Beatles News
When Paul McCartney and John Lennon first met as teenagers, the latter was around two years older and therefore the natural leader of what became The Beatles. As time when on, the duo formed their joint songwriting credit, the most successful in music history. Now two members of the Fab Four always had a healthy and brotherly rivalry, but following the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967, McCartney ended up taking on his role.
In The Beatles: Get Back footage released on Disney+ last year, it's clear that McCartney had a charismatic leadership style and appears somewhat more dominant than Lennon during those 1969 Let It Be sessions.
In the first episode of Peter Jackson’s revisionist documentary, Macca gets frustrated with Lennon for not coming up with enough new material and clashes with George Harrison over the way he plays the guitar.
In the end, on January 10th, 1969, the Quiet Beatle had had enough and temporarily left The Beatles. The second episode opened with just Ringo Starr and McCartney arriving at the Twickenham Studios on Monday, January 13, discussing with the others what to do.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
In 1970, Paul McCartney sued The Beatles. He explained that he did it to protect the band’s catalog of music from band manager Allen Klein, but the move also aired out a great deal of the group’s dirty laundry. The group’s inner workings were made public, and John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had harsh words to share about McCartney. Starr, at least, tried to soften the blow of his words, but he still insulted his former bandmate.
In 1970, McCartney sued The Beatles to dissolve their contractual relationship when the other members appointed Klein to control the band’s finances. McCartney never liked Klein and didn’t trust him to manage the group’s affairs.
“The only way for me to save The Beatles and Apple — and to release Get Back by Peter Jackson and which allowed us to release Anthology and all these great remasters of all the great Beatles records — was to sue the band,” McCartney told GQ. “If I hadn’t done that, it would have all belonged to Allen Klein. The only way I was given to get us out of that was to do what I did.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison didn’t enjoy performing live but did reveal which of his songs he thought was a good stadium tune. However, most of George’s songs sound great over loudspeakers.
George enjoyed playing all night to drunken sailors during The Beatles’ residency in Hamburg, Germany. He liked that the band could hone their performing skills. There was also the freedom to jam on anything they liked. That sort of performance stayed in George’s heart.
However, when Beatlemania commenced, George began to dread touring and performing. With screaming fans following their every move, The Beatles jumped from car to hotel room to stage on repeat. They couldn’t go out. Soon, George became paranoid that someone would hurt or even murder them.
Thankfully, The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. Still, that paranoia stayed with George, even when The Beatles split in 1970.
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
Anyone close to George Harrison knew he had a very low tolerance for nonsense. The Beatles’ first manager, Allan Williams, knew this well, as did George’s friends.
“Allan Williams, who booked The Beatles at his Liverpool club the Jacaranda and later took them to Hamburg, describes Harrison as ‘nice to get on with, but he wouldn’t suffer fools,'” Graeme Thomson wrote. “‘He always had a sharp tongue. Crikey, yeah! He didn’t put up with any bullshitters.'”
Thompson continued, “He was capable of a kind of blissful clarity of thought and perception often only accessible to a child, although through his life he frequently struggled to articulate it to his own satisfaction; he also had a similarly childlike knack for uncomfortably straight-talking.
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon co-wrote a song from The Beatles’ before the band was famous.
Paul McCartney said the song wasn’t as good as “Love Me Do.”
John said a number in the song’s title had a special meaning to him.
John Lennon wrote one of the songs from The Beatles‘ Let It Be as a teenager with help from Paul McCartney. Paul said it was better than some of their earlier compositions. In addition, John revealed the significance of the song’s title.
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul recalled the evolution of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership. “So we just developed the art, gradually, gaining in confidence,” he said. “So we did this every so often through a number of months.
“We did ‘Just Fun,’ ‘In Spite of All the Danger,’ which I’d written more fully so John didn’t have much of a look-in there,” he said. “I did a very bad song called ‘Like Dreamers Do’ which The Applejacks did later. ‘One After 909’ was getting a little bit better, then came ‘Love Me Do,’ which was the culmination of it when we finally got a song we could actually record.” Paul said “One After 909” wasn’t great even though he had a soft spot for it.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
THE BEATLES legend John Lennon would have been 82 years old on Sunday, the birthday he shares with his younger son Sean Ono Lennon. Over the weekend members of the Fab Four family have been celebrating the late star whose life was cut short in 1980.
The Beatles are the world’s best-selling music artists of all time and continue to leave a dominant mark on popular culture over 50 years since they broke up. Just last week fans celebrated the 60th anniversary of their official debut single Love Me Do, released on October 5, 1962 – the same day the first James Bond movie Dr No starring Sean Connery hit cinemas. After a decade of unprecedented success, they went their separate ways on their own solo paths – although tragically John Lennon only had 10 years of life left.
Nevertheless, Lennon’s memory has been upheld through his incredible legacy as his family and fans continue to celebrate his brief life and work to this day.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
Ringo Starr established himself as one of the best drummers in Liverpool, England, before he joined The Beatles. Ringo’s first band nearly shared a bill with early American rock ‘n’ roller Eddie Cochran, but they missed their chance, which might have saved the Fab Four. Ringo sat in with The Beatles, impressed Paul McCartney with one song, and soon joined the band as they charted a history-making course. Yet Ringo earned George Harrison’s praise before George even knew his name.
Before The Beatles extended Ringo an invitation, before he witnessed George and Paul have a two-hour argument during a tour pit stop, Ringo earned praise from George.
George caught a Rory Storm & the Hurricanes show during their time in Hamburg. The band didn’t leave much of a mark on George, but Ringo’s drumming did. John Lennon tended to speak candidly, but George didn’t mince words talking about Rory Storm and Ringo, as Michael Seth Starr (no relation) writes in the Ringo biography With a Little Help:
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
One of The Beatles‘ songs did not become a hit until the 1990s. A rock star who was not a member of the group helped Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr complete the hit song. The rock star discussed how the then-living Beatles felt about getting back in the studio together.1995 saw the release of Anthology 1, a Beatles compilation album that included some previously unreleased material. The three then-remaining Beatles (Paul, George, and Ringo) worked with the Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne to complete some of the material on Anthology 1. He said it took a day or so for him to break the ice with Paul but they eventually became good friends.
During a 1995 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lynne discussed going over old demos. “We lived with the tapes for a bit, just listening to them,” Lynne said. “They were very noisy and required a lot of work. We then added backing, starting with acoustic guitars and drums. Paul played bass and George lead guitar. It sounded like — The Beatles!”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon was terrified during one of his trips to the American South. Subsequently, he thought one of The Beatles’ songs wouldn’t get airplay there. He was surprised to hear the song was played in Jacksonville, Florida.
The book Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon includes an interview from 1969. In it, the singer discussed the reaction to his “more popular than Jesus” comment in the Southern United States. “Yeah, when we were down there, in the States [on The Beatles’ last U.S. tour, in August 1966], it was terrifying,” he recalled.
“That’s when they were getting me for saying we’re bigger than Christ,” he said. “Somebody was letting off balloons, and we all looked around to see which of us had got shot.”
John was surprised by the reception of The Beatles’ “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in the South. The track includes the line “Christ, you know it ain’t easy.” Notably. some Christians are offended by the use of Jesus’ name as an expletive.
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
John Lennon’s son, Julian, recently joined an interview with Good Morning Britain and explained why he changed his name while discussing the sentimental meaning of this gesture.
Julian Lennon came to the world without knowing that he would be the son of a world-renowned musician. When he got older, he decided to embark on his musical journey in 1984 and has since released seven albums. Although he tried to build his own music career, many described him as ‘John Lennon’s son’ or ‘Second John,’ and thus, he always felt overshadowed by the Beatles, and primarily his father.
It is known that Julian Lennon has had problems with his father since childhood, so it is possible to think that being called ‘Second John’ not only damaged his freedom and autonomy in his music career but also reminded him of childhood traumas. As things go like this, in 2020, the singer decided to change his name and played with the arrangement of his three first names, settling on Julian Charles John Lennon.
Source: Cansu Cobanoglu/rockcelebrities.net
