initially George had intended to work with Phil Spector but his unreliability added to the delays until finally Harrison decided to press ahead and produce the record himself.

Whereas his previous album had featured a large cast of musicians it was a much smaller group that George assembled to record ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)’ in the autumn of 1972. Aside from George’s wonderful slide guitar playing that he added early in 1973 it’s pianist Nicky Hopkins that shines on the recording. The rest of the musicians on th details

Paul McCartney has announced a charity single 'Love Song to the Earth', a track written to raise climate change awareness and pull in funds for Friends of the Earth and the UN Foundation.

The single aims to influence the United Nations Climate Change conference which takes place in Paris this December.

Written by Toby Gad, Natasha Bedingfield, John Shanks and Sean Paul, the four-minute track stars Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow, Nicole Scherzinger and Leona Lewis alongside more than a dozen other artists, and is available to download on iTunes now. It will be released more widely on September 11. There is also a website dedicated to the song and explaining its motivation and message.

On the accompanying site, the song is described as "a song with the power to fight climate change and maybe change the world."

"Some of the world’s biggest names in music have joined voices to inspire real action on climate change, and to support the United Nations’ call for a meaningful, universal climate agreement in Paris this December," the site states.

"Every time the song is purchased, streamed, or shared, the royalties go directly towards the efforts of Friends of the Earth to keep fossil fuels details

I love the Beatles, and like many Beatles fans, I think The White Album is one of their great masterpieces. And one of the best songs on The White Album is, without question, “Dear Prudence.”

But did you know that the song was influenced by the music of the Gypsies, Transcendental Meditation, and the daughter (and sister) of Hollywood celebrities?

“Dear Prudence” was written in early 1968, when the Beatles were in India, while John and George were studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga. It was written for a woman named Prudence Farrow (Mia Farrow’s sister) who was there meditating as well, and became so immersed in her meditation practice that she rarely left her room. Hence John Lennon wrote a playful song for her, where he sings, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?” The music was inspired, at least in part, by a Gypsy style of guitar picking that John learned from the folk-rock musician Donovan, also studying with the Maharishi.

While on the surface the song could be seen as a playful rebuke to excessive spirituality — Prudence, don’t waste your time meditating, come out to play! — at its heart “D details

The contract that launched the most successful pop partnership of all time – bringing together the Beatles and manager Brian Epstein – is expected to make up to £500,000 when it is auctioned.

It is the only contract signed by Epstein and the 'Fab Four' line-up of John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

The document was signed on October 1, 1962, just days before the release of The Beatles' first single, Love Me Do.

It goes under the hammer at Sotheby's Rock & Pop sale on September 29.

Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby's specialist in books and manuscripts, said: 'Without this contract, and the relationship it represents, it seems inconceivable that the Beatles could have achieved all that they did: it took more than inspired musicianship and song-writing to remake popular music.

'The presentation, direction, and internal harmony of the Beatles all owed a huge amount to Brian Epstein. He was, as Paul McCartney has acknowledged, the Fifth Beatle.'

Prior to this contract, the band, which then included Pete Best as drummer instead of Ringo Starr, had signed a contract with Epstein. 

Source: The Daily Mail

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The Fab Four of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are perhaps the most influential rock band of the 20th Century (if not all time). Though only active for a decade from 1960-1970, they have nonetheless had the greatest impact, even beyond contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones and the Who that continue to tour as a group to this day. Even so, remaining members McCartney and Starr have shown no signs of slowing down themselves. So from music to movies and all manner of culture in-between, there are some pretty interesting facts about The Beatles that you may not know.

Back in the USSR

The Soviet Union had a pretty strict ban on Western music, which included all rock n’ roll and definitely included The Beatles. Trying to get vinyl on the black market was difficult and also illegal. However, in the 1950s, a resourceful loophole focused on imprinting the music onto x-ray scans either purchased or picked up from a hospital dumpster. The practice was called “music on the bones” and demand for The Beatles created a spike in this process.

First Time on TV

Though Ed Sullivan was the band’s first live television performance in the US, it wasn’t th details