Beatles News
In 1966, The Beatles released “Yellow Submarine”. On their Revolver record, “Yellow Submarine” is written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Out in 1966, the song became one of The Beatles’ many No. 1 hits.
An uptempo, light-hearted tune, “Yellow Submarine” begins with, “In the town where I was born / Lived a man who sailed to sea / And he told us of his life / In the land of submarines / So we sailed up to the sun / ’Til we found the sea of green / And we lived beneath the waves / In our yellow submarine.”
The success of “Yellow Submarine” is surprising, since it was never written to be a mainstream hit. Instead, McCartney says it was originally supposed to be for their younger fans.
“‘Yellow Submarine’ is very simple but very different,” McCartney says. “It’s a fun song, a children’s song. Originally, we intended it to be Sparky, a children’s record. But now it’s the idea of a yellow submarine where all the kids went to have fun. I was just going to sleep one night and thinking if we had a children’s song, it would be nice to be on a yellow submarine where all your friends are with a band.”
What The Beatles Say About “Yellow Submarine”
It may have been written originally as a children’s song, but it quickly became not only a fan favorite but also a favorite of The Beatles.
“Paul came up with the concept of ‘Yellow Submarine’,” George Harrison later says. “All I know is just that every time we’d all get around the piano with guitars and start listening to it and arranging it into a record, we’d all fool about…John’s doing the voice that sounds like someone talking down a tube or ship’s funnel as they do in the merchant marine. And on the final track, there’s actually that very small party happening. As I seem to remember, there’s a few screams and what sounds like small crowd noises in the background.”
Drummer Ringo Starr did the lead vocals on “Yellow Submarine”, which is a rarity for The Beatles.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Gayle Thompson
When most people think of The Beatles, they likely think of songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “Here Comes The Sun”. While these are great songs, The Beatles experimented with lots of different sounds in their day. Here are a few Beatles songs that might surprise you.
“Helter Skelter”
“Helter Skelter”, which appears on the White Album, is a lot more rock ‘n roll than most Beatles’ songs. When Paul McCartney wrote this one, he was referring to a helter-skelter carnival slide, and not so much Charles Manson.
He told Barry Miles: “I was using the symbol of a helter skelter as a ride from the top to the bottom – the rise and fall of the Roman Empire – and this was the fall, the demise, the going down. You could have thought of it as a rather cute title but it’s since taken on all sorts of ominous overtones because Manson picked it up as an anthem, and since then quite a few punk bands have done it because it is a raunchy rocker.”
“Within You Without You”
This is actually one of many Beatles songs that have a lot of Indian musical influence. George Harrison wrote his first song in this style when he wrote “Love You To”, which appears on The Beatles’ Revolver album. “Within You Without You” was his only composition on Sgt. Pepper.
“‘Within You Without You’ came about after I had spent a bit of time in India and fallen under the spell of the country and its music,” he once shared. “I had brought back a lot of instruments. It was written at Klaus Voormann’s house in Hampstead after dinner one night. The song came to me when I was playing a pedal harmonium.”
“Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”
This is a quirky one. In “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?”, McCartney compares the sexual relations of animals to humans. This one was written after he witnessed two monkeys literally doing it in the road while in India.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Kat Caudill
By the mid-1960s, the Beatles had left behind their matching suits and clean-cut image in favor of something far more bohemian. Rubber Soul was famously dubbed the band’s “pot album” by John Lennon, while increasingly mind-altering substances helped shape the psychedelic sounds of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It was a period of constant experimentation, both musically and chemically. As Paul McCartney later told Howard Stern, “Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict.”
Stern asked McCartney about one of the best-known stories from the making of Sgt. Pepper: the claim that Lennon was tripping on LSD while recording the album’s fourth track, “Getting Better.” “It was crazy, because he had a little pillbox,” McCartney recalled. “He’d have his little uppers and his little downers, and he thought he was taking a little upper, and we could get on with the session.
“[Then] he comes over to me and whispers, ‘I took the wrong pill.’
“‘What did you take?’
“‘Acid.’”
All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!
A bandmate unexpectedly taking LSD isn’t the ideal recipe for a productive recording session, but McCartney remained remarkably unfazed.
“Okay,” he remembered thinking, “let’s work around that, then.”
The bigger challenge was keeping producer George Martin in the dark.
“At one point, George Martin comes in, who knew nothing about anything,” McCartney said. “He said, ‘John doesn’t look too well.’
“‘No, he’s not feeling a little under the weather,’ because we had to hide it all from George. He was a grown-up.”
Paul McCartney on the Time John Lennon Took Acid Before Recording The Beatles’ “Getting Better” -
Source: guitarplayer.com
Ringo Starr’s new album, Long Long Road, which has roots in country and Americana, is out today.
It's the second straight album he’s done with producer T Bone Burnett. At a recent listening party in Los Angeles, Ringo said Burnett made making the album easy, noting, "There's a lot of great players in Nashville, and he knows most of them."
Ringo said Burnett would send him "tracks with some meat on" them, and he would send back his drum and singing parts. Then Burnett would "complete the deal," which Ringo describes as “a great way of working."
And it was just as easy for Burnett, who said he’s been listening to Ringo play drums for so long that “his feel is in my DNA at this point. It's in my cells, you know.”
“I've always thought of him as a Texas musician because he played so Texas," he added. "He's the swinginest drummer in the history of the United Kingdom. I can tell you that.”
Ringo said the title of the album represents "the road I’ve taken," adding, “You know all of those stop marks on your walk of life, it’s so far out."
He said that the title track "is me going through my things about my life." And while he said some of it may have been bad, most of it wasn’t.
"I've been a lucky human being," he said. "I got to do what I love to do."
Long Long Road is the follow-up to Ringo’s 2025 country-inspired album, Look Up. It features guest appearances by Sheryl Crow, St. Vincent, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Sarah Jarosz.
Source: AOL
During a 1963 visit to St. Louis, George Harrison found a record he couldn't stop thinking about. He even imagined the Beatles recording it. But despite his enthusiasm, the song never made its way into the band's repertoire. Harrison would eventually get another chance with it — 24 years later.
It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation. “In 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, who was living there at the time,” Harrison wrote in The Beatles Anthology. “The whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the U.K., and we’d had three or four hit singles.
“So while visiting my sister, I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that’s where I finally found the James Ray album, If You’re Gonna Make a Fool of Somebody.”
In particular, the song that grabbed his attention most was “Got My Mind Set on You,” and Harrison thought it had the makings of a Beatles recording — despite one significant drawback. All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!
“It would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn’t really rock and roll,” he admitted. “It was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by a jazz musician — it had all these squawky horns and stuff.” As Harrison later recalled, the song “stuck in my mind.” More than two decades passed before he finally revisited it while working on Cloud Nine, his 1987 comeback album after a lengthy break from recording.
Produced by Jeff Lynne, Cloud Nine found Harrison returning to a more electric guitar–driven sound. Revisiting Rudy Clark’s song, he stripped away the brass-heavy arrangement that had bothered him in the first place and gave it a contemporary rock treatment.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Phil Weller
During a career that was chock-full of momentous events, The Beatles enjoyed plenty of turning points that contributed to their unparalleled achievements. And few loom larger than the release of “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964), their feature film debut, and their August 29, 1966, performance at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Both are subjects of terrific new books about the band.
Samira Ahmed’s superb book about the making and legacy of “A Hard Day’s Night” should send music (and film) lovers to their favorite streamer to revisit the movie. Under Richard Lester’s direction, “A Hard Day’s Night” not only showcased the group’s media-friendly personalities, but ensured that Beatlemania was portable, that you didn’t have to live in a big city for the Fab Four to come to your town.
As Ahmed demonstrates, the film’s documentary style both reimagined the jukebox musical and captured the frenzy of mid-1960s filmmaking. In its finest moments, Ahmed’s book takes readers back to The Beatles’ heyday, when rock ‘n’ roll was still relatively new, and the band was only just getting started in terms of the musical artistry to come. At the same time, she deftly addresses the era’s shifting sexual politics and role of women in The Beatles’ story.
Which brings us to Candlestick Park, the O.K. Corral when it comes to the band’s touring days. On that fateful August night, The Beatles brought their miserable final tour to an end, a North American trek that John Lennon dubbed the “Jesus Christ Tour” for its association with the fallout over his “Beatles are bigger than Jesus” remark that had been republished in Datebook.
Source: salon.com/Kenneth Womack
Northern Irish actor Louis McCartney has been cast as Ringo Starr in upcoming BBC drama Hamburg Days, which will chart The Beatles' formative years in Germany. McCartney, from Helen’s Bay in County Down, is best known for playing Henry Creel in the West End and Broadway productions of Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
The six-part series will explore the band’s time in Hamburg in the early 1960s, before they became one of the biggest acts in music history. Sex Education star Asa Butterfield, Trainspotting actor Jonny Lee Miller and Adolescence actress Christine Tremarco are also among the newly announced cast.
Butterfield will play Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who guided the group from 1961 until he died in 1967. Miller will portray Jim McCartney, Paul McCartney’s father, while Tremarco will play John Lennon’s aunt and guardian, Mimi Smith. McCartney joins Rhys Mannion as Lennon, Ellis Murphy as Paul McCartney, and Harvey Brett as George Harrison. Louis Landau will play the band’s original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, while Patrick Gilmore will portray their first drummer, Pete Best.
A Thousand Blows actress Darci Shaw has been cast as Cynthia Lennon, while Ryan Sampson will play Liverpool promoter Allan Williams and Jorden Myrie will portray music promoter Lord Woodbine.
Casper von Bülow will play German artist and musician Klaus Voormann, while Luna Jordan will portray photographer Astrid Kirchherr.
Voormann, who designed the cover of The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver and later played on several of the band members’ solo records, is acting as a consultant on the series.
Hamburg Days is based on the book of the same name by Voormann and Kirchherr. It will follow The Beatles’ residencies at venues in Hamburg’s St Pauli district, a crucial period in the group’s development before their breakthrough.
Christine Tremarco attends the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards on January 04, 2026 in Santa Monica, California.
Adolescence actress Christine Tremarco will also star in the BBC drama
The series is being made for BBC One. A transmission date has yet to be announced.
A separate set of four Beatles films directed by Sam Mendes is also in development, with Paul Mescal cast as McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo, Harris Dickinson as Lennon and Joseph Quinn as Harrison.
Source: Press Association
One fact about the Beatles that should not be overlooked is how little calendar time it took them to effectively change the course of music forever.
They officially formed in 1960 (counting the years before the permanent lineup was created) and split up precisely 10 years later — not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things — and yet, their influence was unmatched. Plenty of other artists spend their entire lives crafting a legacy like that, while the Fab Four did it in a decade.
Because they only worked together for a relatively short amount of time, the Beatles only released 13 albums, but each of them paints a different picture of a band working hard to develop something groundbreaking, whether they realized it at the time or not.
The full story of the Beatles is told through these 13 albums, but if we absolutely had to narrow things down to the "Big 4," these would be our selections.
1. A Hard Day's Night (1964)
From the opening chord of A Hard Day's Night, it's clear that the Beatles were not and never would be a "normal" rock 'n' roll band — few '60s acts at that time would be willing to start an album with such a bizarre sound, one that would leave guitarists wondering for decades how on earth it was made.
Of all of the Beatles' early albums, A Hard Day's Night is the one that showcases their burgeoning talent as songwriters — the famous Lennon-McCartney duo, with a sprinkle of George Harrison's contributions in there, too — and their penchant for thinking just a bit outside the box. Take, for example, the augmented B7 chord in "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You." This isn't your average teeny-bopper music. There's also "Things We Said Today," which draws melodically from jazz and classical music, the sort McCartney was brought up on at home in Liverpool, and changes between major and minor keys.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com/Allison Rapp
Sir Paul McCartney says his 14-year marriage to Nancy Shevell works so well because they are total opposites.
The Beatles legend tied the knot with Nancy back in May 2011, with the pair beginning their relationship in 2007 as Paul was finalizing his acrimonious divorce from second wife Heather Mills.
Paul, 83, says he and Nancy, 66, are so happy together because they are “nothing like each other” and that works well for their relationship.
Speaking on the Song Exploder podcast, he said: "We’ve known each other quite a long time and it’s a very interesting relationship. We’re nothing like each other. I’m English, she’s American. She’s very practical, gets things done, I’m much more sort of whimsical. I will get things done but maybe not in as practical a way.
“We know each other and we know how to be with each other.” Paul has dedicated the song Ripples in a Pond to Nancy from his new number one album The Boys of Dungeon Lane. McCartney was thinking about how “blessed” he is to have Nancy as his wife when the lyrics and chords began to flow.
Paul - who lost his first wife Linda to breast cancer in 1998, when the photographer was 56 - said: “I was thinking about my missus Nancy and thinking how lucky I am to know and love someone like her. “I was just thinking about how blessed I am. Anyone who is in a good relationship with someone is inevitably really blessed and it’s nice when you’re thinking that to introduce that idea into a song.”
Nancy is the perfect romantic partner for Paul, and he also revealed his greatest ever musical partner was his late Beatles bandmate John Lennon.
Source: yardbarker.com
On this day (June 22) in 1966, the Beatles topped the UK Singles Chart with “Paperback Writer.” It gave the band their tenth consecutive No. 1 in their home country. The song stood out from anything else they had ever released in two important ways. First and foremost, it was the loudest song they had ever recorded. It was also the first song from the Fab Four to feature a boosted bassline.
“Paperback Writer” came at a pivotal time for the band. Brian Epstein and George Martin had formulated a release schedule for the Beatles early in their career. They planned to push four singles and two albums each year, believing this would keep public interest in the band alive. At the same time, it would deliver enough new music to keep up with fans’ demands. According to Beatles Bible, this single marked the end of that release plan.
More importantly, it marked a new period for the band. They were less motivated by commercial gains. Instead, they wanted to experiment and expand their musical horizons. The Fab Four wanted to break the mold they’d made for themselves and explore new sounds and topics. “Paperback Writer” was an example of studio experimentation.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Clayton Edwards
