Beatles News

On 4 December 1965, the Beatles appeared at Newcastle-on-Tyne’s City Hall during what would be their last ever British tour. I was a 22-year-old reporter in the Newcastle office of the Northern Echo. Orders from my newsdesk were: “Go along and try to get a word with them.”

I set out on the assignment with zero hope. This tour came in the wake of their Rubber Soul album, their second smash-hit film Help!, their performance to 55,000 people at New York’s Shea Stadium and their investiture as MBEs by the Queen. I’d be competing not only with Tyneside’s own heavyweight media but also the national newspapers and broadcasters who had offices there. Even if I got close to them, why would they waste a second on some nobody from the Northern Echo?

A few minutes before showtime, I was loitering backstage among a crowd of other would-be interviewers, including my friend Dave Watts from the Echo’s evening stablemate, the Northern Despatch. In those more innocent days, the Beatles’ dressing room was without any security protection, yet no one dared knock on the door, let alone barge in.

Then suddenly Paul McCartney came along the passage. As he opened the dressing-room details

Sir Paul McCartney pretends to be someone else when he gets recognised.

The Beatles legend still enjoys traveling by public transport because he can usually go around unbothered, but on the occasions where a fellow traveler spots him, he insists they are mistaken about his identity.

He said: "I like travelling on public transport. Ever since I was a kid I would always take a bus and go a few stops and get off just to have a look around. In New York or in Paris or in London, I sometimes take the Underground. "The thing about the Underground is nobody looks at anyone. "If I do get somebody saying, 'Are you Paul McCartney?' I say, 'Are you kidding? Do you think he'd be on the Underground?' Then they go, 'Oh yeah, well, I suppose you're right.' "

In 1995, Paul, Ringo Starr and George Harrison worked together on the 'Anthology' project - a documentary series, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book about the history of The Beatles - and though the 'Hey Jude' singer admitted the motivation behind the venture was to tell the true story of their time in the group, he and his former bandmates quickly found they all had differing memories of the same situation.

He told Q magazine: "What was happeni details

I’d waited a long time for a chance to ask Ringo Starr this question. I’d first heard the story more than a decade ago, from people of accomplishment and authority. Still, I remembered the basic point seemed so improbable I had trouble completely processing it, at first:

In 1971, not long after the breakup of the most famous rock band in history, there were serious hopes for a reunion of at least three of The Beatles …

In Syracuse.

“It was the jam that never happened, the one that got away,” said David A. Ross, a young museum assistant at the time who’d go on to a distinguished career as a museum director, curator and writer.

Ringo did a little news conference Friday before he and his “All-Starr Band” – Todd Rundgren, Gregg Rolie, Steve Lukather, Richard Page, Warren Ham and Gregg Bissonette – began a tour at the new Lakeview Amphitheater on the shoreline of Onondaga Lake, near Syracuse. The band moves on Saturday to the Seneca Allegany Resort & Casino, in Salamanca. Ringo is 75 now – if you’re a Baby Boomer, that’s a number hard to contemplate – but I wanted to ask him about that Syracuse gathering, long ago details

It was four-against-one when “The Greatest” met the soon-to-be greatest rock band of all time, but Muhammad Ali had no trouble knocking out all of The Beatles with a single swing when they met at a Miami gym on Feb. 18, 1964.

Ali, whose Friday death at the age of 74 is being mourned around the world, was in Miami for a career-changing fight. Specifically, his heavyweight boxing title fight with then-champion Sonny Liston, who he beat in a major upset. The Beatles were in Miami for a few days of sun and fun after filming their second appearance on TV’s “The Ed Sullivan Show” at Miami’s Deauville Hotel.

Ali, who earlier in his career had trained in Ramona with San Diego boxing legend Archie Moore, was then still known as Cassius Clay. By all accounts, he had no idea who The Beatles were. But he welcomed the opportunity for some extra publicity with the young English band, which was already starting to irrevocably change popular music and culture.

So, he agreed to pose for some photos with George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. It was 18 months before The Beatles performed their first and only San Diego concert at Balboa Stadium.

For the rec details

Lane created several popular sitcoms including The Liver Birds. She also was a passionate advocate for animals who worked with Sir Paul's late wife Linda McCartney.

The former Beatles singer - and fellow Liverpudlian - wrote on his website: "Dear Carla has passed away and all of us in the family are very sad to lose a wonderful women. "We originally met through our involvement with the comedy show Bread and then later came to know her very well as a passionate animal lover. "Any animal in trouble was an animal that she felt she had to help and she did rescue and keep many varied animals for a long time. In her poetry she often expressed her feelings for animals and we in our family shared her passion. "The world has lost a great advocate for the rights of animals but more importantly someone who saw the value of her fellow creatures' lives and did everything in her power to show them the love and respect they deserved."

Lane wrote lyrics for Linda's song The White Coated Man, about vivisection, and they also worked together on her song Cow. advertisement She also created a part for both Sir Paul and Linda in the sitcom Bread, in a episode about an animal refuge. Lane once described her friendship with Linda as l details

With his latest All-Starr Band tour about to start -- a 19-date U.S. trek kicking off Friday in Syracuse, New York -- Ringo Starr is eyeballing a new album release for early next year.

Starr, who's been recording at his home studio in Los Angeles, tells Billboard that he has eight songs in motion, mostly needing lyrics. Two are co-written with Toto and All-Starr Band guitarist Steve Lukather and will be finished during the upcoming tour. "We've got the tracks down; now we have to write the words," Starr says. "We know where it's going. We've got the idea. We've got the first verse of one of them. The second will be a ballad. We're gonna finish them while we're on the road." Another track, meanwhile, is a collaboration with Dave Stewart originally intended for a country album the two were hoping to make this month before the All-Starr tour was scheduled.

"We thought, 'Well, we'll get some songs together,' so we did," Starr says. "So there's stuff around. We'll do the country album another time now. There's lots you can do."

Other collaborators for the follow-up to 2015's Postcards to Paradise include Starr regulars Gary Burr and Gary Nicholson, All-Starr Band veteran Richard Marx and Van Dyke Parks, who's details

As the daughter of a Beatle, Stella McCartney grew up around “crazy famous people”. Now her own children are doing the same - and the designer says she is worried about how it will affect them.

But McCartney, daughter of Sir Paul and his first wife, the late photographer Linda, told PORTER magazine that she turned out “okay-ish” - despite her unconventional childhood.

The fashion designer, 44, has four children with her husband, Hunter creative director Alasdhair Willis - girls Bailey, 9, and Reiley, 5, and boys Miller, 11, and Beckett, 8. She said: “I lived on a farm, but I went on tour and I knew crazy famous people, like crazy. And for my children, it’s not dissimilar, they go to the farm and they’re in the field getting muddy and falling over, and then they come here and they’re surrounded by crazy famous people. I worry about that. But I think I turned out okay-ish, and I hope that they will be okay.”

Some of McCartney’s famous friends, including actress Selma Blair, composer Quincy Jones and socialite Nicole Richie, feature alongside her in the PORTER photoshoot.

On having well-known friends, the designer said: “I did have qu details

George Harrison’s song writing just got better and better over the years as he went from contributing occasional songs to Beatles albums to crafting what for many people is one of the great albums of the rock era, All Things Must Pass. George’s guitar playing is all too often overlooked by even long time fans, but the subtlety of his slide guitar work, and the sheer inventiveness of his playing deserves to be put in the spotlight so here we are, George Harrison in 20 Solos.

We start with a solo that the more knowledgeable among you will immediately go, “Hey, that’s not just George playing, it’s also Paul.” The guitar solo that is appears on ‘The Night Before’ was recorded in February 1965 and it is such a clever idea that it could not go unacknowledged. George and Paul play the double tracked solo, an octave apart. Genius! In October 1965 The Beatles were in the studio working on tracks for Rubber Soul, including George’s ‘If I Needed Someone’. Playing a 12 string electric guitar George conjures a solo that underpins the harmony vocals that according to Roger McGuinn inspired the guitar sound for The Byrds.

George began writing ‘Within You, details

One of rock 'n' roll's most controversial – and valuable – album covers turns 50 this month.

The Beatles "butcher" cover for "Yesterday And Today" was issued by Capitol Records on June 20, 1966. It was quickly withdrawn because (small wonder) the public found the image of the Fab Four wearing butcher aprons and draped with raw meat and dismembered baby dolls disturbing.

The legend surrounding the cover suggests that it was the band's statement on the carnage of the Vietnam War or a sign of their displeasure with how Capitol Records disassembled and repackaged their British albums and singles for the U.S. market.

Not so, says Bruce Spizer, author of several highly regarded books on The Beatles albums. The "Yesterday And Today" cover design was initiated by The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, who first submitted a photograph of the band standing alongside a steamer trunk. Capitol sent him a mockup and he balked, Spizer told a crowd at a Beatles fans convention in Rye Brook, New York, earlier this spring.

Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney were with Epstein when he saw and rejected the mockup. Lennon quickly suggested using an avant garde picture taken on March 25, 1966 by photograp details

Paul McCartney says Oasis’ claim that they were bigger than The Beatles was the biggest mistake of Oasis’ career.

Oasis made the claim in a 1996 MTV interview, saying that their albums ‘Definitely Maybe’ and ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’ meant that they were bigger than The Beatles. In 2015, Noel Gallagher admitted that he was “high” when he made the claim. And in a new interview, Paul McCartney has said that the claim was the biggest mistake of Oasis’ career. 

“Oasis were young, fresh and writing good tunes,” McCartney told Q. “I thought the biggest mistake they made was when they said ‘We’re going to be bigger than The Beatles’. I thought ‘So many people have said that, and it’s the kiss of death.’ Be bigger than The Beatles, but don’t say it. The minute you say it, everything you do from then on is going to be looked at in the light of that statement.”

In the same interview, McCartney says that he regularly travels on the Tube and doesn’t bother disguising himself. 

By: John Earls

Source: NME

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For a street guitarist who can sing and play a few Beatles tunes, one of the most lucrative public stages in New York City is a park bench just inside the West 72nd Street entrance to Central Park in an area known as Strawberry Fields.

Since the area opened in 1985, a parade of musicians eager to coax tips from the unending flow of tourists has played songs of peace and love in tribute to John Lennon, who in 1980 was killed not far away, outside the Dakota apartment building where he lived.

The Beatles songsters play next to the “Imagine” mosaic memorial and greet tourists with a repeating loop of classics such as “In My Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and, especially, “Imagine,” which Mr. Lennon wrote to invoke world peace and the musicians play to evoke monetary appreciation for their efforts.

But for the past few years peace itself was elusive among the musicians. The idyllic mood had been marred by altercations, vitriolic screaming and performers dueling to sing over one another. The unruliness became worse after the death in 2013 of a man known as the mayor of Strawberry Fields, who had helped maintain order. Signs designating the area a quiet zone details

Single captured radically innovative group at a key transitional moment.

In the annals of Beatles singles, we have what we might think of as a game-starter in "Please Please Me," a game-ender in something like "Let It Be," and a host of game-changers, the most important of which is rarely discussed as one of the band's top efforts. 

And yet, "Paperback Writer" – "just a little bluesy song," according to its modest/understating author, Paul McCartney – which was cut 50 years ago in mid-April 1966, and released May 30th of that year, is perhaps the single that best suggests how the Beatles were about to change things up in their most radical way yet.

Rubber Soul had just been released in December 1965, knocking the listening public on its collective ear, and still dominated the charts in the spring. This was a Beatles album unlike any other, one you couldn't have been prepared for, clearly marking that a new era had begun. Mid-period Beatles was underway. 

No one had thought to blend folk music with rhythm & blues, as the Beatles had just done, in essence adding an earthy groove to the wifty-wafty strains of cannabis set to music. A most organic sound, both of nature and t details

THE “Beatles Brain of Britain” Richard Porter has taken more than 7,000 people every year around the awesome foursome’s London stomping ground.

The tour guide, who owns the Beatles Coffee Shop by St John’s Wood Underground station, became enamoured with the group’s music at the tender age of 12. “It’s timeless” he says. His home is a “virtual library” of Beatles literature and memorabilia, including a signed copy of John Lennon’s book In His Own Write on the shelf, which the singer personally handed to his friend.

Richard has taken rock musician Tony Sheridan and Kiss star Gene Simmonds on tours – the latter was given a private view of Abbey Road Studios. But one of the most memorable tours included a group who were originally from North Korea. Richard recalls how they had somehow crossed to South Korea where they discovered and became fans of The Beatles’ music. They came over to England, went along on a tour, and when they got to Abbey Road “they dissolved into tears” Richard says. “I also got them into Trident Studios in Soho where the Beatles recorded Hey Jude.”

It all began when a music producer, Je details

By May 1966, John Lennon and Bob Dylan had become the only serious candidates for the newly conceived "Spokesman of a Generation" title. At the height of their creative powers, each of the men sought to break free from their own reputations by making music that had no precedent. Dylan, having stretched the very definition of a pop song with "Like a Rolling Stone" the previous July, had just completed the sprawling double disc, Blonde On Blonde. The Beatles' groundbreaking Revolver wasn't due out until the end of summer, but sessions began weeks earlier with Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows," a track that blended acid-tinged philosophical lyrics with boldly innovative production. 

The only known footage of Dylan and Lennon together was filmed during this fantastically productive annus mirabilis. But instead of recording an artistic summit of the highest order, the camera captured the incoherent ramblings of two impossibly stoned rock stars riding around London in the back of a chauffeured limousine. Though they don't solve all of society's ills, the scene is a fascinating, unvarnished look at the tense alliance between the superstars. 

It was shot on May 27th, 1966, by director D.A. Pennebaker as part of details

An acoustic detective story.

The story belongs in a film script - a man buys a used acoustic for a few dollars and plays it for years. Then, one fine day, he discovers he has in his possession one of the most important ‘lost’ guitars in rock history. We find out how John Lennon’s Gibson J-160E acoustic, which was used to record some of The Beatles’ legendary early hits, resurfaced in California last year, solving a 50-year mystery.

When the gavel finally fell in the auction of John Lennon’s ‘lost’ 1962 Gibson J-160E acoustic in California last November, the bidding closed at $2.4m. For John McCaw, who had originally bought the guitar for just $175, the hammer’s crash also marked the end of a remarkable piece of detective work - and a kind of farewell.

John bought the guitar in 1969 from a friend, Tommy Pressley, who had picked it up at a San Diego music store called The Blue Guitar two years previously. Neither man had any inkling at the time that the guitar had previously been the main squeeze of John Lennon, who originally bought it at Rushworth’s Music Store in Liverpool in September 1962, for just over £161, and used it to create some of the details