Beatles News

What do you think of when you hear the name John Lennon? He’s an icon and an innovator, but he is so much more and has created a legacy that will last for the ages, both with The Beatles and in his solo career.

Without him, so many songs would have gone unwritten and music history would be drastically different. His 1971 album Imagine is just like him, a moving piece of artistry punctuated with famous singles and strong messages that are a testament to history.

Before even talking about the music on the album, I have to first talk about the man behind the songs. Lennon is one of the greatest musicians of his time. His abilities shone when he was with The Beatles, co-writing many classics with Paul McCartney. After the band broke up between 1969 and 1970, Lennon embarked on a solo career.

Imagine, his second solo album, was released in 1971, with massive social upheaval from the ‘60’s coming to a close but still prominent enough that major themes carried over into the message of many tracks.

The overall tone leans towards almost bitterness throughout the album, about both the tensions between Lennon and McCartney at the time and antiwar sentiments. It may be hard to reach, as it details

Described in a press announcement as “the closest we will come to George Harrison‘s autobiography,” Genesis Publications is issuing I Me Mine – The Extended Edition, which now spans the length of Harrison’s lifelong work in music, told in his words. The new book encompasses 141 songs, lyric sheets and photos – many unpublished until now. The expanded version is being released on October 4 in the U.K. and October 18 in the U.S.

I Me Mine was originally published in 1980. It took its name from a Harrison composition on The Beatles‘ Let It Be album and is said to be the final track recorded by the group.

“Writing a song is like going to confession… writing songs to try and find out, to see who you are.” – George Harrison in I Me Mine –

The Extended Edition In conversation with his friend and former Beatles press officer Derek Taylor, and in a first-person commentary that accompanies his songs, Harrison’s own words recount everything from his upbringing in Liverpool, to early Beatlemania and his spirituality and philosophy.

I Me Mine – The Extended Edition documents Harrison’s songwriting from 1963 to 2001.

A new feature film is taking a deep dive into the tragedy on Dec. 8, 1980 that took the lives of one of the world’s most iconic songwriters. The Lennon Report -- in theaters and on demand Oct. 7 -- gives a dramatic look at what transpired behind the scenes when John Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital.

That night, it just so happened a young news producer (played by Walter Vincent) was at Roosevelt after sustaining injuries in a motorcycle accident. Once he realizes the identity of the shooting victim beside him, it’s clear he’s got an awfully big story on his hands. In the brand new trailer, the filmmaker attempts to get word out while the hospital staff tries to keep it under wraps and save Lennon’s life.

Richard Kind plays the emergency department’s director and Tony award winner Stephen Spinella plays its vascular surgeon, both tasked with trying to keep the former Beatle alive, while the rest of the staff deals with the deluge of press and frenzied fans. Adrienne C. Moore plays Dr. Pamela Roberts and David Mayas portrays Security Officer Medina.

The film was written by Walter Vincent and director Jeremy Profe and produced by Gabriel and Rafael Francisco.

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In 1965 The Beatles played New York's Shea Stadium, and no one could hear a thing. Now the film of the show has been polished to 4K perfection and the sound revived, and it's amazing...

The documentary film of The Beatles' Shea Stadium show has never been officially released on video or DVD, but has been given a serious lick of paint to accompany Ron Howard's Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years movie. Here's what we learned.

1. The noise is intense

It might be stating the bleedin' obvious, but the noise created by 55,000 screaming girls and their presumably perplexed guardians is enormous, especially when it's pumped through a cinema PA. Like a swarm of bees engaged in a fight with another swarm of bees. At an airport. As the Space Shuttle departs.

2. The band look bemused

In these days of stadium tours and outdoor festivals it's easy to take big crowds for granted, but back in 1965 this was all new. And, for the most part, the band look somewhat bewildered as utter carnage unfolds in front of them. 3. No one claps At the end of each song the screaming rises to a new crescendo, but there's very little actual applause. And the overhead shots that sweep the crowd don't show people w details

It helps if you look like him, but anyone thinking about presenting himself as John Lennon on stage better have the chops to go with resemblance. Carm Castiglione knows that rule well. There are Beatles fans, and then there are Lennon fans and they don’t suffer fools gladly.

Lennon wasn’t just a voice for his generation, even in death he’s been a voice of following generations as well. So don’t hit the stage with a set of round glasses and the notes to Imagine. There’s a lot more to it than that. “I’m a fan of each Beatle. I like every Beatle,” Castiglione said. “I just started doing John Lennon a year ago. I think everything happens for a reason and I think the time is right to do this now. It doesn’t hurt the fact that I look like him and I really love his songs. John Lennon’s music really resonated with me. I’m also a composer and I find that John Lennon’s music has its dark side and I can relate to that.”

Castiglione will be performing at the first London Beatles Festival Sept. 23-25 at London Public Library’s Wolf Performance Hall and various other downtown venues.

“It’s one thing to try to sound li details

Former Beatles band mates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recently came together in Las Vegas to give a rare joint interview with the Los Angeles Times to chat about the upcoming documentary Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years. The Ron Howard-directed film, which gets its theatrical premiere on September 15, focuses on the Fab Four’s career through the band’s final official concert in August 1966.

McCartney and Starr both noted that watching the movie helped jar their recollections of that time period, during which the band was subjected to unprecedented fan hysteria while touring the world.

“The stuff you remember when you see the footage, and the old photographs, it helps,” explained Starr. Added McCartney, “It jogs all the memories. That’s one of the joys about seeing the film.”

McCartney also told the L.A. Times that the movie reminded him about his band’s strong anti-discrimination stance in the U.S., as the film showed an archival rider revealing that The Beatles refused to play concerts at segregated venues.

“We’d always naturally had an empathy with [civil-rights issues], just because we had loads of black friends and [man details

Sir Paul McCartney and artist Tracey Emin have come together to create a unique guitar to help celebrity chef Mark Hix raise money for Cancer Research UK.

The acoustic guitar features a drawing by Emin of a nude woman on the back of the instrument and is signed by both Emin and McCartney. The guitar is estimated to be worth thousands of pounds and will be a prize a raffle Hix is putting on during a big charity event in Dorset. He is aiming to draw thousands of amateur guitarists to play together on a Dorset beach to set a new record as Britain’s biggest band.

Article continues below Named ‘Guitars On The Beach’, the massive event runs alongside his food festival Food Rocks in the seaside town of Lyme Regis over the weekend of September 3-4. A London art collector has estimated that it could raise as much as £50,000 at auction - but instead the Guitars On The Beach team is raffling it for just £1 a ticket, so that everybody has a fair chance of winning.

Hix commented: “Tracey and Paul have really turned up trumps. She has created a stunning Tracey Emin original of a topless woman sunbathing on a beach and both she and Paul have signed it, making the guitar a much-prized details

A copy of The Beatles' 1968 "White Album" sold for $790,000 USD at Julien's Live Auction in December 2015. That's officially the most expensive record ever sold at auction, Guinness World Records confirms in its 2017 edition — more than double the $305,000 Elvis Presley acetate that previously held the title.

Now, before you're like: "my mom's got one of those downstairs" or "I saw, like, 20 copies at the flea market last weekend" or "I'm using one of those as a coaster for my bubbler," know that this was a very special copy. Stamped with the serial number "0000001," it's the very first pressing, long thought to belong to John Lennon, but actually, kept in a bank vault in London by that sneaky Ringo Starr for more than 35 years.

It was expected to fetch between $40,000 and $60,000 USD after numbers 0000005 sold for $30,000 in 2008 and 0000023 got $13,750 in 2012, but the gavel price smashed all estimates, raising a handsome sum for Starr's charity benefitting social welfare, The Lotus Foundation. The buyer's identity is unknown. Let's hope it's not Martin Shkreli.

Guinness is really into music right now, it seems.

By: Chris Hampton

Source: Chart Attack

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Liverpool is to host the world premiere of one of a huge new Beatles film. Academy Award winner Ron Howard’s authorised film The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years is going to be shownat FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) at 6.30pm on Thursday 15 September – 30 minutes before it is screened at London’s Leicester Square.

The film charts the phenomenal early years of The Beatles (1962 - 1966) using rarely seen footage to explore how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came to be a phenomenal, world renowned band.

Following the invitation-only city premiere, the cinema doors will be reopened at 8.45pm as members of the public are being given the opportunity to apply for tickets for an exclusive free screening of the film, once again at FACT.

The film explores the history of The Beatles through the lens of the group’s concert performances, from their early days playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg to their unprecedented world tours in packed stadiums around the globe from New York to Melbourne to Tokyo.

The first feature-length documentary authorized by The Beatles since the band’s breakup in 1970, Eight D details

Is it "Magical Mystery Tour" or "Yellow Submarine" or "Beatles for Sale," or a different album entirely? Which Beatles album would you pick as the worst of their original 13 records?

We all have favorite bands, don't we? We have bands that we defend on principle, even if there's a weaker album or a less-than-amazing song, right? Not long ago, I saw an acquaintance post something on Facebook along the lines of (and this is a paraphrase): "The Beatles would have had a perfect string of albums if only they hadn't released 'Magical Mystery Tour.'

" I guess my acquaintance thought The Beatles' 1967 follow-up to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was rather hit-and-miss, an uneven record bogged down with more than its fair share of clunkers. I wasn't sure how I wanted to respond at the time. Others were less forgiving (or were even more damning), and in the end the original post was taken down.

So let's move that discussion here, shall we?

The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" music wasn't intended to be "an album." It was released in the UK as a six-song two-EP (extended-play) record set as a soundtrack for their third film (which bears the same name). In the U.S., singles that hadn't appeared yet details

Fifty years ago, The Beatles released Revolver, an album which saw them move into a more experimental musical world. The band's manager Brian Epstein wanted an album cover that would help fans make the journey with their musical heroes. So the band called on an old friend to help - graphic designer and musician Klaus Voormann.

The artist, who has now produced a graphic novel about his time with the band, said he is still surprised he was chosen to create the cover for Revolver. "I was sitting in the bath in my tiny flat in Hampstead when I got the call from Paul," he said. "He said 'Klaus, the new album... got any ideas for the cover?' "I just couldn't believe they were asking me to do it.

"They invited me down to Abbey Road to listen to the tracks - I was just blown away, floored by what I was hearing. "I thought I was dreaming - Tomorrow Never Knows with its backward looped tapes and bird cries. It was something totally new."

Revolver combined the swirling psychedelia of Tomorrow Never Knows with the dark complexities of Eleanor Rigby, and signalled the shift away from the bright and shiny pop of the Fab Four years. The album cover needed to reflect that change.

Three weeks after he got the cal details

The Beatles' Hollywood Bowl live recordings will get a new life this fall with the newly remixed and remastered Live at the Hollywood Bowl album. Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, oversaw the project at Abbey Road with engineer Sam Okell.

One of the standouts from the original release, which came out in 1977, is "Boys," a Shirelles hit that featured Ringo Starr on vocals. The band performed it on August 23rd, 1964, and the new version captures both they hysteria of the audience as well as the drummer's gritty vocals, his bandmates "bop-shoo-wop" backup vocals and a cutting George Harrison guitar solo. The new mix was taken directly from the original 3-track tapes of the concert.

In 1977, George Martin told Rolling Stone about presenting his mixes of the songs to the Beatles. "John Lennon heard it last week and was delighted with it," he said. "It was a labor of love, like restoring an antique motor-car." At the time he had had to restore the tapes, which had been in storage for over a decade.

"Technology has moved on since my father worked on the material all those years ago," Giles said in a statement. "Now there's improved clarity, and so the immediacy and visceral excitement can be details

Representatives acting on behalf of Ringo Starr have denied claims that he has checked into rehab. The Beatles legend had reportedly admitted himself into a residential rehabilitation clinic to ‘dry out’ before committing himself to a series of autumn tour dates with his All-Starr Band.

Sources claim recovering alcoholic Ringo, 76, had been residing at the facility for a number of weeks as a precautionary measure, telling RadarOnline: ‘As a long-recovering alcoholic, he’s constantly worried about falling off the wagon. That’s his biggest fear. The temptations to drink and do drugs again are all around him, especially when he’s on the road. He wanted to make sure that didn’t happen!’

A spokesperson has since dismissed those claims, insisting the British musician has been enjoying a summer break in coastal California with his wife, the model and actress Barbara Bach. 'The story today about Ringo in rehab is totally untrue,' read an official statement, released on Wednesday. 'Ringo is healthy and happy and has been on holiday with his family in Malibu and sends everyone Peace & Love.'

Ringo has previously spoken candidly abut his battle with alcoholism and details

Despite his stardom with the Beatles, or maybe because of it, George Harrison had an ongoing search for meaning – the meaning of life and of death, and he yearned for a long time for an encounter with someone with the answers.

“I get confused when I look around at the world,” said Harrison during his last public performance before he died in 2001, “and I see everybody is running around and, as Bob Dylan said, ‘He not busy being born is busy dying’, and yet nobody is trying to figure out what’s the cause of death and what happens when you die. That to me is the only thing really that’s of any importance. The rest is all secondary.”

Harrison thought that perhaps no one wanted to talk about what happens after death because no one understood it, but he believed in a ‘knock and the door will be opened’ philosophy. If you want to know anything in this life, he said, you just have to knock on the door.

He acknowledged, however, that getting to the truth was no easy task, and that there is a lot of noise one must get past to find answers. “We’re being barraged by bullshit,” said Harrison. “The answer is how to get peace of details

If you ever wondered who took the clean cut members of the Beatles and turned them into psychedelic, soul searching songwriters, look no further than Bob Dylan. On this date in 1964 (so the story goes), Dylan introduced John, Paul, George, and Ringo to the glories of smoking marijuana.

Dylan, who had just played a show with Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and co. at Forest Hills Stadium, arrived to meet the Beatles at the Delmonico Hotel in New York, and he almost immediately whipped out a joint to smoke with the mop-topped foursome. Manager Brian Epstein announced the band's lack of "experience". While the band relayed stories to Dylan of trying marijuana once in 1960, they said it hadn't worked. Dylan clearly had the goods, as the Beatles would go on to get ridiculous high on that fateful evening in New York.

Dylan had apparently misheard the lyrics to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I get high" instead of "I can't hide", and showed up to meet the Beatles ready to smoke. When John Lennon told him the correct lyrics, Dylan responded incredulously and basically shoved joints in the Beatles' face all night long. Lennon would relive the experience on a later date, remarking, “I don’t remember much what we details