Beatles News

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have never shared an embrace at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony.

Call it a result of unique circumstances or bitter grudges. But it will all change on Saturday, April 18 when McCartney inducts Ringo Starr into the Rock Hall as a solo artist.

The Beatles were inducted as a band in 1988. Yet Paul McCartney chose not to attend. George Harrison, Ringo and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono were on hand to accept the honor.

Mick Jagger inducted the band. Ringo then came to the microphone to deliver a few jokes.

"I've been nominated to say hi and thank you," said Ringo. "You can sit down. I'm going to be here for hours."

"I'd really like to thank everyone here and everyone that's inducted us into the Hall of Fame...Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Harrison went on to say, "The reason we became a band is because of all of the other people who are in the Hall of Fame already...We just wanted to get guitars and get in a band because we didn't have proper jobs at the tim details

For almost 50 years she kept an astonishing secret, refusing to attack the woman who ruined her life. When Cynthia Lennon died aged 75 from cancer last week, the world believed her marriage to Beatles star John had been destroyed by Yoko Ono.
Yet the truth about John and his relationships with women is infinitely more complex, and vastly more revealing of his real character, than the enduring myth.
I know this because Cynthia told me herself. In a rare and never before published interview, she revealed that her former husband believed the true love of his life was not Yoko Ono, but Alma Cogan, a fading female singing star eight years older than himself.

Extraordinarily, he believed Alma to be the reincarnation of his mother Julia.
It was Cogan’s death in 1966 that threw him into the arms of Japanese artist Yoko.
‘John thought I didn’t know anything about him and Alma, and I never let on,’ confided Cynthia.
‘Now that I think about it, with all the emotion gone out of it, I can see the attraction. Alma was about eight years details

One piece of paper signed by all four Beatles before their 1964 gig at Manchester's O2 Apollo and a fan letter addressed to George are on sale on eBay for £6,000.

The genuine autographs and letter – which is said to be from two fans from Derby, contain a six-verse poem about the fab four and has never been published or seen in public before – are being sold by Brian Higham.

Brian, who was brought up in Manchester during the 50s and 60s, used to work for a music shop on Oxford Road which is how he got so immersed in the industry that he got asked backstage before the Liverpudlian legends’ show.

He told MM: “George rang me a couple of months before and said he had problems with the tune on his Country Gent guitar and that they would be in Manchester on such and such a date.

“He asked ‘Could I sort it out for him and turn it round in a day?’

“So I said yes, just get someone to drop it in the morning - early - and I arranged with George about a week before that I would bring it back to th details

Cynthia Powell Lennon’s influence an be heard in tender love songs, but also in the early vitriolic and sarcastic songs of The Beatles.

John and Cynthia met at art school in Liverpool and became a couple at Christmas 1958. She was a nice middle class girl and he was already a rocker, fond of fighting, drinking and sex. Friends said they were opposites.

Lennon in later life was nothing but disparaging about her and their time together. His letters from the time tell a different story, like this one from the Beatles’ long residency in Hamburg:

It’s Monday night and we finished playing about 3/4 hrs ago (its 2 o’clock). I’m dead beat my sweet, so I hope you won’t mind if I finish now and have lovely sleep (without you but it’ll still be lovely – don’t be hurt – but I’m so, so tired). I love you Cyn – I hope you realise why this letter took so long lovey but there has been no post Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon – and this one will go by the early morning Tuesday post ’c details

Ringo Starr didn't have to end up with The Beatles. He could have been a Texas factory worker moonlighting as a country blues player. He might have been a world-class knitter.

Thankfully, fate had other plans for the now-74-year-old drummer, who celebrates spring with his just-released album Postcards From Paradiseand an induction April 18 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo act.

The Liverpool, England, native was 13 and hospitalized for tuberculosis when he first played the drums. "This woman would come in with maracas and tambourines and little drums. I played the drum the first time, and every time she came back, I wouldn't be in the bedridden band unless I got a drum," he says. During the long stay, "I learned to knit."

Postcards acknowledges his past in the title track, which features many Beatles song titles. Rory and the Hurricanes details Starr's membership in another band before he joined John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in 1962.

"Publishing houses have asked me to do my autobiography details

Cynthia Lennon, first wife of The Beatles' John Lennon, has died at her home in Spain, her family has announced.
A message on her son Julian's website said she died "following a short but brave battle with cancer".
It said: "Her son Julian Lennon was at her bedside throughout. The family are thankful for your prayers."
Julian also tweeted a picture of his mother, who was 75, inside a heart with the message "In Loving Memory".
Cynthia met Lennon at art school in Liverpool in 1957 and the couple married just before Beatlemania transformed her husband into one of the most famous men in the world.

At the height of The Beatles' early success she was, at the insistence of the band's management, kept in the background so their legions of female fans were not aware of her existence.
She stayed at home bringing up Julian while the Fab Four toured the world and topped the charts.
The couple divorced in 1968 after Cynthia discovered her husband's affair with Japanese artist Yoko Ono.

Source: BBC News

details

The semi-detached house at 1 Blomfield Rd. in Liverpool is a modest three-bedroom with a stucco exterior, wood-paneled walls, and red shag carpeting. In a typical scenario, such details would make the house feel outdated and undesirable. But Tuesday’s sale was far from typical: The property, which was home to John Lennon’s mom until her death in 1958, sold at auction for $229,000.

That’s $59,000 more than what comparable homes typically list for in the area. The buyer was a London woman named Jackie Holmes, who bought George Harrison’s childhood home last year for $231,000. She told the Liverpool Echo that she plans to live in one home and rent out the other as a Beatles-themed apartment.

This strain of Beatlemania has been going around. Over the last 18 months, anonymous buyers paid $229,000 for one of Paul McCartney’s childhood homes, and $712,000 for the house Lennon lived in until he was 5. Those prices represent markups ranging from 100 percent to 200 percent, based on the prices of similar nearby homes listed on the details

Luxury city centre hotel opened its doors in 2008 and has proved a hit with Fab Four fans from all over the world.

Liverpool’s Beatles-themed Hard Days Night Hotel is being put up for sale today with a price tag of £11m.

The luxury hotel in North John Street opened its doors during the city’s Capital of Culture year in 2008 and since then has proved a hit with Fab Four fans from all over the world.

It is housed in the Grade II-listed Central Buildings, which was designed by Thomas C Clarke and completed in 1884.

Hard Days Night is part of a group of companies ultimately owned and operated by Liverpool-based property firm, Concord Estates, run by Merseyside property entrepreneur, Tony Criss.

Mr Criss has now tasked agents from global property consultancy, CBRE, with finding a buyer for the 110-room boutique hotel with an asking price starting at £11m.

He acquired the building back in 2006 and oversaw its transformation into the hotel and when asked by the ECHO why he was disposing of the business, he replied: " details

by Isabel Vincent And Melissa Klein

Two months before she went missing, Kathie Durst received a call from her husband’s mistress.

On the other end of the phone was Prudence Farrow — the sister of Mia Farrow, a yoga instructor and the muse behind the Beatles song “Dear Prudence.”

She was also married and lived in a Durst-family-owned brownstone on West 43rd Street.

“Prudence wanted Kathie to give Bob up,” Eleanor Schwank, a college friend of Kathie’s, told The Post in June 1982. She wanted him all to herself, friends said.

Prudence Farrow Bruns is lucky Kathie refused — she might be one of the few women to be intimate with Robert Durst who lived to tell about it.

Durst was arrested a day before the March 14 final installment of an HBO documentary series about him, “The Jinx,” where he was caught on a microphone whispering to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Durst, 71, was charged with the murder of his confidante Susan Berman, who was killed execution-style at her home in Beverly Hills in December 2000.

The crime came just days befor details

The Beatles Story and East Z East curry house included on list of unusual Government-approved wedding venues.

An Indian restaurant, Everton Football Club and The Beatles Story are some of the quirky venues where you can get married in Liverpool.

The Government has published its latest list of approved venues for marriages and civil partnerships - aside from churches and other religious buildings - and some Liverpool landmarks are included.

Couples can tie the knot at The Beatles Story on Albert Dock or the Hard Days Night Hotel on North John Street.

Martin King, from the Beatles Story, said: “We very much welcome corporate events and weddings here at the Beatles Story and have actually had our first wedding booking this week.

“This is somewhere totally different for Beatles fans to enjoy their special day - and there is certainly plenty to keep them entertained.

“We decided to organise a licence for weddings after receiving a few requests and it does seems more popular now to get married somewhere a bit different. details

Ringo Starr returns to the cover of Rolling Stone on his own for the first time since 1981 in our new issue (on stands Friday). The happy-go-lucky Beatle gets serious, tracing his whole life to this point, from his poverty-stricken childhood to his struggles with drugs and alcohol to his upcoming induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. He also considers whether the Beatles would have ever re-formed if John Lennon and George Harrison were still alive. Contributing Editor Stephen Rodrick traveled down to Fort Pierce, Florida, to hang out with Starr as the drummer prepped for what he estimated would be at least his 800th solo concert.

On the question of a hypothetical Beatles reunion, Starr says that he believes it would have been possible. "With the [technology] you have now, I think we could have got it together," he reveals. "I think the stumbling block was just sitting around and saying, 'OK, let's do it.' And we never got to that. You know, we did in twos, we talked about it. But I think if we had just relaxed behind it long enough, we details

In the piece I wrote here recently, the talk was of things that happened 40 years ago. Maybe we could stay there for a little, since today is the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's infamous bed-in, a performance "peace" staged for the world's media. Now, I'm maybe not the best person to talk about this, having remained thoroughly immune to the charms of Imagine all these years. Nonetheless, there is something here I think well worth a revisit.

After their wedding ceremony in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono travelled to Amsterdam, where, between 25 March and 31 March 1969, they staged what they called Bed-In for Peace. Each day, for a week, the couple invited the press into their hotel room. Ensconced in bed, they would politely answer questions about their decision to stage this event as a protest against the Vietnam war. If we see it as a one-off caprice, then the event can look remarkably like irrelevant self-indulgence. With memories still reasonably fresh of how ineffective the 2003 anti-war protest was, the idea that sitting in bed for a week mig details

What’s being described as the master tapes of the Beatles performing live in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962 not long before Beatlemania exploded worldwide is going to auction April 1 and is being offered for about $300,000.

The tape, recorded at the Star Club in Hamburg’s red light district and said to be missing for nearly 40 years, will be offered by London’s Ted Owen & Co. auction house. According to the London Guardian, the original tapes, which include nearly five hours of live performances of 33 songs, were made by the Star Club’s stage manager, Adrian Barber, who had been asked to document the Fab Four’s live show by another Liverpool musician, Ted “King Size” Taylor.

Much of the material on the tapes was released in 1977 as a two-LP set titled “The Beatles: Live at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany — 1962,” which the Beatles tried unsuccessfully to block. Those recordings have since been widely bootlegged.

It captured a historically important early chapter details

"These are your photos but just be careful how you use them," photographer Allan Tannenbaum recalls that Yoko Ono advised on a series of intimate portraits he took of her and her husband John Lennon in November 1980. At the time of the conversation, neither had any idea that 10 days later the former Beatle would be dead.

Despite many opportunities in the months that followed to publish the images, Tannenbaum opted to guard most of the pictures until now — 27 year years later. They appear in his new book, Yoko and John: A New York Love Story, a sort of peephole into the couple's final days together.

Initially Tannenbaum, then an employee of the SoHo Weekly News, only planned to photograph the artistic duo in New York's Central Park. While snapping them, however, he overheard something about a shoot for a video promoting their new album, Double Fantasy.

"I kind of invited myself," recalls Tannenbaum, who suggested he attend as a stills photographer.

At first Ono was hesitant. After five years out of details

Students around the world can learn music production and sound engineering in the footsteps of the Fab Four

Beatles fans are being offered the chance to follow in the footsteps of the Fab Four after Abbey Road Studios announced that it is launching its own educational institute.

Students aged 18 and over from around the world will be able to study for a 12-month advanced diploma in music production and sound engineering at the institute, which will be housed in the legendary north London studio complex where the Beatles recorded nearly all their albums and singles.

They are also promised the opportunity to use the studio’s recording spaces, control rooms and equipment.

The studio has also been used by the likes of Paul Robeson and Pink Floyd, but it is most famously associated with the Beatles, who named their 1969 album after the road in St John’s Wood where the studio is based. The cover is one of the most famous in rock history and attracts droves of fans to recreate the image of the band walking across details