Beatles News
George Harrison‘s wife, Olivia, and their son, Dhani, have safeguarded his legacy since his death in 2001. Alongside the remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean, Olivia, and Dhani, help make important decisions about The Beatles.
However, Olivia and Dhani are more opinionated about certain things than others.
Yoko Ono became the first Beatles widow after Mark David Chapman assassinated John in 1980. Olivia followed after George died of cancer in 2001. They have taken their husbands’ seats in Beatles boardroom meetings.
They discuss Beatles business and vote on things that affect the band and their music, including projects like Peter Jackson’s recent three-part documentary, The Beatles: Get Back.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Initially, George Harrison thought Ringo Starr had died when he got the late-night phone call about John Lennon‘s death in December 1980. No call that late at night could bring anything good.
In a 1988 interview on Aspel and Co., George explained that he’d been sleeping at his home, Friar Park, when he got the call about John’s death.
“The call came through sometime in the morning, four or five in the morning,” George said. “I didn’t take the call. Olivia took the call, and she said, ‘John’s been shot.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, how bad is it?’ I just thought maybe a flesh wound or something like that, but she said, ‘No, that’s it, he’s dead.’
Source: cheatsheet.com
John Lennon said his record company wanted one of his songs to be a single. He found the song “embarrassing.” He said something to Yoko Ono in the song that he felt he couldn’t say to her in person.
One of John Lennon‘s songs was really popular with his fans. Despite this, he didn’t want to release the song as a single. The former Beatle said this may have hurt the success of the album Imagine.The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono is an interview from 1980. During the interview, John was asked about his song “Oh Yoko!” “It’s a very popular track, but I was sort of shy and embarrassed and it didn’t sort of represent my image of myself as the tough, hard-biting rock’ n’ roller with the acid tongue,” he said.
Source: cheatsheet.com
John Lennon’s son Julian Lennon has explained why he legally changed his name.
In 2020, the son of the late Beatles star – who is also a musician – changed his name from John Charles Julian Lennon to Julian Charles John Lennon.
During a recent appearance on the podcast Word in Your Ear, he opened up about his decision to change his name, stating that the pandemic played a role.
“It was in 2020, just before we all got locked in a cage that I finally actually decided to legally change my name by default,” he said.
“Because originally my name was John Charles Julian Lennon, and the crap that I had to deal with when travelling and security companies and this and that and the other.”
Source: Annabel Nugent/independent.co.uk
However, one person in the media didn’t stereotype The Beatles; radio personality Cousin Brucie, a.k.a. Bruce Morrow.
Cousin Brucie helped The Beatles become famous in the U.S. He told Forbes that he received the first Beatles record from an armed security guard, who had it handcuffed to his wrist in an attaché case.
The song was “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” “He says to me you can’t have it until 9 o’clock. So at 9 o’clock when I played it would automatically go on our syndication to 40 states,” Cousin Brucie said.
“So I played, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand.’ Never played before. And I heard it. I played it eight times. I knew what was happening. Now it seems what happened is dozens of radio stations because of my reach copied that record. Now it wasn’t great quality. But the next day they all did what I did. And it went everywhere.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
Director Peter Jackson says he has a new Beatles movie idea in mind less than a year after the release of his acclaimed The Beatles: Get Back.
“I’m talking to the Beatles about another project, something very, very different than Get Back,” he recently told Deadline. “We’re seeing what the possibilities are, but it’s another project with them. It’s not really a documentary … and that’s all I can really say.”
Get Back premiered on Disney+ in November and included nearly eight hours of footage originally intended for the band's 1970 film Let It Be, which was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. The 2021 movie recently earned five Emmy nominations, including two for Sound Mixing, which, as Jackson said, “is always a category that people don’t hold in the highest esteem, I guess would be a way to say it, other than people who work in the field. Get Back is all about the sound, and restoring the sound and developing the AI things to separate the musical tracks.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
George Harrison temporarily left The Beatles, as seen during their Disney+ documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back. Ringo Starr confirmed that he walked away from the group before that after feeling like the other three members were “really close.”
Along with George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon, Ringo Starr is one of the featured artists in the Beatles. These artists broke records in the UK and overseas, making history with their unique rock music and massive fan base.
It wasn’t always easy for the band members, as Ringo Starr confirmed he left the Beatles while working on The White Album.
Source: cheatsheet.com
George Harrison's first solo number one single stands alone in the history of rock music for going against the secular grain as a full-on love song to the Creator. Sure, there'd been some precedent with both The Beach Boys' God Only Knows and Norman Greenbaum's Spirit In The Sky, but My Sweet Lord was different. The lyric is loaded with forty “Lords,” sixteen “Hallelujahs” and nine “Hare Krishnas.”
As John Lennon joked about his former bandmate's hit in 1970, “Every time I put the radio on, it's 'Oh my Lord.' I'm beginning to think there must be a God.”
Source: Bill DeMain/loudersound.com
After The Beatles split up in 1970 each of the Fab Four went their own way. They each started releasing their own solo music and dominating the charts in their own way. George Harrison started early with the release of his 1970 album All Things Must Pass.
In this album was the track My Sweet Lord, a song that was later used to accuse Harrison of plagiarism.
After that, the star could not rekindle his love for music.
Harrison was accused of plagiarising the classic song He's So Fine in My Sweet Lord.
While the star - and the court - determined that he did not deliberately plagiarise the song, he did lose the lawsuit.
After that, he struggled to find a love for the art-form again.
He said: "It’s difficult just to start writing again after you’ve been through that. Even now when I put the radio on, every tune I hear sounds like something else."
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
This week, on July 20, back in 1968, Paul McCartney's life came crashing down around him in front of millions of people. His girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, split up with him in perhaps the most ruthless way possible after five years of being together.
McCartney and Asher first met in 1963 as The Beatles were beginning to become one of the biggest acts on the planet. At the time, she was a prominent British actor and was no newcomer to fame.
Cynthia Lennon - the wife of McCartney's bandmate and best friend, John Lennon - recalled the young Hey Jude singer falling in love with Asher extremely quickly.
She wrote: "Paul fell like a ton of bricks for Jane. The first time I was introduced to her was at her home and she was sitting on Paul’s knee. My first impression of Jane was how beautiful and finely featured she was. Her mass of Titian-coloured hair cascaded around her face and shoulders, her pale complexion contrasting strongly with her dark clothes and shining hair."
Source: Callum Crumlish
