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Beatles News
A new pop-up TV channel is being launched to mark what would have been John Lennon‘s 80th birthday this week.
Sky, Virgin and Freeview will broadcast LENNON80 in honour of the late Beatle‘s birthday this Friday (October 9), which will include a mix of old footage and new content.
Among the programmes airing on the channel will be the famous documentary Bed Peace, which follows Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s famous “Bed-In for Peace” protest in 1969, as well as appearances on Parkinson in 1971 and The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 1972.
The channel will also show three documentaries by Ono: her 2004 Tate Gallery Lecture, her Onochord performance piece and a show about the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland.
Source: Sam Warner/nme.com
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Paul McCartney said he and John Lennon had “rescued each other” with the partnership that led to their success with the Beatles and beyond.
Speaking on the BBC radio documentary John Lennon at 80, he recalled how they had started out together at a similar level of musical ability, and kept learning to the point that they “absorbed” each other’s influence.
“We all had to learn together,” McCartney told host Sean Ono Lennon, John's son. “He only knew a couple of banjo chords, but that only lasted a week or two. And I would just show him chords I knew, which [were] very basic, but it was great bonding, just learning chords off each other. And I think the minute he knew those chords, he was as good as anyone. … He might have had a little bit of a hang-up about not being sort of musically trained, but none of us were.”
McCartney recalled how both of them had started trying to write songs around the same time, in an era when it was common for musicians to perform material written by other parties.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
In terms of British cultural exports, there may not be a more significant day than Oct. 5, 1962. That's when the Beatles' debut single, "Love Me Do," and the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, were released.
"Love Me Do" was one of four songs - along with "P.S. I Love You," "Ask Me Why" and "Besame Mucho" - the Beatles played for George Martin at their Parlophone Records audition at London's Abbey Road Studios in June. The producer thought enough to sign the band, which had been building steam over the previous few years thanks to success in Liverpool and Hamburg clubs. But they weren't happy with their drummer, Pete Best. So, they replaced him with Ringo Starr.
On Sept. 4, the Beatles returned to Abbey Road for their first proper session, recording "Love Me Do." But Martin wasn't sure about their new drummer. So, he brought them back a week later and had session drummer Andy White take over, with Starr playing tambourine. Still, the version with Starr on drums was tapped as their first single; the take featuring White ended up on the band's debut album, Please Please Me.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
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In the midst of the conflicts that would define their final days, the Beatles pulled it together for one last, magnificent collaboration. It was the culmination of their seven-year partnership: four men who had grown up together and who were now growing apart, collecting the fragments of their unfinished work and arranging them into a shining monument.
At one point, it was going to be called Everest, and it’s one of the peaks of their career. Following the rancor of the White Album and the disastrous sessions that would eventually be pieced into their last album, Let It Be, in 1970, the Beatles needed a return to the familiar. On the verge of breaking up, they returned to their longtime producer, George Martin, and studios, EMI’s Abbey Road complex, to create a true final statement. “Let’s do it the way we used to,” Paul McCartney is said to have told Martin.
Source: Douglas Wolk/rollingstone.com
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Elton John has spoken about his late friend John Lennon on what would've been his 80th birthday. (Photo by Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
Elton John reckons John Lennon could have won the Nobel Peace Prize if he had lived.
The pair became close friends in the 1970s and featured on each other's records, with Lennon's last stage appearance before his 1980 death taking place at John's 1974 show in New York.
Speaking to Lennon's younger son Sean Ono Lennon for a special radio programme on the late Beatles star, John said: “I think if your dad had still been alive he would have definitely been, maybe won the Nobel Peace Prize or something.
Source: Amy Johnson/news.yahoo.com
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Four chaps with schoolboy haircuts and easy smiles were about to change pop culture forever.
On October 5, 1962, they released their first record: the single Love Me Do.
Within a year they were well on their way to becoming one of the best-known bands in the world at the time.
A hysteria known as Beatlemania would drive hordes of ordinarily sane fans into sobbing, screaming messes whenever the Liverpool band did so much as step out in public together.
Related: Beatles lyrics fetch huge sum at auction
God forbid you made it to a concert – the screams of the crowd were so loud they often drowned out the band.
It became so bad that the band actually retired from touring in 1966, it was just impossible to play live.
They’d go on to release five more albums before finally calling it a day in 1970.
Source: thenewdaily.com.au
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October 9, 2020, marks what would have been The Beatles star John Lennon’s 80th birthday. And to celebrate, Sir Paul McCartney has been interviewed by the late star’s younger son Sean Lennon for a special BBC Radio 2 broadcast called John Lennon at 80. During the interview, the 78-year-old shared his first impression of John in the late 1950s.
Sir Paul said: “The funny thing about your dad was that I'd seen him around a couple of times, because I realised later what it was, my bus route, he would take that bus, but he would be going to see his mum who lived kind of in my area.
“And then he’d take the bus back up to his Auntie Mimi's.
“So I'd seen him a couple of times and thought, ‘Wow, you know, he’s an interesting looking guy.’
“And then I once also saw him in a queue for fish and chips and I said, ‘Oh, that's that guy off the bus’.”
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
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If you have been a fan of The Beatles, information of the band’s breakup hit laborious in April 1970. And that information arrived simply forward of the primary solo album by Paul McCartney. In a question-and-answer insert included with reviewer copies, McCartney revealed that the Fab Four had parted methods.
The Daily Mirror blasted out the signature headline on April 9: “PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES,” it learn, taking over half of the paper’s entrance cowl. McCartney denied attempting to tug off a publicity coup for his file with the timing of the announcement.
“I think a few people thought it was some weird move of me to get publicity, but it was really to avoid having to do the press,” he mentioned in Beatles Anthology. And McCartney acknowledged the band had “known it for months.”
Indeed, when the “Paul is dead” conspiracy principle caught on in October ’69, McCartney had already withdrawn to his farm in Scotland. When reporters tracked him down to verify he was alive, McCartney mentioned in so many phrases The Beatles have been achieved. But neither press nor public obtained the message.
Source: Jeremy Spirogis/sahiwal.tv
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A music scholar has discovered which baseball film inspired John Lennon’s “Grow Old With Me,” solving the decades-old mystery about the origin of one of the singer’s final songs prior to his 1980 murder.
The opening lyric in “Grow Old With Me” quotes Robert Browning’s 1864 poem “Rabbi ben Ezra“: “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.” Lennon had admitted that he was inspired to write the song after watching a baseball movie on television during a trip to Bermuda, but the actual film Lennon was watching remained unknown for 40 years.
However, in the upcoming book John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life, author Kenneth Womack writes that the 1978 made-for-TV movie A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story — about the New York Yankees legend who died at the age of 37 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — was the baseball movie that Lennon viewed.
Source: Daniel Kreps/rollingstone.com
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This week, it’s 80 years since John Lennon was born; in December, it will be 40 years since his murder.
His influence has never faded. From beyond the grave he supplied the Gallagher brothers with their entire career.
His widow, Yoko Ono, and their son Sean are marking the 80th with ‘a suite of beautifully presented collections’ of his solo work. John might have scoffed at that wording, while being secretly delighted at the loving care on display.
Source: Tim De Lisle/dailymail.co.uk
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Sir Paul McCartney, 78, who is best known for being one-fourth of the most influential band of all time, The Beatles, alongside John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, has opened up about how their break up was like a "divorce". However, the crooner has now said it wasn't all as "gloomy" as it may have appeared, after discovering a picture his late wife Linda McCartney took of himself and John, who died in 1980.
It comes after Paul spoke to John Lennon's son, Sean Ono Lennon, in a new interview set to air tonight.
Sean brought up the "glimpses" of studio banter he has previously seen from the time The Beatles were breaking up.
He told Paul how from the footage he had seen, it looked as though they were enjoying themselves despite it nearing the end.
Paul explained that at the time, he was expecting director Peter Jackson to tell him they were looking "gloomy" in the footage, when in fact he told them they looked "jolly".
Source:Ellie Kirwin/express.co.uk
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In October 1969, Paul McCartney was grappling with what would be his next chapter in life. After the completion of Abbey Road, it became clear The Beatles would not go on. And though some reporters were circulating the rumor that “Paul was dead,” they found him alive at his farm in Scotland.
McCartney wasn’t dead, but he definitely sounded depressed. “Perhaps the rumor started because I haven’t been much in the press lately,” he told Life Magazine that day in ’69. “[…] I don’t have anything to say these days.” He also spoke of wanting to be “a little less famous.”
If McCartney had been in London, he might have been intrigued by an offer to record with two of the biggest names in music. On Oct. 21, 1969, Jimi Hendrix sent a telegram to Apple headquarters requesting McCartney’s presence at an upcoming recording session in New York.
Hendrix, of course, would be working his magic on guitar. Meanwhile, jazz legend Miles Davis (1926-91) would be playing trumpet, and Davis’ former drummer Tony Williams would play drums.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Back in 1966, The Beatles star John Lennon appeared with Bob Dylan in the latter’s documentary film Eat the Document. Directed by Dylan, the movie followed the singer on his 1966 tour of the UK and Ireland. Lennon featured in a scene with the American musician in a limousine, when they were both high.
According to Cheat Sheet, the pair discussed World War II and The Beatles among a whole host of subjects.
And in Jann S Wenner’s Lennon Remembers, the Beatle is recorded as saying how he was reluctant to be in a movie with Dylan.
Lennon said in 1971: “I never did see it.
“[I] was so frightened, you know. I was always so paranoid and Bob said ‘I want you to be in this film’…. [And] I thought why? What? He’s going to put me down; I went all through this terrible thing.”
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
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Yoko Ono is saying “Oh no” to a former personal assistant of her late husband John Lennon.
The 87-year-old classic rock icon has filed a new lawsuit against Frederic Seaman, this time for violating a 2002 court order that prohibited him from trying to profit off Lennon’s legacy when he took part in a 23-minute interview that was “flanked with Lennon memorabilia” and discussed topics that were legally off-limits — such as his 1991 book “The Last Days of John Lennon,” his employment with the couple, and Lennon’s murder.
Ono and Seaman have been in and out of the courts dating back to the 1980s.
In 1983, the “Walking On Thin Ice” singer claimed the former aide pleaded guilty to stealing The Beatles' legend journals.
“At the time, Mrs. Lennon believed that to be the end of her ordeal with Seaman,” Ono’s attorney, Dorothy Webber, wrote in the lawsuit, which seeks up to $150,000 in damage. “Those representations turned out to be lies and the start of yet another scheme.”
Source: Karu F. Daniels/nydailynews.com
“This was different. It shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material…Rock ‘n” roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out and opened up a whole world of possibilities.” — Bruce Springsteen
How do you begin to quantify the importance of the music of the Beatles? Those four lads from Liverpool changed the landscape of modern music forever. Award winning composer Howard Goodall credits John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as “almost single-handedly rescuing the entire Western musical system.”
The appearance of the group on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964 before a television audience of more than 70 million people is a watershed moment in our nation’s history. Artists like John Fogerty, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Ann and Nancy Wilson, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen all cite this moment as career inspiration.
Source: Julie Jason/indexjournal.com
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