Beatles News

Abbey Road Studios will host a new series of public lecture events this November entitled ‘Sleeve Notes: From Mono to Infinity,’ and presented by music producer and recording engineer Alan Parsons. Parsons is indelibly linked to Abbey Road – most notably for his work with Pink Floyd, The Beatles and his own music with The Alan Parsons Project. The ex-Abbey Road staffer, now resident in California, will chart the development of his own skills and experience as an engineer, producer and recording artist alongside the developments in music technology at Abbey Road

He will share his first hand experiences – both anecdotal and educational - of his time working with the iconic artists who passed through the Studios’ doors. The talks will incorporate audio recordings, video footage, photos and vintage studio equipment used to create classic tracks. ‘Sleeve Notes’ will include an audience Q&A with Alan, which will be co-hosted by David Hepworth, whose journalistic and TV credentials including The Guardian, NME, Q, Mojo, and The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Alan’s long career at Abbey Road began when he was a young trainee engineer working on The Beatles final two landmark al details

To celebrate the 75th birthday of John Lennon, Yoko Ono is inviting the general public once again to give peace a chance: in the form of a giant, human peace sign in New York's Central Park.

Having recently concluded the run of her solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Ono is taking on as her next major project an attempt to create the world's largest human peace sign on Oct. 6, three days before the date that would have been the late former Beatle's 75th birthday.

Organizers announced Friday that the general public is invited to participate in the event on the East Meadow of Central Park in New York. The gathering is scheduled to take place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., near the park entrance on 99th Street and 5th Avenue.

Participants are required to register online, but the event is free and open to all ages. The event, titled "Imagine Peace," is organized by the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, a traveling, nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing hands-on music education to students.

On Friday, Ono officially brought the Tour Bus to New York to commemorate her late husband's birthday in a public event attended by local officials. She was joined by former "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark" details

In honor of his late mother, Julian Lennon's White Feather Foundation has announced it will establish The Cynthia Lennon Scholarship For Girls

The initial funding will be in partnership with Connect To Learn, a global education initiative of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Ericsson and Millennium Promise. With a focus on Africa, scholarships will be provided to ten girls, covering a full four years of educational support for each recipient. In total, The White Feather Foundation is committing to multiple scholarships (in Cynthia Lennon’s name) over the course of five years.

For Julian Lennon, the scholarship arose from two events. The first: the April 2015 passing of his mother, a woman who aimed to live life as fully as possible, despite her hardships. Foremost, Cynthia Lennon was an artist and poet her entire life, as well as a published writer/author; a clever, wry woman with a heart of gold, yet nobody’s fool. The second was Julian’s visit to Kenya and Ethiopia in 2014 to witness the positive effects of clean water and education initiatives funded by The White Feather Foundation. An acclaimed photographer, Julian also captured images of local people and landscapes that were subs details

The English designer has enlisted fellow Brit Cara Delevingne to star in the campaign. Taking time out of her busy acting career, Cara stuns in the underwear shots. "[Cara] represents a generation of young women that we are really trying to reach,” Stella said in a statement.

Cara takes over from Kate Moss, who fronted the ads in its inaugural year in 2014.

Stella also spoke of her desire for the social media and web launch of the ads to “inspire all generations of women to be aware of breast cancer and be aware that preventing it is the most positive approach.”

The photos were shot by Sean Thomas, and in one image Cara is wearing a pretty pink lace set, making a heart shape with her fingers over her left breast.

The collection is called the Alina Playing range, and is made up of a balconette bra, a soft-cup bra and a bikini brief. All three are the same shade of pink.

A percentage of profits will be donated to three breast cancer charities, including Linda McCartney Centre in Liverpool, England, part of the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, which is the boyhood hometown of her Beatles legend father Paul.

Stella's mother Linda died of breast and liver cancer i details

In the decades since the arrival of John Lennon’s Imagine on September 9, 1971, most of its legacy has telescoped around the title track. But, as members of those sessions reminded us in this Something Else! Sitdown, thete is more to this album than “Imagine.”

“Jealous Guy,” for instance, has become one of the most covered of John Lennon’s solo tracks — with more than 100 reinterpretations, and counting. (Roxy Music had a memorable hit with it just after Lennon passed.) And yet, “Jealous Guy” still belongs completely to its author, as Lennon sings with an unmatched fragility over an atmospheric track that included Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner, Joey Molland, Tom Evans and John Barham.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?,” says Molland, who had recently worked with his late Badfinger bandmate Evans on George Harrison’s post-Beatles solo debut, as well. “They just called up and invited us down there. John wanted to try out some things with acoustic guitars, and George had just come off All Things Must Pass. Phil Spector was also producing John’s record, so they asked us to play a bit. We went down and it was a great evening &mdash details

Beatles legend Sir Paul McCartney admitted he was one 'proud' dad today after his daughter Mary was commissioned to take the official portrait of the Queen to celebrate her becoming Britain's longest reigning monarch.

Like any modern day parent, the 73-year-old star took to social media to express his delight over his daughter's amazing achievement. Writing on Twitter, Paul gushed: "Very proud of @maryamccartney What a way for me to celebrate the Queen’s achievement. God bless us all #longestreign."

The McCartney family have often been called upon to celebrate the Queen's time on the throne, with Sir Paul performing at both the Golden and Diamond jubilee pop concerts.

Today Queen Elizabeth became the longest reigning monarch in British history.

She has surpassed her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria's record on the throne and has reigned for more than 23,226 days, 16 hours and 30 minutes. The monarch, however, remained modest and matter of fact about the achievement.

Although she thanked the nation for their kind messages as she opened the Borders Railway in Tweedbank on the landmark day, she admitted that the milestone was "not one to which I have ever aspired".

By: An details

Ringo Starr has called on Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison to sift through their private photograph collections for a new Beatles project: “If they’re listening ... dig out the negatives,” he said.

Starr was speaking at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London, where a new display of recently found photographs that he took and then forgot about was going on public display.

They include images of his fellow Beatles larking around and relaxing, as well as photographs taken on the band’s first visit to the US in 1964.

The photographs are being published in a new book but Starr thinks there are many more fascinating pictures taken by his Beatles bandmates that could also be published.

“The other boys had cameras too, so the next plan is I want to get the rest of my pictures, Paul’s pictures, Yoko will have John’s pictures, Olivia George’s ... it would make a great book. I’ll be in a lot more photos.”

He added: “If I put it out there, they might respond.”

Starr said he discovered thousands of old negatives in boxes he hadn’t looked in for nearly 30 years.

By: Mark Brown

Source details

'All the Lonely People ' tribute disappears from Stanley Street bench

Liverpool's Eleanor Rigby statue plaque has been stolen.

The disappearance was spotted on social media after visitors to the iconic character from The Beatles’ 1966 song posted photographs from Stanley Street over the weekend.

The bronze statue of Eleanor Rigby sitting on a stone bench with a shopping bag looking down at a sparrow perched on the Liverpool Echo was sculptured by entertainer Tommy Steele. It was erected in 1982 as a tribute to The Beatles.

The plaque carried the words dedicating the sculpture to “all the lonely people”, and was situated on the wall behind the statue.

A spokesman for the City Council, which is responsible for the statue, said today that the plaque had been stolen. He said: “We are very concerned to see that the plaque has been taken and will be examining CCTV to find out exactly how it happened. Obviously we will aim to replace it as soon as possible.”

By: Eleanor Hayward

Source: Liverpool Echo

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On Sept. 11, 1964, the Beatles played in concert for the first and only time in Florida.

The 37-minute show at Jacksonville’s old Gator Bowl almost didn’t happen.

To set the stage: “A Hard Day’s Night” had premiered in the United States the previous month, and Beatlemania was in full swing.

The Beatles were scheduled to arrive in Jacksonville on Sept. 9 — two days before their show — but Hurricane Dora swept into town and left Jacksonville without power for several days.

The band’s plane was diverted to Key West, where they relaxed at the Key Wester hotel for a couple of days.

Because of storm damage in Jacksonville, almost 30 percent of ticket holders were unable to reach the stadium.

There was also tension between the band and organizers, who had planned to racially segregate the audience. The Beatles refused to play until their promoter assured them that concertgoers would be mixed.

Seats in front of the stage were $5, and bleacher seats were $4.

By: Staci Sturrock

Source: Palm Beach Post

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JOHN LENNON WAS constantly bugged by fans congratulating him for writing The Beatles’ Yesterday, a song he had nothing to do with.

“Yesterday drove him crazy,” veteran New York journo/broadcaster Howard Smith told MOJO. “People would say, ‘Thank you for writing Yesterday, I got married to it, what a beautiful song…’ He was always civil. But it drove him nuts.”

Smith’s intimacy with the Lennons began in 1969, when he first interviewed the couple for the ABC-syndicated radio show he hosted in New York. He was to conduct a number of major interviews between 1969 and 1972. All have been retrieved, collected and made available to buy on CD or download from iTunes and Amazon as The Smith Tapes.

“Once we were in a Mexican restaurant, in a back room,” Smith recalled. “We’d just been to see the musical Lenny, about Lenny Bruce. In the main room John spotted this strolling guitar player, which used to be standard in Mexican restaurants. He turned to me and said, “Howard, in five minutes that guitar player is gonna come in, stand next to me and play Yesterday. And sure enough, it wasn’t even three minutes. We had hardly settl details

By the time The Beatles settled in to write the songs that would make up their legendary 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership had drastically transformed from the early days when they would write songs face-to-face, trading lines. It was now far more common for one of them to write a song on his own and then bring it in so the other could edit, criticize, and maybe embellish upon the raw material provided.

In the case of Pepper’s monumental closing track “A Day In The Life,” the collaboration came from the melding of seemingly disparate parts of songs that the two had written separately. As Lennon told Playboy shortly before his death in 1980, “I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled.”

“Paul’s contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song, ‘I’d love to turn you on,’ that he’d had floating arou details

From November 2014

Last week marked 36 years since the release of the Beatles' 'White Album', a record dogged by rumours of containing subliminal messages that, when played backwards, seemed to suggest Paul McCartney was dead. The cult of myths surrounding the Fab Four goes far beyond 'Paul Is Dead' conspiracy theories, however. Here's that and 14 other strange, suspicious tales about the Beatles blown open...

Paul Is Dead: Rumours Macca was killed in a '67 car crash and replaced with a lookalike had already been doing the rounds before audio of Lennon seeming to say "Paul is dead man, miss him miss him" on 'I'm So Tired' sent the myth into overdrive.

The truth: If true, his imposter at least has Macca's sense of humour - in 1993, he released a live LP cheekily titled 'Paul is Live'.

All the Beatles died and were replaced: See that white VW on the 'Abbey Road' sleeve? Its license plate, '28IF', was interpreted by a legion of paranoid Beatles fans as an allusion to John's age - he'd have been 28 if he'd have lived to the album's release date.

The truth: The group laughed off the suggestion. But then, if they were doubles, they would, wouldn't they?The man in the background of the 'Abbey Ro details

"Sometimes you open your mouth and you don't know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it." Said George about one of his most popular songs, ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)’ that is both the opening track and the lead single from his 1973 album, Living in the Material World.

George had been busy working on the release of the Concert for Bangladesh album and film and so he did not start work on his follow up to All Things Must Pass until midway through 1972. Initially George had intended to work with Phil Spector but his unreliability added to the delays until finally Harrison decided to press ahead and produce the record himself.

Whereas his previous album had featured a large cast of musicians it was a much smaller group that George assembled to record ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)’ in the autumn of 1972. Aside from George’s wonderful slide guitar playing that he added early in 1973 it’s pianist Nicky Hopkins that shines on the recording. The rest of the musicians on th details

Paul McCartney has announced a charity single 'Love Song to the Earth', a track written to raise climate change awareness and pull in funds for Friends of the Earth and the UN Foundation.

The single aims to influence the United Nations Climate Change conference which takes place in Paris this December.

Written by Toby Gad, Natasha Bedingfield, John Shanks and Sean Paul, the four-minute track stars Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow, Nicole Scherzinger and Leona Lewis alongside more than a dozen other artists, and is available to download on iTunes now. It will be released more widely on September 11. There is also a website dedicated to the song and explaining its motivation and message.

On the accompanying site, the song is described as "a song with the power to fight climate change and maybe change the world."

"Some of the world’s biggest names in music have joined voices to inspire real action on climate change, and to support the United Nations’ call for a meaningful, universal climate agreement in Paris this December," the site states.

"Every time the song is purchased, streamed, or shared, the royalties go directly towards the efforts of Friends of the Earth to keep fossil fuels details

I love the Beatles, and like many Beatles fans, I think The White Album is one of their great masterpieces. And one of the best songs on The White Album is, without question, “Dear Prudence.”

But did you know that the song was influenced by the music of the Gypsies, Transcendental Meditation, and the daughter (and sister) of Hollywood celebrities?

“Dear Prudence” was written in early 1968, when the Beatles were in India, while John and George were studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga. It was written for a woman named Prudence Farrow (Mia Farrow’s sister) who was there meditating as well, and became so immersed in her meditation practice that she rarely left her room. Hence John Lennon wrote a playful song for her, where he sings, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?” The music was inspired, at least in part, by a Gypsy style of guitar picking that John learned from the folk-rock musician Donovan, also studying with the Maharishi.

While on the surface the song could be seen as a playful rebuke to excessive spirituality — Prudence, don’t waste your time meditating, come out to play! — at its heart “D details