Beatles News

George Michael bought the piano on which John Lennon composed the classic hit song Imagine so it would not end up in storage and could be 'seen by the people'. The Wham! frontman anonymously paid £1.67 million for the upright historic Steinway formerly owned by the ex-Beatle at a pop memorabilia auction in 2000. Purchasing it so it would stay in the country, Michael was later revealed as the owner of the instrument and announced he was going to hand it over to the Beatles Story museum in Liverpool. Before the auction, the piano had been loaned to the museum by a private collector who bought it in 1992, but when the collector decided to sell it there were fears it would be lost to wealthy Beatles fans in Japan or the US.

Sam played a key role in the early years of the Fab Four. A key figure in the early years of The Beatles has died, it was announced today. Former concert promoter Sam Leach had been suffering from cancer and died at his Liverpool home early this morning, just days after his 81st birthday. He was famous in the Liverpool area in the early 1960s for his concert promotions at venues such as New Brighton’s Tower Ballroom, where he put on shows including such rock ‘n’ roll giants as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

Sam Wright looks back at the Lancashire music maker who turned down The Beatles “Just a bunch of youngsters, banging away on guitars, hoping to get somewhere.” One Oscar, 10 Grammys and more than 1bn album sales later, Derek Marsh may have revised his first impression of The Beatles. At the height of the post-war entertainment boom, Marsh and his record label, Deroy Studios, existed as a minor Mecca for ageing crooners and ambitious upstarts in the mid-20th Century. It all began in 1947, when a young Derek Marsh ended his days with the RAF by handling Voice of the Forces, a small, war time recording service in India. Air force personnel, unable to get home for a family occasion or special celebration, would transmit their respective greetings and messages on six-inch records courtesy of both the War Department and Marsh’s technical expertise.

WHENEVER Lady Catherine Mancham hears The Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand, she thinks of Paul McCartney — with good reason. He once held her hand in a suite at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Hotel. Back then, Lady Mancham was Catherine Olsen, a young reporter with The Sun, and she had talked her way into a private audience with the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania, just hours after they touched down in Melbourne on June 14, 1964 for a series of concerts at Festival Hall as part of their world tour. Like any great reporter, she came to work on her day off on the off chance she might get the story of the day.

In 1963, The Beatles began a festive residency of Finsbury Park. We found it was an era when all the best bands played in Seven Sisters Road. Every town or city where The Beatles played one of their early shows likes to claim the same thing: “Beatlemania started here.” There is Liverpool and Hamburg, of course. Hell, even some people in Romford claim Beatlemania started there after a couple of shows in 1963. In that case, we might as well add Finsbury Park to the list. This week 53 years ago, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr began “The Beatles Christmas Show” – their residency of Finsbury Park Astoria in Seven Sisters Road. Rick Burton, an expert on the theatre’s history, insists: “That was the start of Beatlemania. The shows were from Christmas Eve 1963 until January 11, but sold out instantly.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 9: James Woodall on celebrating the musical contribution made by the forgotten Beatle: Ringo Starr ‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best. ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.’

This wasn’t the first time we’d shared a bill with the Beatles. A few years earlier, they were our warm-up band, when we headlined the Cavern in Liverpool. We really admired them. I was the trombonist in the Mike Cotton Sound, a footnote to the 1960s music scene. On this occasion, we were their support band; we are pictured here at the press call for Another Beatles Christmas Show, a follow-up to their successful production a year earlier. The show opened on Christmas Eve and ran until 16 January, and consisted of variety performances, with sketches and comedy that seemed anachronistic even then. Produced by a friend of Brian Epstein, it was lavish, with cascading waterfalls that flooded the stage. We started the night on a revolving podium and the leads kept getting tangled up. Jimmy Savile was compere; none of us liked him. He was an awful show-off.

As has already become clear during Wonder Week, Stevie Wonder is pretty much better than all other pop musicians at all the stuff that pop musicians do. Concept albums? Stevie did ‘em the best. Funky jams and schmaltzy love songs? Yeah, he nailed ‘em both. Oh, you thought it’d be fun to dabble in drumming? Self-taught Stevie only became, like, the best drummer on Earth. And, of course, everyone covers the Beatles. Everyone. But it’s notoriously hard to cover the Fab Four, because they tended to perform definitive, unimprovable versions of their own tunes. The only exception? Stevie Wonder and his cover of “We Can Work It Out,” not only the best Beatles cover of all time but the only one that is definitively better than the Beatles’ original.

Sir Paul McCartney and wife Nancy Shevell supported his son-in-law on Monday in New York City. The 74-year-old rock legend and Nancy, 57, attended a screening of the upcoming British romantic drama This Beautiful Fantastic written and directed by Simon Aboud. Simon and Paul's daughter Mary McCartney, 47, married in June 2010. The Beatles singer and songwriter kept it casual with a white shirt under black denim jacket and black trousers for the event at Park Hyatt. Nancy went with the casual chic look in a long-sleeved white blouse with gold trim.

George, John, Paul, Ringo: they’ve all made solo albums, now. Listening to them all, all through, it’s difficult to believe that they were made by four men who once formed a band together. I hear no important points of connection. I guess this is partly because each bottled up his personal ideas during the Beatles’ latter, bad days; and now the cork is out. I think there’s another reason, too. A couple of years back, reviewing the white album, I suggested that the magnetism of the Beatles could be seen in terms of the temperament of each man corresponding with the four elements (Harrison, fire; Starr, earth; Lennon, water; McCartney, air), and also the four humours. So that, working together, they could work for any listener, whatever his nature and mood. It would follow that, separate, their temperament would clearly be very different each from the others.