Beatles News
An Antiques Roadshow guest was adamant that an item signed by John Lennon and George Harrison is 'not going anywhere' despite its £1,000 to £1,500 value. On Sunday night's episode of the show (December 28) Fiona Bruce presented a showcase of 'unseen treasures' from Trentham Gardens in Staffordshire.
Throughout the show, valuable items included a rare Shamshir sword and a painting by George Leslie Hunter. Plus, Fiona's antiques knowledge was also put to the test with three pieces of pottery with Cubist designs, and ceramics expert John Sandon chatted about his life in antiques.
One man showcased a restaurant bill from his parents dated in 1965, that at first Marc Allum described as 'unremarkable'. It wasn't until the man explained that his parents were joined by some 'interesting people' in the London restaurant - who were none other than John Lennon and George Harrison.
Marc Allum said: "So this looks like a pretty unremarkable restaurant bill from Parks restaurant in Beauchamp Place in London, what's going on with it?"
When explaining the backstory, the man said: "My parents had a very special anniversary dinner, and my father said to the restaurant maître d' can I have their signature?" after spotting the Beatles stars tucking into their dinner.
He continued: "The maître d' responded 'we don't do that in this restaurant' and he stuck it in front of them anyway.
"They were more than delighted to sign it, and off he went on this way." Antiques Roadshow expert Marc Allum than asked if the John and George were 'regulars' in the restaurant, to which the guest replied: "Apparently it was one of their favourite restaurants."
Onto the price, despite the item being 'valuable to the family', Marc explained how the 'first hand account' of it would increase its value entirely.
George said: "You know that they're really genuine these signatures, so it worth £1k to £1.5k"
Despite its high price tag, the guest was sure he wouldn't let it go to auction, and replied: "Okay well, everybody says that, but it's not going anywhere so."
Source: Emily Sleight/liverpoolecho.co.uk
In 2007, Paul McCartney told an interviewer that the Beatles song When I’m Sixty-Four had been on his mind. “Heard it a lot recently – I wonder why?” he said, with a laugh.
Everyone knew the answer: The ex-Beatle had turned 64. And so did I, recently. The song has been on my mind, too. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it. I sing it in the shower, whistle it as I walk to work, and hum it on my way home. I even played it for my students in class.
They weren’t impressed. The song is about old age, which is something that young people usually don’t think about. And why should they, really? When I’m Sixty-Four reminds us about how much we get wrong when we imagine aging. It’s probably good to put it out of our minds, as best we can.
Mr. McCartney composed the song’s tune on his father’s piano when he was a teenager. His father, Jim McCartney, was a jazz trumpeter who took Paul to big-band shows. The melody has a jaunty cabaret sound. But Mr. McCartney didn’t add words to it until much later, around the time his dad turned 64; it was recorded in 1967 for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Mr. McCartney was only 24. And nothing in the song resembled what the family had experienced.
Put simply, When I’m Sixty-Four is a tribute to a kind of domestic tranquility that eluded the McCartneys. The narrator imagines himself fixing things around the house while his wife knits a sweater by the fireside.
The couple is solidly – and humbly – middle-class. The song tells us they will “scrimp and save” to afford a cottage on the Isle of Wight, a common British holiday spot, where they will bounce grandchildren on their knees.
That wasn’t how things went down in the McCartney home. Mr. McCartney’s mother died after an operation for breast cancer when he was 14. A midwife, she was the family’s primary breadwinner. When Mr. McCartney heard the news, his first reaction was to ask how the family would survive without her income.
By the time he penned the words for When I’m Sixty-Four, Mr. McCartney was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest musicians in the world. The song was a “parody” of aging, as the New Yorker critic Lillian Ross wrote. And, more to the point, it envisioned a family that Mr. McCartney didn’t have.
But he wanted one. After a failed engagement and multiple love affairs, Mr. McCartney wed the American photographer Linda Eastman in 1969. They had kids, settled on a farm and created the kind of family described in When I’m Sixty-Four.
Tragically, Linda died in 1998 of the same disease that had felled Mr. McCartney’s mother: breast cancer. He married again, to Heather Mills, but that union soon dissolved amid allegations that he had pushed Ms. Mills into the bathtub during a fight and cut her arm with a broken wineglass. (Mr. McCartney said at the time he would “vigorously” defend himself against the claims.)
Mr. McCartney separated from Ms. Mills in May, 2006. A month after that, he turned – you guessed it – 64.
That doesn’t seem as old now as it did then. When Mr. McCartney was born, in 1942, the average life expectancy for an infant boy in Britain was 63 years. The protagonists in his song were already a year older than that.
Today, as Mr. McCartney recently quipped, 64 “looks quite sprightly.” And few of us look as sprightly as Sir Paul, who continues to tour at the age of 83. But much of his life diverged from the script he imagined, because nobody can write their own story. Not even Paul McCartney.
I’ve been fortunate in ways that he wasn’t. I’ve been married to the same lovely woman for almost four decades. Like Linda McCartney, she had breast cancer. But my wife survived. We were blessed with two brilliant and beautiful daughters. And next spring, we will welcome our first grandchild.
I want to be like the old guy in the song, bouncing my grandkid on my knee. I also know that a lot of this stuff is outside of my control. I’ve got it good, for now. But anything can happen as we age.
So, I’m not going to think about it. I’ll try to live each day as it comes, and to love the people around me. And if I’m lucky, I’ll be singing When I’m Sixty-Four for a good long time.
Source: Jonathan Zimmerman/theglobeandmail.com
In 2026, the 60th anniversary of The Beatles' first compilation of old hits will be celebrated. A Collection of Beatles Oldies (But Goldies!), released for Christmas in 1966, aimed to satisfy the insatiable appetite of fans frustrated by the gap between the releases of Revolver (August 1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1967). The group still had three good years ahead. Even before their break-up, the respectable sales of this premature best-of hinted at the quartet's ability to perpetuate itself beyond its own demise, which was officially announced by Paul McCartney on April 10, 1970.
Since then, from compilations to remixes, from archive discoveries to documentaries, The Beatles, their music, and their legend have become an inexhaustible source of products designed to fuel nostalgia. Logic would suggest that this seam should be running dry – after all, the band's generation, the baby boomers, is nearing extinction, and nostalgia implies having experienced what one now misses.
But that is without counting the digital age and its ability to blur the boundaries of reality. The constant bombardment of Beatles music and footage – from the release of the 1973 compilations (the "blue" and "red" albums) to the streaming (by Disney+ in 2024) of the documentary Beatles '64, edited by David Tedeschi from footage filmed by the Maysles brothers during the group's first visit to the United States in February 1964 – has resulted in a digital contagion made up of both YouTube clips and TikTok memes.
As a result, The Beatles now count among their fans boys and girls young enough to be their great-grandchildren, who consume everything from concert film fragments to AI-generated clips, such as one showing all four octogenarians reunited for a concert at Wembley in London in 2025 – never mind that John Lennon was murdered in 1980 and George Harrison died of cancer 21 years later.
The latest example of squeezing the very last drop from this rich vein is Disney+'s release at the end of November of a new version of the documentary The Beatles Anthology, which first appeared in 1996. This edition comes with a new episode devoted to the making of… The Beatles Anthology, made up of footage captured during the recording of the band's three posthumous tracks – unfinished John Lennon songs that the remaining three members, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, managed to complete as best they could.
Source: Thomas Sotinel/lemonde.fr
The Beatles, the famous British rock band formed in 1960, have become one of the most revered and successful musical acts in history. Their classic hits such as "Here Comes The Sun", "I Want To Hold Your Hand", and "All You Need Is Love" helped the Fab Four to change the face of popular music forever. As many ardent fans know, some of their most famous songs have interesting backstories. One such song, written by George Harrison, could have been one of The Beatles' biggest hits, but instead it became part of Harrison's solo discovery, and the reason why is quite intriguing.
As ardent music fans will know, Frank Sinatra had a love-hate relationship and opinion when it came to The Beatles. For example, in a press release for his 1965 released album A Man and His Music, Sinatra didn’t hold back when it came to criticizing the British band and their new-age sound, choosing instead to prop up his own music, “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons…it should be refreshing.” However, at the same time, he also begrudgingly gave the group their much-deserved props when the moment called for it.
Case in point, Sinatra praised the George Harrison-penned song "Something", even going so far as to call it "the greatest love song of the past 50 years." In fact, Sinatra loved the song so much that he performed and recorded two of his own versions. "Something" isn't the only song Sinatra liked or covered; he also sang their track "Yesterday". In fact, according to singer Billy Joel, it was Sinatra that helped to propel The Beatles into stardom, stating, “Even Sinatra covered it. He wasn’t a big fan of a lot of pop music. The fact he did that was very important to some people who didn’t take The Beatles seriously,” and “Like, ‘Wait a minute, this must be a pretty damn great song if Frank is doing it."
Source: Karly B/collider.com
Shunning The Beatles seems like almost an impossible task, especially given how inescapable their music, history, and cultural presence have been since the 1960s. Yet Zak Starkey, the son of Ringo Starr, recently admitted he deliberately avoided listening to the Fab Four until he was well into his twenties.
During an interview with Q1043 New York, the 60-year-old Starkey, who is an exceptionally talented drummer in his own right (having played with the likes of The Who, Oasis, and Johnny Marr, among others), offered up this surprising revelation.
"I'll be honest, when I was a kid, The Beatles were in my way," Starkey said (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar). "I was in groups from a really young age, and I was getting press attention, but they were only paying me attention, and they weren't paying the rest of the band attention." "And I got a bit resentful of this. And that sort of got me into a place where I sort of shunned The Beatles, for a long time. A few people say that's why I have an identity of my own."
But as previously mentioned, finding his own identity on the drum kit proved exceptionally beneficial, leading to a gig with The Who from 1996 through 2025. A band which he was unceremoniously booted from in May 2025, on the eve of their latest "farewell tour", for reasons he is still not exactly sure of.
Eventually, Starkey did relent and gave a proper listen to his father's former band. And as expected, he was downright impressed with what he heard. "But at the end of the day, when I did listen to The Beatles, I was about 25. I was like, 'Wow! These guys were amazing. Wow, I should have been listening to this forever.' But I'm glad I didn't, because I got into other things."
While he did grow to appreciate The Beatles, he's still not as big a fanatic to sit through the full six-hour version of the Get Back documentary from 2021, which was directed by Peter Jackson."I haven't watched the six-hour one," Starkey confessed. "Because I have a four-year-old child, and if I've got six hours, I'll probably take a break and go to bed!"
Starkey also admitted earlier in 2025 that his famous father was supposedly not exactly quick with compliments when it came to his son's drumming early on.
"My dad never opened the doors for me. He'd watch me and say the most cutting f—ing s—. But he is the greatest rock n' roll drummer in the world. He's better now than he was then."
Source: Ultimate Guitar
We know he’s a fantastic songwriter, dynamic singer of bashers and ballads, and top-of-the-line bassist. But casual fans might not realize that Paul McCartney can play a wide variety of instruments when called upon to do so.
Occasionally, McCartney has even taken the initiative to tackle a song (or even an entire album) all on his own. These four outstanding tracks feature nobody but Macca, who makes for a formidable one-man band. “Maybe I’m Amazed”
McCartney wasn’t really intending to do a solo album, at least not initially, when he headed out to his barn and started making music in his home studio in 1969/1970. He was mostly trying to shake the bad feelings of The Beatles’ breakup, which had occurred but hadn’t yet been announced. The one song that McCartney took into Abbey Road studios was “Maybe I’m Amazed”, perhaps sensing that it needed that professional studio touch. Macca offers several instrumental flourishes on the track, as if it were a band where each member grabs center stage for a moment. Ultimately, the spotlight is on the emotionally potent song and Paul’s stellar, all-in lead vocal performance.
“Every Night”
Many of the songs on the McCartney album feel like they’re homemade, for better or worse. But “Every Night” avoids that, in part because it’s such a tightly written track that doesn’t lose its appealing laid-back vibe. Like so much of the debut, it’s an ode to McCartney’s domestic life with his wife Linda. You can kind of understand why that would appeal to him, considering all the Fab Four chaos surrounding him. Note how McCarthy’s rhythm guitar work propels this song. Meanwhile, his bass keeps popping up in unexpected places in the gaps between. He seals the deal on the catchiness of this track with the wordless “Whoo-whoo” refrain that allows him to show off his falsetto.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
"The greatest pop record ever made. A record that never dates, because it lives outside time”: How The Beatles created Strawberry Fields Forever – the experimental masterpiece that John Lennon regarded as the best song he ever wrote for the band.
Lennon once described Strawberry Fields Forever as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote”, adding that, along with Help!, “they were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it”.
Strawberry Fields Forever is quite simply a masterpiece, a poignant, heartfelt song that bridges the innocence of Lennon’s post-War childhood with the kaleidoscopic, heady sensation of ’60s psychedelia.
It is also a landmark moment in the rich back catalogue of The Beatles. Like everything within the exhaustively chronicled career of The Beatles, there's no shortage of opinions on when exactly John Lennon first came up with the germ of Strawberry Fields Forever.
Forums were abuzz in late 2024, when a clip in the Beatles ’64 documentary showed Lennon in a New York hotel room at the height of Beatlemania playing what certainly sounds like the opening, descending melody of Strawberry Fields Forever on a Melodica. Some observers were not convinced.
What is fairly certain is that Lennon wrote the whole song between 26 September and 6 November 1966 in Spain, during filming for the Richard Lester-directed film How I Won The War, a black comedy in which Lennon plays hapless Private Gripweed.
In David Sheff’s 1980 book, The Last Major Interview With John Lennon And Yoko Ono, Lennon recalled the writing of Strawberry Fields Forever: “We were in Almeria,” he said, “and it took me six weeks to write the song.
“I was writing it all the time I was making the film. And as anybody knows about film work, there’s a lot of hanging around. “I have an original tape of it somewhere, of how it sounded before it became the psychedelic sounding song it became on record.”
Like the Paul McCartney-penned Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever was Lennon’s nostalgia-fuelled look back to his childhood years in Liverpool.
Source: musicradar.com
During an interview on Stephen Colbert , former Beatle Paul McCartney Nancy Shevell went undercover to a movie theater to watch Yesterday , a film that imagines a world without the band.
“It was really fun. We were in the back row, and someone in the movie says, ‘Paul McCartney, the greatest songwriter in history.’ I had to laugh. It was really cool. We wanted to see the movie with the people, not with the studio executives. I thought it was great,” he said.
He also confessed to constantly dreaming about John Lennon , his friend and former bandmate. "When you have such a close and deep relationship with someone, for so long, sometimes that person can visit you in your dreams. I love when that happens," he confessed.
McCartney also commented a bit on his relationship with the musician, revealing that he felt a strong connection with Lennon who, like him, lost his mother very early. “We both knew that feeling. I never thought it affected my music, until someone told me that 'Yesterday' could be about my mother. 'Why did she have to go? / I don't know / She didn't tell me.' I didn't write it with that intention, but maybe it is.”
At the end of the interview, the singer recalled a photo of himself with John Lennon and spoke about the negative way the press portrayed the end of the Beatles, as a fight between the members that resulted in the end of their friendship.
“I believed the idea that I was the 'villain' of the story. So many rumors circulated at the time. I started to question myself: 'Did I really know John? Were we friends?'. Seeing this photo reaffirms, for me, that we were. It was really cool when we worked together.”
Source: Erica Y Roumieh/wikimetal.com.br
The Beatles did not find lasting peace in India, but they found something more enduring: a body of work that captured uncertainty without resolving it.
In February of 1968, at the height of their fame, the Beatles boarded a plane bound for India. They were the most recognisable faces on the planet, their music saturating radios, bedrooms, and public life, yet they arrived in Rishikesh seeking something stubbornly intangible.
Success had delivered them everything it promised and very little that it could sustain. The world expected spectacle; the four young men wanted silence. What they found instead was a brief, strange interlude—part retreat, part unravelling—that would leave behind some of the most enduring music of the twentieth century and quietly mark the beginning of the end.
Their destination was an ashram perched above the Ganges, run by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose teachings on transcendental meditation had begun to circulate through Western “counterculture.” India, to the Beatles, existed both as a real place and as a projection—a landscape onto which exhaustion, hope, and dissatisfaction could be mapped.
The Western press followed eagerly, framing the journey as a kind of pilgrimage, though the tone often veered into disbelief. Why, many wondered, would four wealthy, famous young men abandon comfort for austerity, guitars for meditation cushions?
The answer had been forming for years, particularly for George Harrison, whose fascination with Indian music began in 1966 when he purchased a sitar on a whim. That instrument led him to Ravi Shankar, the virtuoso who would become both teacher and spiritual guide.
Through Shankar, Harrison encountered Hindu philosophy not as fashion but as discipline, a structure for thinking about ego, suffering, and impermanence. The influence seeped into the Beatles’ music, inaugurating what critics later called the band’s “sitar phase,” though the phrase often flattened something more earnest into a trend.
Source: Madras Courier/madrascourier.com
Val Barone is a journalist working remotely and specializing in music features. A passionate music lover, she keeps up to date on the latest developments in the entertainment world, and in the past five years, she's written for several sites, including ScreenRant, MovieWeb, TheThings, and Far Out Magazine. She covers breaking news in the music world and loves sharing stories about the classic rock musicians she grew up listening to. As a Gen Z writer, she offers a fresh perspective on the events that change music history.
In 1967, The Beatles were at the height of their creativity. They had stopped touring, and their last release from 1966, Revolver, was their most ambitious album. At least, until the album that changed everything. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was revolutionary from the start, considered the first concept album. Just the cover art drove people into a frenzy in the '60s, and each song pulls the listener deeper into the world the Fab Four crafted. The last song, "A Day In The Life," is the perfect culmination for the album of the decade, its psychedelic themes, orchestral arrangements, and pop culture references perfectly capturing the music revolution The Beatles were leading at the time. The Song That Changed Rock 'n' Roll Forever
"It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. I had the “I read the news today” bit, and it turned Paul on, because now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said “yeah” — bang bang, like that. It just sort of happened beautifully," Lennon shared, calling it "a real groove." He also spoke about how they decided to divide the singing parts. Lennon had written most of the verses, except for one part. "I needed a middle-eight for it, but that would have been forcing it, all the rest had come out smooth, flowing, no trouble." McCartney, however, had been working on a short song that they both knew instantly would have fit perfectly into it, and that became the middle part.
Source: Val Barone/collider.com
