Beatles News
Anna Sawai fumbled her first audition. She was 11, living in Tokyo after her family bounced from New Zealand to Hong Kong to the Philippines. Her mother, Kaoru, found a listing for a stage production of Annie in Tokyo just one month after they arrived. She bombed. But she filled the next year with dance and singing lessons, working tirelessly with her mother. And she nailed her second audition, going on to play the title role in a live Nippon Television broadcast. "It was my first experience where I learned, if you want something, you really have to put your head in the game. You have to go straight through and commit to it," Sawai, 34, tells me during a video call from her home in Tokyo.
Hard work never scared Sawai. Her early roles demanded a lot from her. In 2009, she joined her first Hollywood production, James McTeigue's Ninja Assassin, as a ninja, a physically strenuous role. She knew at the time that she wanted to pursue acting, but her team, which she says was better positioned in the music industry, had other plans. She fell into the J-pop world, joining a buzzy girl group called Faky, which prevented her from acting until her contract was lifted. Nearly a decade later, in 2018, she finally left the group and landed a role in the crime drama Giri/Haji, a critical success that paved the way for another supporting role in Apple TV+'s historical drama Pachinko. Her real breakthrough finally arrived in 2024 with ShÅgun, the acclaimed FX drama adaptation set in 17th-century Japan. "I was telling my agents that I wanted to do something that was going to challenge me and scare me," she says. Her turn as the highborn Toda Mariko earned her her first Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. This fearlessness has been vital to her evolution, especially as she plunges into the cinematic chapter of her career.
Source: yahoo.com
While Beatles fans dreamed of the group reuniting in the 1970s, David Bowie once revealed that he nearly managed to get John Lennon and Paul McCartney back together in 1974 to form a supergroup with him.
It was the year Bowie moved to New York City, just three years after Lennon himself had emigrated there. Shortly after Bowie’s arrival, he met Lennon at a party hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. Of all the Beatles, Lennon was his favorite.
“He was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.
Although he was nervous when the two met privately, they quickly formed a bond that led to Lennon visiting Bowie one night, with McCartney in tow.
As Bowie explained to Marc Riley on BBC Radio 6 Music, he was lodging at the time at the Pierre Hotel.
“I’d taken over a suite virtually for months and months,” he said. “I was kind of living there.”
Bowie explained that he was obsessed with the newly released Sony video recorder and would spend hours making his own films. “Fortunately, I was doing cocaine so I could stay up most of the night and complete these things,” he said, tongue in cheek.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Christopher Scapelliti
On this day, 64 years ago, a 22-year-old drummer from Liverpool stepped onto the stage with three other young musicians. Just like that, the rock and roll music industry had changed forever.
When The Beatles formed in 1960, the original group consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best. In 1961, Sutcliffe stepped away as their bassist to focus on a full-time career in painting.
Best was the group’s original drummer, but the bandmates had grown frustrated over his inability to improve. The group’s manager at the time, Brian Epstein, dismissed Best on Aug. 16, 1962.
Needless to say, The Beatles’ search for a new drummer would be quick. Two days later, Lennon found a potential replacement for Best and invited him to play at an Aug. 18 show.
On Aug. 18, 1962, Ringo Starr joined The Beatles on stage to perform at the Horticultural Society dance, per Oldies 93. The event was held inside the Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, a village in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, England.
A large portion of The Beatles’ passionate fanbase initially opposed the band’s decision to swap Best for Starr. Nonetheless, the group stayed committed to Starr, and they released their first album, Please Please Me, in March 1963.
Source: aol.com/Alex Hoegler
In late 1969, Paul McCartney was reeling from the impending breakup of the Beatles, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
John Lennon had left the group, and while they'd kept it quiet, McCartney packed up his family and retreated to a remote Scottish farmhouse.
Paul McCartney retreated to Scotland with his family after John Lennon left the Beatles in 1969. "He is not wanting to get out of bed and drinking way too much once he did get out of bed," said biographer Allan Kozinn.
"He's completely depressed. He had been in the Beatles his whole adult life. It was the only job he knew."
Suddenly, Kozinn said, "Paul had a lot of self-doubt."It was the darkest time in Paul's life to that point. "I didn't know what to do at all," the iconic singer recalled. "How could anything I do be as good as the Beatles?" As he sunk into sadness, "that left [wife] Linda with the job of trying to bring him back to life," said Kozinn, coauthor of the book The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969-73.
"Linda's got these two kids, and they're in the middle of Scotland in a ramshackle farmhouse, and she's trying to hold it all together."
Source: radaronline.com/Aaron Johnson
A Liverpool man has told how, as a 17-year-old lorry driver, he unknowingly transported John Lennon and The Quarrymen on the back of his wagon during the July 6, 1957, procession in Woolton - leading to music history being made.
Douglas Chadwick, 86, was a teenager with a driving licence, a vehicle, and a love of the local area when he was asked to provide a wagon for the annual Rose Queen procession summer fete organised by St Peter's Church on Church Road in Woolton.
He had expected to be carrying children and members of the community, but instead, a last-minute decision by the church's vicar saw a megastar in the making climb aboard.
Douglas, from Halewood, told the ECHO: "I turned up with the vehicle early, and the vicar, Price Jones, had a face down to the ground.
"He said, 'I've over-ordered. I haven't got anybody to put on the back of your wagon’, and my face fell. Then he suddenly said, 'I've got a skiffle group playing in the afternoon’. I said, 'Well, who are they?' And he said, 'Well, they call themselves The Quarrymen’.”
It was then decided that the young musicians would be put on the back of Douglas'. wagon. At the time, he had "no inkling" how successful the group's leader would become.
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Rebecca McGrath
By the end of the 1960s, many rockers were turning away from blithe love songs in favor of something far more consequential. Political and social activism became the call of the day. Songs got an existential tinge. But there were a few artists still holding on to the notion that the best medicine for hard times was unfiltered, earnest love. Paul McCartney was a strong proponent of that message in his songs, much to the chagrin of some of his former bandmates.
In the mid-1970s, McCartney and his second band, Wings, decided to push back against the notion that love songs were, in some way, immature. In return, they earned one of their biggest hits. They proved the song’s sentiment: love is eternal and will always bring listeners together.
John Lennon, in particular, took issue with the fact that Paul McCartney was known to write playful songs, often about love. His time with The Beatles saw him write such “silly” songs as “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”. There’s also the darkly tinged “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. That affinity only grew once he got out of Lennon’s discerning eye and started a solo career.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Alex Hopper
The Fab Four are back on Abbey Road ... well, sort of.
Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan were spotted recreating The Beatles' legendary Abbey Road album cover, giving fans a first look at the actors stepping into the shoes of the iconic band.
Dickinson is portraying John Lennon, Mescal is playing Paul McCartney, Quinn is George Harrison and Keoghan is Ringo Starr in the highly anticipated Beatles film project.
The four actors were seen walking across the famous London street in a recreation of the instantly recognizable 1969 album artwork ... complete with the lineup and styling that made the original image one of the most famous photos in music history.
The scene is part of the upcoming Beatles biopic series, which is being made as four interconnected films, with each actor portraying one member of the band from his character's perspective.
The Abbey Road recreation is already giving Beatles fans plenty to talk about, especially with the striking resemblance between the actors and their real-life counterparts.
Source: tmz.com/
In 1966, the Beatles, fed up with Beatlemania, decided to retire from touring. Their concerts had become so loud with screaming Beatles fans that they were unable to hear each other play, and their music was suffering, so taking a step back from live shows was the best decision. It allowed them to go back to the studio with a different mindset, to experiment without worrying about how the songs would sound live. Which is why they were able to record "Strawberry Fields Forever" in a way that was completely revolutionary for its time. What John Lennon had in mind for this song was complicated, and it required producer George Martin to get creative, splicing two recordings together to get a sound they couldn't have gotten otherwise.
"Strawberry Fields Forever" was a very nostalgic track. It came out as a single for their iconic 1967 album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", and Paul McCartney's "Penny Lane" was the flip side of that single, which is another song about their hometown, Liverpool. "Strawberry Fields Forever" was undoubtedly the most experimental one of the two, partly due to the way it was recorded, and it was the first single by the Beatles in four years not to reach No. 1 in the United Kingdom. At the time, critics speculated that, because this track hadn't topped the charts, it meant the band had lost their magic touch. But almost 60 years later, this revolutionary song is a timeless classic.
Source: grunge.com/Valentina Barone
The Beatles have a plethora of hits in their catalog, many of them written by the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting team. But their tunesmith talents weren’t limited to the band, as both John Lennon and Paul McCartney played a role in the careers of other artists.
One notable example came when Lennon collaborated with David Bowie on the song “Fame,” nearly five years after The Beatles broke up.
Released in 1975 as the second single from Bowie’s Young Americans album, “Fame” went on to become his first U.S. chart-topper, reaching No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Canadian Singles chart.
“Fame” also became one of the year’s most successful singles, landing at No. 7 on Billboard’s 1975 Year-End Hot 100 list. “Fame” is also one of Bowie’s songs to make the prestigious list of “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.”
Lennon and Bowie share co-writing credits on “Fame” with frequent Bowie collaborator and guitarist Carlos Alomar. The song came together during a one-day jam session at Electric Lady Studios in New York City in the winter of 1975.
“David Bowie is in New York, and I seem to be the guy in New York that all the Englishmen say ‘hi’ to… I love it,” Lennon recalled Bowie inviting him to the studio during an interview with the BBC. “I got to know David through Mick Jagger really, although I’d met him once before. And the next thing he says, ‘John, I’m doing ‘Across the Universe,’ do you wanna come on down?’ I said ‘alright, you know, I live here… I’ll pop down’. I played rhythm.”
Source: Melinda Lorge/parade.com
You have probably walked past a gallery wall in a friend’s home or a restaurant and thought it looked effortlessly cool, as if every frame had simply found its rightful spot on the wall over the years. Maybe you have even tried to recreate one yourself, only to end up with a cluster of mismatched prints that felt more chaotic than curated. The truth is, that seemingly casual arrangement is anything but accidental. It is a decorating technique with roots stretching back centuries, and one legendary musician’s dining room proves it still works beautifully in 2026. A centuries-old tradition hiding in plain sight.
Gallery walls feel like a distinctly modern interior trend, the kind of thing that floods social media feeds every spring. But the concept actually dates back to the 1670s, when it served as the official display format for the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France. Artworks were hung from floor to ceiling in tightly packed arrangements, turning entire walls into immersive visual experiences.
So when we admire a well-composed cluster of frames in a contemporary dining room, we are really looking at a tradition that is more than 350 years old. The styles of art and photography on those walls have evolved dramatically over the centuries, yet the underlying principle – gathering meaningful pieces together in a deliberate arrangement – has barely changed at all. Isn’t it remarkable that a display method born in a French academy still feels fresh enough to inspire homeowners today?
Source: graziamagazine.com/Grazia Staff
