Beatles News
During the recent interview with Etic’s Live, Deep Purple members spoke about a lot of topics. But only one is very interesting. Singer Ian Gillan has shared the process of writing new songs. He also talked on the band’s dynamics.
Ian Gillan said that “we’ve done everything together since then. It’s a bit like the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to work”. Here’s the statement:
“With Deep Purple, it’s always been the same. It’s part of the English way — it changes every day, but the elements remain the same. I’ve worked with Roger Glover since I was about 20; I was in a band called Episode Six in ’65.
He taught me how to write songs. We’ve done everything together since then. It’s a bit like the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to work insofar as sometimes Roger writes everything, sometimes I write everything and sometimes we do it together, but the music always comes first.
It starts the same every day, during the recording and writing session. We go into a big office six days a week. We meet up, make a cup of tea, talk about football, family, cars, rubbish; then either Ian Paice or Don or anyone kicks off and starts jamming.
Source: Feyyaz Ustaer/metalheadzone.com
Paul McCartney wrote over 300 songs with John Lennon and two new unreleased versions of the Lennon-related track Dear Friend will be released in December.
Dear Friend was the final track on Paul McCartney and Wings’ first album Wild Life, which was released in 1971.
A remastered version, and an unreleased home recording of the song, will feature on as reissue of the album, which will be released on December 7. Red Rose Speedway, which saw the light of day in 1973, will also be reissued next month.
"With Dear Friend, that’s sort of me talking to John after we’d had all the sort of disputes about The Beatles break up," the former Beatle has said.
"I find it very emotional when I listen to it now. I have to sort of choke it back. I remember when I heard the song recently, listening to the roughs in the car.
"And I thought, ‘Oh God’. That lyric: ‘Really truly, young and newly wed’. Listening to that was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s true!’ I’m trying to say to John, ‘Look, you know, it’s all cool. Have a glass of wine. Let’s be cool.’
Source: rte.ie
The track featured on Wings‘ 1971 album ‘Wild Life’, which will be given a remastered reissue on December 7. The new edition of the record will feature rough mixes, home recordings, b-sides, a DVD of rare footage, and more.
Speaking about the song, which you can listen to below, McCartney said: “With ‘Dear Friend’, that’s sort of me talking to John after we’d had all the sort of disputes about The Beatles break up. I find it very emotional when I listen to it now. I have to sort of choke it back. I remember when I heard the song recently, listening to the roughs [versions of the remasterings] in the car.
“And I thought, ‘Oh God’. That lyric: ‘Really truly, young and newly wed’. Listening to that was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s true!’ I’m trying to say to John, ‘Look, you know, it’s all cool. Have a glass of wine. Let’s be cool.’”
He added that he was thankful the pair reconciled before Lennon’s death in 1980 because “it would have been terrible if he’d been killed as things were at that point and I’d never got to straighten it out with him.” McCartney described ‘Dear Friend’ as him “reaching out” to his former bandmate.
Source: Rhian Daly/nme.com
When it comes to Beatles nostalgia, the band’s self-titled 1968 “White Album” has a king-size reputation — the biggest album (30 songs!) by the biggest band in the world at the time. But, to paraphrase a Beatles song, it was all too much, and its producer, George Martin, and at least a couple of its participants, George Harrison and John Lennon, would be among the first to agree.
A half-century later, little has changed, at least in the marketplace for more Beatles. Despite a $138 price tag, a newly released 50th anniversary “White Album” box set is No. 2 on the Amazon CD/vinyl sales rankings. It’s a 4-pound doorstop: six CDs and a Blu-Ray disc containing the original album, 27 early acoustic demos and 50 session tracks, most of them previously unreleased, plus a hardcover book. The mix, by George Martin’s son, Giles, is immaculate, and in many ways the Beatles have never sounded better or more intimate.
But is the actual music worth the fuss? The pop historians have trained generations to believe the Beatles could do no wrong, and that the “White Album” was one of the group’s greatest achievements. It undeniably contains some of the band’s finest songs. But does it really make the case for the Beatles in late-career overdrive, or is it a wildly erratic hit-and-miss hodgepodge that could’ve been better served as a single album?
Source: Greg Kot/chicagotribune.com
There’s something to be said for having your ears scrubbed clean every so often and experiencing a beloved classic for the first time — again. The 50th-anniversary reissue of “The Beatles,” a.k.a. the White Album, does exactly that. It’s more than just nostalgia at work here. This is reappraisal, reinvigoration — a wholesale reintroduction. It’s as though someone had blown the dust off your youth and handed it back to you it in high-definition Sensurround.
The new/old White Album was released Nov. 9 in four different editions, two on vinyl, two on CD, all featuring new stereo remixes of the original 1968 album’s 30 cuts overseen by Giles Martin (son of the late Beatles producer George Martin) and Sam Okell. The 4-LP and 3-CD versions add in the “Esher demos,” acoustic test versions of 21 cuts recorded by the group at George Harrison’s home in Esher, Surrey. The 6-disc coffee-table version — a monolith that hard-core Beatlemaniacs will probably dance around “2001”-style — tacks on three discs of revelatory outtakes, rehearsals, and alternate versions, a book that reprints the original handwritten lyrics and breaks down the genesis and recording of every cut, and a Blu-ray audio disc for serious soundaholics.
Source: Ty Burr - Globe Staff / bostonglobe.com
Producer Chris Thomas and engineer Ken Scott have been speaking about the double LP, which has the formal eponymous title of The Beatles. The album has already gone platinum 19 times. On the new 50th-anniversary deluxe box sets released on November 9, the album’s 30 tracks are remastered and joined by 27 early acoustic demos and 50 session takes, most previously unreleased, in a process overseen by Giles Martin, son of the record’s main producer George Martin.
Scott and Thomas recall John Lennon’s surprising choice of favorite songs; why Ringo Starr walked out at one point; how George Harrison came into his own and stood up to George Martin; and how Paul McCartney fell asleep on the mixing desk after a hard day’s night finishing the White Album.
Thomas, now 71, was working as an assistant to George Martin at his independent production company AIR at the time of the White Album. He watched the early sessions from May 1968 then took time off on a short vacation, he said in an interview at the Arts Club in London: “I came back at the beginning of September. There was a little handwritten note from George Martin on my desk saying ‘I hope you had a nice holiday, I am off on mine now. Make yourself available to The Beatles.
Source: Mark Beech/forbes.com
Rosanne Cash has been named the recipient of the “John Lennon Real Love Award,” an honor she will accept at the 38th Annual John Lennon Tribute concert November 30th in New York City.
Cash will perform several of her favorite Lennon and Beatles classics during the concert, which will also include guests Marc Cohn, Jesse Colin Young (the Youngbloods), Willie Nile, Scott Sharrard and Mark Erelli.
Non-profit organization Theatre Within presented its first tribute event for the late musician as a neighborhood gathering at their studio shortly after Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartment building in New York in December 1980. Proceeds from the tribute will support Theatre Within’s ongoing free workshops in creative expression and mindfulness, which use Lennon’s songs and message to encourage creativity and truth. The organization currently provides workshops through Gilda’s Club NYC, for children who have lost a parent to cancer, as well as adults in treatment and others impacted by cancer. The tribute concert is the only event of its kind worldwide sanctioned by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
Source: Stephen L. Betts/rollingstone.com
Ringo Starr is having a big moment. Pushing 80, the Beatle drummer shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to the revelatory new Super Deluxe edition of the White Album, his legend is getting a boost. Fans can savor new dimensions to his playing on the 1968 masterpiece, in the definitive new mix from Giles Martin — finally, we can hear Ringo rock out on “Long, Long, Long” in all his glory. It proves what true fans have always known — he was the heartbeat of the Beatles.
But Ringo’s moving forward. The 78-year-old mocker who sang “Photograph” has a new coffee-table book of photos, Another Day in the Life. The book follows Ringo’s adventures around the world, dating back to his Fabs days — as he says, “photos by me and a few picked up along the way.” (Like the man says in A Hard Day’s Night, you can learn from books.) There’s a foreword from David Lynch, calling it “Ringoism in book form,” as well as Ringo’s own unique commentary, like when he reflects on the cover of Abbey Road: “We were sitting in the studio thinking, ‘We need a cover, let’s go to Hawaii! Let’s go to Egypt! Oh, sod it, let’s just walk across the road.’”
Source: Rob Sheffield/rollingstone.com
“Hey Jude” remains the Beatles’ biggest-ever hit, the one that stayed at #1 for the longest. It’s also a document of the moment that the band finally started coming apart for good. And from at least one perspective, it’s a song about that fracture — one band member wishing a warm and only slightly premature farewell to his greatest collaborator.
In the spring of 1968, John Lennon separated from his wife Cynthia, leaving her for Yoko Ono. Paul McCartney felt bad for Julian, John’s five-year-old son. He went to visit Cynthia and Julian, to check in on them. And when he was on that trip, he came up with the idea for “Hey Jude,” thinking of it as “Hey Jules” at first. (He ultimately liked the name “Jude” better.) Julian didn’t learn until he was a teenager that the song was about him, but he also has memories of being closer with McCartney than he was with his own father.
So McCartney, by most accounts, wrote “Hey Jude” to comfort Julian. But John Lennon heard something else in the song. Years later in interviews, Lennon said that he thought the song was about him — that it was Paul giving him his blessing to go off with Ono and to leave the band behind him. For that matter, Paul McCartney had only just broken up with his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher and taken up instead with his future wife Linda Eastman. So maybe he was singing the song to himself.
Source: Tom Breihan /stereogum.com
You don’t have to be a fan of the Beatles to appreciate their brilliance.
Over their relatively short career as the fab four from Liverpool, the Beatles recorded 206 original compositions across several different albums. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many albums sold, but data suggest it’s somewhere between 272 million and 600 million.
More recently the Beatles celebrated the 50th anniversary of the so-called “White Album” (actually knowns as The Beatles) by remastering the originals and releasing a treasure trove of outtakes & previously unheard versions in a new box set.
As I listened to the new, sonically superior versions of classic songs like Back in the U.S.S.R, Blackbird, and Dear Prudence, I found myself clamoring for the other goodies nested in the box set package.
As part of the 50th-anniversary celebration, the new “White Album” comes with early recordings logged from George Harrison’s home. During the mid-to-late 1960’s, Harrison lived in the village of Esher, a part of Surrey and southwest of London. Before going into the famous Abbey Road Studios to record the “White Album,” the Beatles spent time at Harrison’s home going through their material to develop early-stage arrangements. All of it was recorded on a four-track recorder.
Source: Dan Pontefract/forbes.com
