Beatles News
In many ways, 1960s It girl Jenny Boyd's life has been overshadowed by that of her more famous elder sister. Pattie met George Harrison of The Beatles while playing a school girl in A Hard Day's Night, later marrying him and inspiring several of his songs, before leaving him for his friend Eric Clapton, who wooed her with Lola, written about her. Yet now Jenny, aged 72, is stepping into the spotlight, with the publication of her own memoir, Jennifer Juniper: a Journey Beyond the Muse.
Born on 8 November 1947, she met her future (two time) husband Mick Fleetwood aged 16, and was with him when he formed Fleetwood Mac, one of the most famous and successful bands of the 20th century. She headed to California to experience the hippy revolution of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury aged just 19 in 1966, before joining her sister Pattie and brother-in-law George on The Beatles' famous trip to India in 1968, spending time with the band as they learned from guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Source: Rebecca Cope/tatler.com
The Beatles recorded hundreds of songs throughout their careers. Many of them made it onto their albums, but a collection of them failed to get appearances in records or single releases. So then, it is surprising to hear that the band’s drummer, Ringo Starr, favours one song over the rest, and it was a B-side of a single.
Shortly into the band’s career they released Paperback Writer - one of their best-known songs.
The single was released in 1966, but was not featured on any of the Fab Four’s studio albums.
While the track itself was a runaway hit, hitting number one in the UK charts instantly, it is the other side of the disc that Ringo remembers fondly.
Rain appears on the B-side of Paperback Writer, and was also recorded during the recording sessions for the band’s seventh album Revolver.
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
The Beatles came to an end in 1970 after a collection of disagreements, and a slow degradation of relationships between the four members. John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr were the most popular people on the planet, but they simply couldn’t work together any more after ten years of hard recording, performing, and touring.
The 1960s were a different time for the band, however. Despite becoming icons later in the decade, they began with nothing to their names, and no notoriety.
A recent interview with former Fab Four pal and artist Klaus Voorman told of the band’s squalor in the earlier days.
Voorman first explained to The Guardian that he met the band in Hamburg, Germany, in 1960.
After storming out of the home of his girlfriend at the time - The Beatles' photographer Astrid Kirchherr - he came across a club that the Fab Four were playing at.
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
Like most classic-rock era bands, their biggest hits tend to get played into rote memory, while adjacent album cuts may languish in relative obscurity. In cases like 1968's The Beatles, they released so many songs in a rush that the project can become overwhelming. With others, including 1970's Let It Be, chart-topping hits tend to suck up all the oxygen.
That said, in still other cases, the most overlooked song from each album can be pretty well known. That's a function of the Beatles' place in rock history, as this music has sparked some of rock criticism's most probing explorations. (In fact, one of these tracks sparked a comparison in London's largest newspaper to the early modernist composer Gustav Mahler.)
John Lennon's role as the group's early principal songwriter meant he inevitably dominated this list – though key tracks from Paul McCartney and George Harrison find a home, too. Together, they created a discography that yielded 20 No. 1 Billboard smashes, 34 other Top 10 finishers, and a few notably underrated moments along the way. Keep scrolling for a look back at the most overlooked song from every Beatles album.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
In September 1969, the bass player and artist Klaus Voormann, who had recently left Manfred Mann, received a phone call from John Lennon. There was nothing unusual in that. Voormann had known the Beatles for nine years and was part of the band’s tight inner circle. It was Voormann’s own band, Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, that Lennon and George Harrison had attempted to go and see live on the night they were famously dosed with LSD at a dinner party. Ringo Starr was already at the gig and was noisily confronted by his lysergically altered bandmates claiming that the venue’s lift was on fire. A year later, he had designed the Grammy award-winning cover of Revolver.
The issue was more what Lennon wanted him to do. Lennon had whimsically agreed to perform live at a rock’n’roll revival festival in Toronto at two days’ notice and was trying to cobble together backing musicians to play as the Plastic Ono Band. Eric Clapton had agreed to play guitar, but Voormann took more convincing, on the not-unreasonable grounds that headlining a festival with a new band who hadn’t rehearsed didn’t seem like one of Lennon’s more inspired ideas.
Source: Alexis Petridis/theguardian.com
When rock fans start debating who was the best band, it won’t be long before The Beatles and Led Zeppelin enter the picture. Given the runaway success of both bands in their respective decades, that won’t come as a surprise to many.
It did come as a surprise, however, when Led Zeppelin topped The Beatles in a 1970 Melody Maker poll. Prior to that, the Fab Four had been on an eight-year run as Britain’s favorite band. But the Zep changed that around the time Led Zeppelin II bumped Abbey Road from atop the charts. Suddenly, Zep heads outnumbered Fab fans.
Maybe the Beatles’ recent breakup had something to do with that. However, on the day Led Zeppelin received their Melody Maker awards, drummer John Bonham spoke about the differences between his band and groups like The Beatles. For Bonham, one big thing was how people approached the two bands’ music.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Beatles drummer Ringo Starr has jokingly thrown his hat in the presidential ring with a cheeky election IG post. He claimed “I love America” to the delight of his 932,000 followers, who have hit the like button over 94,000 times thus far.
The beloved musician added a graphic of himself winning the 2020 presidential race via a tongue-in-cheek share where he was claimed victory by an overwhelming margin across the United States. He also shared a favorite sentiment that Beatles fans know and love in the caption as well and followed that up with myriad emoji. These included a smiley face with hearts for eyes, a red heart, a face with sunglasses, fingers making a peace sign, starburst, and a purple square with a white peace sign atop it.
Ringo’s map of the United States was completely colored in purple, which was the color assigned to him on the key code at the bottom of the graphic. Joe Biden’s color was dark blue and current President Donald Trump was red.
The map showed Ringo winning the campaign by a majority vote of 100 percent.
Source: Lucille Barilla/inquisitr.com
In 2007, Columbia Pictures released the psychedelic Across the Universe, using 33 songs by The Beatles to form a story of young bohemians living in New York during the Vietnam War era.
Liverpool dockworker Jude (Jim Sturgess) heads to the US in search of his American father, where he becomes friends with Princeton dropout Max (Joe Anderson) and Max’s sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood).
Max and Jude move to New York, sharing a flat with Prudence (T.V. Carpio), a lesbian runaway from Ohio; Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a Janis Joplin-like soul singer; and the Jimi Hendrix-like Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy), who is fleeing the race riots in Detroit. When Lucy’s boyfriend is killed in Vietnam, she also moves to New York, where she and Jude fall in love.
The film is in a near-constant state of song — there are only 30 minutes of spoken dialogue – ending with the cast uniting in a rooftop performance of “All You Need is Love”. This mirrors The Beatles’ own final performance on the rooftop of the Apple Corps building in London in 1969.
Source: Phoebe Macrossan/theconversation.com
Sir Ringo Starr has been married to Barbara Bach for some time, but they have no children together. Sir Ringo already had three children with his first wife, Maureen, and met Barbara some time after their divorce. So how did Barbara meet Sir Ringo, and where were they?
Sir Ringo Starr met Barbara Bach, his future wife, on the set of the film Caveman in 1980.
The film starred Sir Ringo and Barbara, alongside Dennis Quaid and Shelley Long.
Caveman was not received well by critics, with Roger Ebert saying: “It has a basic problem, which is that there is no popular original material for it to satirize.”
Ringo and Barbara married at Marylebone Town Hall on April 27, 1981, and have been together ever since.
Source: Jenny Desborough/express.co.uk
Klaus Voormann remembers taking the stage with John Lennon and Yoko Ono's conceptual Plastic Ono Band for their first gig at the Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival festival in September 1969. When Ono, wrapped in a bed sheet, let out one of her signature, guttural wails, the once-enthusiastic crowd was confounded.
"Standing on stage, you could see the way the people react, whispering to each other. Not disinterested but just, 'Christ, what's happening up there?'" the 82-year-old recalls.
"[Ono] was wanting the people to know there were people dying [in Vietnam]. She had us imagine tanks are coming, bombs are coming, dead people on the road. When you're standing behind her, you realise what she's trying to do. But it was too strong for the crowd. They came to see John Lennon the ex-Beatle, you know? They didn't want to think about death and war.
Source: Robert Moran/smh.com.au
