Beatles News
Director Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” is set to be released on DVD and Blu-Ray this summer, with the sprawling doc from 2021 finally available in physical editions July 12.
If there’s a sense of deja vu to that announcement, it’s because these home video editions were already previously announced to come out six months earlier, but that release was scotched before it happened due to a defect that was detected in the discs.
“The Beatles: Get Back” has been originally scheduled to come out Feb. 8, after an initial announcement Jan. 5. But Beatles fans who had placed their orders noticed them getting canceled as the winter release date approached. It was said the reason for the cancellation was an imperfection in the 7.1 audio mix, causing the discs to need to be remanufactured. A few copies did slip out at retail despite the pre-release recall and became high-bid items on the resale market.
With the new release date finally officially confirmed, each of the sets breaks the 468-minute doc down into three separate discs. There are no bonus features beyond the documentary itself, although the foldout package includes four commemorative cards with photos of the individual Beatles. Both editions include several audio options, with the Blu-Ray offering Dolby Atmos, 7.1 PCM, 2.0 PCM and 2.0 Descriptive Audio. The DVD has 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Digital, along with 2.0 Descriptive Audio.
“Get Back” was widely hailed by fans and critics when it was released on Disney+ last Thanksgiving week, with Variety saying it “may stand as the best rock doc ever.”
Source: Chris Willman/ca.movies.yahoo.com
The Beatles’ Abbey Road is getting reissued for its 50th anniversary. The album has been newly mixed by producer Giles Martin (son of the late George Martin, who originally produced Abbey Road) and mix engineer Sam Okell. The super deluxe box set also comes with 23 additional tracks, consisting of recordings and demos. The 4xCD collection is housed in a 100-page hardcover book that has a foreword from Paul McCartney, an introduction from Giles Martin, a written history from Kevin Howlett, and an essay on Abbey Road’s influence by music journalist and author David Hepworth.
Along with the super deluxe edition, there will be a 3xLP deluxe vinyl edition of Abbey Road, a 2xCD deluxe edition, and standard edition with the new stereo mix (available as one CD, one vinyl LP, or one picture disc). Below, listen to the new 2019 mix of “Something,” as well as a studio demo and an instrumental take. Scroll down to preview the Abbey Road 50th anniversary collection.
The 50th anniversary editions of Abbey Road are out September 27 (via Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe). Learn more about the collection at the Beatles’ website.
In 2017, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was reissued for its 50th anniversary. The White Album got the deluxe anniversary treatment last year.
Source: Matthew Strauss/aol.com
Sir Paul McCartney used The Beatles’ lyrics to urge Russian president Vladimir Putin to free Greenpeace activists.
The ‘Let It Be’ singer, 81, wrote to the 71-year-old despot as part of a campaign to release eco-activists charged with piracy in 2013 after they mounted a protest against a floating oil rig in the Pechora Sea on their Arctic Sunrise vessel.
A new BBC documentary titled ‘On Thin Ice: Putin V Greenpeace’ reveals Sir Paul wrote to Putin as part of the row that erupted after 28 campaigners and two freelance journalists were detained by Russia.
The singer wrote: “Forty-five years ago I wrote a song about Russia for The White Album, back when it wasn’t fashionable for English people to say nice things about your country.
“That song had one of my favourite Beatles lines in it: ‘Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it’s good to be back home.’
“Could you make that come true for the Greenpeace prisoners?” The six-part BBC series will also feature unseen footage from during and after the protest as well as interviews and reconstructions.
Source: uk.news.yahoo.com
Like most songs in the early Beatles catalog, “I’ll Cry Instead” doesn’t seem super consequential. Early rock was mostly focused on tales of love gone south, written in language that could ostensibly be described as surface level. But when I get home to you / I find the things that you do / Will make me feel alright…And please, say to me / You’ll let me hold your hand…it’s not the same mind-bending lyricism the Beatles would adopt later in their career.
However, hidden among songs like “A Hard Day’s Night” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” are a few deeper songs. Included in that pack is “I’ll Cry Instead.”
I’ve got every reason on earth to be mad
‘Cause I just lost the only girl I had
If I could get my way
I’d get myself locked up today
But I can’t, so I’ll cry instead
Though the simple, easily-anticipated melody might throw off some listeners, this song holds quite a powerful meaning for its songwriter, John Lennon.
Looking at the lyrics without any context, it seems like Lennon was attempting to create a commentary on fame, which would make sense given the band’s prestige at that time. He seemed to have less than favorable opinions on Beatlemania.
Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com
On March 15, 1967, a lone Beatle entered the recording studio to create a song that would forever define the Fab Four’s shift from teeny-bopper sweethearts to counterculture royalty.
George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” was the last track completed for ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. ‘ It opened the B side and served as a declaration of Harrison’s musical and ideological independence from the cultural behemoth that had become the Liverpool rockers.
Performed by Harrison, Neil Aspinall, and an ensemble of Indian instrumentalists, the song’s creation reflected the Beatles’ troubled dynamic at the time: distant, disjointed, and dissolving. A Reluctant Beatle’s Defining Work.
Shortly after ‘Sgt. Pepper’s release in 1967, George Harrison admitted to biographer Hunter Davies, “I don’t personally enjoy being a Beatle anymore. All that sort of Beatle thing is trivial and unimportant. I’m fed up with all this ‘me, us, I’ stuff and all the meaningless things we do. I’m trying to work out solutions to the more important things in life.”
Thus, “Within You Without You” was born. The track is a droning, hypnotic exploration of the soul’s transcendence from the body into something more significant than the individual, the collective, and, yes, even the Beatles themselves.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
John Lennon believed he shocked the other Beatles with one album. Here's why he found their reaction to it surprising.
When John Lennon released the album Two Virgins in 1968, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were politely shocked. While they tried not to get caught up in the public outcry over the album cover — which featured full frontal nudity from Lennon and Yoko Ono — they didn’t approve of it. Lennon said it surprised him that McCartney and Harrison were so prudish. John Lennon said Paul McCartney and George Harrison were surprisingly prudish
Lennon and Ono chose to pose naked on the cover of Two Virgins because they wanted to reveal all of themselves to the public. It was a bold choice that brought the couple a great deal of blowback.
“It was insane!” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “People got so upset about it — the fact that two people were naked. I didn’t think there’d be such a fuss. I guess the world thinks we’re an ugly couple.” John Lennon and Yoko Ono's face peek out from a circle of the otherwise hidden album cover for 'Two Virgins.' There is brown paper over it. He found it particularly surprising that McCartney and Harrison did not seem to approve of the cover.
“George and Paul were a little shocked, that was weird. That really shocked me, the fact that they were prudish,” Lennon said. “You can’t imagine — it was so uptight in those days. It’s not that long ago, and people are uptight about nude bodies. We didn’t create nudity, we just put it out. Somebody else had been nude before.”
McCartney wasn’t sure this was the case.
“I was slightly shocked but, seeing as I wrote a liner note for the sleeve, I obviously wasn’t too uptight,” he said.
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles never played in Nashville, but five decades ago, Paul McCartney set up shop in Wilson County. It was June of 1974 when one superstar came to Lebanon. That summer, the former Beatle and his band Wings landed in Middle Tennessee.
Lebanon resident Sandra Bryant referred to those days as Paul McCartney fever and her husband Tick remembered those days vividly.
“Everybody in town eventually knew, they were trying to keep it secret, but he was spotted in so many places,” Bryant said. Fifty years later, those stories are still being shared today. “He’s really cute! Haha, he was so cute! I thought I was going to faint!” said Sandra Bryan.
Legend has it, Paul and Linda McCartney were looking for a summer escape and through music industry connections, they found a farm in Lebanon on Franklin Road.
“It was these two houses, a house here, a house there, 133 acres,” said Troy Putman. Putman’s father, Curly, sealed the deal, and in return a trip of a lifetime in exchange for their family home. “At age 12, we went to Hawaii for six weeks that was sort of a paid vacation,” said Putnam.
Paul McCartney and his band Wings were spotted all over the square in downtown Lebanon in the summer of 1974. But is was a home on Franklin Road Paul McCartney called home in Middle Tennessee for six weeks.
“Paul McCartney spotting’s all summer, ya know, like Pokémon or something,” said Bryan.
Source: Blake Eason/yahoo.com
When Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr reunited The Beatles for their 1995 Anthology 1 in the early ’90s, they revisited a song John Lennon had written but never released. Set as a bonus track on the anthology, the three Beatles started working on “Free As a Bird,” originally written and recorded by Lennon in 1977 but never completed.
A simple piano demo, “Free As A Bird” was recorded by Lennon at his home in the Dakota Building in New York City. Though he never completed it in the studio, it was one of the songs he recorded to cassette during his “Househusband” period between 1975 and 1980.
As Anthology 1 was in the works, the former Beatles used Lennon’s previously recorded vocals from the demo. To complete the song, the three added their vocals to more verses, along with instrumentation. Lennon’s vocals were then weaved throughout the track, something co-producer Jeff Lynne achieved by using analog technology and tricks. To complete the song “entailed doing whatever manipulations [Geoff] Emerick [engineer] and [Jeff] Lynne could achieve to help bring out Lennon’s voice above the piano which was playing along with him,” recounted engineer Marc Mann in 1996, “as well as adding whatever effect onto his voice to give it that ‘Strawberry Fields’-Lennon sound.”
Source: Tina Benitez-Eves/americansongwriter.com
This week’s podcast episode of A Life in Lyrics sees Paul McCartney looking back on the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track, A Day in the Life.
The Beatles' classic 1967 track is attributed to Lennon-McCartney but was mainly written by John Lennon with Macca contributing to the song’s middle section.
Reflecting on the opening lyrics about a “lucky man who made the grade”, McCartney wondered if the words were inspired by Lennon’s own struggles.
The 81-year-old said: “When John would bring these things in, it's only these days that I would say, ‘Was he talking about himself? Was there some sort of psychological aspect where he's a lucky man who made the grade?’
Mike McCartney, Paul McCartney's brother, was the original Beatles drummer
“And John did, around about this time, get a little bit out in Weybridge doing drugs. And we were a little disillusioned because we'd sort of given up playing live. So him bringing that in, I would just go with the picture that he was painting.”
McCartney also shared how the pressures of Beatles fame inspired Sgt Pepper’s: “Here's the idea. We are these four space cadets. We're just these four people in this slightly weird band. But what it's going to do is. Going to free us up.
“So we're not going to be the Beatles, which we are now getting a little bit sort of inhibited by, having to be those boys. We'll now just chuck all that away and we'd be these guys.”
Macca also spoke of Lennon’s love of history and Churchill when reflecting on the lyrics “I saw a film today, oh boy/The English Army had just won the war”.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
Model and photographer Pattie Boyd is selling handwritten lyrics and personal letters that reveal her relationships with late Beatle George Harrison and guitarist and singer Eric Clapton.
Boyd, who turns 80 on Sunday, was married to both musicians, inspiring songs such as Harrison's "Something" and Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight" and "Layla".
More than 100 lots, including jewellery, clothes, photographs, handwritten lyrics and drawings by Harrison, are for sale in the "The Pattie Boyd Collection", which runs for auction online at Christie's until March 22.
"If I had one big treasure chest that explained me and my life, all these items here would be in it ... these are all examples of the wonderful life I have been living," Boyd told Reuters at a press preview on Thursday.
Lots leading the sale include the original artwork chosen by Clapton for the cover of Derek and The Dominos 1970 album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs", with an estimated sale price of 40,000-60,000 pounds ($51,228-$76,842) and original handwritten lyrics for Harrison’s 1982 song "Mystical One" (30,000-50,000 pounds).
Source: Natasha Mulenga/reuters.com
