Beatles News
The Beatles’ Anthology 4 dropped on November 21, adding another volume of outtakes and rarities to the three Anthology albums released in the 1990s. Now, as the Anthology docu-series returns to screens this week — along with a revealing new Episode 9 — it’s worth remembering that the group churned out a core catalog of 213 songs between 1962 and 1970.
That’s a lot of tracks in just eight years. And, as you might imagine, the Beatles themselves weren’t fans of everything they produced.
That goes double for John Lennon. In the latter years of his career, the most critical Beatle took a particularly dim view of many songs in the group’s catalog, including his own.
His most withering condemnations were saved for the songs he stamped out in cookie-cutter form or peeled off as nonsensical filler. "It's Only Love" is an example of the former, a Help! track he called “abysmal”, while the latter includes Abbey Road's "Mean Mr. Mustard," a bit of light-hearted fluff he denounced as “a piece of garbage.”
And then there's the song Lennon called his “least favorite.” It appeared on the group's 1965 album Rubber Soul, which may seem odd, given that record's status as the group's first conceptual work, in which every song received its own well-considered musical arrangement.
Released on December 3 of that year, it was the Beatles' sixth album and the second to come out in 1965, following Help! As long-players go, it was something of a rush job, with 13 of its 14 songs written and recorded in two month's time following the Fab Four's U.S. tour. (Another two original songs — "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper" — were also created for a single release during this time, such was the Beatles' remarkable creative output.)
Even so, the band took care in the studio to give the songs exactly what they required, experimenting with folkier sounds and new instruments, including George Harrison's sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and Paul McCartney's fuzz bass on Harrison's "Think for Yourself."
Source: Phil Weller/guitarplayer.com
Part of the magic of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership was their ability to blend the former’s avant-garde experimentation with the latter’s commercial sensibilities, and few singles demonstrate this ability—for better or worse—as the 1967 A-side “Hello, Goodbye” and its B-side, “I Am the Walrus”.
Unsurprisingly to anyone with even a vague knowledge of The Beatles, McCartney penned “Hello, Goodbye”, and Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus”. Both songs are indicative of who each musician was as a songwriter. McCartney explored Gemini-esque themes of duality amidst a pop background, Lennon composed an LSD-fueled ode to Lewis Carroll poetry with nonsense syllables and shocking imagery.
Also unsurprising is the fact that Lennon wanted “I Am the Walrus” to be the A-side to the single. Ultimately, McCartney and George Martin won the debate, and Lennon’s psychedelic ode to the “egg man” was relegated to the B-side. McCartney and Martin were correct in their assumption that “Hello, Goodbye” would perform better on the charts worldwide, though “I Am the Walrus” beat out its A-side in Belgium.
John Lennon Wrote Off This Paul McCartney A-Side Rather Quickly
One of the most recurring issues in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaborative relationship was McCartney’s insistence on prioritizing sellability over oddity. On the one hand, The Beatles were a pop band. But on the other hand, they were riding high in the peak of psychedelic creativity in the late 1960s. Why not stretch their legs a little bit? As Lennon recalled to David Sheff in one of his final interviews, “Hello, Goodbye” smelled of McCartney from “a mile away.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
The early notion of the Beatles as “four lads that shook the world” has been subject to many shifts in emphasis over the decades. They have been valorised, vilified, mythologised, misunderstood and even ignored. The release this month of the new Beatles Anthology – an expansion of the original mid-1990s compilation with CD, vinyl reissues and the documentary series streaming on Disney+ – is testament not just to their enduring appeal but also to how the constant reframing of their story reveals as much about our changing tastes. The 2025 edition arrives as a full-scale revisitation of the original project, bringing with it a remastered, expanded documentary series and a substantial reissue campaign.
What is more likely to reshape the way we see the band, though, is the addition of a brand-new ninth episode to the original TV series, built from recently excavated footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr working together in 1994–95. Far more intimate and informal than the original broadcast, this material captures the three surviving Beatles rehearsing, reflecting and simply spending time as old friends rather than cultural monuments, albeit still with the “kid brother” tensions between Harrison and McCartney. They work on Free As a Bird and Now and Then, jokingly speculate on a stadium reunion tour and generally talk about their history, loss and their unfinished musical ideas. It’s a rare, humanising coda to the well-worn story. With new material like this, and with more than that axiomatic 50 years of distance since the Beatles dissolved in a blizzard of lawsuits and “funny paper”, are we finally approaching a unified theory of everything fab?
Source: Stuart Maconie/theguardian.com
In late November 1968, over Thanksgiving weekend, George Harrison went to Bob Dylan‘s home in Bearsville in Woodstock, New York, for a few sessions. At the time, Dylan was going through a period of low confidence, following his motorcycle accident two years earlier, shortly after the release of Blonde on Blonde, and had retreated from touring until 1974, when he went out again with the Band.
“Bob Dylan had gone through the thing of breaking his neck in a motorcycle accident and being out of commission for a time,” recalled Harrison in his 1982 memoir I, Me, Mine. “He’d got himself back together and had finished ‘Nashville Skyline’ shortly before I arrived there. I was hanging out at his house, with him, Sarah and his kids. He seemed very nervous, and I felt a little uncomfortable—it seemed strange, especially as he was in his own home.”
During this period, Dylan also recorded The Basement Tapes with the Band, along with his eighth album, John Wesley Harding (1967), followed by Nashville Skyline in ’69. Though Dylan had already been linked to another Beatle, John Lennon, he also developed a close friendship with Harrison during their Thanksgiving sessions.
Over the weekend, both co-wrote two songs meant for Harrison’s third solo album, All Things Must Pass, including the opening track, “I’d Have You Anytime,” and another song meant for that was never officially released.
Source: Tina Benitez-Eves/americansongwriter.com
Since 1960, the Beatles—four fabulous lads from Liverpool, England—have remained the greatest rock and roll band in the history of music. How John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr managed to make music together remains a mythical truth over half-a-century later. From Please Please Me to Abbey Road (or Let It Be, commercially), the quartet have influenced thousands—likey millions—of people to pick up an instrument and start writing songs. Without the Beatles, the DNA of modern music as we know it would look unrecognizable.
We first ranked the 50 best Beatles songs nearly a decade ago, and in 2023 we remade the list and took out 20 entries. Now, because opinions change like the day, and because the band is always present and relevant in the zeitgeist, we’re giving the ranking another upgrade. Maybe in two years I’ll bump it up to 100 entries. The popularity of albums and tracks are firmly in flux, and our ranking sets out to illustrate that. I didn’t want this list to look like an obligation. Instead, I hope you can feel the genuine love we have for this band in the order we’ve presented. So, we’ve pulled together a blend of the usual suspects and some deeper album cuts, B-sides, and covers. Without further ado, here are Paste’s picks for the 50 greatest Beatles songs of all time.
Rubber Soul, as masterful as it is, bridges the gap between the very good Help! and the forever-singular Revolver. It got the singles rub in the US a couple months after the album released, but it stalled at #3. No problem, it’s only gone on to be one of the best examples of the Beatles’ historical 3-part harmony technique. Telling the story of a directionless fellow totally separated from love, politics, and motivation, “Nowhere Man” is, in my opinion, John Lennon’s first really mature tune—when he could write philosophically without getting too lost in the weeds of abstraction. When his voice breaks while singing “the world is at your command,” I’m bought all the way in. Side one of Rubber Soul is a murder’s row of songs, but “Nowhere Man” stands the test of time better than (almost) all of them.
Source: Matt Mitchell/pastemagazine.com
Steven Soderbergh directs a documentary using John Lennon's last radio interview. The film emphasizes Lennon and Ono's openness and relevance of their discussion. Lennon was tragically killed hours after the upbeat interview session.
Just before his life was cut short on December 8, 1980, John Lennon spent the day giving a remarkably open radio interview. Now, director Steven Soderbergh is bringing that conversation to life in a new documentary that explores Lennon’s final hours in his own words.
Soderbergh spoke with Variety about the upcoming film, which centers on the interview Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono recorded that fateful afternoon on RKO Radio.
“I’m excited about it… The job is to obviously present it in such a way that it enhances the interview and doesn’t distract from it,” he said. “I’m just hoping to create a film that gets as many people as possible to hear what John and Yoko had to say on that afternoon before he was killed.”
The Oscar-winning director said he was struck by how Lennon and Ono “were both so free in their discussions.”
“I was surprised at how open and excited they were to talk,” Soderbergh added. “You would think they had never been interviewed before. So I want that to come across to the audience. Everything that they said 45 years ago is not just relevant today. It’s even more relevant in terms of relationships, politics, how we treat each other. How systems work on the individual and above all on the importance of love in our daily life and our world.”
At the time, Lennon and Ono had recently released Double Fantasy, their first project together in years. Yet, despite the excitement surrounding it, they chose to give only a single radio interview.
The three-and-a-half-hour session with RKO reporters Dave Sholin and Laurie Kaye reflected a Lennon who seemed happier than he had been in years.
“He had arrived at the Dakota somewhere around noon. The visual of John opening up the door, literally jumping up, leaping into the room and extending his arms like, ‘Hey folks, I’m here!’” Sholin said on 20/20 in 2020. “He had just turned 40. As he said, this was like he was opening up a new chapter. That was the mood of the day, and he could not have been more upbeat.”
Source: Isabella Torregiani/parade.com
In the middle of the celebration at TD Coliseum in Hamilton, playing the longest list of greatest hits any artist has ever had, Paul McCartney paused to talk about Blackbird.
That’s the song he wrote after being inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s. On Friday night, in front of a sold out crowd, he told the story of how the Beatles were asked to play a show in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1964.
The promoter said the show was segregated. Black people on one side and white people on the other. The Beatles refused, McCartney recalled, saying "well that's stupid... and he must have realized there was a bit of money involved so he integrated the show. It was the first one."
McCartney led the grateful crowd on his magical history tour starting in Liverpool and their first number one hit single, From Me To You, with stops at the first song the Beatles ever recorded, In Spite of All the Danger and the first song they played for legendary producer Sir George Martin, Love Me Do.
He paid tribute to his Beatles bandmates, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. He played 1982's Here Today that let him say how much he loved and missed Lennon, easier than saying it in person, face-to-face. He played the ukulele Harrison gave him, to start McCartney's version of Harrison’s Something. McCartney, 83, kept going and going through his list of hits with the Beatles, Wings and as a solo artist.
He went from Get Back to Let it Be. He performed Mull of Kintyre with help from the local 25-member Paris Port Dover Pipe Band. Live and Let Die, a classic from his Wings years, nearly set the house on fire. “He hasn’t taken a sip of water,” said Hamilton's Mike Guyatt. He was there with his wife Mary and their friends. The tickets were a gift for their 70th birthdays from daughters Sarah, Amanda and Alyson.
"Thank you for the music and thank you for the memories," Guyatt said on his way out. "He’s a genuinely good person."
Paul McCartney sings two songs from his days as a Beatle, during his Nov. 21, 2025 show in Hamilton, including 'Drive My Car' and George Harrison's 'Something."
'I'm going to be a grown man crying,' fan says. Before the show, Tim Potocic, owner of Hamilton's Sonic Unyon Records, said he had been waiting just about all his life for this moment to arise.
"I have been told by people that I'm going to have all the feels," Potocic said. "I'm going to be a grown man crying. I've prepped myself for that."
"I'm a guy that loves live music," said Potocic, the organizer behind Supercrawl, Hamilton's annual free music, arts and culture festival, now in its 15th year.
"I think it will be an earth-shattering moment for me to be in the room," he said, adding he just wanted to enjoy the experience. "I'll take a couple quick photos then put my phone away."
A man with grey hair wearing a dark suit sings into a microphone on stage while strumming a bass guitar with one hand and giving the peace sign with the other. A man plays the drums behind him. McCartney last played in Hamilton in 2016.
McCartney — with Starr, the last surviving members of The Beatles — might be the world's most famous living musician.
After two shows in Montreal, his sold-out Hamilton show — his first in the city since 2016 — is the last Canadian stop on his Got Back tour, which began in 2022 and ends in Chicago on Tuesday.
After that, who knows? Abbie Jolly was excited McCartney is in Hamilton, even though she couldn't go — tickets were too expensive, going for between $265 and $5,000 each.
Source: Conrad Collaco/cbc.ca
Back in the mid-1990s, The Beatles released an eight-part Anthology series featuring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr telling their own story outside of the traditional narrator and talking heads structure.
The series was accompanied by three volumes featuring the Fab Four’s albums, complete with all sorts of extras, and an official Anthology book.
Following the recent re-release of all three with extended content is Anthology 4, a special addition featuring “13 previously unreleased demos and session recordings and other rare recordings.
"It also includes new mixes of The Beatles’ Anthology-associated hit singles: the GRAMMY-winning Free As A Bird and Real Love, given new life by their original producer, Jeff Lynne, using de-mixed John Lennon vocals.”
Released today, the 36-track Anthology 4 can be listened to below on Spotify or purchased as a CD & Vinyl here. But that's not all.
The original Beatles Anthology documentary series is set to hit Disney+ with a three-episode premiere on November 26.
Restored by Peter Jackson's team, a brand-new ninth episode has been created for this new presentation, too. Beatles fans rejoice!
Some mental images are inextricable from The Beatles’ legacy, not the least of which include John Lennon holding down rhythm guitar, Ringo Starr smiling and head-wagging behind the kit, Paul McCartney plunking out bass lines on his Hofner viola bass, and George Harrison playing lead guitar. But all that could have looked remarkably different—perhaps excluding Harrison altogether—if it wasn’t for one particularly bad bout of nerves at a show.
Bass players are often also guitar players, and McCartney is no exception. Songs like “Blackbird” and “Yesterday” proved that Sir Paul could work his way around a fretboard years before he would establish Wings, the band in which he played the most guitar. And as one of The Beatles’ principal songwriters, it stands to reason that McCartney might have ended up on lead guitar. At least, that’s what they were planning on in their earliest days of playing out.
As McCartney recalled in a 2025 edition of Anthology, he had a guitar solo on deck during his first gig with The Quarry Men. The young musician planned to take the lead on “Guitar Boogie”, but when the time came for his feature, McCartney’s hands froze. “I got sticky fingers,” he recalled, per Guitar World. “I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” He said he was “too frightened” and that he never played a guitar solo again until years later.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
Harry Lloyd, the British actor best known for playing Viserys Targaryen in the first season “Game of Thrones,” is set to portray George Martin in the upcoming four-part Beatles biopic by director Sam Mendes.
Lloyd joins Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harrison Dickinson as John Lennon and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison in Sony Pictures‘ “The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event,” due for release in 2028.
The casting is being revealed by Martin’s son, Giles Martin, in a pre-recorded interview going out on the Ryan Tubridy Show on Virgin Radio U.K later on Friday. “He’s really good. He’s very committed,” he said. Variety has since confirmed the casting with the production.
A classically trained musician, Martin was commonly referred to as the “fifth Beatle” for his extensive involvement in each of the band’s original albums. He wrote most of the orchestral and string arrangements and also played piano or keyboards on a number of their tracks. Once described as “the world’s most famous record producer,” across a 60-year career Martin produced 30 number one hit singles in U.K. and 23 in the U.S., winning six Grammys. He passed away in 2016 at the age of 90.
Alongside “Game of Thrones,” Lloyd has appeared in major shows such as “Wolf Hall” and “Legion,” playing Charles Xavier. He is due to star in the upcoming sixth season of “Slow Horses.”
The much-discussed Beatles films are now in production and being directed back-to-back by Mendes, with a trio of award-winning writers — Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne — having penned the scripts. Production is expected to carry on into late 2026, with Sony releasing all four movies simultaneously in April 2028.
Source: Alex Ritman/variety.com
