Beatles News

Sometime in the summer of 1993, ex-Beatle George Harrison drove to the recording studio in West Los Angeles where he was to record a brief cameo for The Simpsons. He would appear as himself in "Homer's Barbershop Quartet," an episode-long parody of his old band, and he was assured the session would be brief and discreet. His cover was quickly blown and the studio was swarmed with The Simpsons' writing staff, all professed Beatle fans, overwhelming him with more questions about the old band. Harrison glumly obliged until the show's creator, Matt Groening mentioned Wonderwall Music: a soundtrack album he'd released in 1968, and the first he'd released under his own name. Harrison perked up and started gushing. That album, he told Groening, was the most fun he'd ever had making a record--and almost no one, in twenty-five years, had ever asked him about it.

No one had asked him likely because almost no one had seen the movie. Even today, Joe Massot's Wonderwall is largely unknown, except as an artifact of Swinging Sixties psychedelia. In it reclusive, middle-aged microbiologist Oscar Collins (Jack MacGowran) becomes obsessed with the beautiful Vogue model next door (Jane Birkin) and her freewheeling world that he spies thro details

You would think that a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty would rack up massive hit singles.

Yet their band, the Traveling Wilburys, peaked at only No. 63 with “End of the Line.” The second single to be pulled from the October 1988 release Volume One, “End of the Line” still sounds fresh today. Its infectious, rollicking rhythm suggests traveling with buddies on a beautiful day.

The Traveling Wilburys’ story began in 1988 in the wake of George Harrison’s hugely successful comeback album Cloud Nine. Harrison was about to release another single from the album, the breezy “This Is Love,” and needed a B-side for the track. As fate would have it, Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were hanging out in Bob Dylan’s studio, and Harrison suggested that they record a song together.

When George Harrison presented the resulting song “Handle with Care” to his record label, then-president Mo Ostin loved it so much that he urged the ex-Beatles star to expand the experience into an entire album. According to Ostin, Harrison took full charge of the project.

The name “Traveling Wi details

"All you need is love,” and a little luck doesn’t hurt either, as one Indiana woman found out recently at a Paul McCartney concert in Columbus.

Tara Horan has a lot to be excited about. She recently discovered that she is pregnant with her first child, but said it has been torturous to keep the news a secret, especially from her mother.

She wanted to make the birth announcement in a creative way, and then it hit her – what if she could have her No. 1 idol make the announcement for her?

When Horan talks about all the McCartney concerts that she and her mother have been to – and they’ve been to many -- she gets a little teary-eyed and her passion for the music is apparent.Horan has been a huge Beatles fan since she was a little girl. She credits her mother with introducing her to the music that would go on to have a profound impact on her life throughout her teen years and into adulthood. She even has a tattoo of the Fab Four on her arm.

For Horan, this wasn’t just a music fan meeting her favorite musician, it was truly a dream come true -- getting to share the most exciting news of her entire life with the help of her favorite Beatle.

By: J.J Dixon

Caught on a recording that has sat in a garage for 50 years is a chat with John Lennon that is a bit different than most. The interview, by New Zealand academic Dr Tony Taylor, has come to light in a newly published book and Carly Thomas sat down with the man who talked Beatlemania with John Lennon... twice.

Times change, that's a given. Years pass, decades pass and things that felt so immediate become history in the blink of an eye.

But some things, people, times, stand out more than others. They make an indelible mark and they become a yesterday that we hang things from. . Their memory lingers long after the fact. The Beatles have done just that. Think about the sixties and there they are: dapper suits, lyrics about young love, the hair and screaming fans.

It's those fans, the hysteria, the extreme reaction, that was new. It got given the title Beatlemania. It worried parents, made fans faint and it got Dr Tony Taylor, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Victoria University in Wellington, thinking. "I started to look around just to see if anybody had written anything about this," he says.

"Nobody had, I was very surprised. The consumerisation and the cluster of revolutions - the youth revolu details

Give My Regards to Broad Street, released on October 22, 1984, is still an album that represents the nadir not just of the decade but quite possibly of Paul McCartney’s career. (Yes, he re-recorded Beatles songs; no, that wasn’t a good idea.) As such, a flinty little number called “Not Such a Bad Boy” arrived like a bolt of cool-rocking lightning out of the boring-retread blue.

It wasn’t enough to save Give My Regards to Broad Street, an awful album that was paired with a worse movie. But “Not Such a Bad Boy” is certainly worth returning to.

Paul McCartney, at this point, had scarcely attempted a rock song since the punky final edition of Wings flew apart, and “Not Such a Bad Boy” shows just what an awful loss that had been — even as it points the way to next-decade successes like Run Devil Run.

Appearing here with Chris Spedding and Dave Edmunds on guitars, along with the ever-faithful Ringo Starr at the drums, Paul McCartney tears into a straight-forward little groover about a reformed rebel now reduced to kitchen-pass adventures — and he sounds like he’s having no small amount of fun doing it.

By: Nick Deriso

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Even though they haven’t functioned as a musical unit for more than 45 years, there’s never been a shortage of material on the Beatles. In fact, you could easily fill a major library with all of the books that ruthlessly dissect every corner of the band’s career—from their songwriting and their instruments, to private letters and romantic relationships. Surely there’s nothing new to say on the subject of Beatleology, right?

Wrong.

Chip Madinger, along with co-author Scott Raile, has just released Strange Days Indeed – A Scrapbook of Madness, the first installment in his multi-volume LENNONOLOGY series. The book is a day-by-day diary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s life together, from the moment they met in November 1966, to Lennon’s tragic death in December 1980. The product of 15 years research, the book is the most comprehensive history of John and Yoko’s personal and creative existence ever compiled.

There are few people more qualified to literally write the book of Lennonology. Madinger has worked on numerous projects for the Beatles’ Apple Records, including The Capitol Albums Volume 1 package, Magical Mystery Tour BluRay release, and the sle details

I don’t trust people who don’t like The Beatles.

In certain hipster circles these days, The Beatles are accused of being a boy-band media fabrication (a la One Direction, NSYNC, etc.), pandering musical thieves and overrated pop commodities.

I think they are talking about The Monkees, not The Beatles.

Granted, I never need to hear “Yellow Submarine,” “Octopus’s Garden” or “The Long and Winding Road” ever again but just because you sit around in a coffee shop or an online chat room declaring that the Beatles stink does not necessarily make it true. Backlash leaves such a bitter aftertaste.

I fell in love with The Beatles when The Beatles were falling apart. I’ve always felt a little cheated because I never got to experience the rush of buying a brand new copy of, say, “Revolver” (1966), tearing it open and hearing it for the first time before anyone else.

Last Tuesday night, my friend Alan Hanstein decided to recreate that thrill of the new by buying a sealed, vinyl copy of “Rubber Soul” (1965), opening it and playing it for a live audience at the Challenger Learning Center’s Planetarium. My nephew Hu details

A few weeks ago a historical marker passed seemingly unnoticed: the 35th anniversary of Paul McCartney’s “Temporary Secretary.”

The oversight isn't surprising. To the public at large, "Temporary Secretary" is one of McCartney’s least known, and most dismissed, singles. At the time, rock arbiter Rolling Stone magazine panned it and the rest of McCartney’s curious, synth-heavy second solo album, “McCartney II,” as “an album of aural doodles designed for the amusement of very young children” and the former Beatle’s voice sounding “like a cross between an insect and a windup toy.”

“Secretary” was issued as a 12-inch single in September 1980 and, despite the diss, in the intervening decades the once-scorned new wave ditty has become a secret weapon in the arsenals of DJs worldwide. I’ve heard spinners as varied as No Age’s Randy Randall, Mark “Frosty” McNeill of Dublab and Nightswim DJ Chris Holmes (who’s McCartney’s touring DJ) drop the song on unsuspecting Los Angeles crowds. The respected house DJ and producer Dixon named one of his mixes after it.

For reference, here’s McCartney&rs details

Beatle Paul McCartney gave one of the most bizarre interviews of his life on this day in 1969 when he appeared on the BBC to deny rumours that he had died three years earlier.

The 'Paul is Dead' myth, which claimed the musician had been killed in a car crash in 1966 and been replaced in the band by a lookalike, first surfaced in a university newspaper in the United States in September, before being picked up by a number of radio stations.

The rumour-mongers claimed that clues left by the Beatles in their songs and on their album covers revealed the truth. In fact, they claimed that the photograph gracing the sleeve of the band’s latest LP Abbey Road (below) provided the biggest hints yet.

The image was claimed to show a funeral procession, with John Lennon dressed all in white as a priest, Ringo Starr in a black suit as undertaker; McCartney (the ‘corpse’) barefoot, eyes closed and out of step with the others; and the denim-clad George Harrison as gravedigger.

Furthermore, a Volkswagen Beetle car in the background has the number plate LMW 28IF. 28IF was interpreted as referring to McCartney’s age, if he had lived. However, at the time of the album’s release he would details

Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon, seen through the prism of Kevin Barry’s imagining. Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane, was a dystopian nightmare of comic vernacular and violence, showered with praise and prizes. Think James Joyce and Flann O’Brien collaborating on a script for Tarantino. Beatlebone, his second novel (on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths prize for fiction) has Lennon fleeing New York in 1978 for a secret visit to Dorinish, the uninhabited island he bought 11 years earlier. Burned-out, creatively blocked, he craves a few days of solitude, to sit and stare at the surf. And scream. (In 1970 Lennon and Yoko took a course of Californian Primal Scream therapy. And he did buy the island.) Throughout the book, the fictional and the documented lives intermingle.

We first encounter Lennon in the back of an old Mercedes, bumping his way to the west coast of Ireland, driven by Cornelius O’Grady, an amiable but ambiguous cicerone, feeding Lennon’s paranoia with hints that the dreaded press could be on their trail. Barry captures the deadpan Scouser tone: arriving at a grim hotel, Lennon g details

Beatlemania has returned to Liverpool thanks to the West End hit stage musical LET IT BE – which sees audiences dancing in the aisles as they relive the sounds of the Fab Four.

The show celebrates the music The Beatles’ and charts their rise to global fame from humble beginnings. They were four boys from Liverpool who went on to change the world. And now the show has opened to rave reviews in the band’s hometown where it all began.

LET IT BE opened at Royal Court Liverpool with preview performances on Thursday, 8 October, marking the official relaunch of the multi-million pound refurbishment of the popular venue. The following day, the cast gave a special poignant performance to mark what would have been Beatles’ legend John Lennon’s 75th birthday.

The show has come direct from London’s West End, and a gala show for Press and VIP guests last Tuesday (13 October), has generated rave reviews and 5-star ratings for the show which runs until Saturday, 14 November.

This is what the critics say:

“A LOVING, LOVEABLE, TRIUMPH WITH NOT AN OUNCE OF FAT ON IT, 9/10” Liverpool Confidential.

By: Khyle Deen

Source: Purple Revolver

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McCartney was the first Beatle to officially go solo, and his self-titled 1970 debut drove the last nail into the Beatles’ coffin. You couldn’t really blame the guy for wanting to move on, so unpleasant had life in the Beatlemania bubble become for all involved, and so contentious was the environment fostered by the dubious legal advisement of Allen Klein – the real reason the Beatles broke up, not poor Yoko Ono.

And yet, blame McCartney they did, sending the guy, by many published accounts, into a serious depression. Most biographers credit the lovely Linda McCartney with helping her husband snap out of it.

What followed was a solo career that predated Wings, ran concurrently with that band’s activities until things fell apart following 1979’s mostly great “Back to the Egg,” and then continued without interruption to today.

Even a so-so McCartney album – think the losing-the-plot excesses of “Pipes of Peace” – is a better bet than the best efforts of the majority of the man’s peers. Here are 10 solo Macca efforts that are either full-on perfect, or ridiculously close.

“McCartney” (1970). A one-man, DIY, home-reco details

The Beatles’ “Revolution” is now on VEVO – restored and remixed for The Beatles 1 Video Collection, which is available for pre-order at thebeatles.com.

“I did the slow version and I wanted it out as a single: as a statement of The Beatles’ position on Vietnam and The Beatles’ position on revolution. For years, on The Beatles’ tours, Brian Epstein had stopped us from saying anything about Vietnam or the war.” – John Lennon.

“Plugging directly into the Abbey Road desk and pushing the needles into the red achieved the fuzz-guitar sound. According to George Martin “We got into distortion on that, which we had a lot of complaints from the technical people about. But that was the idea: it was John’s song and the idea was to push it right to the limit. Well, we went to the limit and beyond.”

Revolution was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and filmed on the 4th September, 1968 at Twickenham Film Studios.

20 of the films and videos were not used in The Beatles’ Anthology and of the remaining 30 included on The Beatles 1+ these were only seen in part or in alternate edits. The 27-track DVD and Blu-ray have a running t details

A documentary about the school friend of John Lennon, directed by a Georgian, has been nominated for an award in the US.

Rod, Lennon and Me/Story of the Old Photograph by Giorgi Janelidze, won the nomination in the short documentary movies category at Great Lakes International Film Festival in the USA.

Another documentary by the same director, The Girl is Mine, has also been nominated in the same category.

Rod, Lennon and Me/ Story of the Old Photograph tells the story of Rod David, a school friend, and band mate in skiffle band The Quarrymen, of legendary singer-songwriter John Lennon. Davis was later replaced by Paul McCartney when the Beatles were formed.

The story also includes an eye-witness account of the famous July 6th 1957 day that John met Paul, a relatively unknown story. The film is dedicated to what would be the 75th birthday of John Lennon.

Great Lakes International Film Festival annually takes place in Erie City on the banks of one of the biggest lakes in the USA.

Source: Georgia Today

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If you didn’t get the chance to see legendary musician Ringo Starr during The Beatles’ heyday—or at a Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band show—you can catch him in Boston this week. For free.

Turns out Starr’s creative talents extend well beyond music. He’ll be showcasing his art at the Citi Wang Theatre from Wednesday, October 21 through Friday, October 23.

You can purchase original, hand-signed pieces at the art show, and all proceeds will benefit Starr’s Lotus Foundation, which helps multiple charitable projects.

“I think I’ve got three parts of my brain,” he told The Boston Globe.

“I am a musician. Whatever else I do, I am a drummer; that’s my main joy and passion. And then I’ve got lots of time around that. So I’ve got the computer art, and I actually paint with brushes, and that’s just for myself, and I’m still taking photographs. Some days I can do a lot of just sitting around — I’m good at that too. I just like something creative going on.”

By: Ashli Molina

Source: boston.com

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