Beatles News
The painting that reportedly inspired the cover for The Beatles' legendary Sergeant Pepper album has been sold for €52,722 (£45,360) at Sotheby's in London, bringing the artwork back to public attention after 60 years in the hands of the same private collector.
"Homage to Douanier Rousseau" was painted by 22-year-old John Bellany in 1964 and portrays the Scottish artist himself (on the far right) alongside his friends and the four members of The Beatles Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
The artwork is a monumental diptych that Bellany painted after travelling to Paris on a scholarship in April 1963. There, the Scottish painter had the chance to observe the masterpieces from the time of the French Revolution, and when he returned to Edinburgh - where he attended the College of Art - he decided to produce "Homage to Douanier Rousseau".
Source: euronews.com
Pattie Boyd was nervous when she accepted a bit part in the 1964 movie A Hard Day's Night. Sure, she only had one line — "Prisoners!?" — but she was delivering it to the Beatles.
At the time, the 19-year-old was making a name for herself as a rising star in the modeling world, posing for haute couture fashion spreads with legendary photographers like David Bailey and John French. To date, the most screen time she'd had was a TV ad for potato chips. She assumed this audition was for just another commercial, but then she learned she'd snagged a role in a feature film alongside the four most famous men on the planet. The pressure was on.
"Initially I thought, 'I can't do this. I'm not an actress. There's no way I can do this,'" Boyd tells PEOPLE. "But my agent said to me, 'Don't worry, you've only got one word to say. Easy peasy. It'll be fine.'"
Source: Jordan Runtagh/people.com
John Lennon wrote many hit songs for The Beatles and his solo career. Many of the songs he wrote include “Help!,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Please Please Me,” and “Come Together.” One song he wrote during his tenure with The Beatles he called his “first real major piece of work.”
“In My Life” debuted in 1965 on The Beatles’ album Rubber Soul. While the song is credited to Lennon and Paul McCartney, Lennon wrote most of the lyrics. McCartney admitted later in an interview with Hit Parader that he wrote the music while the lyrics were “words that John wrote.”
The song was personal for Lennon as the lyrics referenced aspects of his life. The lyrics are based on a bus route he used to take in Liverpool, alluding to various locations along the way, including Penny Lane and Strawberry Field. These locations would later become Beatles’ song titles.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
In the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were not happy with Paul McCartney. They complained publicly about his desire to get his way, but they also were embroiled in a legal battle with him. McCartney did not like Allen Klein, who the other band members had hired as their manager, and sued the group so Klein didn’t have complete control over their music. On top of speaking negatively about McCartney’s personality, his former bandmates slammed his solo music. Starr said it made him sad.
When The Beatles broke up, some members, like Harrison and Lennon, felt a sense of relief. Starr, however, was left with feelings of resentment that would linger for the next two decades.
“I was mad,” he said, per the New York Daily News. “For 20 years. I had breaks in between of not being.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
In 2011, Martin Scorsese released a documentary about George Harrison, and Paul McCartney’s daughter Stella felt it was an important watch. Her father and Harrison didn’t always get along, due in part to the fact that Harrison believed McCartney and John Lennon overlooked his contributions to The Beatles. She thought it was good for audiences to get to know Harrison through the documentary, as he didn’t get as much attention as Lennon and McCartney.In 2011, Scorsese released the two-part documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. The Harrison family specifically reached out to Scorsese because they wanted a capable filmmaker who could portray Harrison’s music and his spiritual life.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison had some conflicting thoughts on his legacy. Mostly, the former Beatle didn’t think people would remember him years after he died. If anyone did remember him, he didn’t want them to think of him as one thing. He wasn’t just a lead guitarist, record producer, or Beatle.
For some reason, George didn’t think many people would remember him years after his death. He spoke about his legacy with his wife, Olivia. She was surprised by what her husband said.
Olivia told the LA Times that George knew his music, especially his triple album, All Things Must Pass, “meant things to people. He knew it helped people in their lives — people wrote to him, they told him. And he said, ‘Even if it’s one person, even if it helps somebody, then that’s great.’ But he wasn’t concerned about how he would be remembered,” Olivia said.
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles are known for shattering records with several albums and hit songs that dominated the charts and sales. One of their albums holds the record for the fastest-selling album. However, this album wouldn’t debut until years after the band already disbanded. 1 debuted in 2000 and is a compilation album of all of The Beatles’ number one hits. The album debuted 30 years after the band broke up but was still able to capitalize on the band’s everlasting popularity. 1 is a massive catalog of Beatles’ hits, consisting of 27 songs, including “Let it Be,” “Hey Jude,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Eight Days a Week,” “Yellow Submarine,” “All You Need Is Love,” and “Yesterday.”
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
A five-disc set reveals a band awash with musical and sonic ideas, having fun and making breakthroughs.Imagine — or if you’re young or distant enough, enjoy — a moment when Beatles songs weren’t bone-deep familiar, weren’t canonical, weren’t thoroughly embedded in succeeding generations of rock and pop. A moment when the band that had worked its way up to becoming the most popular act in the Western world was still just four guys knocking songs around in a room and keeping themselves loose and whimsical. The room, however, was a well-equipped recording studio — creating what were then state-of-the-art four-track master tapes — and for all their joking around, the Beatles were also pushing themselves to evolve while applying ruthless quality control.
Source: Jon Pareles/nytimes.com
John Lennon said The Beatles were “more intellectual” than the Bee Gees. In the same vein, he revealed what he thought about songs from the 1970s in general. Notably, both bands had many No. 1 hits in the United States.“Try to tell the kids in the ’70s who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music is just The Beatles redone,” he continued. “There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees. They do a damn good job. There was nothing else going on then.”
John contrasted The Beatles to the Bee Gees. “The Beatles were more intellectual, so they appealed on that level, too,” he said. “But the basic appeal of The Beatles was not their intelligence. It was their music.”
John discussed why the Fab Four were seen as intellectual. “It was only after some guy in the London Times said there were aeolian cadences in ‘It Won’t Be Long’ that the middle classes started listening to it — because somebody put a tag on it.” John was asked if the song actually included aeolian cadences in the track. “To this day I don’t have any idea what they are,” he said. “They sound like exotic birds.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
YES! The Beatles’ Revolver has been rereleased as a box set, and with it comes surprises, treasures and joy beyond belief. It’s a return to all the music that filled my angst-ridden 16-year-old rubber soul and raised me up every time I played it and stared at Klaus Voorman’s intriguing album cover. (What an amazing departure in style and tone for music graphics. It made me want to draw and do collage, too.)
From The Guardian: “A bonus disc on the new, expanded, remixed and remastered box set of 1966’s Revolver offers an even more transformative experience: a jaw-dropping sequence of ‘Yellow Submarine’ work tapes traces the song’s evolution from a fragile, sad wisp sung by John Lennon to its later iteration as a Ringo Starr-directed psych-pop goof. That the band steered ‘Yellow Submarine’ from morose folk trifle to boisterous stoner singalong seems improbable, but the tapes don’t lie: Through a combination of focused acoustic woodshedding and whimsical studio risks, the band arrived at the more familiar, upbeat ‘Yellow Submarine.'”
Source: printmag.com
