Beatles News
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
In the 1970s, John Lennon’s girlfriend, May Pang, warily agreed to stay in a beach house with a number of other musicians to work on Harry Nilsson’s album. To her, the idea of staying in the house sounded like chaos, and she wasn’t wrong. The musicians spent their evenings drinking and partying and their days recovering from the night before. Pang even began referring to Ringo Starr’s room as the “den of darkness” because he didn’t want to let even a sliver of sunlight in.
Nilsson, one of Lennon’s close friends, was working on an album, and Lennon had the idea to lock a number of musicians up to ensure it was completed.
“There should be an asylum somewhere for aged rock ‘n’ rollers,” he told Pang, per her book Loving John. “Then we can all be put in padded cells where we belong. Let’s open an asylum. We should all rent a house and live together. Then we can watch Harry, save money, and make sure all the musicians get to the studio on time when we begin to work on Harry’s album.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison didn’t have the easiest time being a Beatle, but at least being one of the Fab Four heightened his awareness of the world. Then, he took that awareness and used it for something good.
George didn’t have the easiest time as a Beatle. John Lennon and Paul McCartney treated him like a glorified session man and pushed him and his songs aside. He realized early on that he didn’t enjoy fame or adulation.
During a Rolling Stone interview in 1979, George said he “never” thought of being a Beatle again. “Not in this life or any other life. I mean, a lot of the time it was fantastic, but when it really got into the mania it was a question of either stop or end up dead.
“We almost got killed in a number of situations – planes catching on fire, people trying to shoot the plane down and riots everywhere we went. It was aging me.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon taught George Harrison something important in the songwriting process. George used the technique for years until he began working with ELO frontman Jeff Lynne in 1987 on his album Cloud Nine. Lynne showed the former Beatle that he didn’t have to write songs as John taught him.
In Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, fans found out that John taught George something potentially valuable to the younger Beatle’s songwriting process. George began writing songs in 1963; his first was “Don’t Bother Me.” After that, George tentatively increased his songwriting. Whether he could get those songs on Beatles albums was another issue.
To help his bandmate, John taught George always to finish a song once he started writing it.
In Jackson’s documentary, George tells John that he went to bed late. He had to finish writing a song. George explained that he kept hearing John’s voice “from about 10 years ago, saying, ‘finish ’em straight away, as soon as you start ’em, finish ’em.'” John replied, “But I never do it, though. I can’t do it, but I know it’s the best.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
Berkshire is a hot spot for celebrities and royals alike as hundreds of stars call, or have called, the county home. There's no surprise as it is full of beautiful countryside backdrops, winding rivers and bustling towns.
Even the surrounding counties can be just as popular, with one place that sits near the tripoint of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Just 20 minutes from Reading, Henley -on-Thames is a town that sits on the River Thames which many celebs have called home.
Musician and former Beatle member George Harrison lived in the town until his death in 2001. In 1970, he bought and lived in Friar Park where his widow Olivia Harrison continues to live.
Source: Jenna Outhwaite/getreading.co.uk
Paul McCartney claims that one of The Beatles’ songs became the inspiration for John Lennon’s popular tune “Imagine.” Paul discussed the comparison between the two songs in his book called The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
He shared that The Beatles’ song “I’ll Get You” has the line “Imagine I’m in love with you.” He says that the line gave John the inspiration for his song and went with the word imagine. Paul explained, “The word and idea of ‘imagine’ is something John would repurpose in his own song ‘Imagine.'”
“Imagine” was inspired by “I’ll Get You”
Source: doyouremember.com
John Lennon said The Beatles’ ‘Hello, Goodbye” was designed to be a single. He wasn’t a big fan of the track and said it smelled like Paul McCartney wrote it. John revealed his favorite part of “Hello, Goodbye.”
John Lennon said The Beatles‘ “Hello, Goodbye” smelled like Paul McCartney wrote it. Subsequently, John said he wasn’t a big fan of the song. Notably, the track became a hit twice in two different decades in the United Kingdom.The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono includes a 1980 interview. In it, John discussed Paul’s musicianship. “Paul was one of the most innovative bass players that ever played bass, and half the stuff that’s going on now is directly ripped off from his Beatles period,” he said. “He was coy about his bass playing. He’s an egomaniac about everything else, but his bass playing he was always a bit coy about.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
