Beatles News
On this day (January 2) in 1971, George Harrison topped the Billboard 200 with All Things Must Pass. The triple-album marked his first release since The Beatles officially parted ways in April 1970. Musicians on the album include Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Alan White, Pete Drake, and many more.
Harrison began working on All Things Must Pass at EMI Studios the month after The Beatles officially broke up. Co-produced by Harrison and Phil Spector, sessions for the album stretched into October. Finally, after months of work, Harrison released the three-LP collection on November 27.
Upon its initial release, All Things Must Pass consisted of three LPs. The first two contained the album’s 18 official tracks, many of which were passed over for inclusion on previous Beatles albums. The third LP contained a collection of five live studio jams.
George Harrison Won the Race to the Top of the Singles Chart.
Paul McCartney was the first member of the Fab Four to score a No. 1 album after the band broke up. His album, McCartney, reached the top of the Billboard 200 on May 23, 1970, and stayed there for three weeks. Interestingly, Let It Be dethroned McCartney’s solo release.
Harrison, on the other hand, was the first former Beatle to score a No. 1 single. His song “My Sweet Lord” reached the top of the Hot 100 the day after Christmas 1970. It retained the top spot for four consecutive weeks. The single was still at the top when All Things Must Pass reached No. 1.
While “My Sweet Lord” was Harrison’s debut single as a solo artist, All Things Must Pass was not his first solo LP. He released two solo albums during his final years with The Beatles. First, he released Wonderwall Music in 1968. The next year, he released Electric Sound the next year. Neither of those albums saw much chart success.
All Things Must Pass topped charts in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Source: Clayton Edwards/americansongwriter.com
Amidst the cold studios and rising tensions of January 1969, the Fab Four managed to set aside their differences to record one last chart-topping legacy.
On the morning of January 2, 1969, four men walked into the drafty, cavernous Twickenham Film Studios in London. To any onlooker, they were the biggest stars on the planet. To themselves, they were a band on the brink of collapse. This was the beginning of what was intended to be a "return to roots" project for The Beatles, originally titled “Get Back”. It would eventually become their final released album, “Let It Be”.
The atmosphere that first morning was far from the polished magic fans heard on their records. The studio was freezing, the lighting was harsh, and the group was being trailed by film cameras capturing every rehearsal, every argument, and every yawn. Paul McCartney, acting as the de facto director of the group, wanted to strip away the complex studio tricks of their previous albums. His goal was simple: The Beatles playing live, together in a room, with no overdubs.
But the reality was complicated. After years of being the most famous people on earth, the individual Beatles were drifting apart. John Lennon was increasingly focused on his life with Yoko Ono, who sat by his side throughout the sessions. George Harrison was frustrated, feeling his songwriting was being sidelined by the dominant partnership of Lennon and McCartney. Ringo Starr, ever the professional, sat behind his drum kit, watching the friction build.
The tensions were caught in real-time. In footage that would later be famously restored for the 2021 docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”, viewers see the moments of creative spark buried under layers of exhaustion. There is a famous scene where George and Paul argue over a guitar part, a moment that encapsulated the growing pains of a band that had outgrown its own frame. A few days into the sessions, George Harrison actually quit the band, walking out and telling the others, "See you ‘round the clubs."
It took a change of scenery and a new face to save the project. The band moved from the cold film studio to their own Apple Studios in the basement of their headquarters on Savile Row. They also invited keyboardist Billy Preston to join them. Preston’s presence acted as a "musical diplomat"; the band members were on their best behavior with a guest in the room, and his soulful electric piano gave the tracks the lift they needed.
Despite the internal heavy lifting, the music that emerged was legendary. During these weeks of January, songs like "Get Back," "Across the Universe," "The Long and Winding Road," and the title track, "Let It Be," took shape. The sessions culminated in the famous "Rooftop Concert" on January 30, 1969. Clad in heavy coats against the winter wind, The Beatles played their last public performance on top of their office building, bringing central London to a standstill until the police eventually shut them down.
Source: muskokaradio.com
Name a music industry record, and chances are the Beatles hold it. With the release of their 1963 debut album Please Please Me, a quartet of shaggy-haired musicians from Liverpool forever altered the listening experience of rock music enthusiasts. Comprised of George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Star, the Beatles remain the best-selling artists of all time more than five decades after their split. That’s perhaps what makes the events that occurred in North London on this day in 1962 all the more mystifying in hindsight.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon Differed on the Beatles’ Failed Decca Audition
“Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr. Epstein.” While former Decca Records head Dick Rowe denied ever uttering these words on Jan. 1, 1962, they have continued to endure in Fab Four lore as an example of monumentally poor judgment.
The way Rowe told it, he gave Decca A&R representative Mike Smith a choice between the Beatles and another “guitar group,” Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. Smith chose the latter mainly for logistical reasons—their hometown of Dagenham was closer to the West Hampstead studio than Liverpool.
Nonetheless, it was a pretty crushing blow for manager Brian Epstein and the Beatles, who had been working overtime to secure a record deal for the band. By this point, Columbia, His Master’s Voice, and other labels had already shot them down.
Along with original drummer Pete Best, Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney began their trek to London on New Year’s Eve 1961, with then-road manager Neil Aspinall behind the wheel. Aspinall got lost, resulting in a 10-hour trip.
The Beatles would go on to perform 15 songs, including “Searchin’”, “Three Cool Cats”, “The Sheik of Araby”, “Like Dreamers Do” and “Hello Little Girl.”
Beatles “Three Fantastic Cats” π·πΏπΌπΈ . π· . π· From the “Decca Audition” recording A cover of The Coasters with George Harrison’s lead vocals A well-known pre-debut sound source, one of the songs included on the official compilation “Anthology π· ” George’s singing voice at the age of π·πΎ at the time.
For his part, Paul McCartney could see their point after listening to the tapes. We weren’t that good, though there were some quite interesting and original things,” the iconic bassist has said. His primary songwriting partner, Lennon, disagreed. “I wouldn’t have turned us down on that. I think it sounded OK,” he said, adding, “I think Decca expected us to be all polished. We were just doing a demo. They should have seen our potential.”
Disheartened, an otherwise undeterred Epstein requested the audition tapes from Decca and continued his quest. And three months later, producer George Martin eventually signed the Beatles to EMI’s Parlophone Label.
Source: Erinn Callahan/americansongwriter.com
The actress who plays Ringo Starr’s first wife in a forthcoming biopic has admitted that she couldn’t name all four members of The Beatles. Mia McKenna-Bruce, 28, also said she was unfamiliar with most of the band’s songs until she was cast as Maureen Starkey.
Sam Mendes is directing four Beatles biopics, each focusing on a different member of the band, to be released in 2028.
McKenna-Bruce’s casting was announced while she was filming an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery with Martin Freeman. The actress revealed that Freeman teased her over her lack of Beatles knowledge. “We sang Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine at school, but it wasn’t my jam,” she told Tatler.
“On Seven Dials, Martin Freeman was asking me to name all the Beatles. I didn’t know. Then he’d ask me: ‘What band was Mick Jagger in?’ I was like, ‘I have no idea, Martin’, and he was like, ‘Aargh!’
“Yet now, I’m like: ‘Oh my God, the Beatles are underrated! This is good! It’s music I’d sit and listen to on the train.’”
The Beatles films will star Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.
Maureen was a teenage hairdresser and Beatles fan when she met Starr at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. They began dating in 1962 and hastily married in February 1965 after discovering that Maureen was pregnant. They went on to have three children including Zak Starkey, now a famous drummer in his own right.
The marriage was strained by infidelity on both sides, including Maureen’s affair with George Harrison. She and Starr divorced in 1975 and she later married Isaac Tigrett, one of the founders of the Hard Rock Cafe. Starr married Barbara Bach, the Bond actress, in 1981.
When Maureen died from leukaemia in 1994, Starr was among the family members at her bedside.
McKenna-Bruce said: “I haven’t met Ringo but apparently, to this day, when he talks about Maureen he gets this brightness behind his eyes. “Ringo went through so much – all of the Beatles did – and Maureen really grounded him, so it’s important to me to keep her as human and warm as possible.” She will appear in the biopics alongside Saoirse Ronan as Linda Eastman, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono and Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd.
Source: Anita Singh/telegraph.co.uk
By 1974, George Harrison had recorded countless number 1 albums, sold out tours across the globe, and he had enough of being in the biggest band in the world, The Beatles. The lead single from his fifth studio album, Dark Horse, “Ding Dong, Ding Dong,” has long divided fans, with half enjoying the New Year’s optimistic festivities and the other half disregarding it as a novelty piece. Where critics saw emptiness, Harrison shared a sentiment that had been dear to him for years. When we put the song in a wider context instead of jumping to easy, harsh conclusions, it becomes far more interesting and impactful than one might think on the surface.
Criticism of George Harrison’s Single Rang Out Loud
“Ding Dong, Ding Dong” was the lead single from George Harrison’s fifth solo studio album, Dark Horse, which was released in 1974. Harrison wrote the song to be a sing-along classic to enjoy festivities, and crucially to embrace the future by letting go of the past in welcoming the new year. Critics and fellow musicians alike have speculated that Harrison wanted to follow in the successful footsteps of the British glam rock Christmas tunes of 1973 and 1974 by Wizzard and Slade, but never quite met neither the chart space nor public respect that they did.
Some critics, however, deem the plainness of “Ding Dong, Ding Dong” to be elementary and effortless. The BBC’s John Peel called the tune "repetitive and dull,” and Bob Woffingden of the New Musical Express rather sharply noted that “There’s nothing more disappointing than finding one's teenage heroes crumbling ineluctably into middle-aged mediocrity.” Perhaps the worst of all was Chris Irwin of Melody Maker labeling Harrison’s NYE track as a “Glorified nursery rhyme.” Harrison admitted that "Ding Dong, Ding Dong" was written quickly, but perhaps not as much as critics thought:
“It took me three minutes, except it took me four years of looking at the thing which was written on the wall at my home, ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new. Ring out the false, ring in the truth,’ before I realized it was a hit song. It makes me laugh because it’s so simple.”
George Harrison Was Fighting Fatigue, Freedom, and Expectations
Source: Fiona MacPherson-Amador/collider.com
It was a moment of horrible deja vu for music fans around the world — a mentally unwell man had attacked one of the Beatles, leaving him for dead.
It's a headline that could have been from December 8, 1980, but it was also sadly true of this day, December 30, 1999, when George Harrison was stabbed in his home.
Unlike his former bandmate John Lennon, Harrison survived the attack by a knife-wielding attacker, though Harrison's friends and family speculated it ultimately hastened his death from lung cancer less than two years later.
But like the fatal attack on Lennon outside the Dakota Building in New York, the stabbing of Harrison was another case of someone with mental health issues slipping through the cracks and not getting the help they needed before doing something horrible to a much-loved musician.
A troubled man struggling
About a month before he broke into Harrison's home and stabbed the former Beatle, Michael Abram was in a psychiatric ward in Merseyside, the English county centred around Liverpool.
The 33-year-old father of two had been grappling with addiction and undiagnosed schizophrenia for the previous decade, according to reporting from the BBC and The Guardian at the time and police had taken him to a Merseyside hospital in November 1999.
Abram's mother Lydia told the BBC the health system had failed her son and was "totally and completely useless".
After leaving hospital, Abram returned to the 10th floor flat where he lived alone in Liverpool, sitting "on an up-turned plant pot" in his "sparsely-furnished rooms", listening to The Beatles, John Lennon, U2 and Bob Marley, a court later heard.
His neighbours watched him walk to the chemist each week to collect his methadone, singing Beatles songs as he went.
All the while, Abram was sinking further and further into his delusions.
The hearings held in the wake of Harrison's stabbing heard Abram had witnessed a total eclipse on August 11, 1999, which led him to believe he was St Michael and on a mission from God to kill Harrison, who Abram believed to be the "phantom menace" that was possessing him.
"He thought George Harrison was the alien from hell," psychiatrist Phillip Joseph told the court.
"He thought the Beatles were witches flying on broomsticks from hell."
a policeman walks past an ornate gate
A policeman stands guard outside Harrison's home after the stabbing. (Reuters)
The attack
Harrison lived at Friar Park, a Victorian mansion built in 1889 that he'd purchased in 1970, at Henley-on-Thames, west of London, some 300 kilometres south-east of Abram's Liverpool home.
On December 29, Abram arrived at a nearby local church and asked the vicar: "Where does the squire live?"
It wasn't the first time Abram had travelled from Liverpool to Henley-on-Thames and asked about Harrison.
But this time, things were different. He had with him a metre-long cord and a knife. Abram loitered around the property, and sang in the nearby town square, apparently "hoping to provoke an uprising against the star", Morris wrote.
At about 3:30am, Abram scaled the walls around Friar Park, evaded security, and used part of a statue George Harrison's wife, Olivia, had made to break a window and gain entry to the mansion.
Olivia heard the noise and woke her husband, who went in search of the sound, pulling on a jacket and a pair of boots over his pyjamas.
According to detailed court reporting at the time for The Guardian, Olivia rang staff and police as Harrison spotted Abrams in the main hall.
Abrams began screaming up at Harrison, who was above him on the landing, and in an attempt to distract the attacker, Harrison began shouting "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna" back at him.
The intruder advanced up the stairs and Harrison, thinking about his wife, son and mother-in-law in the house, lunged at Abrams, trying to grab the knife from him.
"We fell to the floor," Harrison told the court. "I was fending off blows with my hands. He was on top of me and stabbing down at my upper body." Olivia arrived and attacked Abrams with a small brass poker, causing Abrams to attack her too.
"There was blood on the walls and on the carpet," she told the court.
Source: Matt Neal/abc.net.au
Did John Lennon really steal music from other musicians? That’s been the hot subject of debate among Beatles fans for decades. Many of those accusations aren’t based in reality. However, when it comes to a few songs from back in John Lennon’s heyday, it really does seem like he stole at least part of some famous tunes. I’ll let you form your own opinion on that. Let’s take a look at three songs that John Lennon allegedly stole from other musicians!
“Come Together” by The Beatles
This might just be one of the biggest songs of the 20th century. “Come Together”, released in 1969, is a blues-rock venture that went on to be one of the most-covered songs of all time. And according to lore, it wasn’t entirely John Lennon’s brainchild.
Some believe that “Come Together” boasts a very similar melody and overall song structure to rock and roll icon Chuck Berry’s tune, “You Can’t Catch Me”. In fact, Chuck Berry (or whoever owned the copyright to that song) even sued The Beatles over it. The suit was settled out of court without much fanfare, and Berry would later collaborate with Lennon. Apparently, there were no hard feelings there.
“Jamrag” by John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band
“Jamrag” comes from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s collaborative album from 1972, Some Time In New York City. This controversial album boasted a few infamous songs, though it didn’t produce many hits. One little hidden track among the rest is “Jamrag”.
The problem is that “Jamrag” was originally titled “King Kong”, and it was written by Frank Zappa. Zappa himself commented on the theft in interviews, saying that he did not receive a songwriting credit for the song.
“There’s a song that I wrote called ‘King Kong’,” Zappa said of a night in which he and Lennon worked on music together. “I don’t know whether it was Yoko’s idea or John’s idea, but they changed the name of the song to ‘Jamrag’, gave themselves writing and publishing credit on it, stuck it on an album, and never paid me.”
Source: Em Casalena/americansongwriter.com
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
