Beatles News

Pop historians believe they have uncovered a mysterious lost Birmingham gig by The Beatles. And they’ve issued an SOS in the hope that members of the public who were at the 1962 concert will get in touch.

The Fab Four were then unknowns and Ringo Starr had only just joined the group. Not surprisingly, the set was played to a sparse audience at The Ritz Ballroom in Kings Heath.

Details of The Beatles’ gig at the same venue in February 15, 1963, are well-documented.

Then, the world’s greatest group was riding high in the charts with Please Please Me and they arrived at The Ritz to a chorus of screaming girls. But Bob Prew and Ken Whittaker, who organised the celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the ‘63 show, were stunned to be told it was The Beatles’ second visit. No fewer than four people have approached them, claiming to have been in the audience. “There must be something in it,” said Ken. “We have received the same information from four independent sources, all saying the same thing.

“It was apparently an ordinary Sunday, it was not crowded. Remember, no-one had heard of them. “They were just The Beatles. “I’ve gone details

The faux Fab Four are back.

You’ll have a chance to relive those strawberry fields, golden days of yesteryear or maybe introduce your kids and grandkids to what have become timeless tunes, when the Las Cruces Symphony Orchestra joins “Classical Mystery Tour: A Tribute to the Beatles” to present a pair of pops concerts Jan. 16-17 at New Mexico State University’s Atkinson Music Center Recital Hall.

“It’s one of my favorite pops shows. They look like the Beatles. They sound like the Beatles and dress like them, from their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show to the last part of their career. It’s a great show,” Lonnie Klein, LCSO’s music director and conductor, said.

“We sold out when they appeared with us in 2005. People loved them, danced and had a great time. They were on their feet after the first song and they never sat down,” said Klein, who added that audience members are welcome (and encouraged) to dress up in outfits representing their fave Beatle eras, from the early moptop hairstyles and suits and ties to Sgt. Pepper garb, Nehru jackets, and hippie psychedelic costumes.

The tribute group stars Jim Owen (John Lennon) on details

Robert Balser, an animator who co-directed the cartoon sequences of the Beatles' 1968 musical fantasy film Yellow Submarine, passed away January 4th at a Los Angeles hospital following complications from respiratory failure. He was 88. Balser's widow Cima Balser confirmed her husband's death to the Animated World Network.

Yellow Submarine was Balser's first feature film in a career that would eventually span five decades. The animator and co-director Jack Stokes led a team of 200 artists in creating the cartoon Beatles' trippy journey to Pepperland to battle the Blue Meanies, a production that took 11 months and over $1 million. (Stokes passed away in 2013.)

The feature film was borne out of the Beatles' hatred of their American cartoon series: A similar deal with a production company for an animated series in the U.K. resulted in the Fab Four only agreeing to do the film due to contractual obligations; they didn't even voice their own animated counterparts. With only the film's title track and four new Beatles songs to work with, Balser and his collaborators created a story concocted only by "whiskey and imagination," the animator told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2012, when the remastered film was released details

Ringo Starr will be getting by with a little help from his friends again in 2016.

The 12th and longest-running incarnation of his All-Starr Band, together since 2012, is planning to hit the road again in the new year. "Yes, we are going out again, I believe next summer," Todd Rundgren -- who was part of the second All-Starr Band during 1992 as well as in the current lineup -- tells Billboard. "We decided to do another American tour, and I hear rumors of possibly going back to the Pacific Rim in October or something like that." There are scheduling challenges, of course -- notably guitarist Steve Lukather's commitments to Toto and keyboardist Greg Rolie's involvement with the reunited early Santana lineup, as well as Rundgren's solo projects. But all concerned seem more than willing to work around any conflicts.

"As far as Ringo`s concerned, as long as everyone is able to show up he's probably just going to keep doing this until either he can't do it anymore or one or more of us can't do it anymore," Rundgren says. Starr himself notes that "I love this band. I love the guys and we all get on well and everyone is cool. I'm keeping it together." And Rundgren concurs that this All-Starr collective has a little somet details

The original Beatles Gear book was published back in 2001 and, over the past decade-and-a-half, it’s become the go-to bible for anyone with an interest in the extensive equipment the Fab Four dabbled with during their incredible albeit brief career.

The new expanded Ultimate Edition, which has recently hit the shops, provides fascinating new interviews, 650 new and previously unpublished photos and a slew of surprising recent gear-related discoveries that author Andy Babiuk has helped uncover.

One astounding addition to Beatles Gear is the inclusion of John Lennon’s original 1962 Gibson J-160E acoustic, which had been lost for over 50 years. This was the guitar that Lennon wrote many of The Beatles’ early hits on before it was stolen in December 1963 at the Astoria Cinema in Finsbury Park, London.

“This one happened last summer when a guy contacted me on the phone,” explains Andy, “I get a lot of people calling and emailing with stuff but 99% of the time, it’s nothing or just nonsense.

“Anyway, this guy said, ‘My friend’s got John Lennon’s J-160E’. So I was like, ‘Hey, right, okay… well, send me the picture&rsquo details

So you've spent the first week of 2016 glued to the highly anticipated release of the full Beatles catalog streaming on Spotify and Apple Radio? Us too. We've played all the songs on repeat, shed some tears (of joy), got nostalgic, and earned for peace, just like you.

And while we could go on and on about the many romantic first dance song opportunities (All You Need is Love, In My Life, Something, I'm Happy Just to Dance With You, just to get you started), it's time to talk about the many loves of all the Beatles. More specifically the Beatles weddings that still make us swoon. They may have had nine brides between them, but these Beatles weddings were so subtle and under the radar (lots of register's offices to keep the screaming fans away), while still hitting all the fashionable '60s staples (miniskirts galore).

John and Yoko

They were a force to be reckoned with. John Lennon met and fell in love with Yoko Ono in 1966. At the time, Lennon was famously married to Cynthia Lennon, with whom he shared a son, Julian. After John's divorce from Cynthia was final, John and Yoko were free to tie the knot. And they wanted to do it in true romantic fashion, on the train to Paris. "We wanted to get married on a details

The Beatles’ rise to prominence in the United States in February 1964 was a significant development in the history of the band’s commercial success.In addition to establishing the Beatles’ international stature, it changed attitudes to popular music in the United States, whose own Memphis-driven musical evolution had made it a global trendsetter.

The Beatles’ first visit to the United States came at a time of great popularity in Britain. The band’s UK commercial breakthrough, in late 1962, had been followed by a year of successful concerts and tours. The start of the Beatles’ popularity in the United States, in early 1964, was marked by intense demand for the single “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—which sold one-and-a-half million copies in under three weeks—and the band’s arrival the following month.The visit, advertised across the United States on five million posters, was a defining moment in the Beatles’ history, and the starting-point of the British Invasion.

These images were taken by Dr. Robert Beck, who died in 2002 and left them in an archive of photographs and slides in his Hollywood home.

Source: The Vintage News

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Concord, backed by Wood Creek – an investment manager with over $2.5 billion in committed capital – merged with independent publisher The Bicycle Music Company in April last year.

At the same time, it raised $100m to help expand its market presence. Since then, it’s gone on a bit of a spending spree, snapping up the likes of Fearless Records and Wind-Up Records and signing a worldwide JV with US indie Razor & Tie. Just last month, Concord licensed the global recorded rights to R.E.M’s classic ‘Warner Bros’ catalogue – a deal executed under the nose of the major label which helped make the band’s name. Now Bicycle Music has entered into exclusive worldwide publishing agreements with the Estate of George Harrison, which MBW believes was previously administered by Wixen.

The deal includes the Harrisongs catalogue, as well as the works of Dhani Harrison. The agreement covers George Harrison’s songs from the Beatles’ “White Album” (1968, featuring “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), “Abbey Road” (1969, featuring “Something” and “Here Comes The Sun”) and “Let It Be” (1970), as well as so details

Over Christmas, when the Beatles catalogue finally got released on several music-streaming services, Spotify notably among them, a few of us waited to see not whether anybody wanted the old songs but which ones they would want. Would the audience in 2016 make smart choices, or confused ones, about music already a half century old?

Well, not only was there an audience out there—many millions have already streamed the Beatles songs—but, more important, with an eerie wisdom-of-crowds instinct, the choices it made did perfect justice to the spread of talent in the band and its distinctive interminglings. On Spotify’s list of the top-ten most-streamed songs of the Christmas weekend, there were, the Independent in London reported, three all-Johns (“Help,” “All You Need Is Love,” and “Come Together”), three all-Pauls (“Let It Be,” “Yesterday,” and “Hey, Jude”), two fifty-fifties (“Love Me Do” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), one George (“Here Comes the Sun”), and one cover (“Twist and Shout”). It was a perfectly balanced and insightful list.

This much justice was done and wisdom show details

This week back in 1962, The Beatles were waiting to hear back on their first major record audition. Just a few days before, they played an audition to the label on New Year’s Day, an opportunity set up by their newly hired manager, Brian Epstein. Despite tearing through 15 songs in just under an hour, including three originals, their audition for Decca Records would be rejected. Epstein, a man known for his persistence, kept pushing back trying to sway the label’s decision. Instead, the label responded to Epstein’s follow-up request by telling him that “guitar groups are on their way out.”

“Like Dreamers Do”

As far back as early 1960, The Beatles were a popular blue-collar bar band that played fast and loose rock and roll in towns across England, Scotland and Germany. The band featured a mostly familiar lineup, with dueling frontmen John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and George Harrison on lead guitar, but this being the pre-Ringo days meant that Pete Best was behind the drum kit.

After cutting their teeth on rock and roll standards from the likes of Chuck Berry and Phil Spector, they’d been signed to Polydor Records as the backing band for crooner Tony Sherid details

Meet the Beatles—And Their Studio And then there’s the role of the studios themselves. Massey’s 357-page lavishly-illustrated book progresses in more or less order of their historical importance, beginning with, not surprisingly, the British studio, EMI’s Abbey Road, the home of the Beatles throughout their run, to the point where they named their last album as a group after its address. (As Geoff Emerick, their engineer at EMI once noted regarding the iconic photo of the Beatles atop their last album, “For people who don't know the geography, they're actually walking away from the EMI Studios -- or Abbey Road [studios], as everybody knows it now…When I saw that photo, I did think to myself, ‘They're sending a message.’”)

During the many hours they inhabited the studio during the 1960s though, the Beatles found a facility with beautiful acoustics, and well-stocked with those aforementioned expensive high-quality tube-based German condenser microphones, but with some limitations: Because EMI management dictated that the eight track recorder they had purchased in 1968 be thoroughly vetted by their maintenance department before its use, Abbey Road was slow to update fr details

In the words of the immortal Spinal Tap: Hello, Cleveland!

Also: Goodbye, Cleveland!

I wasn’t there for long, just the night of Dec. 27 and the following day. My Lovely Wife and I stopped on our way back from visiting her sister in Evanston, Ill.

I love Washington, but it’s a good idea to get out of it every now and then. And no offense to my family living in North Carolina, but boy is it nice to drive on an interstate that isn’t called “I-95.” Breezewood, Pa., may be a strange carbuncle, I-80 may cross the featureless landscape of Ohio, and Gary, Ind., may resemble Mordor, but at least traffic was moving. We weren’t inching past Quantico at a snail’s pace, like you do on 95.

All we had to contend with was rain in all its myriad guises, from fine mist to apocalyptic downpour. There were some scary moments in Indiana when it seemed as if we’d been plunged into a carwash. Even the truckers — those jaded cowboys of the asphalt — were slowing down and putting on their hazards.

Those sorts of conditions always remind me of riding in the back seat when we lived in Texas. Thunderstorms would explode across the landscape, my father would details

Sorry to get to this so late.

George Martin, the Fifth Beatle and the group’s producer of all their amazing records, turned 90 today. Since it’s 1am in London he is no doubt asleep. But we owe Sir George a huge debt of gratitude for making those records, producing and arranging them, suggesting things to Lennon and McCartney and helping them realize their ambitions.

I think his last real act was apprenticing his son Giles, who helped him create the soundtrack for the Cirque du Soleil “Love” show. That was an incredible project in which Sir George pulled apart the whole Beatles catalog and re-assembled it like a cubist painting. In Martin’s memoir, “All You Need Is Ears,” available at amazon (and should be an ebook– Giles, please call Jane Friedman at Open Road Books) he tells a funny story about the making of Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die.”

You see, George continued into the 70s producing McCartney records. (He also produced a lot of hits for America, including “Sister Golden Hair” and “Tin Man.”) Turns out the Bond producers– Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzmann– wanted George to score the film. They details

The date was Friday June 21 1963 and The Beatles were preparing to play to a horde of screaming girls at the Odeon in Guildford . Rosemary Rolls, 66, was one of the lucky audience members in the crowd and for her and best friend Stella it was their first concert, aged 14. “Stella's mum worked as a cleaner every day at the Odeon picture house, so she bought the tickets for us because she knew how much we loved them, and we had front row seats,” said Rosemary, who moved to Guildford when she was five-years-old.

“We enjoyed every moment and got autographs, but I don't have mine anymore unfortunately. “This was our first concert and of course it was in our home town, we lived in the centre and so we just walked up the High Street.” Rosemary explained she had a different favourite member in the band to her best friend Stella.

“John Lennon was my favourite because I thought he was very handsome, I liked the way he moved while playing the guitar, his mouth when he sang and his smile - my friend's favourite was Paul [McCartney].

“On the night in Guildford the fans were well behaved. I guess we were all frightened if we made too much noise we would have been thrown out. W details

The ability to talk is not something most of us give a second thought — it had certainly never occurred to me how bereft I’d feel without my voice. Then one day I woke up in a hospital bed robbed of the power to utter a single word. I’d had a stroke. It came without warning and wreaked havoc on my well-being and ability to communicate.

It happened as I was preparing for a picnic in June last year. I was with my youngest daughter, Isabella, 12, putting up the garden umbrella when I suddenly felt strange, dizzy and light-headed. At the same time I felt something ‘click’ inside my head. I didn’t lose consciousness, my face didn’t droop — some of the characteristic signs of a stroke — but it felt like the worst migraine ever, with flashing lights and double vision. I tried to speak but all the words were jumbled. My partner, Barbara, realised I was having a stroke and drove me to hospital.

For the first time in my life I felt depressed and retreated into my own world. The one thing that gave me any pleasure was music. Then suddenly I found hope. Four days after my stroke I was lying in bed listening to a Beatles track and found that I could sing along. To the amu details