Beatles News

Ringo Starr's Liverpool birthplace is likely to be saved after years of uncertainty and wrangling.

Liverpool City Council is being asked to approve proposals by developers Place First to demolish and refurbish terraces in the Welsh Streets district. Some homes will be knocked together to appeal to families, while others will be knocked down.

Last year, then Communities Secretary Eric Pickles overturned his planning inspector's backing for a housing plan.

The streets are known as Welsh Streets as they are named after the Welsh towns of the construction workers who built the terraces in the 19th Century.

Ringo Starr used to live at 9 Madryn Street - which is one of the 200 homes that would be refurbished. Sources differ on how long Starr lived there, with some suggestions it was three years before his family moved to nearby Admiral Grove, where he was living as a teenager shortly before The Beatles found fame.

'Insult to injury' Joe Anderson, Liverpool's Mayor, said 80% of residents backed the original plans for this area. "As a result of the prevarication over this scheme from different outside interest groups, we have lost a £13m government grant," he said. "However, given that the details

The Beatles Story has been shortlisted for national awards for two campaigns it has run in the past year.

The Albert Dock attraction’s Imagine No Food Poverty and Beatles Ambassadors campaigns are in the running for the accolades. It is shortlisted for Integrated Campaign of The Year and Digital Campaign of the Year for its Imagine No Food Poverty and Beatles Ambassadors campaigns in the Marketing Minds Awards.

A chocolate brownie was created by Merseyside charity Can Cook to sell at The Beatles Story to celebrate what would have been John Lennon’s 75th birthday.

Proceeds from the 1,200 sold since October have paid for almost 600 meals to feed those in need in Merseyside.

Meanwhile the Beatles Ambassadors competition saw people from 52 countries all over the world compete to be named the biggest Beatles fan. There were 25 Ambassadors chosen, while the ultimate prize was presented to Tere Chacon, from Mexico.

The Imagine No Food Poverty Campaign is also shortlisted in the Marketing Campaign of the Year SME in the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Awards. Beatles Story marketing manager Diane Glover said: “We’re immensely proud to have been shortlisted for three details

IS Paul McCartney being a rock tease?

The 73 year old former Beatle posted a vintage photo of him draped in an Australian flag on his social media accounts yesterday. “Salutations to our cousins down under on Australia Day,” the message read. “Have a great one. Watch out for flying Kangaroos!”

The post, presumably by McCartney’s digital team, was flooded with comments from Australian fans hoping it meant he was finally ready to return down under. McCartney has not mentioned the occasion in the past. McCartney’s last Australian tour was in 1993, but whispers suggest he may be back at the end of 2016.

However the flag photo he used was taken 14 years ago to promote a cancelled Australian tour, which opened old wounds for some bitter fans.

Two shows in Melbourne for November 2002 were abruptly cancelled just a month before they were due to take place. McCartney cited the Bali bombing (which had taken place a fortnight before) as the reason and the fact he felt Australia was still in need of healing, not hearing Hey Jude. “This is not the appropriate time for a rock show,” McCartney said in a statement. He gave no date for a rescheduled event and said & details

Staring at her reflection in the old recording booth window, Michelle Graham recalled a seemingly long-lost era.

“It is very, very sad,” Graham, 48, said, pausing to look around the damp, moldy studio. “I just wish you all had seen it back the way it was before.”

When it was opened by George Martin in 1979, AIR (Associated Independent Recording) studio was a state-of-the-art recording facility which just happened to be in Montserrat, a tiny British Overseas Territory in the eastern Caribbean. Stars including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Boy George, Stevie Wonder and Sting passed through this studio to record some of the biggest hits of a generation.

Seventy-six albums were made here before the studio shut its doors in 1989, when the island was devastated by a hurricane. Six years later, Montserrat took another hit when the Soufrière Hills volcano began erupting, ultimately destroying the island’s capital, Plymouth, in 1997.

Nowadays the wasp-infested building which once housed AIR is a mere shell of its former self. But for many Montserratians, it remains a symbol for what their nation used to be.

By: Ryan Shuessler

Source: The Guardian

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BEATLE fans looking for an extra special bit of memorabilia could find themselves getting into the grove after it was announced that Ringo Starr's childhood Liverpool home is to go under the hammer.

Number 10 Admiral Grove, in the Dingle, where the teddy boy drummer lived until he was 21, is up for auction after its tenant of 37 years died last year.

Owner social landlord Plus Dane will be selling the two-up-two-down to the highest bidder at a special March auction at Liverpool's world famous Cavern Club. It has a guide price of £55,000, but auctioneers Countrywide are hoping it might attract investors with an interest in the Fab Four.

According Plus Dane, which says profits raised will be ploughed back into its housing stock in the area, the Victorian terrace was a regular haunt for the Beatles and Cilla Black in their younger days. If that wasn't enticement enough, it also points to The Empress pub, at the end of the street, which graced the cover of Ringo’s first solo album, Sentimental Journey, in 1970.

A number of restrictions have been placed on the sale of the house so it cannot become a tourist attraction or museum.

Source: Liverpool Confidential

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This weekend Creme Tangerine will be taking to a rooftop in downtown Kirkland to celebrate the Beatles final concert in London.

Creme Tangerine, headed by Kirkland Performance Center Executive Director Jeff lockhart, will perform on the rooftop balcony of the Livengood Alskog building at 121 3rd Ave on Saturday at noon. The free 45-minute event is put on by the KPC and the Kirkland Chamber of Commerce to benefit Northwest Harvest and will include well-known, memorable Beatles songs, including those performed during the last concert.

Previously, the rooftop concerts were held at Pike Place Market in Seattle starting in 2009 in tribute to the 40th anniversary of the Beatles last concert. This year, Lockhart said, they are holding the performance in Kirkland after they decided to play at Pike Place during the summer to accommodate the large crowds. “We just decided as long as people wanted to keep coming out we’ll keep doing it,” he said. “It’s been so cool over the years to see streets packed, shoulder-to-shoulder with people celebrating the music of the Beatles on the last weekend of January,” Crème Tangerine’s leader singer Byron Prather said in a press release. details

Butler University graduate Aaron Krerowicz has turned his love of music and the Beatles into a one-of-a-kind career. As in, he’s the only one. Krerowicz, who lives in Carmel near the border with Zionsville, bills himself as the country’s only full-time Beatles scholar, and fortunately for local Fab Four enthusiasts, he moved to the area in September after attending graduate school and living in New England the past seven years.

He’ll be giving his signature multimedia presentation, “The Beatles: Band of the Sixties,” at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library, 250 N. Fifth St., in Zionsvillle.

“That’s by far the most popular, because it’s just an overview in general scope,” Krerowicz said of the presentation. “A lot of the others are specific albums or specific songs or specific angles like Paul’s bass playing or something like that. We just go year by year, 1960 through 1970. It’s a very good survey of their career.”

While “Band of the Sixties” is Krerowicz’s most popular, it’s just one of more than two dozen Beatles presentations in his repertoire. Album- and song-specific prese details

Roll up, step right this way – particularly if you’re a Beatles fan planning a weekend in the band’s home city of Liverpool. Tens of thousands of Fab Four followers do just that each year, with the most famous group in the world generating millions of pounds for the city. And all this despite the fact that John, Paul, George and Ringo parted ways almost five decades ago.

There’s certainly plenty to see and do if you do make the trip to the banks of the Mersey – whether it be from Argentina, Australia, Alamaty or Andover. Where to start? What to do?

Start your weekend on the Liverpool waterfront where you can admire – and have your photo taken with – the new Beatles Statue. The latest addition to the city’s Beatle attractions, the statue was commissioned and paid for by the Cavern Club and was unveiled on the Pier Head in December by John Lennon’s sister Julia Baird. It’s modelled on the giant image of the young John, Paul, George and Ringo walking along the street which adorns the front of the HMV store in Liverpool One.

By: Catherine Jones 

Source: Liverpool Echo

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CAPTURING THE WHIMSICAL SPIRIT of one of the world’s great musicians and one of the ’60s best-dressed men, painter John Bratby’s Paul McCartney portraits ooze character, one of them freezing the Beatles tunesmith in mid-whistle, or perhaps even a trademark ‘Ooooooh!’.

Two Macca portraits that Bratby painted in 1967 are reunited for the first time at Hastings’ Jerwood Gallery between January 30 and April 17, 2016, in a show of the late painter’s works entitled John Bratby: Everything But The Kitchen Sink, Including The Kitchen Sink. But a third McCartney by Bratby – this one, presumably – appears to have hunkered down and has so far eluded curators.

Bratby, who died in his adopted home town of Hastings in 1992 whilst walking home from his local fish and chip shop the day after his 64th birthday, was one of the British art scene’s great “radical realists” of the 1950s and ’60s. Celebrities who sat for him included McCartney, Michael Palin, Arthur Askey and Claire Rayner. He is thought to have painted over 3,000 works, and many of the exhibition’s most fascinating items were crowdsourced after an appeal for submissions elicited an a details

It’s impossible to visit Liverpool and not intertwine your visit with The Beatles somehow. Whether it’s a visit to the museum down on Albert Dock or a pint in Mathew Street’s legendary Cavern Club, the influence of the most influential rock band in history can be seen right throughout the city.

In February of 1967, The Beatles released ‘Penny Lane’ as one half of a double A-sided single, accompanied by ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. While the former did not top the charts in the UK – nor did the combination continue the band’s four-year stint of continually chart-topping singles – ‘Penny Lane’ remains one of the bands most revered records, and was ranked as the nation’s 6th favourite Beatles track in a recent ITV poll.

The song’s title is eponymous with the street of the same name, and can be found at Smithdown Place, just less than four miles from Liverpool Lime Street.

In an interview with Clash magazine in 2009, Paul McCartney discussed the song’s origin, saying: “’Penny Lane’ was kind of nostalgic, but it was really a place that John and I knew; it was actually a bus terminus. I’d get a bus details