Beatles News
For decades they were just a set of gates at the entrance to a children's orphanage in Liverpool, until the Beatles recorded their smash hit Strawberry Fields Forever, transforming the bright red gates into a site fans from across the world could visit.
Fifty years on from the UK release of the song, the original iconic red gates returned to Liverpool Thursday to go on public display at The Beatles Story museum.
After the gates became famous, the originals were taken into "protective custody" at a secret location. Since 2011, fans have snapped keepsake photographs of replica gates close to the childhood home of Beatle John Lennon.
The display of the original gates forms part of fundraising plans by the Salvation Army charity to redevelop the iconic Strawberry Field site, which finally closed in 2005 as a children's home.
The Salvation Army has unveiled a new plan for the site, which will include a training and work placement hub for young people with learning disabilities and a new exhibition on John Lennon's early life around Strawberry Field.
A spokesman for the Salvation Army said: "Strawberry Field holds a special place in the history of The Beatles, with John Lennon's experiences in and around the children's home providing inspiration for the unforgettable song. He grew up with his Aunt Mimi just a stone's throw away from the site, and was said to find peace and refuge in the grounds."
Martin King of The Beatles Story said: "The gates are a real piece of Beatles' history, and it's a privilege to display such a special exhibit at The Beatles Story...We hope that by displaying the gates here it will help raise awareness for the project."
Major Drew McCombe of the Salvation Army said: "Strawberry Field has a very special history, both for its connection to John Lennon and the song Strawberry Fields Forever, and for its history as a place for solace for Liverpool's most vulnerable people."
The replica gates were built by Jim Bennett, 60, who spent five years creating them. Bennett used to drive past the gates every day and decided to create the gates as a passion project and to help conserve the originals.
The iconic red gates stood at the entrance of Strawberry Field for more than 100 years. Unlike the replica gates, which are welded to make them stronger, the originals are held together with rivets, but some sections were missing.
The original Strawberry Field gates are to go on display in Liverpool to mark fifty years since the UK release of The Beatles' hit.
The iconic gates from The Salvation Army's children's home will be returned to their home city of Liverpool to mark the occasion.
They were replaced by replicas in 2011 to protect them. The song, written by John Lennon, was inspired by the Strawberry Field site in Woolton, close to where he grew up with his aunt Mimi.
The woods around the children's home were said to be a place of peace and refuge from Lennon's troubled childhood, where he played in the grounds with friends.
As custodians of the site, The Salvation Army were aware of how important the gates had become to Fab Four fans, they recognised that the original gates were extremely fragile and moved them to a secure location, to protect them for future use.
Now the original gates, which have been in storage ever since, have been loaned by The Salvation Army to the award-winning Beatles Story where they join a wealth of Fab Four memorabilia.
Source: ITV News
To paraphrase that famous Beatles lyric: "It was 50 years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play."
And, to celebrate the half-century since the release of the Fab Four's seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, here's our rundown of the Mersey moptops' little known links to Wales.
Lennon was airlifted to Abergavenny:
The hysteria that followed The Beatles around was felt in such places as Abergavenny Town Hall Ballroom, which local promoter Eddie Tattersall had secured for the tiny fee of £250 in 1963, having luckily booked them just before they hit the big time.
However, in the run up to the show, John Lennon had been double-booked with an appearance on the BBC’s Jukebox Jury, leaving manager Brian Epstein to arrange a helicopter - at a cost of more than £100 - to take him from Battersea Heliport in London to Penypound Football Ground in order to make the gig.
They caused uproar in Llandudno:
But it was at a later two-night stint at the Odeon Cinema in Llandudno that the full weight of Beatlemania really became apparent.
Billed as “Britain’s fabulous disc stars”, the scenes at the shows drew in furious letters of complaint to the local newspapers, one disgruntled reader commenting: “While having a more than mild interest in the popular music of today, I was appalled and disgusted at the unbelievable display of mass hysteria which took place at the theatre."
By: Nathan Bevan
Source: Wales Online
When The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band fifty years ago, they inspired an entire generation of artists, musicians and, as it turns out, scientists.
One of the album’s most iconic songs, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was immediately branded a psychedelic anthem, though John Lennon said it was inspired by a drawing his 3 year-old son Julian made of his classmate Lucy and the whimsical poeticism of Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows.
“When we sat down to write the song at John’s house, Julian’s drawing of Lucy and the stars was what inspired us,” said Paul McCartney. “At the top of the drawing Julian had written in childlike script, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.’”
Almost a decade later, the song would become the backdrop to one of the biggest scientific discoveries of our time. On 24 November 1974, a team of scientists was digging in an isolated area in the Afar region of Ethiopia when paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted a small fossil elbow bone. He immediately recognised it as coming from a human ancestor and soon discovered more parts that made up almost a complete hominin skeleton.
Found at a site where the sediments were known to be 3.2 million years old, it was clear that this discovery was cause for celebration.
By: Laura Stavropoulos
Source: UDiscover - Music
With the music world celebrating 50 years since the release of the Beatles' landmark album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," new details are emerging about the Canadian police officer who inspired the title.
The original Sgt. Pepper was a straitlaced, no-nonsense Ontario Provincial Police officer from Aurora named Sgt. Randall Pepper, who forged an unlikely friendship with the band while running their security detail during a 24-hour visit to Toronto in 1966. His identity had long been a mystery to the music world, fuelled in part by the OPP officer's badge Paul McCartney wore on the album cover.
Pepper's granddaughter, Cheryl Finn, says the whole matter had been a mystery to her as well, until her mother told her it was one of the family's "little claims to fame."
"My grandfather supposedly kept them out of some trouble and they wanted to recognize his good work and his kindness," Finn told CTV News Channel on Thursday. But, despite the honour, Finn says the real Sgt. Pepper was not a Beatles fan at all.
"He always thought they were kind of hooligans, and men in the Sixties should be clean-cut and clean-shaven," she said.
Music journalist Alan Cross says Pepper softened on the Beatles during their visit, and when it was over, "they parted as friends."
"For whatever reason he was charmed by the Beatles, and the Beatles were also charmed by him," Cross told CTV News Channel on Thursday.
By: Josh K. Elliott
Source: CTV News
An evening in early April. Outside Abbey Road Studios in north-west London, tourists are performing their customary dance with irate motorists as they attempt to have themselves photographed on the zebra crossing across which The Beatles walked in 1969 for the cover shot of Abbey Road.
Inside the complex, a group of 100 people are seated in Studio Two – another historic landmark, if one less easily accessible to the public. Here, guests are looking around, taking photos on their phones, peering up the stairs to the control room: spaces once populated by living, working, actual Beatles as they went about their business making some of the world’s greatest music.
It is 50 years ago today, pretty much, that the Beatles released their album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The record starts with an orchestra warming up and ends with a thunderous piano chord. There are sentimental songs and otherworldly trips, rooster noises and laughter. It’s the pinnacle of the band’s achievement but possibly also marks the beginning of their end. Shortly after, John Lennon and Paul McCartney became creatively estranged. Here, though, they are still working genuinely in partnership and it’s magnificent to hear.
As the producer’s son – a 40-something named Giles Martin – tells the gathering, it has been quite something to work on such an album. From the start of their recording career in 1962, his father George worked with the Beatles to turn their ever-expanding musical brief – feedback, sitar drones, a song which would sound like "monks chanting on a mountain top" – into something which might be technically achievable in a recording studio. From late in 1966 to April 1967, he embarked on their most ambitious project yet: a release on June 2, 1967 that was both nostalgic and thrillingly contemporary. On the original vinyl record, the tracks were all run together with no gaps between them, to create a seamless trip into the Beatles’ new world.
The group worked tirelessly on the album. They spent 30 hours recording the final song A Day in the Life – three times longer than they spent on their entire debut LP (Please Please Me) four years earlier. Long into the night, they laboured on the mono mixes of the original recordings, then retired to their homes with acetates of the night’s work to continue listening. The stereo mixes, roomier affairs, were created by studio engineers, with Beatles seldom present. Before this one, the last major Beatles project was the mastering of the catalogue in mono for vinyl – reflecting the appetite for this form among the deepest listeners of the band.
By: John Robinson
Source: The National (AE)
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone named as the best album of all time, turns 50 on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for each of the album's tracks, excluding the brief "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary and beloved record. Today's final installment tells the full story of the late Swinging London socialite immortalized in "A Day in the Life."
Just past midnight on December 18th, 1966, a light blue Lotus Elan sports car slammed into a parked van on Redcliffe Gardens, an affluent residential street in southwest London. The driver, 21-year-old Tara Browne, heir to a million-pound Guinness Brewery fortune, died of his injuries a shortly thereafter. The story was still making headlines a month later, when the coroner's verdict was published in the January 17th, 1967, issue of The Daily Mail. John Lennon, a voracious newspaper reader since childhood, had a copy propped on his intricately carved upright piano in the den at Kenwood, his English country estate. He scanned the pages while his hands floated over the keys, finding the chords that would ultimately close the Beatles next album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
"I noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story," he recalled in a 1980 interview with Playboy. "On the next page was a story about 4,000 potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled." While the holes were delightfully absurd, Browne's accident hit chillingly close to home. He was a familiar face in the Beatles' social circle, and one of Swinging London's first famous fatalities.
By: Jordan Runtagh
Source: Rolling Stone
A remarkable letter in which Beatle George Harrison pleads poverty while at the same time boasting about a new Jaguar car he had just bought has come to light.
Writing just as the Beatles were on the verge of international stardom, the lead guitarist appeared concerned songwriters Paul McCartney and John Lennon would become 'very rich' while he would be 'poor and hungry'.
He then outlined a money-making idea he had of writing a book about the Beatles - and wrote to friend Astrid Kirchherr in August 1963 for help.
Kirchherr, a German, had been the fiancee of the so-called fifth Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, who tragically died of a brain haemorrhage in April 1962.
Four months earlier Kirchherr had accompanied Paul, George and Ringo Starr on holiday to Tenerife and took some intimate photographs of the band.
In the letter that is now up for sale for £20,000, Harrison asked her to send him the photos so he could use them in his book.
He also included a tongue-in-cheek pic of his new Jaguar while lamenting his lifestyle.
By: Adam Aspinall
Source: The Daily Mirror
The bodies of a woman and two children have been found at a flat in Liverpool that John Lennon lived in.
Police were called to a ground floor flat on Falkner Street, near Toxteth, Liverpool shortly before 19:30 BST on Tuesday.
A man, 30, was detained on suspicion of murder before being taken to hospital after falling ill.
Merseyside Police believe the incident was domestic in nature. It said it was not looking for anyone else.
A police spokesman said tests were being carried out on a substance found at the scene.
The arrested man was taken to hospital before being discharged and taken to a police station for questioning.
The force added a post-mortem examination will be carried out to establish the causes of death.
Neighbours said the property in the Georgian Quarter was regularly visited by Beatles fans on tours of the city.
The flat was once owned by the band's manager, Brian Epstein, and Lennon lived there with his first wife Cynthia shortly after they married in 1962.
BBC
It is (almost) 50 years ago today that The Beatles released Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Liverpool is celebrating the landmark album's anniversary with a festival - and one event is taking it particularly close to home for locals.
When actress Brodie Arthur was asked to take part in Liverpool's official Sgt Pepper anniversary celebrations, she first needed to do some quick research.
"When they said 'Sgt Pepper,' I said, 'Oh no, I'll have to Google it because I don't know any of the songs on the album,'" the 25-year-old says.
"When I listened, I knew a couple of them, but I wouldn't necessarily have associated them with the album. I remember the cover and what it looks like, but I've never really been familiar with it."
Now more familiar, Arthur is the star of a play inspired by track six, She's Leaving Home.
Listening to it afresh as someone half the age of the album itself, the stirring ballad still "hits you in the feelers", she says.
The play is one of a number of events taking place in the Fab Four's home city for the anniversary.
Each song has inspired a different performance or artwork.
But none is what you might expect - there are no tribute gigs or homages to the LP's iconic cover.
More details: Sgt Pepper reimagined for anniversary
For She's Leaving Home, Liverpool-based theatre company 20 Stories High asked young people about their home lives and their reactions to the song, which was written about a girl who walks out because she feels trapped by her parents - who say they have "sacrificed most of our lives" for her.
Performances will take place for audiences of just 10 people in the front rooms of terraced houses in the Toxteth area, meaning the play is more closely rooted in the city than any of the other anniversary events.
Arthur, who's from Toxteth and is a former member of 20 Stories High's youth theatre, says she can relate to the song.
Bringing the song up to date
"Even though it was 1967, it does feel like that [now], and it hit me because when I left home my mum was a bit like that - 'I've sacrificed my whole life,' and all the rest of it.
"I was just looking at it like, 'I'm 18 and I want to move out and why are you being so horrible?'
"But now when I look back and after listening to the song, I thought, 'Oh bless her, she must have been an absolute emotional wreck and I was just packing my bags and leaving her.'"
Source BBC
Photo:
Gareth Jones
