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"You see so many people who retire and then immediately expire," says McCartney. Despite achieving more than any man (or any star) could ever dream of, the 73-year old has no intention of ever stopping. "Sit at home and watch telly? That’s what people do, man. Gardening, golf… no thanks," he declares. "My manager, who I don’t have any more, glad to say, suggested quite a long time ago that I retire at 50. He sort of said it’s not a good look. I went, 'Oh, God, he could be right.' "But then I still enjoy writing, I still enjoy singing. What am I gonna do?"

The living legend is about to play at Roskilde tomorrow, followed by dates in Norway and Sweden on the Out There tour, and then on to Lollapalooza at the end of July. He also hit the charts recently with two of the world's hottest younger stars, Rihanna and Kanye West, even if he ruffled some feathers by comparing Kanye to John Lennon. It seems unbelievable that a man who has is still touring, who has sold over 600 million records with The Beatles alone, plus his solo releases, could possibly feel that he hasn't done enough. Yet, he does.

"It is a silly feeling,' he admits. "And I do actually sometimes talk to myself and say, 'Wait a mi details

John Lennon would have turned 75 this autumn. And despite it being 35 years since he was murdered in New York, the Lennon ‘legend’ lives on.

Now The John Lennon Songbook is returning to the Philharmonic Hall in a new staging as part of the Liverpool Philharmonic Summer Pops and the Liverpool Phil’s 175th anniversary.

First performed in Liverpool to sell-out audiences in 2008 during the city’s year as Capital of Culture and again in 2010, including performances in Shanghai and Beijing during the Phil’s first tour to China, Liverpool actor and vocalist Mark McGann reprises his role as Lennon in the concert. The 53-year-old first stepped in to the shoes of John Lennon as a teenager at the Liverpool Everyman in the 1981 hit play Lennon, written by Bob Eaton, which made him a star. He has since reprised the role on stage and on film, including in his show In My Life and has picked up a coveted Olivier Award along the way for his portrayal of the Beatles’ frontman

He said today: “‘It’s been an honour and great privilege to work closely with the world class RLPO on The John Lennon Songbook in recent years. “I certainly hadn’t expected to be appro details

Sir Paul McCartney has shared his "frustration" at people thinking John Lennon was the Beatles.

The 73-year-old musician and John formed the band along with George Harrison in 1960, with drummer Ringo Starr joining in 1962.

They went their separate ways in 1970 and all produced solo music, but John's career came to a halt when he was assassinated in 1980. It was a difficult period for Paul and all involved, and not only because they had lost someone close to them.

"When John got shot, aside from the pure horror of it, the lingering thing was, OK, well now John's a martyr. A JFK. So what happened was, I started to get frustrated because people started to say, 'Well, he was the Beatles.' And me, George and Ringo would go, 'Er, hang on. It's only a year ago we were all equal-ish,'" Paul recalled to British magazine Esquire. "Yeah, John was the witty one, sure. John did a lot of great work, yeah. And post-Beatles he did more great work, but he also did a lot of not-great work. Now the fact that he's now martyred has elevated him to a James Dean, and beyond. So whilst I didn't mind that - I agreed with it - I understood that now there was going to be revisionism. It was going to be: John was the one. That was details

On the eve of his 75th birthday, it's time to celebrate the musical contribution Ringo Starr made to the Fab Four.

‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best. ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.’

I think Ringo Starr was a genius. The world seems to be coming around to the idea. Two months ago, he was finally accepted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — the last Beatle to be inducted. About time too. On 7 July he turns 75.

Some might now plead, enough. Ringo should surely just be celebrated for being Ringo: daffy, doleful, odd. Ousting for good in mid-1962 the gloweringly sexy, Mersey-fan-adored Best, Ringo chanced upon the biggest ride in showbiz history and so became the luckiest Scouser of al details

By the time it reached Osaka, Japan, in late April, Paul McCartney’s “Out There” tour had been on the road for nearly two years. It had played to close to two million people, from Montevideo to Winnipeg, Nashville to Warsaw, with crowds in Seoul and Marseille and Stockholm still awaiting its arrival. “Out There” succeeded the “On the Run” tour, which itself followed closely on the heels of the “Up and Coming” tour, which began at the start of this decade. I could keep rewinding through his past in this way to make my point about McCartney’s tireless globetrotting, but not with anything like the energy and enthusiasm the man himself can summon for each retrospective spectacular. He plays up to 40 songs at each gig, from a catalogue that stretches back more than 50 years. Each show lasts nearly three hours. The intense demands this places on him would have been remarkable in 1965, when he was 23, so it’s anyone’s guess how he does it now. Not that he shows any signs of stopping, or even slowing down.

By: Alex Bilmes

Source: Esquie

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Sony Corp. won a U.K. court ruling blocking a documentary-maker from showing a movie about the Beatles’ first concert in the U.S.

The film by WPMC Ltd. about the 1964 performance in Washington called “The Beatles: The Lost Concert,” infringed Sony’s copyrights in the U.K. and the U.S., according to a ruling in London Wednesday. Sony owns the worldwide copyrights to eight songs in the concert, including “From Me to You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” Judge Richard Arnold said.

The concert, shown in cinemas and theaters across America as part of a 90-minute package with performances by the Beach Boys and Lesley Gore, took place a few months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and helped spark “Beatlemania” in the U.S. What happened to the master tapes after the show “is unclear,” Arnold said.

The songs “are reproduced in their entirety; the extent of the reproduction is excessive having regard to the transformative purpose; and the permit such use would likely damage the market for, or potential value of,” the songs, Arnold said in the ruling.

Calls to Sony and lawyers for the company and WPMC were details

It’s a familiar story, at least as old as I am: across America’s public schools, arts education programs have been slashed as a cost saving measure, leaving private systems and non-profits to fill in the gaps. In my estimation, one non-profit happens to be filling in that gap rather well, doing so in a way that benefits students, teachers, schools, and the private sector all at the same time.

This program is called, quite simply, the Lennon Bus; think of it as a highly technical realization of Partridge Family values: essentially a recording studio on wheels (though these days, it’s much more than that), the Lennon Bus tours the country, making appearances in school districts and after-school programs—many of them severely impoverished.

More than an arts/engineering intensive, the Lennon Bus aims to teach children the importance of team work, focus, discipline, and goal-based learning—and they do all of this by means of a technologically up-to-date multimedia facility. The Lennon Bus also seeks to demonstrate just how valuable such student programs can be to school administrators; having shown off its wares, the Lennon Bus often proceeds to facilitate the donation of the necessary e details

When recounting their experience, anyone who has ever had the pleasure of interviewing Sir Paul McCartney will reveal the one agonising thought that whirled through their mind as they began their preparations: where do I start?

The life and career of a musician so vital that he stands as a pillar in the foundations of rock and roll is naturally so expansive, so prolific and so unique that finding one point in thousands from which to launch a line of questioning can drive you crazy. Of course, that's only half the battle: once you've found your flow, and the research throws up an endless list of questions, where do you stop?

For his 2007 cover story with Clash Magazine, I arrived at my first interview with Paul clutching six sheets of A4 paper and enough questions to fill both sides of each (and that was after some furious self-editing), eager to satisfy a lifetime's curiosity, and squeeze into our conversation and the allotted time the kind of answers any superfan - like myself - would cherish, because who knew if or when this opportunity would ever arise again. We'd begin, of course, by talking about his new album, 'Memory Almost Full', but from there, our direction was unmapped and the landscape vast.

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In 1973, John Lennon was sued by an American music mogul for the claimed theft of lyrics written by rock and roll legend Chuck Berry. The case was settled out of the court but it turns out the Beatle was not the only member of his family to be accused of being light fingered.

Historic records which go online today for the first time show that a century before John Lennon’s unwelcome brush with the law, his great uncle was busy embarking on a life of prolific crime to make ends meet in Victorian Liverpool.

The documents detailing William Lennon’s criminal career, which started in 1876 with the theft of 11 coats and four pairs of trousers before eventually graduating to counterfeiting coins, are part of 1.9 million legal and criminal records held by the National Archives now available on the internet.

The vast database details the nefarious activities of hundreds of thousands of Britons over 157 years until 1936, as well as chronicling the lives of some of the justice system’s more notorious enforcers, including the man reputed to be Britain’s longest-serving hangman.

By: Cahal Milmo

Source: The Independent

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After collaborating with the likes of Kanye West and Rihanna, Paul McCartney is continuing to work with a younger generation of influential artists. This time around he's teamed up with Lady Gaga and Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready for the soundtrack to a new animated feature he's producing titled High in the Clouds. The film is based off the children's book McCartney co-authored in 2005, and Macca will also voice one of the film's characters, Deadline reports.

Gaga hinted at the collaboration back in February, saying she was working in the studio with McCartney on an unspecified project.

"Had a beautiful session with Sir Paul McCartney and friends. Working on one of his many secret projects! Killer musicians, vibe, and lots of laughs," Gaga captioned a photo on Instagram of herself alongside McCartney, McCready and a room full of instrumentalists. "Always a good time with my buddy. I'll never forget when he called me last year to work and I hung up the phone cuz I thought it was a prank!"

By: Caitlin Carter

Source: Music Times

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