Beatles News

John Lennon is without question one of the greatest musical geniuses ever to live. Whether as a member of The Beatles, a solo artist, or with Yoko Ono, his contribution to popular culture has stretched for decades. But much of his story has been told from the outside looking in by critics and historians. Now, in a new graphic novel from writer Eric Cobeyran and French artist Horne, Lennon will tell the story of his life from his own point of view.

Described as a “true biographical fiction,” Lennon: The New York Years is based on the 2010 novel Lennon by David Foeniknos. The story imagines the late Beatle during his time living in New York City, recounting his life to an unnamed, unseen therapist who lives in his building. As one does when speaking with a therapist, the character of Lennon traces his entire timeline, from his difficult upbringing in Liverpool, to the rise of The Beatles, and through his solo career.

The graphic novel is due out later this month from IDW. As a preview the comic publisher has shared a brand new trailer, which you can watch above. Below, find the cover art and a few interior pages to get an idea of what reading Lennon: The New York Years is like

By: Ben Kay details

In a conference room at the Beverly Hilton, Ringo Starr prepares for an upcoming auction with proceeds going to his non–profit Lotus Foundation. Gary Astridge, The Beatles' drum archivist and gear curator, stands by to answer any obscure questions about Ringo's drum memorabilia on the auction block.

A photo shoot ensues, with a confident yet modest Ringo standing in front of his first Ludwig kit, missing his favorite snare. This would be the last time Ringo would ever see his iconic set.

Someone suggests that Astridge take a photo with Ringo. Ringo cheerfully agrees. Each with one arm around the other, Ringo and Astridge both flash a peace sign with their fingers. Astridge is in this element among his two passions: his favorite drummer and his favorite drummer’s drums.

In some ways, Astridge knows Ringo's drums better than Ringo does. Astridge has been a huge Beatles fan for a long time and has spent decades — and over six figures — researching and investing in Beatles–era drum kits and gear.

When his obsession became a sought–out expertise by way of Ringo Starr himself, Astridge was finally able to solve a mystery that had been eating away at him since just ab details

So why do it? Remix Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 50 years after the album's original release? Giles Martin (above), son of Sir George and the man behind the new remix, said the answer is simple. Because the original tapes are in pristine condition we can.
And then there's the all-important context: record labels need something to sell. And after all we are talking about the Beatles here. If there is anything like a sure thing, a guaranteed hit, in the music business, it's John, Paul, Ringo and George.

Better face it now Beatles fans: we are all going to be buying "new" Beatles reissues for the rest of our time upon this mortal coil. When it come to the Beatles, and the trove of unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, and live tracks still in the vaults, it's best to just admit we want if not need it all. And now that the sonics are said to be improved, price is really no longer an object. Think about the coming reissues—nothing has been announced, but rest assured there's a plan—of the The Beatles "White Album" and Abbey Road with outtakes, alternates and a fresh remix. I will pay, within or without reason, whatever they ask.

That said, the new remix of the Sgt Pepper's is a welcome fres details

Sir James Paul McCartney is one of the greatest musicians of all-time. He has “Sir” at the beginning of his name for a reason. While most people who don’t live under a rock know Paul McCartney as the legendary bass player for The Beatles and later as the leader of Wings, his solo career over thirty plus years has been just as impressive.

Even today he is still making ripples in the industry, collaborating with none other than Kanye West on the singles “FourFiveSeconds” and “All Day.” McCartney has been such a huge part of music, and has obtained such a large pedigree, that I’m going to try my best and stick with the task at hand of re-visiting one of his more acclaimed solo albums from 1982, Tug of War.

What’s important to note about this album is, prior to its release, McCartney was going through some tough times in his life. Not only was his former bandmate and revolutionary rock legend John Lennon senselessly murdered, but McCartney was coming off of his worst reviewed solo album to date, McCartney II, which was deemed as a worthless project by one critic. Tug of War was the album that would redeem his career. And it did more than that. Thirty-five years l details

Throughout the past three decades, drummer Zak Starkey has enjoyed a unique career that shows no signs of slowing down. The son of legendary Beatle Ringo Starr (real name: Richard Starkey), the younger Starkey inherited the drumming bug and has successfully navigated the upper echelons of rock ever since, whether drumming for Oasis or joining the performing lineup of The Who in 1994.

Aside from prepping for an upcoming summer tour with The Who, Starkey is hot off of a series of gigs at South by Southwest with latest project SSHH alongside partner Sshh Liguz. The long-gestating electro-punk project is readying for an album later this year, and today on Billboard, Starkey premieres the video for a SSHH cover of the Bob Marley/Peter Tosh-penned classic “Get Up, Stand Up." He also talks life on the road with The Who, how SSHH came to be, and teaming up with Mick Jagger’s activist daughter Lizzy to spread a message of equality.

You’ve been playing with The Who since 1994 and have a tour coming up with them this summer. How do you prepare for something like that?

How it started last time was, I walked off the plane in London and went straight straight into a windmill. We arrived at 10 in the details

John Lennon's original album art sketch for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band will anchor Julien's Auctions' upcoming sale in New York City. The "Music Icons 2017" auction will take place May 20th at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square.

The drawing was found in a sketchbook uncovered at Lennon's former home in Surrey, England, where he lived with his first wife Cynthia starting in 1964. Lennon wrote several Beatles hits in the Surrey mansion, as well as much of Sgt. Pepper's. The early album artwork sketch features a bass drum emblazoned with the LP's title and is estimated to be worth between $40,000 and $60,000.

Along with the Sgt. Pepper sketch, "Music Icons 2017" will feature other Beatles memorabilia including a Lennon-signed "Please Please Me" album cover, a George Harrison-signed Fender guitar used by the Beatle and a program page from 1963, which all four Beatles autographed.

A number of Beach Boys items are also set to hit the auction block including photographs, manuscripts, handwritten notes and lyrics, music sheets and band contracts. Several Elvis Presley items will also be up for sale, including his first piano and the King's chest X-ray.

By: Jon Blistein

Source: Rolling details

James McCartney is a man of few words, preferring as it were to let his music do the talking.

So McCartney, the only son of Paul and Linda McCartney, doesn’t turn up with a lot of hype. Nor does he do anything to contribute to any buzz that would be generated by talking about his life and family, playing Paul’s songs or, in an opposite strategy, coming out against his dad’s kind of music.

Rather, the 39-year-old simply plays his own songs — he’s released a pair of EPs and two albums since 2010 — and flies quietly under the pop culture radar.

After spending his first two and a half years on the road with Paul McCartney and Wings, James grew up in the county of East Sussex in southeast England, attended the local state secondary school, and in 1998, graduated from Bexhill College, near his East Sussex home, having studied art and sculpture.

A guitarist since he was 9, when his father gave him a Fender Stratocaster once owned by Carl Perkins, McCartney played on a pair of Paul McCartney and Wings albums, taking a guitar solo on 1997’s “Flaming Pie” and contributing guitar and percussion to 2001’s “Driving Rain.”

By: L. K details

Rock ’n’ roll staples don’t come much bigger than “Twist and Shout.”

More than half a century since it was first penned by Bronx-born songwriter Bert Berns (and his occasional partner Phil Medley), it can be heard everywhere from cable reruns of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to encores at Bruce Springsteen concerts. It’s even been adopted as the unofficial fan anthem of Coventry City FC — a once-elite English soccer team.

But, as explored in the new documentary “Bang! The Bert Berns Story” (out now), it was a song that went through some changes.

Here’s how the classic came about.

The Top Notes (1961)

Berns (also known as Bert Russell) wrote “Twist and Shout” with a slight Afro-Cuban swing to it. Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler heard it and presented it to a struggling R&B duo called the Top Notes. A young Phil Spector produced this version, adding rewrites and a changed tempo — much to Berns’ fury. It flopped.

By: Hardeep Phull

Source: The New York Post

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PHOTOGRAPHER Mike McGear McCartney’s passion in photography has led to an out-of-the-box thinking that fuels his thirst to discover, develop and see the common surroundings in a fresh perspective.

Composing an image is simple but with a little thought plus a creative angle, Mike, gives a freshness and progression to the common perspective.

He encourages young people to be observant of their surroundings and see things with a fresh angle.

Mike, who is the younger brother of Paul McCartney from the famous English group Beatles, said teenagers who have a higher-than-average exposure to arts, be it photography, music or drama tend to take their imagination a step further that allows them to create something from abstract ideas.

It was Paul who gave Mike a Rollei camera in 1962, which made him pursue photography.

“Photography, music and drama allows a person to explore their own creativity,” he said.

Mike said he was grateful to his late father, Jim McCartney, a cotton salesman and part-time pianist, who encouraged him to pursue music by giving him and his brothers a guitar and banjo, and later a drum kit.

“It was my dad who gave us the gift of music.

One of the saddest facts of John Lennon’s senseless murder in December 1980—and there are many, to be sure—is that his killer robbed him of the opportunity to grow old, to rethink his relationships and perspectives as we all inevitably do with the passage of time.

Yesterday marks the 41st anniversary of John and Paul’s last day together—the last day, at least, for which we have convincing historical evidence in the post-Beatles biographical record.

It was Saturday, April 24, 1976, when Paul and Linda McCartney were visiting John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Dakota apartment building in New York City. It was a far cry from July 7, 1957—just shy of 19 years earlier—when John and Paul first met in a Liverpool churchyard.

As it turned out, that fateful evening in April 1976 was not the first time that Lennon and McCartney had crossed paths since the Beatles’ disbandment. The songwriting duo had previously reunited on March 29, 1974, during Lennon’s infamous Lost Weekend in Los Angeles. The last known photo of John and Paul was taken that day by May Pang at Lennon’s rented house in Santa Monica.

During the previous evening, the former bandmates details

A modern take on meals with a classic rockstar.

Ringo Starr is offering two lucky fans the chance to dine with music royalty as a part of his charity campaign with Omaze.

The Beatles alumni will play host to one charitable fan (and their plus-one) at his 77th birthday brunch on the July 7 in LA. All you have to do is donate a minimum of $10 to Ringo’s Omaze campaign.

All the money goes to benefit the David Lynch Foundation, a non-profit organisation that reduces trauma and toxic stress among at-risk populations, reports Rolling Stone.

Winners will be flown to the event, where they’ll become part of Starr’s inner-circle to dine in style with other VIP guests in front of the world-renowned Capitol Records building.

As is tradition, Starr is encouraging the world to take midday (local time) on July 7 to spread a little “peace and love”. He says, “Wherever you are: on the bus, in the factory, having dinner, having lunch. No matter what part of the world you’re in.”

Recently, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were found to be in the studio together. Starr shared a photo of the two Beatles legends together and wrote: “Thanks for coming details

Looking at it in retrospect, Cloud Nine, released thirty years ago by George Harrison, seems like just another in the long line of triumphant albums released by members of The Beatles during their solo years. Yet at the time, no one seemed like a longer shot to create a hit record than Harrison, whose reputation as a recluse who wanted nothing to do with making records peaked in the middle of the ’80s.

What made the album even more surprising was how it represented a willingness by Harrison, who always seemed to view his Beatles years with caustic suspicion, to embrace the sounds of his past. The chart-topping “Got My Mind Set On You,” for example, effortlessly captured a simplistic Merseybeat feeling. Even more striking, “When We Was Fab” so eerily recreates a Beatlesque mélange of sounds that you’d be forgiven upon hearing it for the first time for thinking it was a Magical Mystery Tour outtake.

When Harrison decided upon pursuing the track, it helped that he had a kindred spirit in the producer’s chair in Jeff Lynne. “I just had the thought, ‘I’d like to write a song that’s reminiscent of that period of &rsq details

In this day of anti-immigration, anti-science, ‘America First,’ and less-than-subtle racism, I found a welcome arrival recently with Ron Howard’s film The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years. Like many people my age, I grew up with the Beatles, and their music, values and image are deeply ingrained in my view of how the world works. I remember the day in early 1964 when they flew into New York’s Idlewild (now JFK) airport. I was home from school with the flu, but listening to their progress on a transistor radio, and hearing the song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, so many times that I could play each Beatles’ part. But more than hearing the pieces, I remember the sheer rush of emotion that washed over me whenever I heard the song begin and the deep sense of wellbeing I felt as the song ended. Their music was an emotional experience for a ten-year-old school boy in Brooklyn. As they evolved through the 1960s, we grew up along with them.

Growing up in Brooklyn I knew many people from other countries and I knew we weren’t alone in the world, but I suppose I saw Europe and Asia as places where people were from, not as a place we were going. Europe was where they details

As the future Beatles members grew up in Liverpool, they keenly listened to songs of the day, learning them for their local gigs. While imitating these popular artists, they were also honing their own songwriting and musicianship skills. During the summer of 1957 — still in their pre-Beatles group, the Quarrymen — John Lennon, and Paul McCartney began experimenting with writing songs.

Just a year later, George Harrison, Lennon and McCartney found themselves in a crude recording studio, singing into one microphone, laying down two tracks: a cover of Buddy Holly’s “That’ll be the Day” and a Harrison-McCartney composition (yes, you read that correctly) entitled “In Spite of All the Danger.” A blend of doo-wop, rockabilly, and rock and roll, the song is first time that Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney would appear on a recording.

“In Spite of All the Danger” represents one of McCartney’s earliest compositions. In Barry Miles’ Many Years from Now, McCartney described how the two would ditch school to write songs together during summer 1957. Once McCartney’s father left the house for work, the two friends would settle in for a three-hour comp details

PAUL McCARTNEY HELPS MOJO celebrate 50 years of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with an exclusive interview in the magazine that hits UK shops on Tuesday, April 25. He recalls the circumstances surrounding the group’s most groundbreaking album and gives his verdict on the new stereo mix designed to add legs to one of popular music’s key benchmarks.

But as McCartney reminds MOJO, before Sgt. Pepper became an icon, there was a period of critical bemusement. How dare Beatles band go all weird?

“We were always being told, ‘You’re gonna lose all your fans with this one.’” McCartney tells MOJO. “And we’d say, ‘Well, we’ll lose some but we’ll gain some.’ We’ve gotta advance.”

In 1967 The Beatles ran the gauntlet of a media gripped in a moral panic over the younger generation’s embrace of drugs, and others who regarded Pepper’s stylistic smorgasbord and hints of thematic coherence as evincing ideas above the group’s station. The Lovable Moptops stereotype died hard.

“Sgt. Pepper did actually get a terrible review in the New York Times,” recalls McCartney. details