Beatles News
The Beatles original drummer Pete Best has said that John, Paul and George continued to "put the boot in" even after they had dismissed him from the band and replaced him with Ringo Starr.
Best (78) first met the Beatles, who were then called The Quarrymen, in 1959 when they played some of their first gigs at his mother's club, The Casbah, in suburban Liverpool and later joined the band in August 1960 after a phone call from Paul McCartney.
He went on to perform with them over 220 times, including many shows during their long stint in Hamburg. However, in what is perhaps showbusiness’s biggest bad luck story, the rest of the band kicked him out just as super stardom beckoned.
Speaking on the Late Late Show on Friday night, Best, who has Irish relatives in Limerick and Dublin, said, "They could’ve been nicer, they put a load of boots in," he said.
Source: Alan Corr/rte.ie
Help! The owner of a scary collection of waxwork heads is selling off the bonce of Beatles guitar legend George Harrison.
Colin Hill bought it for less than £200 five years ago and keeps it in a cabinet along with the heads of Britney Spears, Winston Churchill and a barely recognisable Princess Diana.
And the Fab Four fan hopes to make thousands if his sale plan can Come Together.
Retired hospital worker Colin, 59, waxes lyrical about his collection. He says: “At the auction they also had Ringo’s head but I was outbid for that. I don’t know what happened to Paul and John’s heads.
“It would have been nice to get both of them. They were from Madame Tussauds and had been left in a storeroom.
Source: Phil Cardy/mirror.co.uk
Highly acclaimed since it made its stage debut in 2006, LOVE is a theatrical production by Cirque du Soleil which combines the re-produced and re-imagined music of The Beatles with an interpretive, circus-based artistic and athletic stage performance.
A joint venture between Cirque du Soleil and The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd, the three-time Grammy Award winning LOVE is described as “a Rock ‘n’ Roll poem”, inspired by the poetry of the Beatles’ lyrics and brought to life by a cast of world-class aerialists, acrobats and dancers. Music Director Giles Martin, son of the legendary Beatles producer, Sir George Martin, has heightened LOVE’s listening experience with a completely remixed soundtrack, noting “The show is the closest anyone can get to being in the studio with the band.”
The show plays at a specially built theatre at the Mirage in Las Vegas and uDiscover Music caught up with two Cirque du Soleil members, actor Uys De Buisson and acrobat Sophia Singleton, to discuss how The Beatles’ music connects with the LOVE cast. You can watch it in full below, but to whet your appetite, scroll down to read a few choice extracts.
Source: Tim Peacock/udiscovermusic.com
After the innovative Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), you might have believed The Beatles would keep topping themselves with every project. Then the band released the Magical Mystery Tour TV film on Boxing Day ’67.
Almost immediately, fans began phoning the BBC to say how much they hated what they’d seen. Going by the BBC’s reaction index, Magical Mystery Tour had the worst rating in history (23 out of 100). Critics pounced on the film as well, describing it as “rubbish,” “piffle,” or worse.
With the lack of plot and a considerable dose of psychedelia, The Beatles acknowledged they might have asked too much of its holiday audience. However, the BBC had its share of blame as well — it had shown a color film in black-and-white.
Source: cheatsheet.com
While The Beatles had several peaks together collectively, the band members didn’t always see it that way. Take Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is often called the greatest album of all time. Neither George Harrison nor Ringo Starr had a great time making that record.
George described being bored by the “assembly process” the band went through during the Sgt. Pepper sessions. For his part, Ringo wasn’t thrilled about all the sitting-around the band did making the album. (He compared it to being a session musician.)
On “She’s Leaving Home,” Ringo didn’t even have a drum part to play. Overall, Sgt. Pepper was very much a Paul McCartney project. That hints at another reason Ringo didn’t enjoy making the album.
In an interview published in the Anthology project, Ringo said he generally preferred playing songs John Lennon wrote to those penned by Paul. It was a matter of the songwriters’ individual styles.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Ringo, Paul, John — and Eric?! Perhaps no other band in history is quite as synonymous with the first names of its members as the Beatles. But at one point, George Harrison walked out on the band — and at the top of the list to replace him: Eric Clapton.
The guitarist first met the Fab Four when he was in the band the Yardbirds, who were a supporting act for one of their headlining shows in 1964.
That led to a connection so strong that straddled both the Beatles' professional and personal lives. Clapton didn’t just collaborate with the band as a whole, but he also played with each of the four members independently on their solo endeavors. On top of that, he became best friends with Harrison — and they even ended up sharing an ex-wife, Pattie Boyd.
Source: biography.com
You’ll sometimes hear Beatles fans referring to a Fab Four record as “perfect.” Given the power of the songwriting, production, and individual performances, it’s not hard to understand what they mean. But from a technical standpoint, band’s recordings were far from perfect.
In some cases, The Beatles intentionally made a recording flawed. Geoff Emerick, the band’s longtime engineer, explained how it worked in the book Here, There and Everywhere. “When someone made a mistake and the others liked it, we’d often make it louder [during mixing] to accentuate it.”
On the Abbey Road album, you find an example of what Emerick was talking about on “Polythene Pam.” In the middle of that track, which was part of the Side Two medley, Paul McCartney made a mistake playing his bass part.
Source: cheatsheet.com
Collector guitars signed by rock and roll legends such as Eric Clapton and Van Halen were recently stolen from a storage unit in Daytona Beach.
“I hate thieves. They’re the worst on earth so I’m glad that he got caught and I’m excited about getting my guitar back,” Jack Baker said.
Jack Baker lives out of state and stored his precious memorabilia he bought online at the storage facility while he renovates his Florida home.
“Something in my brain told me that it would be better taking it to Hyde Park because it’s built like a fortress,” said Baker.
Officials from the Daytona Beach Police Department said the crime was reported on Dec. 20, 2019, after someone came to the unit at Hyde Park Storage Suites and noticed the eight instruments were missing. The crime likely occurred sometime between October and Dec. 17, 2019, but it’s unclear exactly when.
Source: Adrienne Cutway/clickorlando.com
While George Harrison was working to refine his songwriting craft, he wasn’t getting much help from his bandmates in The Beatles. “I had a little encouragement from time to time, but it was very little,” George said in a 1977 interview.
Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick backs up that account in the book, Here, There and Everywhere. “In general, sessions where we did George Harrison songs were approached differently,” Emerick said. “Everybody would relax — there was a definite sense that it really didn’t matter.”
During the sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), George faced more criticism than usual. It began when he introduced “Only a Northern Song” in the studio. After John Lennon didn’t play on the backing track, The Beatles decided to shelve the song for a later date.
Source: cheatsheet.com
There's a special piece of Beatles memorabilia up for sale ... handwritten lyrics to a classic song from the 'White Album' scribbled by George Harrison and Ringo Starr!!!
The lyrics to George's signature song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" are penned on the back of a studio recording sheet, and it's going up for sale through the memorabilia company Moments in Time -- and they're hawking this slice of Beatles history for $195,000.
It's pretty cool ... the lyric sheet is a working draft used during the hit song's recording way back in 1968 at EMI Studios in London.
George started the top of the sheet by writing, "I Look at You all see the love there thats sleeping -- While my guitar gently weeps" and continued at the bottom with, "While my Guitar Gently weeps as I'm sitting here doing nothing but aging still my guitar G W."
All the writing in between is scribbled by Ringo ... including an effort to work out a misspelling on the side of the sheet.
Source: tmz.com
