Beatles News
PLEASE WELCOME A NEW PART OF THE MOJO FAMILY. We’re thrilled to announce MOJO Essentials, and the first of a new series of deluxe bookazines. In MOJO Essentials: The Beatles, our experts guide you through The Beatles’ key albums, songs, films and books. You can order a copy from us here .
The Beatles are for many the greatest band of all time, the charismatic young musicians from Liverpool who changed the way music sounded in the 1960s and laid the foundations for the five decades of rock and pop music that have followed in their wake. But how best to navigate the maze of Fabs studio albums, rarities compilations, live recordings, mono and stereo mixes and deluxe remasters – not to mention the feature films, promo videos, documentaries and books?
Source: Chris Catchpole/mojo4music.com
It was September 12, 1964, the very height of Beatlemania, and 14-year-old Debbie Chase was exactly where every Beatles fan on the planet wanted to be: in the same room as John, Paul, George and Ringo.
But the Newton eighth-grader was determined to get even closer. And soon, on the strength of an audacity she marvels at to this day, she was indeed up close and personal with the Fab Four — thanks to a Globe reporter, Jack Thomas, who still occupies a special place in Chase’s memory.
Having recently released A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles were in town to perform at the Boston Garden. A psychiatrist had been quoted in a Globe article claiming the Beatles and their music had a pernicious effect on girls. In response, young Debbie wrote an indignant letter to the newspaper, defending her mop-topped heroes.
Source: bostonglobe.com
Dhani, George Harrison’s only child, has numerous pseudo siblings among his father’s friends’ children, including Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob. Paul McCartney’s children, Mary, Stella, and James, as well as John Lennon’s son, Sean, were among Dhani’s Beatle friends.
While their fathers were in the Traveling Wilburys, however, Jakob hung out with Dhani. They later teamed up on their own.
Dhani Harrison, the son of George Harrison, grew up in a celebrity-saturated environment.
Friar Park was a unique place to grow up. Dhani used to joke with his friends about how his father makes a living by “pushing buttons.” He had no idea those buttons were responsible for the success of hit albums.
Source: Micheal Kurt/technotrenz.com
For teenager Janice Mitchell, hearing the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand on US radio in December 1963 affected her in ways she still can’t quite articulate. “How do you explain why [you were] electrified when you were struck by lightning?” she says, laughing.
I Want to Hold Your Hand didn’t just sound more interesting than the other songs in rotation on her home town station, the single represented an escape from a difficult childhood. Mitchell, of Cleveland, Ohio, grew up with neglectful parents who eventually abandoned her and two younger siblings. And 1963 had been another hard year. Mitchell was reeling from the death of a beloved great uncle, one of the few adults who had shown her kindness.
The arrival of the Beatles provided a glimmer of hope. “I realised I wanted to go to where the Beatles were from, because I figured that’s where happiness would lie,” Mitchell says. “That was my goal: to go there and breathe Beatles air, walk on sacred Beatles soil and have a happy life.”
Source: Annie Zaleski/theguardian.com
The Beatles‘ ‘1’ compilation album has been remastered for spatial audio by Giles Martin, the son of the band’s late producer George Martin.
Giles said in an interview last year that he was a fan of the immersive 360-degree sound technology launched in 2021 by Apple Music, as well as the Dolby Atmos that it is built on, but said that it doesn’t always “sound quite right”.
He revealed that he intended to remaster The Beatles’ 1967 album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ but has since worked on the band’s greatest Number Ones compilation album, which was released in 2000.
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about reworking ‘1’ in spatial audio, and how his father laid the foundations for his interest in pursuing modern audio tech.
Source: Charlotte Krol/nme.com
Even before John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were known as the world’s biggest boy band, Lennon and McCartney were writing songs together after school. The Beatles revisited some of these unreleased songs during The Beatles: Get Back, even if McCartney thought they were “unsophisticated.”
Formed by teenage Lennon in the 1950s, the Quarrymen first emerged in Liverpool, eventually adding McCartney and then Harrison to their roster. According to All Music, they changed their name to The Silver Beetles, later becoming The Silver Beatles.
After adding Ringo Starr to their lineup and changing their name a final time to the Beatles, the group became one of the world’s biggest rock bands. The Beatles became international superstars, performing at The Ed Sullivan Show. Since their debut, the band released songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Hey Jude,” and “In My Life.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles changed their songwriting styles and techniques a lot throughout the 1960s. But John Lennon once revealed how discovering the music of Bob Dylan in 1964 had a particular effect on his writing. He said in Anthology: "In Paris in 1964 was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all. Paul [McCartney] got the record [The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan] from a French DJ. For three weeks in Paris, we didn’t stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan."
Dylan's poetic penmanship led Lennon to begin writing in a more emotional way, he recalled.
The following year, in 1965, Lennon released You've Got to Hide Your Love Away on The Beatles' fifth studio album, Help! Reminiscing about this track, he said: "It’s one of those that you sing a bit sadly to yourself. 'Here I stand, head in hand...' I’d started thinking about my own emotions." He added: "I don’t know when exactly it started, [songs] like I’m A Loser or Hide Your Love Away, those kind of things. Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself, which I’d done in my books."
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
Paul McCartney and John Lennon were living proof that opposites attract. They had different upbringings, which, of course, gave them dissimilar personalities. John sang “Help!” and Paul sang “We Can Work It Out.”
However, they did have a lot in common. Paul and John shared a deep love for music. They both wanted to make it to the top, but their work never satisfied them. They had one of the best songwriting partnerships in the world.
Yet when John died in 1980, fans started treating acting as if Paul was never part of it.
Looking back on his career and his time as a Beatle, Paul is just happy that he got to be the one who wrote songs with John. Being a Beatle wasn’t always a walk in the park, but at least he got to do that. He’s the only person on the planet who knows who got that pleasure.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Dave Grohl said he’d kept his eyes on Ringo Starr while watching the recent Beatles documentary Get Back.
The Foo Fighters leader – who’s played drums with Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures and others – found himself in familiar territory as Starr sat in silence amid long conversations between Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison.
Asked by the Guardian to choose his favorite recent book, Grohl named McCartney’s title The Lyrics, saying: “I’m familiar with every one of Paul McCartney’s songs, and I could probably recite most of them off the top of my head, but to have this new perspective coming from the writer, explaining the songs himself, is really rewarding. It humanizes the whole process.”
Speaking of the Beatles he continued: “I did love the documentary Get Back too. I watched Ringo the entire time: I know what it’s like to sit on a drum stool and watch a bunch of people argue. All you want to do is play a beat. Come on, fuck it, no more words!”
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
John Lennon‘s son, Sean Ono Lennon, has lots of thoughts about the former Beatle’s songs. For example, Sean said one of his father’s songs feels like a commentary on the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. He said John wrote the song to highlight how his true self differed from his public image.
John Lennon of The Beatles holding a guitar
During a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone, Sean discussed the former Beatle’s album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He felt it was a huge musical evolution from his father’s time as a pop star. Sean said John releasing John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was akin to Elvis Presley joining a punk rock band. He said Yoko Ono was the catalyst for this sonic shift.
Sean had a lot of feelings about one of the tracks from the album, “Isolation.” “I grew up listening to it, but I couldn’t believe how spot-on the lyrics were,” Sean said. “I mean, it literally could be a song that was written about quarantine.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
