Paul McCartney had a famously stoic reaction to John Lennon's death in 1980.  Lennon's son Sean Ono Lennon defends McCartney in the new documentary Man on the Run.  McCartney's daughter Stella also reveals he did, in fact, have an emotional reaction to Lennon's death.

Just hours after John Lennon’s death, Paul McCartney was bombarded by reporters asking him for a reaction to losing his lifelong friend and bandmate.

The stunned McCartney, 83, famously offered a stoic response, nonchalantly telling the reporters, “[It’s a] drag, isn’t it?” in a clip that has been repeatedly analyzed by fans. Now, in a new documentary following McCartney’s life and career, Lennon’s son Sean Ono Lennon is opening up about why the singer’s reaction actually makes a lot of sense to him.

“I always notice the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice. Really felt like someone who was unable to process what was going on,” Sean says in the documentary Man on the Run (in theaters Thursday, Feb. 19 and Sunday, Feb. 22 only and out on Prime Video Feb. 27). “He just seemed almost robotic, which I think some people took possibly as coldness, but I never took it as that, ‘cause I understood even then what it was like when something that terrible happens.” 

 Lennon was 40 years old when he was shot and killed outside his New York City apartment building on Dec. 8, 1980.

In his interview with reporters, McCartney says he was “very shocked” to learn of his Beatle bandmate’s death, calling it “terrible news” and saying he was told in a phone call earlier that morning. He says he’s unsure whether he’ll go to the funeral, and leaves the interview by saying, “Okay, cheers.”  In Man on the Run, Sean, 50, goes on to explain the bond that his father had with McCartney, and reveals that his dad often played the 1970 album McCartney on vinyl.

“When the Beatles broke up, he had to grow up, but in a way I feel like my dad passing was probably the real growing up moment,” he says. “They had a once-in-a-millennium chemistry that I don’t think we’re likely to see again.”
Paul McCartney in Paris in 1976.

McCartney’s daughter Stella is also interviewed in the film, and reveals that her dad actually did have an emotional reaction to hearing about Lennon’s death, despite what his interview suggested. “I remember that moment. I remember the phone ringing. I remember some, the biggest reaction I'd ever seen and him leaving the kitchen and going outside,” she says. “That was heartbreaking, like truly heartbreaking.”

Source: Rachel DeSantis/people.com

Read More<<<

Though John Lennon reached the highest levels of musicsuccess with The Beatles, the prolific singer-songwriter only topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart once while he was alive. Lennon’s 1974 song, “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night,” was put together with an assist from another major player in the music game, Elton John, and was inspired by an unexpected television show.

The song made its debut on September 28, 1974 and made it to the top of the chart by November. American Songwriter reports that the song’s title and message came from Lennon’s late-night channel surfing habit.

May Pang, who was his wife Yoko Ono’s personal assistant and who was in a romantic relationship with Lennon (approved by Ono!) at the time he wrote the song, told Radio Times, “One time, he was watching Reverend Ike, a famous Black evangelist, who was saying, ‘Let me tell you guys, it doesn’t matter, it’s whatever gets you through the night.’ John loved it and said, ‘I’ve got to write it down or I’ll forget it.’”

The song eventually made its way onto Lennon’s 1974 album, Walls and Bridges, with a little help from Elton John. While recording the album, Lennon leaned on his friend to give the song an extra boost, with John eventually adding in piano, organ, and vocal harmonies.

The duo famously made a bet that if the song made it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Lennon would join John onstage at a concert for a live version, and the Beatle kept his word, taking to the stage at Madison Square Garden in November 1974.

In addition to their Billboard hit, Lennon also performed “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “I Saw Her Standing There” by The Beatles. American Songwriter notes that this was the last major live performance from Lennon before he died in 1980.

After his death, Lennon once again made it to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with “(Just Like) Starting Over,” which spent five weeks at number one beginning on December 27, 1980.

Source: Gabriela Arevalo/yahoo.com

Paul McCartney met the actor set to portray him in an upcoming four-film project about the Beatles.

McCartney, 83, and Paul Mescal, 30, were amongst the attendees at the London screening of Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run. The Amazon MGM documentary details McCartney’s life after the Beatles disbanded.  Mescal attended the premiere with girlfriend Gracie Abrams. The pair posed with McCartney on the red carpet.  A photo illustration of The Beatles for the Obsessed podcast.

Mescal will be seen as McCartney in the forthcoming movie series The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event. The set of four films, each focusing on a Beatles member, will release theatrically in April 2028. In addition to Mescal, the films feature Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. 

Each segment of the film anthology will be directed by Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, known for critically acclaimed projects like American Beauty and Skyfall. Mendes also produced Hamnet, in which Mescal starred as William Shakespeare.

Other key characters will be played by a starry cast: Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, James Norton as Brian Epstein, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd, Harry Lloyd as George Martin, and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey.
(l to r) Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison)
The main cast of 'The Beatles - A Four-Film Cinematic Event,' directed by Sam Mendes: Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison).  

Mescal has spoken about meeting McCartney previously, calling the Grammy-winning artist “extraordinary.”

“He’s an extraordinary man, like to spend any time—it’s a crazy sentence to say that I’ve spent time with that man, let alone play him," the actor told IndieWire in September.
Ringo Starr and Barry Keoghan

He also told Backstage that the opportunity to play McCartney is “so exciting” and that the cast is approaching the legacy of the Beatles with “the greatest love and respect and rigor.”

“I get to play somebody who I have always admired. You could count on one hand how many people have influenced the world as much as he has,” Mescal said. “His relationship to his art is so inspiring to me.”

Source: Meera Navlakha/thedailybeast.com

Billy Preston recorded several albums for the Beatles’ Apple Records and added a driving organ to the song “Get Back” (1969), which was credited to “the Beatles with Billy Preston,” the only time the group shared credit with another artist. He also contributed to the albums Abbey Road (1969) and Let It Be (1970), and he was part of the band’s legendary rooftop concert during the making of the documentary film Let It Be (1970).

Source: britannica.com

Nearly 60 years after the most devastating breakup in music history, Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville is shedding new light on what kept the Beatles from reuniting.

“Every single interview any of them gave in that entire decade, they were asked, ‘When are the Beatles going to get back together?’” Neville, 58, told Obsessed: The Podcast host Matt Wilstein in a new interview about his latest documentary, Man on the Run. “They could not escape it.”

Despite the band’s refusal to answer those questions at the time, Neville now believes they had something in the works.

“I actually think, if John had lived, they would’ve gotten back together,” the director added. “Eventually, somehow, somewhere.”
Portrait of the The Beatles. From left to right: Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison, circa 1965.
The Beatles' split in 1970 rocked the music world to its core and left each of the band's members questioning their musical futures. McCartney later reflected that he thought he might "never write another note of music ever."  

Neville has spent his 30-year career piecing together the lives of pop culture’s biggest names: Johnny Cash, Anthony Bourdain, and Steve Martin, to name a few. Now, he’s set his sights on one of the music industry’s biggest living legends: Paul McCartney.

In his new documentary, Man on the Run, Neville details McCartney’s turbulent decade following the split of his boyhood band.
Producer Caitrin Rogers (L) and director Morgan Neville win Oscars 2014
Neville won an Oscar for his documentary about the behind-the-scenes lives of backup singers. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

“In the early days, they were feuding, and I think they were all just trying to get away from each other in some ways,” Neville said of the reunion talks.

According to the filmmaker, McCartney had talked with John Lennon about playing on his 1975 album Venus and Mars, so the pair’s feud had “considerably thawed by then.”

To the acclaimed documentarian, it was an issue of time rather than of disdain. Lennon’s untimely murder just 10 years after the breakup put a tragically permanent end to any tentative plans the bandmates may have had in place.

Source: Owen Mason-Hill/thedailybeast.com

Read More<<<

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville dove in deep to create “Man on the Run,” a movie about Paul McCartney in the 1970s after the Beatles’ breakup. The film, which is playing at selected theaters locally, arrives on Prime Video on February 27th.

By the time he’d completed the film, the director had far more interview material than he could fit into two hours. McCartney’s company, MPL, decided to use that material as the basis for an oral history book, “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.”

Ted Widmer, a historian and former speechwriter in the Clinton White House, was leaving a McCartney concert in 2023 when he ran into a book editor he knew, Bob Weil, and they discussed their love of the Beatles.

Later, Widmer positively reviewed McCartney’s photo book, “1964: Eye of the Storm,” and it turned out that Weil had been the editor of that book and other recent McCartney publications. Widmer learned all this in early 2024 when Weil called and invited him to compile the oral history into a book.  “I was excited,” Widmer said in a recent video interview. “We had to work really fast. We had a good team with Bob and a couple of people at MPL.”

The book begins with the breakup of the Beatles and covers the two pre-Wings albums, “McCartney” and “Ram,” as well as “McCartney II,” which was essentially McCartney’s escape hatch from Wings.  The book credits McCartney’s wife Linda as a grounding force against the perils of superstardom, as well as a vital contributor to some of the biggest songs of the ‘70s. It is also filled with memorable anecdotes, and while some come from McCartney, many of the best come from band members like drummers Denny Seiwell and Joe English.

Seiwell recounts how he bought what he thought was Ringo’s Shea Stadium drum kit, only to have Ringo later tell him it was fake. Seiwell also recalls being amazed at the simple life that McCartney, the world’s biggest rock star, was living on his farm in Scotland, recalling that the house was so simple that in the cold weather – and he says even the summers were cold – he had to sleep with a hot water bottle between his legs.

English, meanwhile, had a different experience while staying at the McCartneys: when he went to hang his clothes in a closet, he saw his bandmate’s original Sgt. Pepper outfit hanging in there. English was as awestruck as any ordinary Beatles fan would be.

Source: Stuart Miller/ocregister.com

Read More<<<