Beatles News

It was 20 years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play and it will be 50 years ago this year that the Beatles first recorded their epic concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Among the many classics on the album, one of the most intriguing and haunting is the dreamy, psychedelic Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite, which promises a "production second to none" on trampolines, with "somersets through hoops and garters and hogsheads of REAL FIRE" and with dancing by a colourful cast of characters, including the talented Mr Kite, the Hendersons and Henry the waltzing horse.

The story behind the song is even more curious and astonishing. On 31 January that year, John Lennon walked into a Sevenoaks antique shop where a poster advertising a February 1843 benefit for Mr Kite — "celebrated somerset thrower, wire dancers, vaulter, rider etc etc", pictured balancing on his head on a 12-foot-tall pole, playing a trumpet, of course — by Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal caught his eye.

Lennon bought the poster, took it home, put it above his piano and, a little over two weeks later, he'd written what he insisted was correctly called Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite. "Everything in the song details

The Beatles blasted the London financial district for their last lunchtime concert. The Beatles ended their concert history the way it began. Before the four Beatles were fab, there were five of them and they played to swinging teens during their midday breaks at the famous Cavern Club and the Casbah, an obscure performance space painted in day-glo colors by art students Stuart Sutcliff and John Lennon, in Liverpool. This was before and after the band pulled eight hour live shifts in Hamburg, Germany.

For their last concert, on Jan. 30, 1969, The Beatles took to the roof of Apple headquarters at 3 Savile Row and sang for their last supper, well, lunch. Starting at midday, Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Star and a keyboardist friend they’d known since their early touring days, Billy Preston, strapped on, plugged in and let loose with an impromptu 42-minute set that was closer in style to their earliest and rawest performances than to their half hour pop concerts. The Beatles got through nine takes of five songs, plus sundry snippets, before London’s Metropolitan Police Service told them to turn it down.

The concert was shot as a last-minute idea to end the 1970 documentary film Let It details

From Barbie and the Care Bears to The Beatles! It’s been an incredible journey for comic book novelist Jason Quinn. Jason, 52, from Crosby, is the author of a Fab Four book with a difference – a graphic novel called The Beatles: All Our Yesterdays .

Now living in Tunbridge Wells and the editor of the hit BBC magazine Doctor Who Adventures, Jason’s working life has been fascinating to say the least.

And explaining how it all began, he says: “I grew up reading Marvel comics – I think I learned to read with Spider-Man! Later, my brother Tim was working for Marvel UK – and it’s who you know so he got me in.

“I thought ‘I’m going to be working on superhero titles!’ But the first title I worked on was Barbie! Then it was the Care Bears. I didn’t get to the superheroes for ages – I was in the nursery and girls’ department!

“I then worked in TV at Pinewood Studios (as head of creative development for Platinum Films) but I decided I preferred comic books so I went freelance and ended up working in India for two and a half years.”

Jason moved to Delhi in 2012 to work for Campfire Graphic Novels as their details

We seem to be living in what the Chinese curse calls “interesting times.” 2016 was one of the most turbulent years in modern American political history, and the turmoil attendant to the presidential election felt exacerbated by the deaths of some of popular music’s most important figures. The list still seems breathtaking: inimitable talents David Bowie, Prince, and George Michael; Eagles founder Glen Frey; Jefferson Airplane founder Paul Kantner; both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of ELP; songwriter extraordinaire Leonard Cohen; funk genius Maurice White…. I’ll stop here out of a kind of emotional fatigue. For one like me, it was at the least a trying year, one which left me feeling that I was losing my country to people possessed by greed and at the same time losing so many musicians whose work provided me with joy, solace, and inspiration. Yes, anyone and everyone have to die. Like many others, I suspect, I have questioned why it had to be these anyones and everyones. (My apologies to both you and ee cummings for the digression.)

Yet, as the French say, and rightly so, “La vie continue….”

It’s important, too, to remember those things which sustain us. For details

Before they took the world by storm, the Beatles were influenced by Buddy Holly and the Crickets (where do you think their name came from?), Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers and more.

And while the Beatles would not have existed in the form they did without taking bits and pieces from those who came before them, they did an incredible amount of things no musicians before them ever did.

Before the Beatles, there had never been a band that had more than one talented songwriter. In fact, aside from Holly and Berry, nearly every popular act (Elvis among them) primarily covered songs that were written for them. No band before the Beatles played in the ferocious style they did. No band had a personality like theirs, and no band spoke out about world issues.

Even though the Beatles broke up in 1970, after evolving at a furious pace while recording 13 albums in just over seven years, the earthquake that was their musical style and influence continues to shake the world. Here are three current bands who were influenced by the Fab Four in a major way:

Foo Fighters:

“If it weren’t for The Beatles, I would not be a musician,” Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl has said details

Lennon and McCartney: One of the most famous songwriting partnerships in pop music history, and this year on July 6th, it will be 60 years since the two first met at a church fete in Liverpool, England, back in 1957. John Lennon was 16 Paul McCartney, 15, and since then, it's become Beatles lore that over the years they had their ups and downs. The question for fans has always been, how did these differences effect their songs?

To mark the anniversary, and their relationship as creative duo, composer Dr. Alexis Kirke from Plymouth University has used an algorithm to "chart the emotional development of their friendship through their lyrics." For a new piece, Come Together: The Sonification of McCartney and Lennon, Kirke will take the data he's gathered to create a classical duet of emotionally-annotated words from 156 McCartney songs and 131 Lennon songs.

Kirke is no stranger to using algorithms for experimental music making. Previous experiments have included using bots with the personalities of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Superman, and Batman to create a live performance. Come Together will be an a cappella performance between a soprano and tenor voice, interwoven where Kirke plotted the emotional positivity a details

A Beatles-inspired hotel in Liverpool is up for sale. The Penny Lane Hotel, in Smithdown Place facing Penny Lane, is on the market for £950,000.

The three-storey Mossley Hill hotel has been decorated with a Beatles theme to reflect its famous location. All 17 bedrooms, as well as the reception and breakfast room, feature Fab Four works of art and memorabilia.

From their windows, many guests can look straight out at the “shelter in the middle of a roundabout” that features in Paul McCartney’s song Penny Lane. McCartney and John Lennon would often catch buses from that bus stop, which later became Sergeant Pepper’s Bistro and is undergoing a slow renovation.

The hotel, once a bank, is being sold by Christie & Co.

Christie associate director Ryan Lynn said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for a buyer to not only get involved in a hotel which is continuing to grow on a yearly basis, but to also be a part of the history of The Beatles by playing homage to their memory.

By: Alistair Houghton

Source: Liverpool Echo

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of when Beatlemania hit Sevenoaks. The legendary British band recorded promotional videos for their double A-side, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, from January 30, 1967. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr visited the deer park on three occasions in January and February that year, each time accompanied by Swedish film director Peter Goldmann and a camera unit from Don Long Productions. And Kent Live has been given access to some brilliant images of that nostalgic time.

Most of the film for Strawberry Fields Forever was shot around a dead oak tree – perhaps inspired by the lyric, "No one, I think, is in my tree". Due to lighting issues the recording had to be completed on January 31. The band and the film crew went to Stratford to film further sequences for Penny Lane, but returned to Knole Park on February 7 to shoot the horse-riding and candelabra scenes. 

They rode their horses out through an arch in a ruined wall, watched by a crowd of pupils from Sevenoaks School. The champagne bottle in the dinner table scene was obtained by pupil Julian Joseph Sylvester, who was then 14. "It was a games afternoon but I was off games due to details

Despite every attempt to marginalize and discredit him, John Lennon still matters and always will.

” I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.” – John Lennon

Mark Twain once described his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as “A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.”

Twain’s quote sums up the complex personality of our newest Scrogue, John Lennon – a sound heart often in collision with a deformed conscience.

Lennon’s achievements as a songwriter and musician are indisputable. With his songwriting partner (and lifelong friend) Paul McCartney, he is arguably the premiere composer of the 20th century. As a solo artist he left a body of work that is alternately brilliant, haunting, and petulant. As a writer he is an experimenter of the first order, playing with language in ways that rival Joyce and Beckett.

Even as we enter an age of not just indifference but open hostility to artistic achievement, his genius is undeniable. “If there’s such a thing as a genius – I am one. And if there isn’t, I don& details

"'A Day in the Life' – that was something," John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1968, setting up a classic bit of understatement. "I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me." The Beatles' catalog brims with legendary tracks, but the epic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band finale has long towered above the rest, a fact made official in 2011 when Rolling Stone named it as the group's single finest song. Studio recordings for "A Day in the Life" commenced 50 years ago, on January 19th, 1967. Here we look at 10 things you might not have known about the Fab Four's most glorious achievement.

1. The death of a friend of the band inspired the pivotal line about the man who "blew his mind out in a car." A core inspiration for the song – specifically John Lennon's opening sequence, about a man who "blew his mind out in a car" – pertained to the death of Tara Browne, who had died in a car accident on December 18th, 1966. The 21-year-old Browne was the heir to the Guinness fortune and a friend of the Beatles'. The January 17th edition of The Daily Mail – which is to say, the edition two days before recording sessions started for "A Day in the Life" – featured an article about Browne's details