Beatles News
Paul McCartney discussed bands ripping off The Beatles during the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band era in a new website Q&A. Paul McCartney ‘Slept In Bed’ With The Beatles Icon.
PaulMcCartney.com: At what point did you realize your music had changed the world? Or had, at least, helped change attitudes in the world?
P: I suppose it was our first big success in America. I started to realize that the attention was not just local, and it was around the time of Sgt. Pepper when we started seeing our clothes and the music we were making getting copied on an international level. Although this had happened before at home, with people getting the Beatle haircut and all dressing in a similar fashion, it was around about Sgt. Pepper that you could feel the worldwide movement. You could feel that people in California were thinking about what you were thinking about. And that’s when people started saying to us, ‘Wow man, you know your music changed my life!’ So, I think around about that time I started to think it was changing the world
Source: William Curtis/britpopnews.com
It was over 50 years that The Beatles broke up and John Lennon released his iconic debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Now as The Ultimate Mixes of the record are released, a special listening party has been announced for this Saturday with a whole host of guests. The interactive Twitter event will include the participation of The Beatles drummer Sir Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon.
Also contributing will be The John Lennon Estate, The George Harrison Estate, original Plastic Ono Band bassist and artist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White.
Plus Abbey Road recording engineer John Leckie, John and Yoko’s personal assistant Dan Richter and the new Ultimate Mixes’ engineer Paul Hicks and producer Simon Hilton.
The Twitter Listening Party will be hosted by Tim Burgess of the Charlatans and take place on Saturday April 24 at 6pm BST.
While the hashtag for the one-off event will be #TimsTwitterListeningParty and after the event, the newly launched Twitter Spaces will host a special discussion.
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
THE BEATLES had one of their songs covered by legendary crooner Frank Sinatra, who said the track in question "was the greatest love song of the past 50 years" - but George Harrison wasn't "thrilled" by it.
The Beatles released their 11th album, Abbey Road, in September 1969. Just a year before the band split up, the Fab Four had dropped some of their most memorable work to date. Included in the album were some incredible hits including Come Together and Here Comes The Sun. Perhaps the most notable work on the album was George Harrison’s Something.
Something, which was released as a single, quickly became one of the band’s best-known and best-loved tracks.
The song is a lovesick ballad which George later revealed was inspired by his wife at the time, Pattie Boyd.
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
Sir Paul McCartney, Victoria Beckham and Eva Longoria were among the celebrities sharing messages about sustainability and environmental conservation on Earth Day.
Former Beatle Sir Paul, a long-standing vegetarian, shared an image of himself performing against the backdrop of the Earth.
He wrote to his 3.5 million Instagram followers: “Celebrating #EarthDay. It’s the only one we’ve got!”
Pop star turned fashion designer Beckham shared a black and white photo taken by her eldest son Brooklyn of a lion pouncing, describing it as “one of my favourites”.
She wrote on Instagram: “Happy #EarthDay our planet is so incredible! We can all, and must, do better to take care of it.”
Source: irishnews.com
In 1966, while returning from a tour in Manila to London, The Beatles made a three-day layover in Delhi. Kabir Bedi, a 20-year-old-freelance reporter with All India Radio at the time, managed to get an exclusive interview with the Fab Four. In his memoir Stories I Must Tell (Westland Books), Bedi wrote that he spoke to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr for 30 minutes by bluffing to their manager, Brian Epstein, that the government had asked for the interview.
When Bedi later learnt that AIR had taped other programmes over the interview, he was outraged and left the national broadcaster. He headed to Mumbai, where he worked in advertising companies and later became a model and an actor. Here are edited excerpts of Bedi’s encounter with the Beatles.
By 1966, the year I interviewed them, The Beatles had become one of the most successful groups in the history of pop music. “Beatlemania” was raging around the world. And here I was, a crazy fan just out of college, interviewing them in their hotel room, the only Indian reporter to get through to them.
Source: Kabir Bedi/scroll.in
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that former Genesis frontman Phil Collins was in his musical career first and foremost a drummer. He’s had eight Grammy Award wins and sold millions of records, including his chart-topping albums Face Value, No Jacket Required, and Hello, I Must Be Going.
Easily considered one of rock’s greatest percussionists, here’s what Collins – who can be counted on for his brutal honesty – had to say about former Beatle Ringo Starr as a drummer.
The You’ll Be In My Heart singer was an extra in The Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night. Collins was 13 years old at the time. He sat among the crush of screaming fans in the film’s final scene during which the band finally performs.
Collins recalled in his 2016 memoir Not Dead Yet the thrill of that moment for him as a young kid watching the performance of a lifetime. As one of hundreds of students in the London area, Collins was ushered in for a reason unknown to them: they hadn’t been told The Beatles were filming a movie.
Source: cheatsheet.com
A cinema where George Harrison and John Lennon spent their teenage afternoons has been saved from demolition.
Supermarket chain Lidl wanted to knock down the Abbey Cinema in Wavertree, Liverpool to make way for a new store.
The cinema, which closed in 1979, housed a branch of the Co-op supermarket until that shut in 2020.
Historic England (HE) said following a local campaign, the "rare survivor from the 1930s heyday of cinema" had been given Grade II listed status.
HE listings advisor Sarah Charlesworth added that she hoped "a sustainable new use" could now be found for the building.
Source: BBC News
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are releasing a cover of Grow Old with Me, one of the last songs John Lennon wrote before he died.
The two surviving members of The Beatles are set to reunite for a heartfelt cover of the John Lennon song, Grow Old With Me.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr’s rendition of the 1980 track will appear on Starr’s latest solo album, What’s My Name, due out this October.
Grow Old With Me was one of the last songs written by Lennon before his murder in 1980, and was posthumously released on the 1984 record Milk and Honey. The song came about because Lennon and Yoko Ono had both been inspired by the poetry of 19th-century couple Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In 1980, Ono had awoken one morning with an idea for a song called Let Me Count the Ways – inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet, How Do I Love Thee? At the time, she called Lennon, who was in Bermuda and played him the song over the phone.
In turn, she suggested he write a response in the style of Robert Browning. Lennon got to work, and inspired by Browning’s poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra, he came up with Grow Old with Me, and rang Ono back to play it to her.
Source: Claudia Schmidt/happymag.tv
One of the highlights of The Beatles‘ album Abbey Road was the drum solo Ringo Starr performed on the collection’s medley.
It was the only recorded drum solo Starr would provide The Beatles, and he did it grudgingly. Here’s why.
While the band was recording what’s come to be known as their “White Album” in 1968, the drummer hit a symbolic wall within the group. Feeling left out and, as he has said, a little flipped out by Yoko Ono’s constant presence in the recording studio, Starr took his leave. It was temporary, of course, but necessary, as Michael Seth Starr (no relation to Ringo) wrote in his biography of the drummer, Ringo: With a Little Help.
“Even Ringo had his limits, and he reached his boiling point on August 22,” Starr wrote. “Frustrated with the in-fighting, the mixed signals, and his own drumming – and ‘freaked out’ by Yoko Ono’s immutable presence – he walked out, quitting the band.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
The Beatles have fans everywhere, but actually knowing individual members of the band is a privilege. Chevy Chase has had the privilege of knowing two Beatles. He still knows Paul McCartney, and Chase said he knew John Lennon, too. Lennon died in 1980 but Chase remembers spending time with him in New York. Chase was a guest on Rob Lowe’s Literally! Podcast on April 14. While discussing his early days on Saturday Night Live, Chase revealed he was also friendly with the Beatles members. The Beatles broke up in 1970. Chase was on Saturday Night Live from 1975-76. Living in New York in the late ‘70s, Chase would run into Lennon and Yoko Ono regularly. Here was Lennon’s New York hangout back then. “I was living on the west side around 71st street or something, close to the Hudson River,” Chase told Lowe. “He and Yoko lived somewhere near there too, because I’d see him quite frequently in the little park there, eating something and that’s where I liked to go to eat. I think the first time I met him, I had a huge sandwich in my hands. Anyway, then I’d walk back up 72nd street from the park with the two of them.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
