Beatles News
Sir Ringo Starr says the new Beatles song "Now and Then" is the "closest we’ll ever come to having" the late John Lennon back.
The 83-year-old drummer became very emotional whilst working with Sir Paul McCartney, the only other surviving member of the iconic band, on their new Artificial Intelligence-assisted song.
The track is a demo recorded by Lennon, who was killed in December 1980 at the age of just 40, in the wake of The Beatles break-up. It features his voice and him playing the piano at his Dakota building apartment in New York.
Ringo and Paul, 81, used the same technology to isolate and improve Lennon's vocal that was employed to enhance the audio in Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back.
Discussing the recording process with Radio Times magazine, Ringo said: "He called me up and said he’d like to work on 'Now and Then’, ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think it’s great. So he put the bass on, he sent the files to me. I put the drums on. It was the closest we’ll ever comes to having him [John] back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know?”
Source: loudwire.com
Following his acclaimed documentary Get Back, director Peter Jackson is continuing his relationship with the Beatles by directing his first ever music video for the band’s final song, Now and Then.
It will feature unseen footage of the band, including what Jackson describes as “a few precious seconds of the Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of the Beatles and never seen before.”
Now and Then features performances from all four Beatles, including guitar parts recorded by the late George Harrison in 1995, and vocals by John Lennon drawn from a late-70s demo prior to his death in 1980. Jackson was part of the team who used AI-assisted software to isolate Lennon’s vocal from the demo recording, having already used the technology during the making of Get Back to isolate different parts of the recording process for songs that appeared on the Beatles’ final albums Let It Be and Abbey Road.
Source: Ben Beaumont-Thomas/theguardian.com
Lady Judy Martin passed away on Sunday - seven years after her husband died in 2016.
The couple married in June 1966
Tributes have flooded in for the former Abbey Road secretary.
The Liverpool Beatles Museum said: "Very sad news to hear of the passing of Lady Judy Martin. Reunited with George.
"Our thoughts and prayers our with the Martin family. May she RIP."
Lady Judy married Sir George - known as the fifth Beatle - the year he signed the group.
Source: Holly Christodoulou/thesun.co.uk
What do you get when you put the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney in a studio together? A “fucking blast”, says producer Andrew Watt, as he recalls the former Beatle’s excitement while recording the Stones’ new album Hackney Diamonds.
Discussing the record’s making in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Watt reveals the reason the band decided to have McCartney feature on its fourth track, Bite My Head Off.
“It would be expected to have him play on a great big ballad like Depending on You, or one of the softer songs to get that ‘melodic Paul McCartney’ thing,” says the producer.
“But you’ve got to also understand, Paul McCartney loves to fucking rock. So I thought, “Why not pick the most punk-rock fucking song – the one where everyone’s on 10 the whole time – and let these guys have the time of their lives rocking out together?”
Watt also shares that the ’64 lefty Hofner he’d gifted Macca at the time was responsible for the Beatles’ fuzzy bass sound on the track: “My guitar tech, Mark, put in a Univox Super Fuzz circuit into the bass, so when he hit one of the Hofner switches it gives the loudest, most wicked fuzz bass you ever heard in your life,” he says, adding that McCartney was “crying laughing” by the end of it.
Source: guitar.com
When I was growing up, the cost of a plan ticket was prohibitive, well beyond our budget so a ‘day trip’ was much more likely for us. Wealthy people might go to the seaside for a week or two and live it up in a hotel or boarding house, but people like us would mostly just go off somewhere for the day. The idea of the day trip was something that had a new lease of life after the Second World War. It was a way of having a break. An inexpensive holiday. If you didn’t have enough time or money, you just went out for the day and it often involved a charabanc, the old term for a bus or coach. You’d all just get on that and go for a trip. If anyone had a car – though in my family I was the first to buy one – then you could drive somewhere too.
On the way out of Liverpool, we might head ‘left’ to Wales. Maybe we’d get as far as the market town called Mold, where one of my aunties lived. The name Mold might sound a little off-putting, but it’s lovely countryside round that way. That part of the country is also full of ruins and there’s a castle in Mold that we’d go and explore. Even though we were a bit disappointed that it was mostly just a little hillock with some standing stones, it was so different to what we knew in Liverpool, which was still full of bomb sites from the war.
Source: Paul McCartney/vanityfair.com
An 'Acknowledgment of Country' sign at Sir Paul McCartney's concert in Sydney over the weekend has divided several fans of The Beatles singer.
The sign was displayed over two large screens at McCartney's gigs at Allianz Stadium on Friday and Saturday night.
It read, 'We acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation and all family groups connected to this Country, as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather and perform today.
'We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.'
Concertgoer Kobie Thatcher shared her anger over the sign on X on Saturday evening, writing : 'You can't even go to a concert now without an "acknowledgement of country."'
Source: Savanna Young/dailymail.co.uk
Paul McCartney may be the only person on Earth who believes the Beatles have any unfinished business in 2023.
For years, McCartney fixated upon “Now and Then,” a song John Lennon sketched in the late 1970s that the surviving Beatles attempted to complete in the mid-1990s when they were searching for new material to supplement their long-gestating documentary, “Anthology.”
Thanks to machine learning techniques developed by a technical team led by Peter Jackson, the director who helmed 2021’s multipart Beatles documentary “Get Back,” McCartney and Ringo Starr, the other surviving band member, received the opportunity to finish “Now and Then” in the past year. Now touted as “the last Beatles song” — a phrase that’s an omnipresent slogan in all its marketing — “Now and Then” makes its debut this Friday, roughly 26 years after it was slated to appear on “Anthology 3,” the concluding volume in the Beatles’ multimedia archival project. Accompanied by a brief, heartfelt making-of mini-film and music video, “Now and Then” will also appear on a deluxe expanded reissue of “1962-1966” and “1967-1970,” the career-spanning compilations commonly called the “Red Album” and “Blue Album,” respectively.
Source: Stephen Thomas Erlewine/latimes.com
John Lennon once explained how Salvador Dalí and boredom inspired The Beatles' butcher cover. He contrasted it with the cover of his album 'Some Time in New York City'.
Even today, The Beatles‘ butcher cover is one of the most controversial album covers in classic rock history. John Lennon once explained how Salvador Dalí inspired the Fab Four’s disturbing album art. He also contrasted the reception of that album cover with another one created by Yoko Ono that features a nude Richard Nixon.
The Beatles’ butcher cover shows the Fab Four dressed like butchers, smiling, and covered in raw meat and dismembered baby doll parts. It’s pretty unsettling, especially for a band once known for cute hits like “Eight Days a Week!” During a 1980 interview from the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John gave fans insight into the image.
“That was a repackage for the Americans called Yesterday and Today,” he recalled. “The original cover was The Beatles in white coats with figs ‘n’ dead bits o’ meat and dolls cut up. It was inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it. Also, the photographer was into Dalí and making surreal pictures. That combination produced that cover.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
Ringo Starr reveals his favorite albums that he can’t live without. The Beatles’s drummer Ringo Starr shares his 5 albums of all time.
Ringo Starr, the legendary drummer of the iconic band The Beatles, is a memorable part of music history, his rhythmic beats and characteristic style leaving an eternal mark on the fabric of popular culture. Starr’s musical career began long before the global phenomenon of The Beatles took the world by storm in the 1960s, when he was born Richard Starkey in Liverpool, England.
Starr was famous for his unique drumming style, which his constant precision and attractive groove could identify. He was instrumental in shaping the sound and popularity of the Fab Four, contributing to their unequaled musical legacy.
Ringo Starr also earned several awards and honors over his long career, including entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of The Beatles and for his solo work. His influence as a musician, songwriter, and peace advocate has established his place as a beloved and respected figure in the international music community.
Source: Yunus Emre/metalshout.com
George Harrison was the lead guitar player in perhaps the most well-known band of all time. That’s The Beatles, of course. But many music fans may not know that Harrison was also the big-name principal co-founder of another formidable supergroup. That’s the Traveling Wilburys.
Laura Bell Bundy on returning to Broadway after 15 years in 'The Cottage.'
That band featured the likes of Harrison, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. Together, the all-star collection of artists wrote songs, sang together, and recorded two LPs, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 and Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3.
From the Traveling Wilburys’ second album, the strangely named 1990 LP, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 (indeed, where is Vol. 2?), this song, like all when it comes to the supergroup, features writing credits from each and every member. And while Petty sings the lead vocals for the track, it’s easy to hear the former Beatle’s influence on the track, both in the chorus and the verse and the acoustic guitar underneath it all.
You took my breath away
I want it back again
Look at the mess I’m in
I don’t know what to say
I don’t know how to feel
You don’t care anyway
All I can do is wait
You took my breath away
Source:Jacob Uitti/americansongwriter.com
