Beatles News
George Harrison wrote "Something," arguably one of the greatest love songs in music history, about his first wife, Pattie Boyd, but their marriage didn't stand the same test of time as his lyrics and melody: The pair divorced after Boyd left Harrison, a Beatle, for Eric Clapton, a guitar god. And that wasn't even the only love triangle to plague the couple's marriage. According to Boyd, Harrison cheated on her with his bandmate Ringo Starr's then-wife Maureen Starkey (no, really!). That's a lot of drama for a man known as the "quiet Beatle."
Keep reading to learn more about Harrisons wives, including who he was married to at the time of his death in 2001. Harrison was married two times: first to Pattie Boyd, from 1966 to 1974, then to Olivia Harrison, from 1978 until the time of his death in 2001. How did George Harrison and Pattie Boyd meet?
Boyd was 19 and just starting her modeling career when she got a small part as a school-aged Beatles fan in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. Harrison was immediately smitten with the young woman and asked her to dinner, but she politely declined because she was seeing someone else at the time. A week later, newly single and back on set for a photo shoot, she changed her answer — and the course of her life forever.
That summer, Harrison bought a quiet country home to retreat from the chaos of Beatlemania, and Boyd soon joined him there. Less than two years after their first meeting, on Jan. 21, 1966, they were married. Why did Pattie Boyd leave George Harrison? The short answer is that Boyd left Harrison for their friend and fellow rocker Eric Clapton, kicking off one of the most famous love triangles in music history. But, really, their marriage had been unraveling for years.
On leaving Harrison, Boyd told The Telegraph in 2022, “It was an extremely difficult decision of mine to make.” “I felt that I had to leave George because things were getting really out of hand. George was just being a different George. We had gone in different directions, basically. But we still loved each other…”
Addressing his well-documented infidelity, which included an affair with Ringo Starr’s then-wife Maureen, Boyd added, “It’s just that I think he wanted to spread his wings and take advantage of being the handsome, famous, rich guy that he was, and see how the girls feel about him. A hot-blooded boy – why not, I suppose.”
Did Pattie Boyd leave George Harrison for Eric Clapton? Technically, yes, but her marriage to Harrison had been suffering for years due in part to his own infidelity. Still, her decision to leave Harrison for Clapton — who had been pining for her for more than a decade despite being friends with the Beatle (she was even the inspiration for his 1970 hit “Layla”) — was a massive story in 1974 and remains a major part of the band's lore to this day.
Harrison, the most reclusive of the Beatles, wasn’t big on talking to the press about his private affairs (none of the band members were, really). But he did reportedly tell Men Only magazine in 1978 that, “For a long time I could not talk about Pattie, after she left. But I now admit that I loved her very much and wish her the best.”
Source: Patti Greco/au.lifestyle.yahoo.com
Have you met the Beatles? The odds are you have, whether you grew up with them, sought them out, or were never formally introduced. You may know the name, at least, even without having heard the numbers, as one knows Shakespeare’s without having read or seen a play, or even knowing he wrote them.
The Fab Four — phenomenal in their time, phenomenal after. Though they made their split official in 1970 after coming apart in bits and pieces, they have never gone away. As long as John Lennon lived, there was always the possibility of the band getting back together — in a classic “Saturday Night Live” bit, Lorne Michaels offered them $3,000 to reunite on the show — and his death, and the global consciousness of loss, launched an era of revived Beatles awareness, of finding new things to do with the old music, protecting the legacy and promoting the brand.
With the band’s recorded catalog lately being remixed, remastered and rereleased, in special editions with extra tracks, it was only logical that Apple would get around to the movies. Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” his six-hour AI-enhanced cut of footage shot during the making of the album “Let It Be,” premiered Thanksgiving 2021, followed in May 2024 by his remastering of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original “Let It Be” itself. (Last Thanksgiving, we got the Martin Scorsese-produced “Beatles ‘64,” built on the Maysles Brothers film of the band’s first visit to America; the moptops have become a new holiday tradition.)
Now, 30 years after it premiered here, also around Thanksgiving, the digital squeegee has been applied to “Anthology,” the band’s own multi-part video memoir. (It aired on ABC over three nights; this edition, which echoes the longer video release, comes as eight episodes, with a new, extra ninth.) Premiering Wednesday on Disney+, also over three nights, it does look great; my only complaint is that music, every little snippet of it, is mixed too loud against the rest of the film. To make it exciting, I suppose, or because that’s what the kids expect these days; but I am right when I tell you it is wrong.
Along with the film, the original “Anthology” project included a coffee table book; three two-CD sets of demos, alternates and unfinished takes; and two “new” songs, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” in which the surviving Fabs added themselves to a demo recorded by John at the piano. (In 2023, a third song, “Now and Then,” was completed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr; it topped charts in the U.S. and U.K. and won a Grammy for rock performance.) This year adds another audio set, “Anthology 4.”
Source: Robert Lloyd/latimes.com
Yoko Ono is spending her final years in reflective seclusion, far from the spotlight she once craved, with sources telling OK! she now believes she has changed the world and now wants the peace of watching it from a distance.
The avant-garde artist, musician and activist – who stalked John Lennon before they met – has retreated from public life decades after rising to global fame in the 1960s and meeting Lennon, whom she married in 1969.
Their personal and creative partnership, forged after they met at Ono's London art exhibit in 1966, reshaped cultural and political activism in the early 1970s as the couple settled in New York City. The pair welcomed their son Sean in 1975, made boldly experimental music, and became fixtures of anti-war and civil rights campaigns.
But Ono's world changed irreversibly on December 8, 1980, when Lennon was shot and killed outside their Upper West Side home as she stood nearby.
Yoko Ono said she missed her husband's 'tenderness' after he was shot. Ono later said about his assassination by unhinged fan Mark David Chapman: "What I miss most about John is his incredible tenderness and his belief in me ... love can sometimes be h---. You could abuse each other in the name of love. But the thing that worked in our relationship was that we never lost respect for each other and always made sure to express it. We loved each other like there was no tomorrow."
That devotion shaped the decades that followed Lennon's death, with Ono continuing to create art while guarding Lennon's legacy. She also remained the subject of intense public fascination and criticism, including lingering claims she was the reason for The Beatles' breakup.
The new HBO documentary One to One: John & Yoko, directed by Kevin Macdonald, revisited the pivotal era of the couple's activism, music and relationship. It charted their life in New York, where they collaborated on albums such as Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, Some Time in New York City and Double Fantasy.
The film also recounted their One to One benefit concerts on August 30, 1972 – Lennon's only full-length performances after The Beatles' final show in 1966.
Source: Aaron Tinney/aol.com
The newly refurbished version of “The Beatles Anthology” has been rolling out on Disney+ over a period of days this week, with a newly commissioned Episode 9 premiering on the service Friday night. It gives the epic 1995 docuseries more than just a new edit and a fresh set of paint: it gives it an all-new finale that feels sweeter than the way the original project faded out with the gradual breakup of the most popular band of all time. And fans aren’t likely to mind the extra hour’s worth of either added context or additional sentiment.
With the new episode about to premiere, its director, Oliver Murray, told Variety about his intentions for this fresh finale. He’s the same man whom Apple Corps drafted to a short movie about the “final Beatles single,” “Now and Then,” when that was unveiled two years ago. Even though he was not yet a teenager when the original “Beatles Anthology” first aired in prime time 30 years ago, Murray was considered the right candidate to draw together footage that was shot at the time with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The three ex-Beatles became active Beatles once again at that point in drafting old John Lennon home demos to expand upon for “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” songs that were added to the “Anthology” albums also being released in ’95. And they even attempted, briefly, “Now and Then,” although it took till 2023 for that third number to come to fruition, but it at least gets foreshadowed in the new Ep9.
The British filmmaker says he gave himself the mission to humanize the three musicians as they reassessed their legacy in the ’90s, while also recognizing that their story is “modern, 20th century folklore (that) doesn’t age, in the same way that something like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ doesn’t age.” (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Source: Chris Willman/variety.com
Before The Beatles came around, singles ruled the roost in terms of rock and roll importance. The band started to change that. Their ability was such that even their non-singles rivaled or surpassed the quality of their contemporaries’ biggest hits.
Because these four songs are so popular, you might think they were huge smashes. But The Beatles never even released them as singles.
“In My Life”
In the first half of their recording career, The Beatles, for the most part, released singles in the United Kingdom that didn’t appear on their albums. In turn, they usually reserved the albums for songs that wouldn’t get a single release. This wasn’t a hard and fast rule. But it did mostly account for brilliant songs like “In My Life” only getting exposure via LP. The song could easily have been another No. 1 for the group, as it’s one of the most beautiful, affecting ballads ever written. Of course, it wasn’t long before people who heard it realized its brilliance. It has received a ton of cover versions over the years as well. But none of them match the unaffected lead vocal of John Lennon on the original.
“A Day In The Life”
When The Beatles first began separating singles from albums, they did so as more of a commercial ploy. But by the time they got around to making Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it became more a matter of insisting on a sense of artistic purity. They didn’t really want any of the songs off that album to be presented as something apart from the whole. In the case of “A Day In The Life”, it still works beautifully when you hear it on its own on the radio. But it’s a different story when it comes rolling in quietly after the raucous applause from the reprise of the album’s title track. Hearing that final piano chord after going through the entire journey of the album makes for a special experience.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
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
