Beatles News
Peter Jackson's documentary series "The Beatles: Get Back" premiered on Disney+ over Thanksgiving weekend. The three-episode special, which ran 470 minutes, was culled from over 60 hours of original studio footage and 150 hours of audio recordings.
To preserve continuity, streamline themes, and get the final running time under eight hours, the following moments were edited out:
Day 1: Paul shows up to Twickenham Studios with 11 new songs, plus a formula for a future unknown pandemic vaccine he jotted down in the cab on the way over.
Day 2: Peter Sellers drops by Twickenham to say hello to Ringo, his co-star in the upcoming film, "The Magic Christian." The visit is cut short when Yoko Ono asks Sellers if he'll call her estranged husband's divorce lawyer and threaten him using the Clouseau voice.
Source: salon.com
I’m desperate to hang out some more with the Beatles, and I know I’m not alone in feeling this. I miss Paul, John, George and Ringo. I feel like we had such a great Thanksgiving weekend together—them making iconic songs, sipping tea and mildly bickering, and me on the couch, lying in the darkness, microwaved leftovers on my chest.
Source: Jason Gay/wsj.com
The widow and son of former Beatle John Lennon have given away 50 rare records of Happy Xmas (War is Over) to charities and record shops so they can raise funds.
Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon said they wanted to "spread Christmas cheer".
A note attached to the gifts urged the charities to use the limited edition 12-inch vinyl acetates to "sell, auction [and] raise money".
Liverpool-based The Brain Charity said it was "hugely moved" by the gesture.
"We feel absolutely bowled over by this astonishingly generous surprise Christmas gift," Chief Executive Nanette Mellor said.
The one-sided 12" acetate featuring John and Yoko was hand-cut on the lathe at the legendary Abbey Road Studios.
Each edition is stickered and numbered out of 50 and includes a machine printed signature from Yoko, making them collectable.
Source: BBC News
Paul McCartney gave the world many great albums with his band Wings. Despite this, critics weren’t always receptive to the band. Paul himself once thought one of Wings’ albums was a disaster. He later softened his stance on the album while spending time with David Bowie.
During an interview with Reverb.com, Paul said lots of listeners compared Wings to The Beatles. Paul admitted The Beatles were a difficult act to follow. Despite this, he said Wings is an underrated band.
“The interesting thing is that, looking back on some of the work, some of the stuff, it’s better than you think it was, but because it got such harsh criticism … from me,” he said. “The critics gave us a hard run, but I was particularly hard on us. I remember looking at a book, there was an album we did, I think it was Back to the Egg, which didn’t do well, and I remember thinking, ‘God, complete disaster.'”
Source: cheatsheet.com
George Harrison was known as the quiet Beatle, and sometimes also wanted to be invisible.
“Beatle George Harrison, above, is due in court here today to answer assault charges,” John Lennon reads from a newspaper in a scene in Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. “Harrison is accused of assaulting a photographer last May as he and Beatle Ringo Starr left a nightclub.”
The accused looks fairly bewildered, as did much of the audience. The story intermittently creeps back into the documentary, making its presence known while Harrison largely ignores it and moves on.
In The Beatles: Get Back, Jackson shows how news items about The Beatles have a tendency to take on lives of their own. Paul McCartney improvises his version of Michael Housego’s article “The End of a Beautiful Friendship,” about Harrison quitting the band, while the rest of the group rolls through old time rock and roll.
Source: Tony Sokol/denofgeek.com
Musical superstar Phil Collins plays the drums but he doesn’t take stick from anyone. One person who discovered that to their detriment was none other than Sir Paul McCartney.
A passing remark led to bitterness years later and the opening of old wounds. How did it all go down? Take this story at Face Value…
What did Paul McCartney say to annoy Phil Collins?
The year was 2002. Collins and McCartney were attending “Party at the Palace.” This prestigious event celebrated the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a time for smart suits, canapés and (we’re guessing) extreme politeness.
Collins mentioned the encounter during a 2016 interview with the Sunday Times. He had in his hand a first edition copy of The Beatles authorized biography by Hunter Davies (1968). Why not ask the Liverpudlian legend to sign it? Paper grew on trees. Opportunities like that didn’t.
Source: Steve Palace/thevintagenews.com
George Harrison and Michael Jackson discussed one of Van Morrison’s songs during a radio interview. George and Jackson had different opinions of the track. Listeners in the United States and the United Kingdom had essentially the same reaction to the song.
According to the book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters, the quiet Beatle appeared on a radio show called Roundtable alongside Jackson in 1979. Guests on the show discussed their opinions of new songs. One of the songs George and Michael discussed was Morrison’s then-new single “Natalia.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
Hardcore fans of The Beatles like to think they know everything about the band. Most have bootlegs of recording sessions, live shows, and bookshelves full of books documenting—sometimes to the hour—what any of them were doing personally and creatively during the group’s 10-year run.
Yet even those fans are hailing Peter’s Jackson’s new Disney+ exclusive docuseries, The Beatles: Get Back, which curates and culls down 50+ hours of footage from the Get Back sessions that reveals, from a fly on the wall perspective, when the creative magic was coming to a close in early 1969.
Even with anecdotal stories or their voices captured in the recording sessions bootlegs, the docuseries is the most contextual and revealing artifact to exist that expresses, in their own words and deeds, what was going wrong amongst the Fab Four. And because of that, the new knowledge gleaned for fans and music historians is nothing less than legendary.
Source: Garrett Martin and Paste Staff
During Thanksgiving weekend, Disney + released a new three-part documentary after the last Beatles recording sessions before their disbandment, titled simply The Beatles: Get Back.
The three-part documentary shows rare behind-the-scenes footage of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr recording their last songs together as a band in 1969.
And it also sheds a whole new light on the troubled narrative that has been around since 1970: Yoko Ono breaking up with the Beatles. There are several moments throughout the 7.8 hours of footage that deconstructs this misogynistic theory and instead proves that it is unpopular – the Beatles were actually responsible for the dissolution of the Beatles.
Source: creatorsempire.com
The Beatles may have been in their own little world for much of their time together, but they did know about other artists’ music. We saw that clear as day in Peter Jackson’s new three-part documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. While the group was supposed to be writing 14 original songs for their new album and a TV special, they often found themselves jamming out to songs penned by their idols, past and present. In other scenes, The Beatles even praised those idols.In Part 2 of Jackson’s documentary, John Lennon asked the rest of the group if they’d seen Fleetwood Mac on Late Night Live the night before. This was, of course, before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had joined the band. Then, Fleetwood Mac consisted of founder and frontman Peter Green, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, guitarist Danny Kirwan, the occasional keyboardist Christine Perfect (later Christine McVie), and slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer.
Source: cheatsheet.com
