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“Rain” remains one of the Beatles’ most beloved tracks. It’s a fan-favorite for its experimental production. How did John Lennon come up with “Rain?” According to him, this masterpiece was a gift from a higher power. Learn more about why Lennon thought he got a bout of divine intervention, below.

If the rain comes
They run and hide their heads
They might as well be dead
If the rain comes
If the rain comes

When the sun shines
They slip into the shade
And sip their lemonade
When the sun shines
When the sun shines

While trying to compose “Rain,” Lennon ran into some road blocks. He had the bones of the song fleshed out, but it wasn’t worthy of release in its current state, according to Lennon. He decided to take a smoke break–a marijuana smoke break that is. Despite it being a way to kick back, it ultimately became just the ticket for Lennon to finish this track.

“I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana,” Lennon once explained. “As I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, details

There's no denying the vast impact both groups had on the evolution of popular music.

After The Beatles kickstarted the British Invasion, the entire world took notice of the Liverpudlian whippersnappers and their generational songwriting.

Opening the gateway for a number of British bands to succeed across the Atlantic and around the world, their cultural fingerprints are still felt today.  Though The Beatles may have become the biggest band in popular music history, America already had their own music idols at the same time bands like The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Small Faces, The Who, The Zombies, and many others began flooding the airwaves across the Atlantic.

The Beach Boys were a cultural behemoth in their own right, and epitomised youth values in the US - particularly on the West Coast - more than the Fab Four ever could in the beginning.

The Beach Boys reveal how Pet Sounds influenced one of The Beatles' biggest albums. Barbie's Margot Robbie refused to listen to The

In 1963, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson, Bruce Johnston, and Carl Wilson rode the wave to number three in the US Billboard charts with 'Surfin' U.S.A.'

A year later, many groups of the details

The Beatles fans were left split after a fan suggested there is a better album in their discography than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with an album released before it tipped as their 'best'.

Fans of the legendary Liverpudlian rock group The Beatles are split on which of their albums sounds better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The record catapulted the Fab Four into the history books, with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison's album still considered one of the greatest of all time. Fans are now suggesting there may be one album released before Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that is actually better.

A post to the r/Beatles subreddit had users discuss whether there was an album which could better the achievement of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Many were split on one suggestion, with some saying the album should be discredited as it is just "four number one singles" on the second half.

The original post suggests Magical Mystery Tour, an album The Beatles made to tie in with a movie of the same name, is far superior to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Source: themirror.com/Ewan Gleadow

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George Harrison is as foundational to electronic music as Black Sabbath is to metal. Welcome to No Skips, the weekly column where we take an album track by track to see if any tracks are skippable or not! The verdict is pretty simple this week, given the Beatles member released his 1969 album “Electronic Sound” as a two-track composition.

I admire Harrison’s confidence to drop this dookie of an album in this era of the Beatles’ commercial height, as “Abbey Road” would use the Moog synthesizer that defines “Electronic Sound” in clever and less annoying ways. However, having listened to abrasive noise music acts in the past, part of me enjoys “Electronic Sound,” a sentiment that most listeners from the 1960s and today couldn’t fathom to share.

Album covers got riskier in the ‘60s, but Harrison’s may take the cake. The only comparisons I can make are to the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and drawings that kids in therapy are forced to create to portray problems happening in the home. The atmosphere in the Beatles’ recording studios during this time was tumultuous and this may have been Harrison’s way of showing that all was not details

A contract from a controversial 1966 concert by The Beatles is one of the many pieces of Beatles memorabilia currently available at Rockaway Records, which boasts having over $1 million worth of rare items related to the band in stock.

The contract in question was from the band’s concert in Memphis that year, known as the “cherry bomb” concert because someone threw a cherry bomb and firecrackers at the stage. The show happened not long after John Lennon was quoted as saying the band was “bigger than Jesus.”

“In our nearly 50 years in business we have had countless amazing Beatles artifacts, but never an original contract,” Rockaway Records co-founder Wayne Johnson shares. “The opportunity to own one from a historically significant show is a collector’s dream.”

Other Beatles-related items in stock include unused concert tickets from 1964, 1965 and 1966, hundreds of rare Beatles LPs and 45s, plus items autographed by all four members of the group.

More information on the collection can be found at rockaway.com.

When Paul McCartney and John Lennon met as teenagers, John, being two years older, naturally assumed the leadership role in what would eventually become The Beatles.

However, following the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967, Paul took control and stepped up to fill his shoes. In the Disney+ documentary The Beatles: Get Back, it's evident that Paul's leadership style was charismatic and he seemed more dominant than John during the 1969 Let It Be sessions.

The first episode of Peter Jackson's documentary shows Paul growing frustrated with John for not producing enough new material and having disagreements with George Harrison over his guitar playing technique.

Eventually, on January 10, 1969, George had reached his limit and temporarily left The Beatles. The second episode begins with only Ringo Starr and Paul arriving at Twickenham Studios on Monday, January 13, discussing with the next steps.
George Harrison briefly left The Beatles

George's absence posed a significant challenge, as the band was scheduled to rehearse for a TV special later that month, which ultimately never came to fruition. When John finally arrived at lunchtime, he and Paul retreated to the cafeteria for a private dis details

A furious letter sent to Allen Klein from Paul McCartney shows exactly what The Beatles member had wanted from the Let it Be tapes.

McCartney, who had a tumultuous time with the fellow Fab Four members and record label Apple Records following the completion of Abbey Road, sent a letter to Klein warning no one could “add to or subtract” from his works without explicit permission. The furious letter, which saw producer Phil Spector and lawyer John Eastman c.c.’d, noted the four changes McCartney wanted for the Let it Be album. His troubles would continue as Apple Records tried to change the release date of his debut solo album, McCartney.

This letter mentions only The Long and Winding Road, with the problems surrounding the recording of the song and its mix highlighted by McCartney.

He wrote: “In future no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission. I had considered orchestrating The Long and Winding Road but I decided against it. I therefore want it altered to these specifications.” McCartney’s four specifications were as follows:

“Strings, horns, voices and all added noises to be reduced in volume.< details

John Lennon’s tragic death in 1980 forever changed the trajectory of life for his widow Yoko Ono and their son Sean.

The former Beatle was just 40 years old when Mark David Chapman shot and killed him outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City, where he lived with Ono, now 92, and Sean, 49.

The immediate aftermath was devastating for Ono, a prolific artist and musician whose life story is being shared as never before in Yoko, a new biography from journalist and author David Sheff (out March 25 from Simon & Schuster).

The intimate biography covers Ono’s incredible life story, from her early years in Japan and her progressive artwork to her love story with Lennon and the ways she rebuilt her life after losing him.

The book features interviews with Ono, her family, close friends and collaborators, and comes from a longtime friend in Sheff, who has known Ono since 1980 and who previously covered Ono and Sean for PEOPLE in the 1980s.

Source: people.com/Rachel DeSantis

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The woman who broke up the Beatles: Why everything you think you know about Yoko Ono is wrong

David Sheff spent many hours with Ono and John Lennon and has strong views on her talent - and how profoundly she changed pop culture. A popular media narrative implied that Ono somehow controlled Lennon Credit: Mark and Colleen Hayward/Redferns

Yoko Ono has been characterised as many things during her lifetime, most of them negative. Even now, she’s still lazily seen as the woman who broke up the Beatles.

But she was no groupie or hanger-on; Ono was in fact an avant-garde artist asking challenging questions about art itself long before she met Lennon, as a new book about her seeks to show. The art world has belatedly come to appreciate her, dedicating a Tate Modern retrospective to her work last year. But to many others she has always been, as her biographer David Sheff writes, “a caricature, a curiosity, or even a villain – an inscrutable seductress, a manipulating con artist, and a caterwauling fraud who hypnotised Lennon and broke up the greatest band in history”.

Source: Rosa Silverman/telegraph.co.uk

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Back in February, The Beatles won a Grammy for best rock performance for their single “Now and Then.” And the win was a very special one for Ringo Starr.

“I didn’t expect to win, but it was great,” Ringo tells People. “It just felt like John (Lennon) was with us.”

The win came 55 years after The Beatles broke up. It marked the band’s first Grammy win since 1997, when “Free As A Bird,” from Anthology 1, took home the Grammy for best pop performance by a duo or group with vocals.

Released in November 2023, “Now and Then” featured vocals Lennon recorded on a demo in the late ’70s, along with new recordings from Ringo and Paul McCartney, and guitar parts George Harrison recorded in the ’90s during the sessions for the Anthology series.

The song, said to be the final Beatles tune, debuted at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at #1 in the U.K.

Source: ruralradio.com

Ringo Starr is ready to see his past play out on the silver screen.

Director Sam Mendes announced last year that he’s set to direct four intersecting feature films that tell the stories of each of the four Beatles members — Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison — from their point of view.

Now, Starr, 84, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue that he’s looking forward to his film. “I’m excited that [Mendes] has taken the madness of making four movies at the same time," he says.

"My life as a lad, John's life, Paul's life, George's life, I mean, it must interact in some way," adds Starr. "There’ll be Beatles in mine around when I joined, and there’ll be Beatles in Paul’s. We’ll all be there. So I’m excited to see what he does with it.”

While no official casting announcements have been made, Starr seemingly confirmed that Barry Keoghan will pick up a set of drumsticks to portray him, saying in an interview last year that he thought the rumors of the Saltburn actor playing him were &ldquo details

George Harrison remains one of the most celebrated musicians in history, and his legacy extends far beyond his time with The Beatles. Decades after his passing, his solo work continues to resonate with listeners, especially in his home country of the United Kingdom. While attention is usually paid to his more mainstream successes — like All Things Must Pass or Cloud Nine — this week, one of his lesser-known, but still beloved releases, is back in the spotlight.

This week, Wonderwall Music returns to the Official Soundtrack Albums chart in the U.K. The set lands in one of the lowest rungs on the 50-spot tally, as it settles at No. 49. The full-length, originally released more than five decades ago, continues to find an audience with Harrison’s fans.

Though it might not be the first record that comes to mind when discussing Harrison’s solo career, Wonderwall Music has previously enjoyed great success. The collection previously peaked at No. 1 on the same U.K.-based ranking, standing out as the top-performing soundtrack for a while.

Source: forbes.com/Hugh McIntyre

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On This Day March 20, 1969 …

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who met in 1966 and became romantically involved in 1968, got married in Gibraltar.

They honeymooned in Paris, Amsterdam and Montreal, staging bed-ins for peace in the latter two cities. Lennon documented the whole honeymoon experience in the top 10 single “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” recorded with help from Paul McCartney.

The couple welcomed their only son, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, in October 1975 and remained married until Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980.

They did separate for 18 months between 1973 and 1975, during which Lennon dated May Pang. That time was referred to as Lennon’s “Lost Weekend.” A documentary from Pang’s point of view, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, was released in 2023.

John and Yoko are the subject of another documentary, One to One: John & Yoko, which follows the 18 months they lived in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early ’70s, culminating with their 1972 One to One concerts, Lennon’s only full-length performances after The Beatles‘ 1970 breakup.

Source: kslx.com

Ringo Starr Barbara Bach attend Starr's annual 'Peace And Love' campaign, in Beverly Hills, California, on July 7, 2024.

Ringo Starr keeps things simple. He and his wife, actress Barbara Bach, have been married for nearly 44 years, so the pair are clearly doing something right. But when asked if he has a secret to marital bliss, the legendary rocker’s answer comes easily: “No.”

The rule, according to Starr, is there is no rule.

“There’s up-and-down days, and sometimes I’m really stupid, and then we get over it,” he tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.

Starr, 84, and Bach, 77, tied the knot in London 1981 and have been happily married ever since, raising five children as part of their blended family (The former Beatle shares sons Zak, 59, and Jason, 57, and daughter Lee, 54, with his late ex-wife Maureen, while Bach is mom to daughter Francesca, 56, and son Gianni, 52, with ex-husband Augusto Gregorini).

These days, Bach is a muse, too, having inspired Starr’s song “Thankful,” which he co-wrote for his new country album Look Up.

With lyrics like, “My world came crashing down and shattered/Then you came alo details

The final days of The Beatles saw relations between the band tested. After they retired from touring in 1966, the band focused their attention on producing innovative music in the studio, beginning with their seminal 1967 record 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', which captured the zeitgeist and reinvented popular music.

That album's follow up, 1968's 'The White Album' was marked by disagreements. Its sessions were notoriously tempestuous. About that period of recording, Paul McCartney said: "There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". John Lennon later added: "The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album."

The recording of 'The White Album' saw Ringo Starr briefly walk out of the band. It was during the recording of the song 'Back in the USSR' and the Dingle native was said to have grown tired of the mood in the camp and criticism of his drumming.

Source: uk.news.yahoo.com/Dan Haygarth

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This week has turned out to be a very special one for The Beatles on the band’s home turf in the United Kingdom. The rockers appear on multiple albums rankings, as well as a tally dedicated to bestselling songs. That’s not unusual for one of the top-performing acts of all time, but what is notable about the group’s showing this time around is that it includes two brand new releases – from a band that hasn’t been properly together in more than half a century.

The Beatles collect not one, but two new hit singles this week. The titles are not actually individual tracks, but rather very short collections that the Official Charts Company classifies as singles instead of EPs – which many fans would argue they are.

A pair of closely related projects, Saturday Club 31st March 1964 Part 1 and Part 2, both manage to debut on the Official Physical Singles chart. The projects enter right next to one another, coming in at No. 81 and No. 82, respectively. Those two “singles” are actually EPs, and they both feature five songs apiece.
The Beatles on Saturday Club

Saturday Club 31st March 1964 Part 1 is made up of The Beatles covering tracks by American acts such as C details

There were many reasons behind The Beatles' split and relations remained strained for some time. Tensions ran high in the final years of the 1960s as creative differences emerged among the band.

They had retired from touring in 1966 and focused on recording innovative, boundary-breaking music in the studio. That began with the iconic 1967 album 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', which captured the zeitgeist of the so-called summer of love that year and spent 27 weeks on top of the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom.

The recording sessions of its follow up, known as 'The White Album', were notoriously feisty. Ringo Starr left the band for a period, fed up with the mood, as The Beatles clashed.

About that period of recording, Paul McCartney said: "There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". John Lennon later added: "The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album."

In September 1969, after the band had recorded the majority of what became 'Let it Be' (the 'Get Back' sessions) and 'Abbey Road', John told Paul, George Harrison and Ringo that he wanted a "divorce" from The Beatles. Paul went away to work on his firs details

The '80s were marked by dizzying highs and catastrophic lows for ex-members of the Beatles.

The horrifying first year of the decade saw John Lennon score his first U.K. No. 1 album in almost 10 years before being murdered by a deranged fan. Paul McCartney released his worst album ever but rallied late in the '80s amid a new songwriting partnership with Elvis Costello.

George Harrison experienced his own ups and downs. He took a long break after 1982's Gone Troppo failed to even chart in the U.K. then rallied with platinum-selling albums under his own name and with his Traveling Wilburys supergroup. Ringo Starr was actually dropped by his label before getting sober and founding his long-running All-Starr Band late in the '80s.

Lennon died before he could release a planned companion album to 1980's Double Fantasy, leaving his widow Yoko Ono to complete 1984's Milk and Honey. (She also oversaw a pair of archival projects, Live in New York City and Menlove Ave., both from 1986.) There were a few partial reunions in his absence, including "Take It Away" (featuring McCartney, Starr and former Beatles producer George Martin), "When We Was Fab" (Harrison and Starr) and, most memorably, "All Those Years Ago" (Har details

If you had told me when I was a young teenager — swooning over a certain mop-topped quartet from Liverpool, like most girls my age at the time — that I would one day talk to Pete Best, the drummer often called "the fifth Beatle," I would have giggled in disbelief.

Even though my allegiance was clearly to John, Paul, George and Ringo, I had heard of the drummer who played with the Silver Beatles before Ringo joined the band.

Yet, there I was one afternoon last week, a teenager no more, on the phone with Best, laughing away at his stories and talking easily to the man who played drums before Ringo took the number four spot as he spoke about "The Best of the Beatles," his upcoming show at the United.

That's because Best — who turned 83 last November — was charming, entertaining, funny and easy to talk to.

"It will be my first time in Rhode Island," said Best, who formed the Pete Best Band in the late 1980s and has been touring ever since, bringing the "sound of the Beatles in their formative years" to audiences worldwide.

"It's a powerhouse of a show," he told me with enthusiasm. "There's lots of energy."

Source: thewesterlysun.com/Nancy Burns-Fusaro 

On August 30, 1972, John Lennon played his only full-length post-Beatles concert at Madison Square Garden. But what led to that moment? One to One: John & Yoko, directed by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald, explores 18 pivotal months in Lennon and Ono’s life, from their move to Greenwich Village to their evolving approach to activism. The film immerses viewers in their world—restored concert footage, archival TV clips, and a meticulously recreated NYC apartment where they watched everything from Nixon’s speeches to The Price Is Right. With newly remixed audio by Sean Ono Lennon, this documentary is a seismic revelation that challenges everything we thought we knew about John & Yoko’s American journey.

Source: thatericalper.com/Eric Alper

Sean Ono Lennon was just five years old when his father John Lennon was murdered.

He has now opened up about how it felt to hear previously unheard recordings of his late dad during the production of new Kevin Macdonald documentary One To One: John & Yoko.

"I was completely floored," Sean told Mojo of listening to the box of tapes of conversations between John and drummer Jim Keltner, Allen Klein and MC5 manager John Sinclair that was only recently discovered.

"I think maybe not everyone realises how special it is for me to hear my dad talking or to see him.

"I grew up with a set number of images and audio clips that everyone's familiar with. So to come across things that I’ve never seen or heard is really deep for me, because it’s almost like getting more time with my dad."

Source: goldradio.com/Mayer Nissim

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With a hit new album under his belt, a concert special filmed at the Ryman Auditorium now streaming and a slew of upcoming tour dates, Ringo Starr is as busy as ever. So it’s fair enough that when he brings up talk of slowing down, his three kids consider him something like the drummer who cried wolf.

“Sometimes when I finish a tour, I’m like, ‘That’s the end for me.’ And all my children say, ‘Oh, Dad, you’ve told us that for the last 10 years.’ And they get fed up with me,” Starr tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I do feel, ‘Oh, that’s got to be enough,’ and then I get a phone call: ‘We’ve got a few gigs if you’re interested.’ Okay, we’re off again!”

The drummer, 84, will set off again with his All Starr Band in June for a 10-date tour, and in September, they’ll play six shows as part of a Las Vegas residency at The Venetian Theatre. Starr — who is dad to sons Zak, 59, and Jason, 57, and daughter Lee, 54, with late ex-wife Maureen and stepdad to wife Barbara Bach's kids Francesca, 56, and Gianni Gregorini, 52 — has played with his namesake band since 1989, and the cur details

We know that The Beatles influenced rock and roll like no band or artist before or since. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how music might have progressed without the example they set. But it’s also important to note the Fab Four weren’t above borrowing what they liked from others.

John Lennon’s 6 Favorite Beatles Songs

“If I Needed Someone,” found on The Beatles’ landmark 1965 album Rubber Soul, features lyrics that owe a great deal to the unique sensibilities of the song’s writer, George Harrison. But musically, it’s indebted to another ‘60s band of note: The Byrds.
“Someone” Special

By 1965, George Harrison had developed a great deal as a songwriter, and his contributions to The Beatles’ albums started to become a bit more frequent. In the first four albums of the band’s career, he managed just a single solo composition. But on the group’s first album of 1965 (Help!), Harrison earned two writing credits.

He would also write a pair of tracks on Rubber Soul, released at the end of that same year. That was an album where the group took a huge leap in both their songwriting depth and studio wizardry. &ldquo details

Across his time in The Beatles and as a solo artist, John Lennon wrote countless iconic songs. With Paul McCartney, he was part of the most legendary songwriting partnership of all time, which was the driving creative force behind The Beatles.

In the early days, the two wrote songs together at Paul's childhood home on Forthlin Road in Allerton. As they grew older and artistic differences within The Beatles emerged, the two tended to write independently before presenting songs to each other for final tweaks.

Speaking about working with Paul, John told Playboy in a 1980 interview: "(Paul) provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn't write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock 'n' roll.

"But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs - 'In My Life', or some of the early stuff, 'This Boy' - I was writing melody with the best of them."

About John and Paul's special working relationship, Wilfred Mellors wrote in 1972: "Opposite poles generate electricity: between John and Paul the sparks flew. John's fiery iconoclasm was tempered by Paul's lyrical grace, whi details

One To One – the new film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s radical 1971-73 – is full of fear, intimacy and great music. “I was completely floored,” says Sean Lennon.

It’s 1972 and John Lennon is talking to drummer Jim Keltner on the phone, about a tour he’s planning that will end in Miami Beach to coincide with a protest at August’s Republican National Convention. The ex-Beatle’s ongoing challenge to President Nixon and the US political establishment has him buzzing, but Keltner sounds a note of concern. Does Lennon realise he’s playing with fire? Has he considered the risks?

Lifted from a recently discovered box of tapes, the audio is one of the stars of One To One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ vivid and visceral new film about Lennon and Yoko Ono’s period of controversial activism, 1971-73. The pair’s recorded phone conversations with Keltner, Allen Klein, MC5 manager John Sinclair and more provide some of the film’s most surprising insights. One viewer was particularly struck.

Source: mojo4music.com/Danny Eccleston

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