Beatles News
George Harrison was always known as the “quiet Beatle,” as he was the least gregarious and outgoing of the bunch. That nickname stuck even after the band broke up and all four men pursued solo careers. While he may have been fairly soft-spoken, his music did a lot of the talking for him, and it was plenty loud enough.
One of Harrison’s most famous albums, Living in the Material World, returns to the Billboard charts this week. The decades-old collection was recently re-released as a collectible vinyl, and fans of the late rocker and former Beatle musician bought the title in large numbers—ones that become especially impressive when compared to how the title was performing before it was reissued.
In the past tracking week, Living in the Material World sold another 6,800 copies throughout the U.S., according to Luminate. That’s up massively from the period before, when there were very few people in America who wanted to buy the classic.
Before it was re-released, Living in the Material World sold a little more than 50 copies in the United States in the prior tracking week. From one frame to the next, the title soared 12,550% in pure purchases.
Several versions of Living in the Material World were made available to celebrate the title’s fiftieth anniversary, and they were offered in limited quantities, which likely spurred the buying frenzy. All editions included the original full-length, as well as various other extras, like a book, a seven-inch vinyl of one single, and even previously unreleased tracks—the kind that would surely intrigue longtime lovers of Harrison’s work.
All those purchases help Living in the Material World debut on two Billboard charts. While the project was a quick top 10 smash on the Billboard 200 when it was first released in the ‘70s, it now lands on a pair of tallies that weren’t around at the time.
Source: Hugh McIntyre/forbes.com
In early 2024, it was announced that Sam Mendes would be producing four films about worldwide musical phenomenon The Beatles with Sony Pictures Entertainment and Mendes’s Neal Street Productions. At the time, Ringo Starr himself tweeted that the films were fully supported by himself and the families of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison.
This is the first time Apple Corps Ltd. and The Beatles have granted a scripted film expansive life story and music rights, so it’s a pretty big deal. Here’s what we know about the movie quartet so far.
What are The Beatles movies about?
Mendes hasn’t been too specific—the details of the band’s life and history together is pretty well-covered in myriad movies and documentaries anyway, so it is really a matter of style over substance. The Oscar-winning director indicated that the films will be interwoven and include one band member’s point of view per movie.
Mendes is directing all four films and producing with Pippa Harris and Julie Pastor, but they’re supposedly still searching for their screenwriters. Who is in the cast for the four movies?
Ringo Starr was interviewed by Entertainment Tonight and seemed to confirm that Irish actor Barry Keoghan had been cast as his youthful doppelgänger. When asked about Keoghan possibly being a match, Starr replied, “Well, I think he’s great, and I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons.”
Source: Aimée Lutkin/elle.com
While creative differences, the strain of stardom and John Lennon's girlfriend Yoko Ono have all been blamed for the Fab Four's break-up, the documents reveal the numerous convoluted legal battles that also weighed on the band.
The documents, which were discovered in a cupboard where they had been stored since the 1970s, include copies of The Beatles advisor's minutes of meetings, legal writs and a copy of the band's 1967 Original Deed of Partnership.
They show that after manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, the band realised that money was unaccounted for and that they were being pursued by tax authorities.
Another damaging legal battle erupted when Paul McCartney opposed the decision by other band members to hire Allen Klein as their new manager.
The uncovered stash of files document the subsequent 1970 High Court battle launched by McCartney against the band in London, which exposed Klein's mismanagement.
"It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the actual complexity of the various legal arrangements which have been entered into by Messrs. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starkey (Ringo Starr)," said notes on one document.
Other legal difficulties besetting the band included deciding when Pete Best left the group and Ringo Starr joined, royalties for film and music rights and Klein's inability to produce accounts for the tax authorities.
"Even though John, Paul, George, and Ringo had grown tired of being The Beatles and wanted to record and perform as individual artists, this must have been a difficult time for each of them," said Denise Kelly, head of Dawsons Entertainment and Popular Culture department.
Source: france24.com
John Lennon and Yoko Ono were not just a power couple because of their undeniable impact on music history. The couple were also dedicated activists and key players in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. And this did not sit too well with the political powers at the time.
Their only son, Sean Ono Lennon, recently sat with PEOPLE to debut the reissue of his father’s album Mind Games, along with a multimedia box set that includes song remixes, reproductions of art pieces made by Lennon and Ono, posters, postcards, and much more. But Ono Lennon also took the time to share important details about his iconic parents’ relationship, including the trying moments where President Nixon wanted them deported. John Lennon and Yoko Ono had the State Department on edge.
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon to stage a “bed-in” protest in the Netherlands. They also recorded their iconic anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance” during a similar protest held in Montreal. This, among other anti-war gems like “Merry Xmas (The War is Over)”, was evidently powerful enough to have then-President Nixon threatened, especially as both Lennon and Ono were relentless in their activism. Furthermore, the power couple had billboards put up all around the world that read: “War is Over! If You Want It!”
Following all of this, the Nixon administration began to attempt to get Lennon deported from the United States. The President decided to send the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) after one of The Beatles on a phony drug charge. Nixon’s administration’s petty justification for Lennon’s intended deportation was a marijuana-related misdemeanor charge the musician had gotten in England over five years prior.
Source: Demi Phillips/wegotthiscovered.com
John Lennon never pretended to have all the answers. While he put himself in the limelight at times for his political views, it was generally in the guise of someone who was posing opinions and beliefs that questioned the status quo, not as someone with definitive solutions.
He also displayed inquisitiveness when it came to his own life. From his 1971 album Imagine, the song “How?” finds him practically paralyzed by questions about his potential path forward that he can’t seem to answer.
If you just listened to the sound alone of John Lennon’s first two solo albums, you might think he’d undergone a drastic change in attitude in the year that separated their releases. But the different musical tone of the records had more to do with what Lennon wanted out of those two records.
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which he released in 1970, was extremely stark from a musical standpoint. He recorded most of the songs with a trio, and he often screamed out the lyrics. This was in response to the “primal scream” therapy he was undergoing at the time.
By contrast, Imagine, released in 1971, arrived sounding much lusher and more produced. The record was also full of sweet melodies. But that benign feel didn’t often translate to the lyrics. Songs like “Crippled Inside” and “Jealous Guy” were quite catchy, but the sentiment of the lyrics was often just as raw as what appeared on the first record.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
Paul McCartney has given fans insight into how he wrote many of his most famous songs. He said he wrote The Beatles’ “Yesterday” because of magic and a dream. The cute Beatle felt the tune could not be explained in purely natural terms.
Paul McCartney had no idea how he came up with the tune for The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’
The Beatles wrote many songs that were innovative and inspired new genres of music. “Yesterday,” on the other hand, was pretty old-fashioned. It could have been a hit for Frank Sinatra in the 1940s or Elvis Presley in the 1950s — or for Michael Steven Bublé or Meghan Trainor today. It’s beloved not because it was novel but because it was such a well-written example of a traditional pop ballad.
Paul discussed the origin of “Yesterday.” “‘Yesterday’ came to me in a dream, but at this time it wasn’t just my mom saying a phrase,” he said. “This was a whole tune that was in my head. I had no idea where it came from.
“Best I can think is that my computer [in my head] through the years loaded all these things and finally printed out this song in a dream kind of thing,” the “Silly Love Songs” singer said. “I have to believe that that’s magical. I have no other rational explanation for it.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
A tribute show will honour a music icon from one of the biggest bands in history.
The George Harrison Project, a live music tribute to the Beatles' guitarist, will perform at The Muni Theatre in Colne on March 1, 2025.
The show features some of Harrison's most popular hits from his time with the Beatles, his solo career, and his stint with the Traveling Wilburys.
Alongside John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, Harrison was an integral part of the best-selling music act of all time with 600 million units sold worldwide.
After the Beatles disbanded, he formed the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty.
Harrison, who died in 2001, also enjoyed a successful solo career, releasing 12 studio albums, including Living In The Material World, Cloud Nine, Brainwashed, and the classic triple album All Things Must Pass.
The 2025 tour of the George Harrison Project aims to authentically recreate some of his best-loved hits.
The show is packed with favourite songs such as All Things Must Pass, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes The Sun, Taxman, My Sweet Lord, and many more.
Source: Tabitha Wilson/uk.news.yahoo.com
The Beatles beefed with each other quite a bit through music. It’s not entirely surprising, either. When you’ve been with the same people in a band for the better part of a decade, it only makes sense to get a little bit toxic about your grievances through song. Without further ado, let’s look at four songs that The Beatles wrote about each other!
1. “How Do You Sleep?” by John Lennon
This is probably the most famous Beatles-related diss track out there. John Lennon wrote this song as a response to a few tracks on Paul McCartney’s solo album, Ram, which Lennon believed were digs at him.
Lennon does not hold back at all with “How Do You Sleep?” Some of the lyrics go beyond tame, poetic jabs at his former bandmate. “You live with straights who tell you, you was king / Jump when your momma tell you anything / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day” is aparticularly brutal line.
2. “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” by George Harrison
When McCartney broke off from The Beatles, quite a few legal battles were fought. The first few years after The Beatles called it quits were rife with lawsuits, mostly between McCartney and Lennon. George Harrison, watching it all unfold, wrote the melancholy “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” about the depressing courtroom experiences that McCartney eventually won.
Source: Em Casalena/americansongwriter.com
It’s like the light came on, after total darkness,” is how author Joe Queenan remembers the arrival of Beatlemania in America at the dawn of 1964. He’s not alone in citing the coming of the Fab Four as the true beginning of the 1960s, of the modern era, of a transformative period driven in no small part by the music, words and actions of four young lads from Liverpool. But if you were a teenager in America when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived on Boxing Day 1963, then it’s personal. And if you caught any of the concerts on their first US tour in February 1964, or watched their performances on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, or stood outside Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel hoping for an autograph, it’s likely you’ve never forgotten their impact.
That first US tour and the special relationship between The Beatles and America are explored in depth by the new documentary Beatles ’64. “The trip was a dream come true for [them],” says the movie’s producer, Margaret Bodde. “They’d always loved American music, and now they were coming to the home of everything they’d dreamed about.”
But America was going through some issues. The nation had spent a bleak winter mourning its princelike president John F Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas that November. “JFK represented hope, youth, the future,” says the movie’s director, David Tedeschi. “A gloom had descended upon the US. One interviewee told us his girlfriend locked herself in her room for four days after the assassination.” But just as it seemed like this grief would never abate, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived, topping the charts. “From that gloom,” says Tedeschi, “there was this spark of life and optimism and joy.”
Tedeschi’s movie chronicles this cultural moment through the words of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (and, via archival footage, the late John Lennon and George Harrison) as well as interviews with Beatle heroes such as Smokey Robinson and Ron Isley and the then teenaged Beatlemaniacs like Queenan and Jamie Bernstein (daughter of composer Leonard). Much of the film originates from footage shot during the tour by Albert and David Maysles, later recognised as pioneers of the modernist documentary form via masterpieces like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, but only just beginning their careers when Granada TV commissioned them to film the 1964 documentary What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA.
Source: Stevie Chick/the-independent.com
Likely most people have seen iconic footage of the Beatles performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But how many have seen Paul McCartney during that same U.S. trip feeding seagulls off his hotel balcony?
That moment — as well as George Harrison and John Lennon goofing around by exchanging their jackets — are part of the Disney+ documentary “Beatles ’64,” an intimate look at the English band’s first trip to America that uses rare and newly restored footage. It streams Friday.
“It’s so fun to be the fly on the wall in those really intimate moments,” says Margaret Bodde, who produced alongside Martin Scorsese. “It’s just this incredible gift of time and technology to be able to see it now with the decades of time stripped away so that you really feel like you’re there.”
“Beatles ’64” leans into footage of the 14-day trip filmed by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, who left behind 11 hours of the Fab Four goofing around in New York’s Plaza hotel or traveling. It was restored by Park Road Post in New Zealand.
“It’s beautiful, although it’s black and white and it’s not widescreen,” says director David Tedeschi. “It’s like it was shot yesterday and it captures the youth of the four Beatles and the fans.”
The footage is augmented by interviews with the two surviving members of the band and people whose lives were impacted, including some of the women who as teens stood outside their hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of the Beatles.
“It was like a crazy love,” fan Vickie Brenna-Costa recalls in the documentary. “I can’t really understand it now. But then, it was natural.”
The film shows the four heartthrobs flirting and dancing at the Peppermint Lounge disco, Harrison noodling with a Woody Guthrie riff on his guitar and tells the story of Ronnie Spector sneaking the band out a hotel back exit and up to Harlem to eat barbeque.
The documentary coincides with the release of a box set of vinyl albums collecting the band’s seven U.S. albums released in ’64 and early ’65 — “Meet The Beatles!,” “The Beatles’ Second Album,” “A Hard Day’s Night” (the movie soundtrack), ”Something New,” “The Beatles’ Story,” “Beatles ’65” and “The Early Beatles.” They had been out of print on vinyl since 1995.
Source: wbrz.com
