Beatles News

John Lennon‘s widow, Yoko Ono, may be 80 years old, but she remains as creative and active as ever.  The avant-garde artist and the latest incarnation of her Plastic Ono Band have recorded a follow-up to their 2009 album, Between My Head and the Sky, that’s scheduled for a September 17 release.

The new collection, titled Take Me to the Land of Hell, includes guest appearances by Roots drummer Questlove and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, while surviving Beastie Boys Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and Michael “Mike D” Diamond collaborated on remixes for the release.

“The energy I have right now, and the desire to continue to make as much great work as I can, is really moving me forward all the time,” says Ono in a statement.  “This album is the culmination of a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the last few years and I feel proud to release it at such an exciting time of my life.”

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OTTAWA — Fifty-six years to the day after Sir Paul McCartney met his former Beatles bandmate John Lennon in a church hall in a suburb of Liverpool, England, the legendary rocker was in Ottawa preparing to play the nation’s capital for the first time in his career.

A perfectionist by nature, McCartney came to town at least one day before kicking off the North American leg of his Out There! tour to lead a full band rehearsal, the Citizen learned, begging the question: what’s Ottawa like through the eyes of Sir Paul McCartney?

Keeping tabs on the English musician was surprisingly difficult, especially considering he was once partially responsible for a worldwide fan frenzy known as Beatlemania. Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which have been known to erupt when stars like Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are caught in town, stayed fairly subdued, with comments centring around McCartney’s upcoming show rather than a minute-by-minute play of his whereabouts.

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ARTISTIC culture separated by hundreds of years will be coming together during a performance at Gosden House School next month.

Pupils at the Bramley special educational needs school will be performing Shakespeare’s classic comedy, Twelfth Night, to mark its ten-year collaboration with Globe Education.

The performance of The Bard’s play will also be mixed with songs from the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as a way of saying a fond farewell to headteacher and Beatles fan Jon David, who is retiring this year.

Mr David helped develop the school’s relationship with Globe Education, based at Shakespeare’s globe in London, which has made annual visits to the school for a decade to work with pupils aged five to 16.

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Source: Get Surrey

Fans of the Beatles have always been a passionate bunch. But few can rival Ottawa’s Yvan Tessier. He bought his first Beatles album, Yellow Submarine, in 1968. Since then he’s amassed one of North America’s largest collections of vinyl Beatles records. He owns around 5,000 of them, worth an estimated $70,000.

As a band, The Beatles only released a handful of studio albums. But Tessier’s collection includes both mono and stereo versions,  records pressed in different countries, re-releases with different labels and covers, box sets, bootleg albums, even records given to fan club members that were never sold to the public. Then, of course, he has all the records released by the band members from their post-Beatle solo careers. Tessier’s reason is simple."Because I'm a label geek! I just have to have every single version."

It's also made him an expert in all things Beatles. Tessier has contributed to Beatles books and magazines. He's helped  to authenticate rare albums. He is particularly versed in the Beatles albums made details

Paul McCartney has carried more tunes in his day than a pallet full of iPods. Music, says drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., is in “every fiber” of McCartney’s being: “Even if he’s making a little fruit salad, he’s humming a tune or whistling away. The music doesn’t stop around him. It’s beautiful.”

The same could be said of Laboriel, who is not only McCartney’s drummer but his harmony partner of more than 10 years. Musicality runs in his blood: his father, Abraham Laboriel Sr., is a highly respected bassist, and Abe Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps when he graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 1993.

Watching Laboriel work has been one of the great joys of McCartney’s return to the stage, after the 71-year-old former Beatle took most of the ’90s off from touring. (McCartney and his band, including Laboriel, guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray and keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens, return to Fenway Park on Tuesday.)

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Hand-signed memorabilia from the Beatles, particularly the late John Lennon and George Harrison, get more and more rare every year. That only makes events featuring them more and more special.

Such an event returns again this year as WZLX presents the Beatles Art Show and Sale on Saturday, July 6, just days before Paul McCartney takes the stage at Fenway Park. The four-day exhibit will display plenty of classic artwork from the Beatles’ career, namely lithographs and animation cells from the Yellow Submarine movie. Many of these pieces will be hand-signed by the Beatles themselves. Every single piece will be up for sale.

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Source: Classic Rock WZLX

Photo Credit: Ron Campbell

Nearly 50 years after writing the conceptual art book Grapefruit, writer, artist and peace activist Yoko Ono has released a sequel that she hopes will inspire people and get them thinking and reading.

Acorn, a book of 100 "instructional poems" and drawings that will be published on July 15, goes back in time, according to the widow of Beatle John Lennon, because it is something she originally created for the Internet in the 1990s.

Each day, for 100 days, she communicated a different idea for people to explore. She has now compiled them in a book.

"I like the idea because many people are not reading books anymore. They are just going to the computer," Ono, who turned 80 earlier this year, said in an interview.

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2013-07-04July 7 is Ringo Starr's birthday and since 2008 the world has been celebrating with him by sharing a moment of "Peace & Love" at Noon.

When Ringo is on tour during the summer we join forces with the Hard Rock who have generously hosted many of his birthdays.

This time Ringo is taking the summer off and will be in England at home with family and friends, so he sent this video message for his fans to let them know even though he is at home he will still be celebrating with a Peace & Love moment and invites everyone everywhere to join him at Noon their time to do the same.

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Chris Purcell's lyrical short film, Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? explores a regular old crosswalk in the St. John’s Wood district of London — the place where the Beatles took a few short steps into pop culture history. Yes, it’s that crosswalk — the one where the fab four are captured for all time on the cover of the Beatles’ famous album.

The image was the result of a quick 10-minute photo session back in the summer of 1969, turning a pedestrian area into a full-fledged tourist attraction. Today, you can even monitor the crossing via live streaming webcam. And, perhaps it’s that accessibility — that averageness — that makes the location so appealing. Out in the open, not caged behind the walls of some locked-down photo studio, the most famous band in history took a short stroll. And, if you’re so inclined, you too can walk in their footsteps, literally.

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On May 16, 1975, John Lennon stepped off the train at 30^th Street Station, Philadelphia, and gave his old friend, famed Philadelphia journalist Larry Kane, a hug.  Weeks earlier, Philadelphia’s number one music station WFIL Radio, with Kane’s Channel 6 News, began planning for their annual Helping Hand Marathon, a three day event to raise money for charitable organizations in the Philadelphia area.

Larry Kane, a Channel 6 news anchor at the time, had been friends with John Lennon ever since he went on several tours with the Beatles as a journalist during the 60’s. Kane agreed to invite the former Beatle, whose participation would generate maximum publicity for the event.  He also saw the event as an opportunity to help Lennon, who along with being estranged from Yoko Ono and struggling with the intense celebrity that came with being a Beatle, was facing deportation charges that threatened to remove him from the U.S. and his beloved adopted city of New York. Promised letters of support from Pennsylvania politicians, Lennon details

Excerpts from Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, a thrilling song-by-song history of the Beatles’ records that Slate’s Stephen Metcalf has called “one of the best, if not the best, work of pop culture criticism I’ve ever read.” MacDonald was a British music critic; he died in 2003.

50 years ago today, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You.” Below, MacDonald describes how they wrote and recorded the single, which he describes as “one of the most explosive pop records ever made.”

Lennon and McCartney wrote “She Loves You” in a Newcastle hotel room after a gig at the Majestic Ballroom on June 26, 1963. The initial idea (from McCartney) consisted of using the third person rather than their usual first and second.* To judge from the expressive link between the song’s words and melody, a roughed-out lyric must have come next, after which the pair presumably fell into the phrase-swapping details

Admittedly, there are some questionable band names out there. Nickelback. Limp Bizkit. Kajagoogoo. But The Beatles? The legendary Fab Four who shook up the music world in the 1960s like no other group?

According to Rolling Stone's list of "The Thirteen Dumbest Band Names in Rock History," yes. The Beatles' name makes their bad-name list, published Monday.

"Before you start writing furious comments, stand back and think about this stupid band name." wrote Andy Greene. "The Beatles is a dumb pun. That's all. They took the idea of naming themselves after an insect like the Crickets, but changed the spelling for a pun on musical beats. It's a simple as that. There's no deep hidden meaning. There's no wisdom here. Just a pun that might have provoked a very mild chuckle back in 1962. We accept it because we've heard it 50,000 times and they're the best group in history, but that doesn't mean they don't have a details

A copy of Wings’ 1972 single ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’ / ‘C Moon’ signed by both Paul McCartney and his wife Linda has sold for $1,205 after 16 bids on eBay. The late Linda added “Happy New Year” to her inscription.

‘Hi, Hi, Hi’ was originally slated as the A-side to the 45, but the song was banned in McCartney’s native England because of its drug references. So the reggae-styled ‘C Moon’ became a No. 5 U.K. hit. ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’ managed to reach No. 10 in the U.S.

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That the brutality should come from the same source as last week’s acoustic sounds (even with the salt and vinegar of John Lennon’s voice on You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away) makes it all the more thrilling.

We have now arrived in the deep sixties, that moment in pop culture where the battle lines are being drawn up.

Again, you might say. Ten years earlier, after all,  rock’n’roll was seen as an assault on convention. But its agenda was purely sonic. In the sixties the assault was on culture and politics and sexuality and anything else that was going.

The sixties youthquake was marked by the hugeness of its ambitions (and when it failed to match them the distrust of the baby boomer generation from those of us who came after was all the greater. Because it had aimed high and fallen short).

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Source: Heral details