Beatles News
The piano was the last instrument John Lennon is known to have played before his death in 1980. The last piano ever used by John Lennon before he died is set to be played for the first time in 30 years. The New England Piano Company upright has been at the Beatles Story museum in Liverpool since 2015.
The former Beatle used it at the Record Plant studios in New York for his last album, Double Fantasy, released shortly before his death in 1980. Brad Kella, winner of Channel 4's The Piano, will be at the museum to play his own arrangement of the famous Lennon hit Imagine later.
Kella, 24, told the BBC he had been a Beatles fan since childhood, growing up in the Merseyside town of Bootle and later Fazakerley in north Liverpool. He said: "It's just something that's embedded into anyone that's in the city. It's just an honour to be able to say I've touched the same instrument.
"I think it's the last instrument he touched before he died, as well, so it's just an honour to be able to follow in those footsteps." Brad Kella, in a grey hoodie and baseball cap, plays the piano.
Source: bbc.com/Marc Waddington
John Lennon and Paul McCartney met and fell for each other in the summer of 1957. John was 16, Paul 14. Paul came to see John play with his skiffle group, the Quarry Men, at a village fete. Introduced afterwards, they almost immediately formed a connection that went beyond the bounds of normal male friendship.
Lennon and McCartney were not sexual partners, as far as we know. But in every other sense, their relationship was a romance: intoxicating, tender and bittersweet. Passionate male friendships like this are rare, but not unique, and a remarkable number of them have changed the world, transforming our ideas about music, art, poetry and human nature. John and Paul were, without knowing it, part of an extraordinary lineage.
After impressing John with his guitar-playing and his ability to remember all the words to a song, Paul accepted John’s invitation to join the Quarry Men. The pair began sharing the front of the stage; this was no longer just John’s group. They were fascinated by each other. Paul admired John’s coruscating wit and teddy boy swagger. John admired Paul’s musical abilities and pop star good looks. They made each other laugh more than anyone else they knew.
They made for an odd couple: John spiky, full of bravado, prone to anger; Paul more temperate and socially subtle. But each thought the other the most brilliant person they knew and they shared a fierce ambition. On weekday afternoons, they would bunk off from school (for Paul) and college (for John) and go to one of their houses to play songs.
Source: theguardian.com/Ian Leslie
Yoko Ono’s family have shared how the artist is spending her final days after the death of her husband John Lennon. Now aged 92, Yoko’s family says she is “in a happy place”, and is “listening to the wind and watching the sky” after losing Beatles star John in 1980 when he was only 40 years old.
Yoko – best known for her activism and for helping Lennon write his hit song Imagine – has been profiled in a new book releasing this week, which paints her as a reclusive figure in her early nineties. She lives alone in upstate New York on a farm, but is thankfully visited by her son Sean and daughter Kyoko. Kyoko wrote of her mother: “She believed she could change the world, and she did… now she is able to be quiet – listen to the wind and watch the sky.” She added: “She is very happy, in a happy place. This is well deserved and genuine peacefulness.”
Source: express.co.uk/Jess Phillips
Few hits are captured in one take. Perfection isn’t often happenstance, it’s more often the product of painstaking work in the studio. But, if you’re a really great musician, you might just be able to nail it early on in the process. One of John Lennon’s hits, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night”, was perfected quickly. Learn more about the song Lennon cut in one or two takes, below.
The John Lennon Hit That Was Cut in One Take
Whatever gets you thru the night
It’s all right, it’s all right
It’s your money or your life
It’s all right, it’s all right
Don’t need a sword to cut thru flowers
Oh no, oh no
One of Lennon’s final hits was his collaboration with Elton John, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” Though the final product is relatively polished, it didn’t require many takes to get it there. According to Lennon, the final recording features one of their first takes.
While we might chalk up the quick recording process as evidence of Lennon’s time-honed talent, he more-so admired the energy his backing band was able to get on the first few plays. He didn’t want it to become stale, so he decided to quit while they were ahead.
“It’s almost the first or second take, and the musicians are ragged but swinging,” Lennon once said. “We tried to cut it a few times again but it never got that feel…We put that on and it was over and done within five minutes.”
Source: americansongwriter.com/Alex Hopper
Beatles enthusiasts have crowned legendary songwriter Paul McCartney the greatest member of the iconic quartet, attributing the decision to one specific song.
The track, penned by McCartney and a staple in his setlists, has been hailed as one of The Beatles' finest creations. Fans remain captivated by the masterpiece, and a recently shared recording session clip has left many astonished.
The segment, extracted from Peter Jackson's docuseries Get Back, captures the astonishing moment McCartney begins to assemble the legendary tune. John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are seen watching on as McCartney brings the piece to life. A social media user pointed out that the other members' reactions during the session serve as proof of McCartney's unparalleled status within the band.
A viral post by @historyrock_ features McCartney strumming Let it Be for his peers, leaving onlookers convinced that his brilliance surpasses that of his fellow Beatles.
One comment reads: "It was Paul's group. The others were the best support musicians he ever had."
A second fan added: "Beautiful song! Love the expressions of Harrison, Lennon and Star. Can you imagine being in a group with all that immense talent and one says oh, listen to this I just thought of, and it's all magical."
Source: express.co.uk/Ewan Gleadow
The Ramones were one of the defining bands of the punk rock era - and they took their name from one of The Beatles, who was forced to use a pseudonym to check into hotels
In the swinging sixties, The Beatles were the heartthrobs of Great Britain, causing a frenzy wherever they went.
To dodge their adoring fans, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had to resort to pseudonyms while lodging at hotels. It was one such alias that inadvertently gave rise to a legendary punk rock group—the Ramones. The Ramones, in homage to Paul, all took on the last name Ramone. Drummer Marky Ramone reminisced about the origin of their iconic band name during an interview. He credited the idea to the band's bassist, Dee Dee Ramone, who was inspired by The Beatles' early days when they were known as The Silver Beatles and chased by legions of fans.
Marky recounted, "So the next thing you know, Paul McCartney would sign into a hotel room as Paul Ramon."
Source: themirror.com/Callum Crumlish
Recording for some of the songs featured on Abbey Road took “a hell of a lot of time” according to The Beatles‘ George Harrison.
The so-called “quiet one” wrote of each track in a newspaper column ahead of Abbey Road’s release, and says one song written by Paul McCartney took the group longer than any other. Harrison, alongside Ringo Starr, assessed each song from the album and Harrison confirmed Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, the “fun but sick” song about a hammer-wielding murderer, was the toughest part of recording the album. A snippet of the paper was shared to the r/Beatles subreddit, where the music column from Harrison was shown.
It seems Harrison predicted the split opinion of the song too, with fans still on the fence about its inclusion on Abbey Road. In the Rolling Stone Magazine column, he writes: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is just something of Paul’s. We spent a hell of a lot of time recording this one.
“It’s one of those instant, whistle-along tunes which some people will hate and others will love. It’s like Honey Pie, a fun sort of thing, but probably sick as well because the guy keeps killing everybody. We used my Moog Synthesizer on this track, and I think it came out effectively.”
Source: cultfollowing.co.uk/Ewan Gleadow
In March 1964, when Yoko Ono was 31, she performed Cut Piece, a piece that she would go on to stage five more times in her life—four times in the 1960s, and once more in 2003, at age 70. In Cut Piece, Ono sits on a stage in her best clothes with a placid expression as she instructs audience members to, one by one, take the pair of scissors she’s placed beside her and cut off a small piece of her clothing. In the ’60s, these performances took menacing turns: male participants, products of the era’s fraught understanding of sexual freedom, felt emboldened to strip Ono bare. Spectators were turned into passive witnesses.
Cut Piece—perhaps Ono’s greatest work—was lauded as a feminist statement about the subordination of women at a time when feminism had yet to meaningfully pervade the avant-garde. Although the performance testifies to the ease with which women are objectified, it communicates multitudes through the prism of Ono’s body: it also tells the story of her native Japan’s devastation during and after World War II, which she lived through as a child. And, it’s about her relationship with John Lennon, which transformed her private life into a public spectacle, as well as the sacrifice and surrender that Ono, a passionate anti-war activist, considers a precondition for peace.
Yoko, a new biography about Ono by David Sheff, opens with a prologue about Cut Piece, introducing her—as provocateur, martyr, and social experimenter—through the lens of her own creation. Sheff, who came up as a journalist in the eighties and nineties, knew Ono and Lennon when the latter was still alive, and his previously published interviews with the couple (and, more recently, just Ono) inform large portions of the book.
Source: artnews.com/Beatrice Loayza
It is to Paul McCartney‘s credit that he has never based his songwriting or recording tendencies on what people expect from him. He follows his muse wherever it takes him, and that’s why his albums tend to be packed with variety.
For example, the 1975 Wings album Venus and Mars is a mostly rocking affair, as McCartney reestablished the band as a full unit. But he also included on that album “You Gave Me the Answer,” which hearkens back to a much earlier era of music.
“Answer” the Call
After a few years of false starts and disappointments, Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles band Wings hit its stride in a major way with the 1973 album Band on the Run. Ironically, that album was delivered by a piecemeal unit, as the group had been decimated by defections to just three members.
Coming off that triumph, McCartney looked to once again beef up the Wings roster so they could tour effectively. The band added two new members for the 1975 album Venus and Mars, which leaned into a hard-rocking sound so listeners knew what the reconfigured Wings lineup could deliver.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia
The recording of 1968's 'The White Album' was a tumultuous time for The Beatles. The avant-garde album was the band's follow up to their incredibly successful 1967 work 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' captured the zeitgeist of the so-called summer of love and spent 27 weeks at the top of the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom.
'The White Album' sessions were notoriously feisty. Ringo Starr left the band for a period as they recorded 'Back in the USSR'. The drummer was fed up with the mood, as The Beatles clashed.
About that period of recording, Paul McCartney said: "There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". John Lennon later added: "The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album."
Another song on the album which divided the band was 'Revolution 9'. The track is a sound collage and began as the extended ending to John's song 'Revolution', a song warning against violent revolutionary tactics that was released in several versions by the band in 1968.
Yoko Ono and George Harrison worked with John on 'Revolution 9', which John wanted to be a sonic representation of an uprising. About it, he said: "'Revolution 9' was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution.
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"All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects.
"One thing was an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine’. I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number nine it.
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Dan Haygarth
