Beatles Pins/Buttons

A letter written by John Lennon to the radio and television host Joe Franklin to endorse Yoko Ono's music sold for $28,171, flying past its presale estimate of $15,000-20,000. It went under the hammer at the Marvels of Modern Music sale hosted last Thursday by RR Auction in Massachusetts, Art Daily reports. The two-page handwritten letter is dated December 13, 1971. In it, Lennon makes a passionate case for his wife's musical talents, writing: "I know you're a musician at heart! And especially I know you dig jazz. Well, Yoko's music ain't quite jazz but to help you get off on it, or understand it, please listen to a track on the Yoko/Ono/Plastic Ono Band, called 'AOS,' which was recorded in 1968 (pre Lennon/Beatles!) with Ornette Coleman at Albert Hall London, you could call it free form, anyway Yoko sits in the middle of avant-garde, classic, jazz—and now through me and my music—rock 'n' roll!"

A PAIR of John Lennon’s iconic glasses, which he lent to a flirty girl who had pinched his bottom during a conga, will go on sale for £25,000. Wendy Baker sat with the late Beatle in a Soho, London, club in 1966. He joked that the bottom pinch had been “lovely” and asked for another. Wendy, now 75, used his “granny” specs to read the menu – and he left without them. Bournemouth-born Wendy said: “It’s hard to imagine someone as cool as John doing the conga, but it happened.”

A new species of tarantula discovered in Brazil has been named after John Lennon. As a study in online science journal Zoo Keys reveals, the spider – which was discovered in Brazil's western Amazonia region by a team of researchers – has been named Bumba lennoni in honour of The Beatles' late singer. The arachnid was found by researchers Fernando Perez-Miles, Alexandre Bonaldo and Laura Miglio. They decided on the Lennon-indebted name after discovering that they were all equally passionate fans of the Fab Four. Recently, it was reported that a guitar once owned by Lennon and used to write The Beatles' 1966 hit 'Paperback Writer' is expected to fetch around £600,000 at auction. The Gretsch 6120 was given to Lennon's cousin David Birch as a gift in 1967 and will now be auctioned off at Le Meridien Hotel, Piccadilly, London on November 23.

For the last 30 years, the Flaming Lips have been one of the predominant torch-carriers to the psychedelic music movement of the ’60s. So it’s fitting that they’d try to tackle the Beatles psychedelic classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in its entirety. The band recorded over the last year with a host of different artists like Miley Cyrus, My Morning Jacket, Tegan & Sara, Tool‘s Maynard James Keenan and many more. They’re calling the resulting effort “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” a track-by-track recreation of the 1967 record, with a Flaming Lips twist at just about every turn. The band has done this before. In 2009, they released a cover version of Pink Floyd‘s“Dark Side of the Moon” and this time last year, a recreation of Brit-pop band theStone Roses self-titled 1989 debut. This of course isn’t their only means of making music these days; in 2013, the band released their 13th studio album of original material called “The Terror.” Earlier this week, Speakeasy talked with the Flaming Lips’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, while he was cruising around his hometown of Oklahoma City,

There are only so many times you can interrupt traffic to walk over a busy London road to have your picture taken before you become a public nuisance – even if you are the Beatles. Six, in fact, as shown by these rare photographs, one of which became one of the most famous album covers of all time. In what is believed to be an auction first, the full set of six photographs of John, Paul, Ringo and George striding over Abbey Road is to be sold along with the picture of the street sign that was used on the back cover. “They are incredibly rare,” said Sarah Wheeler, head of photography at Bloomsbury Auctions. “I’ve spoken to other music dealers and no one has been able to find a complete set on the market for at least 10 years.” The shots were taken by the photographer Iain Macmillan, a friend of Lennon and Yoko Ono, on 8 August 1969. He had his Hasselblad, a stepladder and 10 minutes. It was the fifth of the six shots that was chosen by McCartney for the album and it’s easy to see why as all four men are in step and nicely spaced. One of Iain Macmillan's photographs that did not make the Abbey Road album cover. Photograph: Bloomsbury Auctions Macmillan made a signed edition of 25 but most were sold individually, so having them all together as one set 46 years later is extremely exciting, said Wheeler.