Beatles News

If you’d been taking bets in 1970 on which former Beatle would be the most successful in the new decade, George Harrison was definitely – to borrow the name of one of his future hits – the dark horse. But as he’d sing in that tune, “Baby, it looks like I’ve been breaking out.”

In November, he turned the page on the Fabs with All Things Must Pass, a triple album brimming with artistic confidence and gorgeous, melancholy songs, not to mention the world’s first-ever God-conscious Number 1 single.

The album topped the charts around the globe, earned two Grammy nominations and had critics spouting superlatives about the formerly quiet one. As Melody Maker put it, “Garbo talks! – Harrison is free!”

Free maybe, but as 1971 unfolded, he was caught up in all kinds of trouble and strife. There was the prolonged legal drama of the Beatles’ split, the newly filed copyright infringement case over My Sweet Lord (in the context of its similarity to the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine), a marriage on the rocks and a drug-addled producer who was losing his mind.

Source: guitarworld.com

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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