Beatles News
Today, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), Sam Mendes, and Neal Street Productions announced a groundbreaking creative endeavor to tell the story of The Beatles with four distinct theatrical feature films. The project marks the first time Apple Corps Ltd. and The Beatles – Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison – have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.
As conceived by Mendes, who will direct, the four theatrical feature films – one from each band member’s point-of-view – will intersect to tell the astonishing story of the greatest band in history.
SPE will finance and distribute worldwide with full theatrical windows in 2027. The dating cadence of the films, the details of which will be shared closer to release, will be innovative and groundbreaking.
Mendes will direct all four films and produce alongside his Neal Street Productions partner Pippa Harris and Neal Street’s Julie Pastor. Jeff Jones will executive produce for Apple Corps Ltd.
Source: thebeatles.com
Heather Mills' high-profile marriage to legendary musician Paul McCartney, came to an end nearly four years after their nuptials.
She revealed the issues that led to the end of their marriage pointing a finger at McCartney’s daughter as a significant factor in their split.
She accused the singer's daughter of doing "evil things" that sabotaged their relationship.
Following the passing of Linda Eastman, the beloved wife of the iconic musician, Sir Paul McCartney, he found solace in the companionship of Heather Mills, a model and activist. Their love story, which blossomed rapidly, soon became a subject of intense media scrutiny and public fascination.
Mills, a figure of extraordinary courage and tenacity, had already navigated many challenges in her life. Her courage in the aftermath of a life-altering accident that cost her a leg was widely celebrated. However, the media's portrayal of her changed dramatically after she married McCartney, one of the most beloved figures in the music industry.
Source:Amo Mama
John Lennon dismissed the idea that a short Beatles song is about cocaine. He also dismissed cocaine, saying caffeine is superior.
One of The Beatles‘ songs feels like it’s about a drug that isn’t generally associated with the band: cocaine. John Lennon dismissed this interpretation. He also dismissed cocaine. John Lennon said this Beatles song was inspired by a real guy.
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, John was asked about the song “Mean Mr. Mustard” from Abbey Road. The tune revolves around a man who puts bills up his nose — which could be interpreted as a metaphor for cocaine.
“That’s me, writing a piece of garbage,” he said. “I’d read somewhere in the newspaper about this mean guy who hid five-pound notes, not up his nose but somewhere else. No, it had nothing to do with cocaine.”
Elsewhere in the interview, John was asked about his feelings about cocaine. “I had lots of it in my day, but I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s a dumb drug. Your whole concentration goes on getting the next fix. I find caffeine easier to deal with.”
The Paul McCartney Beatles song John Lennon hated: "He made us do it a hundred million times. He did everything to make it into a single and it never was, and it never could've been"
As Beatles fans, we'll always be grateful to Peter Jackson's 2021 epic Get Back documentarty series for showing the band's final throes in a more positive, rounded and less wholly antagonistic light than the 1970 Let It Be movie. Despite the forces pulling and pushing the band apart, there's plenty of mutual respect, creative energy and, yes, fun to go around.
But the sessions did come freighted with plenty of tense moments, and there was at least one song that every Beatle except McCartney would have happily binned from those sessions, one that Lennon in particular took unambiguously against.
When Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick ran through the Abbey Road track-by-track for MusicRadar he bluntly recalled “John absolutely hated Maxwell's Silver Hammer.
Source: Will Groves/musicradar.com
The Beatles got used to playing shows to crowds of brawling people. They shared what it was like to watch their audience fight.
In the Beatles’ earliest concerts, they played for crowds who seemed to be out for blood. Their audiences picked fights with staff at the venues, brawled with one another, and sprayed tear gas as the band played. They shared what it was like to constantly have this kind of chaos happening during their shows. The Beatles played to tough, violent crowds in their early concerts.
The Beatles’ first big break came when they traveled to Hamburg. Here, they learned how to play to an audience and work together onstage. They also learned how to continue to perform in the face of tumult.
“The problem with the nightclubs in Hamburg was that most of the waiters and the barmen were gangsters,” George Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “They were tough guys, anyway; they were fighters, and there would always be fights.”
Their audiences were so predictably violent that the band knew which songs would whip them into a frenzy. They even learned to play, at least temporarily, through a haze of tear gas.
“I remember there were many nights in Hamburg when they pulled tear-gas guns out … Soldiers were in, and I remember telling one not to mess around with the barmaid, that she belonged to the club manager — one of the tough guys,” Harrison said. “But this soldier was getting drunk, trying to make it with the barmaid, and the next minute ‘Hully Gully’ was playing and all hell broke loose. By the end of the song we had to stop playing because of the tear gas.”
According to Harrison, the shows were always more violent when soldiers were in the audience.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison wrote a Beatles song while horribly jetlagged. Here's why a Beatles associate thought it was a simpler song than expected.
In the latter half of the 1960s, George Harrison began writing more songs for The Beatles. While he hadn’t had much interest in songwriting early in the band’s career, he took it more seriously in later years. He was so dedicated to songwriting that he wrote one song while reeling from jetlag.
In 1967, Harrison traveled to Los Angeles with his wife, Pattie Boyd, road manager, Neil Aspinall, and friend, Alex Mardas. He went from the airport to his rental home, where Beatles press officer Derek Taylor was due to meet him. Taylor was running late, though.
“By the time we got there the song was virtually intact,” Taylor said, per the book A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song by Steve Turner. “Of course, at the time I felt very bad. Here were these two wretchedly jetlagged people and we were about two hours late.”
Still, Harrison used the wait time to write “Blue Jay Way,” a song he named after the street where he was staying.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Sir Paul McCartney is a music icon who has a special bond with his youngest daughter, Beatrice.
Her birth was a "kind of miracle" for him and his ex-wife Heather Mills who lost a limb when she was 25.
McCartney raised his daughter without a nanny and kept her away from the limelight.
Sir Paul McCartney, the iconic musician with a career that spans several decades, is not only celebrated for his unmatched contributions to music but also for his role as a devoted father. Among the many milestones in his life, the birth of his daughter is a significant chapter, that came as a surprise for both McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills.
Their daughter's arrival came under unique circumstances, marking a tender milestone in their lives as McCartney already had adult children and Mills believed it was unlikely she would ever bear a child. Despite his age and fame, McCartney's approach to fatherhood with his youngest child was remarkably down-to-earth.
Source: Amo Mama
Paul McCartney was thrilled to put out a new Beatles song in 1995. Producer George Martin wasn't as sure about the finished product.
In 1995, The Beatles released “Free as a Bird,” their first new song in years. John Lennon originally wrote it in 1977, and his surviving bandmates worked on it years later. While the song was a success on the charts, longtime Beatles producer George Martin wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He gave it his stamp of approval but felt it sounded a bit odd.
George Martin wasn’t sure about the finished product of a late Beatles song
At the start of 1994, Paul McCartney called Yoko Ono to wish her a happy New Year. Through this conversation and further ones, they began discussing the possibility of working on some of Lennon’s home demos and releasing them as Beatles songs.
“I liked ‘Free As A Bird’ immediately,” McCartney said in the book A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song by Steve Turner. “I liked the melody. It had strong chords and it really appealed to me…”
Ringo Starr and George Harrison joined him to complete the song “Free as a Bird” along with ELO’s Jeff Lynne. They showed it to Martin, who had produced the rest of The Beatles’ singles. He said he approved, but cautiously. He believed that the work they did to conceal the song’s “bad bits” made it sound awkward.
“They stretched it and compressed it and put it around until it got to a regular waltz control click and then they were done,” Martin said. “The result was that, in order to conceal the bad bits, they had to plaster it fairly heavily so that what you ended up with was quite a thick homogeneous sound that hardly stops.”
Despite Martin’s misgivings, the song hit No. 2 on the U.K. Singles Chart and No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Ringo Starr recently revealed details about a new EP titled Crooked Boy on which he collaborated with songwriter/producer Linda Perry. Now the former Beatles drummer has announced that the four-song collection will be released as a limited-edition colored-vinyl disc as part of the 2024 Record Store Day event on April 20.
The EP will be available on black-and-white marble vinyl exclusively at independent record stores. Only 2000 copies of the vinyl disc will be sold.
“I’m really excited to be releasing an exclusive edition of my EP Crooked Boy for Record Store Day this year,” Starr wrote in a message on his social media sites. “I’ve always loved record stores from 81 Renshaw or Brian’s North End Music Store in Liverpool to Tower Records and Amoeba Records in [Los Angeles] and I support them with Peace and Love.”
Crooked Boy features four songs that were all written by Perry, who also produced the EP. Starr shared information about the project in a video update he posted on his in early February. The names of the songs on the EP are “February Sky,” “Adeline,” “Gonna Need Someone,” and “Crooked Boy.” Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi played on all four tracks, while Perry contributed guitar and backing vocals to some of the tunes.
Source: americansongwriter.com
George Harrison quit The Beatles on January 10, 1969. He was persuaded to rejoin the band after just a few days but faced other obstacles soon after. He had his tonsils removed just a week after the famous rooftop concert and then faced an arrest for possession of cannabis the following month. It was a winter that had taken its toll on the quiet Beatle.
After several weeks of not even playing guitar, Harrison found himself in the garden of his friend Eric Clapton’s house, just trying to avoid the reality of what the business of The Beatles had become. He would write a song that would go on to become the most streamed of the entire Beatles catalog despite the fact it was not released as a single. Let’s take a look at the story behind “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles.
Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo
Here comes the sun
And I say, it’s alright
Source: Jay McDowell/americansongwriter.com
