Beatles News

A music mogul’s assistant from Runcorn nicknamed ‘Mr Fixit’ by Paul McCartney has been honoured with a blue heritage plaque at The Brindley theatre.

Alistair Taylor charmed Brian Epstein in a job interview and joined him on his musical adventures and was with him when he first saw The Beatles perform before signing them.

A biography on the blue plaque revealed that James Alistair Taylor was born on Curzon Street in 1935 and completed his National Service with the RAF before meeting Epstein in 1960.

Alistair also worked with acts including Cream, James Taylor, Cilla Black and The Bee Gees. The blue plaques of Runcorn heritage crusader Stuart Allen, who with help from Runcorn And District Historical Society, has fixed a trail of the mementoes around the town to honour its characters and buildings of note.

Stuart said: “Alistair was instrumental in the rise and rise of The Beatles. “He was greatly respected and much loved in the music business by both the artists he worked with and by fans.

“Together with writer Hall Caine and pianist Martin Roscoe, he is one of the most important figures connected with the Arts that Runcorn has produced.”

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Fans of the Fab Four have a treat in store.

Thurnham author Neil Nixon has written a book on the world’s most famous band.

The Beatles: Myths and Legends exams the wealth of strange stories and little known “facts” that have sprouted up around the pop legends.

Mr Nixon said: “We’ve all heard the story about Paul dying in a road accident and being replaced by an imposter, but when I looked into the range of myths and legends around even I was amazed!”

The book includes a list of records that are widely - if wrongly - believed to feature The Beatles; one of which even fooled Yoko Ono into believing she was listening to her dead husband. It also identifies the true identity of a man, who did resemble Paul McCartney, and the details of the real road accident that gave rise to the McCartney death rumours in the Sixties

Mr Nixon, 56, is a self-confessed “music obsessive” and also a lecturer in professional writing at the North Kent College in Dartford. He has 25 books under his belt, including two novels written as Stanley Manly.

By: Alan Smith

Source: Kent Online

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For his new album, James McCartney – son of Beatle Paul McCartney – was looking for the songs to be “eclectic” and “a bit more raw.” He ended up turning to renowned engineer Steve Albini, whom James admired for his work with PJ Harvey, Pixies and Nirvana. The end result was “The Blackberry Train,” out May 6 on Kobalt Label Services.

Things don’t get more raw than a song called “Waterfall,” which was inspired by memories of the singer-songwriter’s mother, photographer and animal-rights activist Linda McCartney, who died of cancer in 1998. “It’s just a song that was trying to summarize that time after she died, so that kind of grieving process,” says James.

James cites bands like Nirvana, the Cure and the Stone Roses as influences for “The Blackberry Train,” but prefers to emphasize the fact that he’s “trying to be unique and just myself, really.”

The musician will be touring the U.S. this summer in support of “The Blackberry Train,” kicking things off in San Juan Capistrano, California, May 10, and wrapping the shows up in Lincoln, Nebraska, on June 27.

By: Sarene Lee details

Taking a sneak peek at the setup inside Rogers Arena on Tuesday ahead of McCartney’s double date with Vancouver Tuesday and Wednesday evenings (April 19-20), it was obvious the legendary Beatle is going all out for his One On One tour.

State-of-the-art projections were being rotated on massive floor-to-ceiling LED screens while the PA blasted Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean to test out the sound. The stage was packed with instruments, including a grand piano where one can expect Macca will be tickling the ivories. Some of the visuals on display during the stage setup included a kaleidoscopic, multi-coloured animation for The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and black-and-white footage of McCartney with Wings.

In total, 175,000 pounds of gear were hauled into the arena by 21 trucks, requiring more than 250 crew members. “It’s a good size mob come to put this up,” Spring said. Spring, who has been working with McCartney since 2002, promised an entirely different show than the one that set BC Place ablaze (almost quite literally thanks to all that pyro bouncing off the roof) in 2012.

“It’s completely different — it’s another monster,” assistant st details

A mysterious white label of a Paul McCartney & Wings classic has captured the imagination of music fans over the past couple weeks. On March 30, a crop of 12" records materialized on Phonica Records' website featuring a chugging house remix of the ex-Beatle's Band on the Run finale 'Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five.' The limited vinyl run swiftly sold out amid a frenzied demand that found copies fetching upwards of $400 on eBay

The authenticity of the remix's multitrack recordings and McCartney's recent announcement of a 67-song greatest hits package prompted iD to speculate "whether it was officially sanctioned by the man himself." Social media support from McCartney's camp on April 8 only thickened the plot.

Billboard Dance can now exclusively reveal that German veteran Timo Maas and Canadian producer James Teej are responsible for the release (and acted with Sir Paul's blessing). We caught up with the artists to flesh out the story behind the unlikely rework.

By: Matt Medved

Source: Billboard

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Liverpool is no stranger to shows about John Lennon, from Bob Eaton’s benchmark titular musical production to Scott Murphy’s ‘lost weekend’ play Walls and Bridges. And Liverpool audiences generally have a better working knowledge of the ex-Beatle than perhaps some others might. So it’s a brave man, or men, who present another telling of the Lennon life story here in his home city. But while the subject matter of Lennon Through a Glass Onion is nothing new, it comes with an international pedigree, and – critically – with the blessing of Yoko Ono herself. Added to which, it’s not really a play at all. In fact, it’s a slippery customer to pin down. Part-concert, part-monologue, it’s I suppose what one might term aural storytelling, but narrated from somewhere inside the contrary musician’s head.

It’s December 8, 1980, and John – just turned 40 and finally comfortable and contented in his own skin – is returning home to the Dakota Building after a recording session. Idly noticing a fan who has been waiting hours to see him (Chapman klaxon), Lennon (Liverpool’s Daniel Taylor) starts musing on his life, the nature of fame and fandom, fri details

A massive new biography of Paul McCartney casts a sly eye on the revered rock star’s love life.

“Paul McCartney,” by Philip Norman, the author of the best-selling “Mick Jagger,” comes in at 818 pages. While most of it is concerned with the icon’s musical career, it also peers closely at the women at McCartney’s side through the decades.

First off, doe-eyed McCartney was never the “nice” Beatle, the one even parents could embrace, though that’s how he played it in the early throes of Beatlemania. According to Norman, McCartney hit it off with so many ardent young fans the numbers were legendary. McCartney once bragged to a cousin about a foursome he’d particularly enjoyed as the only male. Eventually, the lad from Liverpool settled into a fairy-tale romance with the upper-crust doctor’s daughter, Jane Asher, even living with her family for a few years.

First off, doe-eyed McCartney was never the “nice” Beatle, the one even parents could embrace, though that’s how he played it in the early throes of Beatlemania. According to Norman, McCartney hit it off with so many ardent young fans the numbers were legendary. McCart details

It was 46 years ago today (April 17th, 1970) that Paul McCartney released his first solo album apart from the Beatles. Although McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had all produced and released solo projects before, the McCartney album was the first solo mainstream record released in the aftermath of the group's breakup.

McCartney featured an assortment of tracks recorded at home and in the studio, featuring McCartney on all instruments, with the help of his wife Linda McCartney on harmonies. Several of the songs were Beatles-era rejects, such as "Junk," which was originally intended for the band's 1968 self-titled double set commonly known as "The White Album." Early versions of "Every Night," "Teddy Boy," and a snippet of "Maybe I'm Amazed" were also rehearsed by various members of the band during the next year's Let It Be sessions. The instrumental track "Hot As Sun," also performed during the January 1969 sessions, dated as far back as 1960.

Although Lennon had quietly quit the band the previous September, none of the Beatles said anything about the split publicly until McCartney issued a self-penned interview included in the press copies of album.

Sadly, 28 years to the date of details

It could rank as the classic rock concert of the century — six bands and performers who revolutionized popular music in the 1960s gathering in the Southern California desert over a single weekend in October. The company that stages the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is planning a three-night event featuring Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Neil Young and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters — all Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees — Oct. 7-9 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, The Times has learned.

The six acts have never shared a billing before, and it also would be the first time that Dylan and ex-Beatle McCartney — representing what are widely considered the two most important rock acts of the 1960s — have played on the same bill, albeit on different nights.

The concert is being organized by Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles-based promoter that is a unit of AEG Live, according to people with knowledge of the plans. They could not speak publicly because negotiations with the performers were being finalized.

“It will be their full stage productions, with full sets,” said one person close to the project. That would be in contrast to most festiv details

The birthplace of the modern American documentary is Wisconsin, where Robert Drew brought a crew in early 1960 to film the campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in that state’s Democratic Presidential primary. Albert Maysles was the cinematographer of its most iconic sequence, a long hand-held tracking shot following Kennedy from backstage to a lectern. There, Maysles caught Kennedy in the magic moment—the transformation from private to public, from casual manner to stage manner. Yet Drew’s fundamental insight is the unified field of cinematic activity—in a word, the filmmakers are present and are an inextricable part of the proceedings that they film. Everything that takes place in front of the camera—and, for that matter, behind it—is a performance, even the ordinary activities of ordinary people.

For Maysles and his brother, David Maysles, who worked together to make documentaries for decades to come, performance became their fundamental subject. Their first feature was “Showman,” about the producer and distributor Joseph E. Levine, and its very title bears a paradox: Levine was a man who put on shows, but he himself was, in the film, a man who became a show. details