Beatles News

f you remember the '60s, you weren't there: so it is said of that explosive decade of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll when girls sashayed down the Kings Road in tiny skirts and Biba boots, boys wore ruffled shirts over tight velvet trousers and London was the epicentre of cool.

Oblivion came with the territory: Eric Clapton was supposed to have slept with more than 1000 women but as he told me in an interview for Fairfax Media, "I wouldn't know, I was in a blackout for quite a few of them".

Pattie Boyd and her then husband George Harrison in England in 1968.
Pattie Boyd was both muse and wife to Clapton, to George Harrison before him and no stranger to drug and booze-fuelled partying. But there was little danger of failing memory for her. She kept a record of the wild years – portraits and reportage style snaps taken with a Polaroid and, later, on a Hasselblad.

Source: Jane Wheatley/smh.com.au

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Ringo Starr has signed an exclusive worldwide publishing deal with BMG, the company announced on Tuesday (April 10). The agreement covers Starr's Beatles and solo catalog, spanning nearly 50 years, as well as future compositions.

Among the over 150 titles included in the deal are his songwriting contributions with The Beatles'
"What Goes On" from Rubber Soul, "Flying" from Magical Mystery Tour, "Don't Pass Me By" from The White Album, "Octopus's Garden" from Abbey Road and "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae" from Let It Be, as well as other rarities.

As a solo artist, Starr has released 19 studio albums, spanning from 1970's Sentimental Journey to last year's Give More Love. His 1973 album, Ringo, peaked and No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and is RIAA certified Platinum, with singles "Photograph" and "You're Sixteen" topping the Hot 100 chart.

Source: billboard.com

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The handwriting of Kurt Cobain, David Bowie, John Lennon and other rock stars has been turned into fonts.

The Songwriters Font project includes typefaces developed from “original handwritten letters and notes” by Cobain, Bowie and Lennon, as well as Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg.

“Songwriting is about inspiration,” say creators Julien Sens and Nicolas Damiens. “Write songs as the ones who inspired you before. The Songwriters fonts have been created to give musicians inspiration.”

“Writing lyrics with the handwriting of influential songwriters helps imagination to develop. Being in the mood of Bowie, Cobain, Cohen, Gainsbourg, Lennon, might be purely imaginative… but that’s precisely the point.”

See some examples of the fonts beneath.

Source:

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 A piece of Beatles memorabilia is going up for sale for $375,000 — lyrics handwritten by Paul McCartney for the 1968 classic “Hey Jude” at a recording session.

The same lyrics are seen being used by John Lennon in a videotaped recording, hung from a mike stand. The song is credited to Lennon and McCartney and adapted from a ballad McCartney wrote for Lennon’s son Julian, originally called “Hey Jules.”

Moments in Time dealer Gary Zimet, who is selling the item, said, “This rare lyric sheet was seen being used by Lennon in a filmed recording session and is written all in McCartney’s hand.”

Source: Page Six Team

George garden idea grows

A GARDEN inspired by musician George Harrison is set to be created in Mill Meadows in Henley.

The location is favoured by the late Beatle’s widow Olivia, who still lives at Friar Park, the home they bought in the Seventies.

Henley in Bloom is working with Gae Exton, from the Harrisons’ charity the Material World Foundation, to develop the idea. Mayor Kellie Hinton, who chairs Henley in Bloom, said the charity would fund the project.

She said: “They are keen for the garden to be at Mill Meadows. It’s a great location by the flowing water and away from traffic as well as being looked after by the council’s parks team.

“They are happy to fund the garden and are not expecting us to come up with a huge amount of money as they are aware of our budget constraints.” Giles Reynolds, the head gardener at Friar Park, will be involved with the design.

Councillor Hinton and council administrator Becky Walker will look around Mill Meadows for several possible locations for the garden. These will then be considered with Mrs Harrison and the charity as well as the Henley in Bloom committee. The final design will be signed off by t details

 Toronto police are working to identify a woman who allegedly stole an individual stone from a Yoko Ono exhibit at the Gardiner Museum on Friday. As Global News reports, the rock, which is inscribed with the words “Love yourself,” was taken from the museum after 5:30PM. The suspect was caught on security camera footage walking south from the museum.

The rock, which has an appraised insurance value of $17,500, was part of a three-part interactive instillation from Ono called The Riverbed. One of these three parts is an interactive work called “Stone Piece,” which “features a pile of river stones that have been honed and shaped by water over time,” according to the museum’s website. “Ono has inscribed some of the stones with words, such as dream, wish, and remember. Visitors are invited to pick up a stone and hold it, concentrating on the word, and then placing the stone upon the pile of other stones in the center of the room.”

Source: Rob Arcand/spin.com

Yoko Ono Lennon, Southern California-based Beatles tribute band the Fab Four and the California Department of Motor Vehicles have joined forces to combat hunger in the state with the sale of specialty license plates featuring the iconic self-portrait image of the late John Lennon.

The Emmy Award-winning Fab Four unveiled the design for the new plate at its show at City National Grove of Anaheim on Saturday, April 7, and asked fans to pre-order the design, which will be put into production after 7,500 pre-paid applications are received by the DMV. Proceeds from the plates, which cost anywhere from $50-$103 depending on customization at CaliforniaImagine.com, will go directly to the California Association of Food Banks to help supply food an estimated 2 million Californians in need.

Source: ocregister.com

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 The Yellow Submarine & other 50-year-olds

The animated film, featuring Beatles music and the Beatles themselves, tells the story of Pepperlandia, an undersea paradise that was invaded by the Blue Meanies who hate music.

The Yellow Submarine, the animated film featuring Beatles music and the Beatles themselves, is turning 50 years old this year. The musical fantasy inspired by Ringo Starr’s composition of the same title, first hit the theaters on July 1968 and a version that was restored frame by frame with a remixed soundtrack, is set to have a special theatrical run this year to commemorate the event.

Directed by George Dunning using a process called limited animation, The Yellow Submarine tells the story of Pepperlandia, an undersea paradise that was invaded by the Blue Meanies who hate music. These bad guys imprisoned the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in a music-proof glass globe and rendered the people immobile. The King sent out his servant Young Fred to bring back The Beatles and rescue Pepperlandia. So the Fab Four were soon on board The Yellow Submarine and on the way to a fun psychedelic adventure.

Source: philstar.com

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In April 1968, Derek Taylor and Paul McCartney were in New York discussing how a new McCartney song, Thingumybob, would be best served played by a brass band. “The best band in the land,” said Paul. So it was that both were in Saltaire, Yorkshire, at 10am the following Sunday – “a fine northern time of day for a brass band” – recording the song with the Black Dyke Mills Band. On the way back to London that night, the pair stopped at a pub in the village of Harrold, Bedfordshire, where McCartney sat at the pub piano to play a new song he’d written called Hey Jude. “There was never a long wait,” says Taylor, “between the musical will and the recorded deed.”

Source: Bob Stanley/The Guardian

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The Beatles will forever be known as the original boy band, a status they achieved only a few years after forming in Liverpool in 1960, when fangirls started fawning over John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. But before Starr joined the group in 1962, when Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best were still around, the men—or, rather, boys—owed a major part of their success to a woman: Astrid Kirchherr, a German photographer who first stumbled upon them when she heard music coming from a club in her hometown of Hamburg. After flattering them with a request to photograph the group, leading to a trip to a local fairground that would produce their first-ever group photo, she became intimately close to its members: She was, for example, the one to first cut their hair into their iconic mop tops, which were initially favored by the local German boys Kirchherr grew up around.

Source: by Stephanie Eckardt

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Bravo’s “The Fifth Beatle” will examine what it was like to be gay and Jewish in 1960s England through the prism of the life story of legendary Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who died in 1967 at age 32.

Production on the Sonar Entertainment series, based on the graphic novel by Vivek J. Tivary, is still months off and details as to where it will shoot are scant, but Jenna Santoianni, Sonar’s executive VP of television series and a “Fifth Beatle” executive producer, offered a glimpse at plans for the limited series. Sonar developed the property and set it up at Bravo last month.

“I think Vivek has done an amazing job in adapting his graphic novel to the television script,” Santoianni tells Variety. “And from the script, people are going to get the true life story of Brian Epstein and really feel that he was brilliant yet was a bit of a tortured dreamer and get the early look at Brian Epstein’s discovering the band in the Cavern Club in Liverpool and get a sense of how he both nurtured and protected them, and really guided their careers to worldwide success. We’re going to explore that he was a gay Jewish man in 1960s England, which wasn’t a p details

Indian Classical music has its own charm and is like a therapy to some. The ragas and talas in this music drown every music lover into a pool of imagination.

The contribution of many music composers and instrumentalists in the classical music of India is not something to forget.

While some may like Indian Classical music to its core, others may be the fan of Western Music. But two of these fans are often parallel to each other when it comes to choice of their music. But what if they reach a point where they can be the fan of both the kinds of music?

This is possible when two vastly dissimilar artists come together to create something fantastic and over the top.

One such incident is when Sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar and George Harrison of The Beatles met and collaborated with each other.

Source: indiatoday.in

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When Glenn Gass developed his first rock and roll history class at Indiana University in 1982 it wasn’t exactly a hit among his peers.

Pop music didn’t seem to have a history worth preserving, Gass recalled. Pop music was for one generation, he said, and then the next generation had its own version and so on.

As a composition major, Gass knew enough about music and firmly felt The Beatles were a “great gift to the musical world.”

But those were fighting words in the early 80s at the IU School of Music.

It was the first rock album with printed lyrics, the first with a fold-out cover, the first to win a "Best Album" Grammy. It may be the most influential record in pop history, and the best-loved. It changed the direction of The Beatles, and rock-and-roll, forever. It's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," released 50 years ago June 2nd.

“I had the head of the musicology department ask how I could teach even one minute of musical garbage,” Gass said. “To him rock and roll was just noise. And he wasn’t even trying to be insulting, he was just baffled by how anyone could even listen to that junk.”

Source: Megan Erbacher, Courie details

Something in the way she moved attracted not only Beatles legend George Harrison but also guitar god Eric Clapton.

Pattie Boyd is the muse who inspired the music giants to write among the greatest love songs of the 20th century – Something, Layla and Wonderful Tonight.

The Vogue cover model who wed first the Beatles pin-up, breaking fans' hearts around the world, and then Clapton who immortalised his desire for her with chart-topping Layla while she was still with Harrison.

Boyd is bringing her extraordinary life story to audiences here, with a show in May at the Auckland Museum.

She will share memories, film footage and personal photographs from her incredible time with many of the brightest stars of rock'n'roll.

Source: Lee Umbers lee.umbers@nzherald.co.nz

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When I suggested to my Beatles-obsessed husband that we should go to Liverpool, I won points for the rest of our marriage. What I didn’t realize until later, when I was standing on a certain lane behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout, was that I would actually enjoy myself. Very strange.

I had wondered if, in making such a pilgrimage, there would be a place for the nonreligious. But when slanted sunbeams fell on Eleanor Rigby’s headstone as if on cue, I shivered a little and smiled.

My husband, Ricky, knows all the answers (at least when it comes to the Beatles), so I let him engage in trivia contests with our tour guide in Liverpool. Freed from the tug of minutiae, I was able to marvel in the phenomenon of the Fab Four: how one band united the world, and continues to do so, 50 years after the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Source: nytimes.com

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