Beatles News

Ringo Starr didn't have to end up with The Beatles. He could have been a Texas factory worker moonlighting as a country blues player. He might have been a world-class knitter.

Thankfully, fate had other plans for the now-74-year-old drummer, who celebrates spring with his just-released album Postcards From Paradiseand an induction April 18 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo act.

The Liverpool, England, native was 13 and hospitalized for tuberculosis when he first played the drums. "This woman would come in with maracas and tambourines and little drums. I played the drum the first time, and every time she came back, I wouldn't be in the bedridden band unless I got a drum," he says. During the long stay, "I learned to knit."

Postcards acknowledges his past in the title track, which features many Beatles song titles. Rory and the Hurricanes details Starr's membership in another band before he joined John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in 1962.

"Publishing houses have asked me to do my autobiography details

Cynthia Lennon, first wife of The Beatles' John Lennon, has died at her home in Spain, her family has announced.
A message on her son Julian's website said she died "following a short but brave battle with cancer".
It said: "Her son Julian Lennon was at her bedside throughout. The family are thankful for your prayers."
Julian also tweeted a picture of his mother, who was 75, inside a heart with the message "In Loving Memory".
Cynthia met Lennon at art school in Liverpool in 1957 and the couple married just before Beatlemania transformed her husband into one of the most famous men in the world.

At the height of The Beatles' early success she was, at the insistence of the band's management, kept in the background so their legions of female fans were not aware of her existence.
She stayed at home bringing up Julian while the Fab Four toured the world and topped the charts.
The couple divorced in 1968 after Cynthia discovered her husband's affair with Japanese artist Yoko Ono.

Source: BBC News

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The semi-detached house at 1 Blomfield Rd. in Liverpool is a modest three-bedroom with a stucco exterior, wood-paneled walls, and red shag carpeting. In a typical scenario, such details would make the house feel outdated and undesirable. But Tuesday’s sale was far from typical: The property, which was home to John Lennon’s mom until her death in 1958, sold at auction for $229,000.

That’s $59,000 more than what comparable homes typically list for in the area. The buyer was a London woman named Jackie Holmes, who bought George Harrison’s childhood home last year for $231,000. She told the Liverpool Echo that she plans to live in one home and rent out the other as a Beatles-themed apartment.

This strain of Beatlemania has been going around. Over the last 18 months, anonymous buyers paid $229,000 for one of Paul McCartney’s childhood homes, and $712,000 for the house Lennon lived in until he was 5. Those prices represent markups ranging from 100 percent to 200 percent, based on the prices of similar nearby homes listed on the details

Luxury city centre hotel opened its doors in 2008 and has proved a hit with Fab Four fans from all over the world.

Liverpool’s Beatles-themed Hard Days Night Hotel is being put up for sale today with a price tag of £11m.

The luxury hotel in North John Street opened its doors during the city’s Capital of Culture year in 2008 and since then has proved a hit with Fab Four fans from all over the world.

It is housed in the Grade II-listed Central Buildings, which was designed by Thomas C Clarke and completed in 1884.

Hard Days Night is part of a group of companies ultimately owned and operated by Liverpool-based property firm, Concord Estates, run by Merseyside property entrepreneur, Tony Criss.

Mr Criss has now tasked agents from global property consultancy, CBRE, with finding a buyer for the 110-room boutique hotel with an asking price starting at £11m.

He acquired the building back in 2006 and oversaw its transformation into the hotel and when asked by the ECHO why he was disposing of the business, he replied: " details

by Isabel Vincent And Melissa Klein

Two months before she went missing, Kathie Durst received a call from her husband’s mistress.

On the other end of the phone was Prudence Farrow — the sister of Mia Farrow, a yoga instructor and the muse behind the Beatles song “Dear Prudence.”

She was also married and lived in a Durst-family-owned brownstone on West 43rd Street.

“Prudence wanted Kathie to give Bob up,” Eleanor Schwank, a college friend of Kathie’s, told The Post in June 1982. She wanted him all to herself, friends said.

Prudence Farrow Bruns is lucky Kathie refused — she might be one of the few women to be intimate with Robert Durst who lived to tell about it.

Durst was arrested a day before the March 14 final installment of an HBO documentary series about him, “The Jinx,” where he was caught on a microphone whispering to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Durst, 71, was charged with the murder of his confidante Susan Berman, who was killed execution-style at her home in Beverly Hills in December 2000.

The crime came just days befor details

The Beatles Story and East Z East curry house included on list of unusual Government-approved wedding venues.

An Indian restaurant, Everton Football Club and The Beatles Story are some of the quirky venues where you can get married in Liverpool.

The Government has published its latest list of approved venues for marriages and civil partnerships - aside from churches and other religious buildings - and some Liverpool landmarks are included.

Couples can tie the knot at The Beatles Story on Albert Dock or the Hard Days Night Hotel on North John Street.

Martin King, from the Beatles Story, said: “We very much welcome corporate events and weddings here at the Beatles Story and have actually had our first wedding booking this week.

“This is somewhere totally different for Beatles fans to enjoy their special day - and there is certainly plenty to keep them entertained.

“We decided to organise a licence for weddings after receiving a few requests and it does seems more popular now to get married somewhere a bit different. details

Ringo Starr returns to the cover of Rolling Stone on his own for the first time since 1981 in our new issue (on stands Friday). The happy-go-lucky Beatle gets serious, tracing his whole life to this point, from his poverty-stricken childhood to his struggles with drugs and alcohol to his upcoming induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. He also considers whether the Beatles would have ever re-formed if John Lennon and George Harrison were still alive. Contributing Editor Stephen Rodrick traveled down to Fort Pierce, Florida, to hang out with Starr as the drummer prepped for what he estimated would be at least his 800th solo concert.

On the question of a hypothetical Beatles reunion, Starr says that he believes it would have been possible. "With the [technology] you have now, I think we could have got it together," he reveals. "I think the stumbling block was just sitting around and saying, 'OK, let's do it.' And we never got to that. You know, we did in twos, we talked about it. But I think if we had just relaxed behind it long enough, we details

In the piece I wrote here recently, the talk was of things that happened 40 years ago. Maybe we could stay there for a little, since today is the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's infamous bed-in, a performance "peace" staged for the world's media. Now, I'm maybe not the best person to talk about this, having remained thoroughly immune to the charms of Imagine all these years. Nonetheless, there is something here I think well worth a revisit.

After their wedding ceremony in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono travelled to Amsterdam, where, between 25 March and 31 March 1969, they staged what they called Bed-In for Peace. Each day, for a week, the couple invited the press into their hotel room. Ensconced in bed, they would politely answer questions about their decision to stage this event as a protest against the Vietnam war. If we see it as a one-off caprice, then the event can look remarkably like irrelevant self-indulgence. With memories still reasonably fresh of how ineffective the 2003 anti-war protest was, the idea that sitting in bed for a week mig details

What’s being described as the master tapes of the Beatles performing live in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962 not long before Beatlemania exploded worldwide is going to auction April 1 and is being offered for about $300,000.

The tape, recorded at the Star Club in Hamburg’s red light district and said to be missing for nearly 40 years, will be offered by London’s Ted Owen & Co. auction house. According to the London Guardian, the original tapes, which include nearly five hours of live performances of 33 songs, were made by the Star Club’s stage manager, Adrian Barber, who had been asked to document the Fab Four’s live show by another Liverpool musician, Ted “King Size” Taylor.

Much of the material on the tapes was released in 1977 as a two-LP set titled “The Beatles: Live at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany — 1962,” which the Beatles tried unsuccessfully to block. Those recordings have since been widely bootlegged.

It captured a historically important early chapter details

"These are your photos but just be careful how you use them," photographer Allan Tannenbaum recalls that Yoko Ono advised on a series of intimate portraits he took of her and her husband John Lennon in November 1980. At the time of the conversation, neither had any idea that 10 days later the former Beatle would be dead.

Despite many opportunities in the months that followed to publish the images, Tannenbaum opted to guard most of the pictures until now — 27 year years later. They appear in his new book, Yoko and John: A New York Love Story, a sort of peephole into the couple's final days together.

Initially Tannenbaum, then an employee of the SoHo Weekly News, only planned to photograph the artistic duo in New York's Central Park. While snapping them, however, he overheard something about a shoot for a video promoting their new album, Double Fantasy.

"I kind of invited myself," recalls Tannenbaum, who suggested he attend as a stills photographer.

At first Ono was hesitant. After five years out of details