Beatles News
THIRTEEN pays tribute to singer-songwriter and Beatles member John Lennon with two films airing the week that he would have turned 80. Both films center on his post-Beatles career and life. American Masters: LENNONYC takes an intimate look at the time John Lennon, his wife Yoko Ono and their son, Sean, spent living in New York City during the 1970s. Classic Albums: John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band, airing Thursday, October 8 at 9 p.m., captures and reflects on the making of Lennon’s first post-Beatles album in 1970, widely regarded as one of his finest.
American Masters: LENNONYC is, essentially, a classic immigrant tale: Lennon and Ono left London in 1971 in search of freedom, both artistic and personal. Maintaining his residence in the U.S. was not easy, despite his fame. With unprecedented and exclusive cooperation from Yoko Ono, access to never-before-seen material from the Lennon archives and conversations with those closest to him – Ono, Elton John, the photographer Bob Gruen, fellow Beatles member Ringo Starr – American Masters tells John Lennon’s story as it has never been told before.
Source: thirteen.org
A new pop-up TV channel is being launched to mark what would have been John Lennon‘s 80th birthday this week.
Sky, Virgin and Freeview will broadcast LENNON80 in honour of the late Beatle‘s birthday this Friday (October 9), which will include a mix of old footage and new content.
Among the programmes airing on the channel will be the famous documentary Bed Peace, which follows Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s famous “Bed-In for Peace” protest in 1969, as well as appearances on Parkinson in 1971 and The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 1972.
The channel will also show three documentaries by Ono: her 2004 Tate Gallery Lecture, her Onochord performance piece and a show about the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland.
Source: Sam Warner/nme.com
Paul McCartney said he and John Lennon had “rescued each other” with the partnership that led to their success with the Beatles and beyond.
Speaking on the BBC radio documentary John Lennon at 80, he recalled how they had started out together at a similar level of musical ability, and kept learning to the point that they “absorbed” each other’s influence.
“We all had to learn together,” McCartney told host Sean Ono Lennon, John's son. “He only knew a couple of banjo chords, but that only lasted a week or two. And I would just show him chords I knew, which [were] very basic, but it was great bonding, just learning chords off each other. And I think the minute he knew those chords, he was as good as anyone. … He might have had a little bit of a hang-up about not being sort of musically trained, but none of us were.”
McCartney recalled how both of them had started trying to write songs around the same time, in an era when it was common for musicians to perform material written by other parties.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
In terms of British cultural exports, there may not be a more significant day than Oct. 5, 1962. That's when the Beatles' debut single, "Love Me Do," and the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, were released.
"Love Me Do" was one of four songs - along with "P.S. I Love You," "Ask Me Why" and "Besame Mucho" - the Beatles played for George Martin at their Parlophone Records audition at London's Abbey Road Studios in June. The producer thought enough to sign the band, which had been building steam over the previous few years thanks to success in Liverpool and Hamburg clubs. But they weren't happy with their drummer, Pete Best. So, they replaced him with Ringo Starr.
On Sept. 4, the Beatles returned to Abbey Road for their first proper session, recording "Love Me Do." But Martin wasn't sure about their new drummer. So, he brought them back a week later and had session drummer Andy White take over, with Starr playing tambourine. Still, the version with Starr on drums was tapped as their first single; the take featuring White ended up on the band's debut album, Please Please Me.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
In the midst of the conflicts that would define their final days, the Beatles pulled it together for one last, magnificent collaboration. It was the culmination of their seven-year partnership: four men who had grown up together and who were now growing apart, collecting the fragments of their unfinished work and arranging them into a shining monument.
At one point, it was going to be called Everest, and it’s one of the peaks of their career. Following the rancor of the White Album and the disastrous sessions that would eventually be pieced into their last album, Let It Be, in 1970, the Beatles needed a return to the familiar. On the verge of breaking up, they returned to their longtime producer, George Martin, and studios, EMI’s Abbey Road complex, to create a true final statement. “Let’s do it the way we used to,” Paul McCartney is said to have told Martin.
Source: Douglas Wolk/rollingstone.com
Elton John has spoken about his late friend John Lennon on what would've been his 80th birthday. (Photo by Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
Elton John reckons John Lennon could have won the Nobel Peace Prize if he had lived.
The pair became close friends in the 1970s and featured on each other's records, with Lennon's last stage appearance before his 1980 death taking place at John's 1974 show in New York.
Speaking to Lennon's younger son Sean Ono Lennon for a special radio programme on the late Beatles star, John said: “I think if your dad had still been alive he would have definitely been, maybe won the Nobel Peace Prize or something.
Source: Amy Johnson/news.yahoo.com
Four chaps with schoolboy haircuts and easy smiles were about to change pop culture forever.
On October 5, 1962, they released their first record: the single Love Me Do.
Within a year they were well on their way to becoming one of the best-known bands in the world at the time.
A hysteria known as Beatlemania would drive hordes of ordinarily sane fans into sobbing, screaming messes whenever the Liverpool band did so much as step out in public together.
Related: Beatles lyrics fetch huge sum at auction
God forbid you made it to a concert – the screams of the crowd were so loud they often drowned out the band.
It became so bad that the band actually retired from touring in 1966, it was just impossible to play live.
They’d go on to release five more albums before finally calling it a day in 1970.
Source: thenewdaily.com.au
October 9, 2020, marks what would have been The Beatles star John Lennon’s 80th birthday. And to celebrate, Sir Paul McCartney has been interviewed by the late star’s younger son Sean Lennon for a special BBC Radio 2 broadcast called John Lennon at 80. During the interview, the 78-year-old shared his first impression of John in the late 1950s.
Sir Paul said: “The funny thing about your dad was that I'd seen him around a couple of times, because I realised later what it was, my bus route, he would take that bus, but he would be going to see his mum who lived kind of in my area.
“And then he’d take the bus back up to his Auntie Mimi's.
“So I'd seen him a couple of times and thought, ‘Wow, you know, he’s an interesting looking guy.’
“And then I once also saw him in a queue for fish and chips and I said, ‘Oh, that's that guy off the bus’.”
Source: George Simpson/express.co.uk
If you have been a fan of The Beatles, information of the band’s breakup hit laborious in April 1970. And that information arrived simply forward of the primary solo album by Paul McCartney. In a question-and-answer insert included with reviewer copies, McCartney revealed that the Fab Four had parted methods.
The Daily Mirror blasted out the signature headline on April 9: “PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES,” it learn, taking over half of the paper’s entrance cowl. McCartney denied attempting to tug off a publicity coup for his file with the timing of the announcement.
“I think a few people thought it was some weird move of me to get publicity, but it was really to avoid having to do the press,” he mentioned in Beatles Anthology. And McCartney acknowledged the band had “known it for months.”
Indeed, when the “Paul is dead” conspiracy principle caught on in October ’69, McCartney had already withdrawn to his farm in Scotland. When reporters tracked him down to verify he was alive, McCartney mentioned in so many phrases The Beatles have been achieved. But neither press nor public obtained the message.
Source: Jeremy Spirogis/sahiwal.tv
A music scholar has discovered which baseball film inspired John Lennon’s “Grow Old With Me,” solving the decades-old mystery about the origin of one of the singer’s final songs prior to his 1980 murder.
The opening lyric in “Grow Old With Me” quotes Robert Browning’s 1864 poem “Rabbi ben Ezra“: “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.” Lennon had admitted that he was inspired to write the song after watching a baseball movie on television during a trip to Bermuda, but the actual film Lennon was watching remained unknown for 40 years.
However, in the upcoming book John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life, author Kenneth Womack writes that the 1978 made-for-TV movie A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story — about the New York Yankees legend who died at the age of 37 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — was the baseball movie that Lennon viewed.
Source: Daniel Kreps/rollingstone.com
