Beatles News
Anticipation grows for The Beatles’ Anthology 4 as “Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” debuts as a top-selling track on iTunes, decades after it was first recorded. The Beatles (left to right) George Harrison (1943 - 2001), Ringo Starr, John Lennon (1940 - 1980) and Paul McCartney, hold the sleeve of their new LP, 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', at the press launch for the album, held at Brian Epstein's house at 24 Chapel Street, London, 19th May 1967. (Photo by John Downing/Getty Images)
The Beatles may be done releasing new music, but there are still plenty of recordings from the band’s history that are shared with the world. From time to time, there’s still an intense demand for anything connected to the Fab Four, and countless films, books, and albums have been issued in the decades since the musicians split. Many of them have become commercial successes. Now, months ahead of a new compilation of the group’s work being released, a new take on a Beatles classic quickly becomes a bestseller in America.
“Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” Debuts On iTunes
The Beatles currently sit at No. 23 on the iTunes Top Songs chart, which ranks the best-selling tracks on the platform in America. The group nearly cracks the top 20 with “Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17).”
“Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” Previews Anthology 4
“Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” is the second single from the Beatles’ upcoming compilation Anthology 4. It follows the release of “Free as a Bird (2025 Mix),” which the group shared in mid-August.
When Will The Beatles Release Anthology 4?
Anthology 4 is, as its name suggests, the fourth installment in the Beatles’ highly popular Anthology series, which gathers together rarities, outtakes, new mixes, demos, and other tracks from the band’s history. The compilation is expected to drop on November 21.
Anthology 4 includes new mixes of tracks like “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which were reworked by Jeff Lynne. The collection also features specific numbered takes of Beatles classics like “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Tell Me Why,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Get Back,” among many others.
Multiple versions of Anthology 4 will be available on physical formats. The compilation was originally only going to be included in an updated version of the Anthology series, which fans were not happy about. When it was first announced, it became clear that longtime supporters of the Beatles would need to purchase the entire Anthology again in order to hear these new mixes. Later, it was revealed that Anthology 4 would be delivered as a standalone project as well. The upcoming compilation will be available as a double CD and a triple LP.
“Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” Competes With New Hits
After “Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” was released, it became one of the top new performers on the iTunes Top Songs chart in America. Several other just-shared cuts, including tunes from Hardy, Aerosmith, Chris Young, and Bon Jovi, currently rank above the Beatles, although “Helter Skelter (Second Version – Take 17)” could continue to climb as this Friday marks the beginning of another tracking week in the global music industry.
Source: forbes.com/Hugh McIntyre
John Lennon was a bully and nuisance as a schoolboy, a current teacher at the singer’s old school has claimed.
The Beatles star was said to have been such a troublesome student that the staff at Quarry Bank School in Liverpool were reluctant to recognise him as a former pupil after he found fame with the Beatles.
Tom Barry, a design and technology teacher at what is now The Calderstones School, said: “When John left, he was that much of a nuisance and a bully and that much of a poor student the school staff didn’t want to acknowledge that he ever went to the school and removed any trace of him.
“He was never spoken about, he was never acknowledged through Beatlemania. Apparently, fans would come to the school gates and just be sent away because the school didn’t want any connection to him.”
The teacher added: “They didn’t want to idolise him and for students to think you can prat about and be a bit of a bully and still be successful.”
Lennon attended the school from 1952 to 1957 and formed the Quarrymen, the forerunners of the Beatles, while a pupil there.
His record and antics in school have been well-documented, including detention sheets that revealed his “extremely cheeky” side when they came up for auction in 2013.
Reasons for punishment given by his teachers on the recovered sheets, from Quarry Bank School when Lennon was 15, include ‘‘sabotage’’, ‘‘fighting in class’’, ‘‘nuisance’’, ‘‘shoving’’ and ‘‘just no interest whatsoever’’.
The Beatle even managed to receive three detentions in one day on two occasions in 1955 and 1956.
Lennon’s old desk was discovered hidden away in the attic of the school, where teachers were said to have stored it so they would not have to remember his time there.
Source: India McTaggart/telegraph.co.uk
The desk, which is an old-fashioned lift-up, will now feature in a display at the Liverpool Beatles Museum along with other items from the band members’ schooldays, including Lennon’s enrolment ledger signed by his aunt.
Despite years of refusing to acknowledge the school’s link to pop history through Lennon’s rise to stardom, the school is now starting to offer tours of its site for Beatles fans.
The first ever public memorial dedicated to a legendary Beatles producer is underway.
The rose garden, at Strawberry Field, will is the first of its kind commemorating Sir George Martin CBE - often nicknamed the 'fifth Beatle' - and his wife Lady Judy Martin.
The garden, built at the iconic Liverpool attraction made famous by John Lennon in the Beatles hit 'Strawberry Fields Forever', will feature a curved wall with a biography of Sir George Martin's career, alongside 30 discs commemorating the number one UK hit singles he produced.
A calming water feature and circular raised rose bed will also feature, designed as "a place of peace and reflection," and will be donated by CEO of Orange Amps, Cliff Cooper.
He said: "As a patron of Strawberry Field, I'm honoured to support this tribute to Sir George and Lady Martin. Their impact on music and their dedication to charitable causes align in harmony with the spirit of Strawberry Field.”
Cliff Cooper also donated Strawberry Field its drum shaped bandstand. Credit: Strawberry Field
Before her passing, Lady Martin personally gifted rose bushes to Strawberry Field and envisioned the garden as a lasting tribute to her husband.
It will honour Sir George and Lady Martin, shaped with involvement of their children.
Lucie Kitchener, daughter of Sir George and Lady Martin, said: “The creation of the rose garden at Strawberry Field was a project our mother was passionately involved in.
"We are honoured that the garden will now pay tribute to both our parents, and we are so grateful to those who have made it possible."
“Strawberry Field’s work in supporting young people is extraordinary, and this will add another dimension to an already magical place.”
The garden will commemorate the number one singles Sir George Martin produced in his career. Credit: Strawberry Field
The garden is set to open in spring 2026, with all proceeds from visits to Strawberry Field supporting the centre's programmes which help people with learning disabilities and barriers to employment access paid work.
Major Michelle Lovegrove-Huggins, Mission Director at Strawberry Field, added: "This rose garden will be a wonderful complement to our existing attraction, including the interactive exhibition and the bandstand which was also generously donated by Cliff Cooper.
"The rose garden is the result of so much hard work, dedication, and valuable generosity from our beloved patrons and supporters, and we are delighted to honour Sir George and Lady Judy Martin in this special space.
“Visitors will be captivated by the rose garden, which will enhance the peaceful atmosphere and serve as a place of tranquillity for both the local and international communities.
"It's another way we're preserving the rich musical heritage of this unique site while continuing The Salvation Army's mission of service and love.”
Source: ITV News
It’s previously been acknowledged that the ancestral roots of John Lennon are firmly rooted in Wales. However the extent of his Welsh DNA was little known, but according to a book on The Beatles family history his fascinating ancestry can be traced all the way back to the greatest of Welsh royalty.
Lennon’s family connections to Wales have been fully detailed in genealogist Richard Edmunds’ book ‘Inside the Beatles Family Tree’ – a forensic tome that took 10 years to complete and details the family histories of the Fab Four. And it unearths some incredible findings, especially when it comes to one half of the greatest songwriting duo in music history.
From his mother Julia’s side of the Lennon family, the ancestral line can be traced back to the days of Owain Glyndŵr and Llywelyn the Great. Inside The Beatles Family Tree by Richard Edmunds
“Past Beatles biographers have tended to skim over their family roots, or filled a vacuum of knowledge, by utilising scant and woefully inadequate earlier published accounts,” says the author. “As a result, a variety of tales, often belonging firmly to urban mythology rather than serious academic research, have been told, and retold, time and again.”
Edmunds adds that beginning from scratch, researching the original documentary evidence in the archives, he has had slowly but surely reconstructed their genealogy and history, both within the city of Liverpool, and further beyond.
The book details Lennon’s Welsh roots through his Victorian ancestors, John Millward, a solicitor’s clerk, of St Asaph, Flintshire, and Mary Elizabeth Morris, a farmer’s daughter, of Berth y Glyd, Llysfaen. Their daughter, Annie Millward, married merchant seaman George Stanley, in November 1906 in Liverpool, and the couple had five daughters, including Lennon’s mother, Julia, who later wed a merchant seaman, Alfred Lennon, in 1938.
Berth Y Glyd Farm, Llysfaen
Writing in a blog post – ‘John Lennon – a Welsh national hero?’ the author and genealogist details the extensive background to the musician’s family roots in Wales. Through poverty and tragedy to the most aristocratic of Welsh heroes, it tells a story as captivating as The Beatles’ songbook.
“Previous researchers into Lennon’s Welsh roots had mis-identified John Millward as the son of a pub owner in Llantwit Major, South Wales,” he says. “My research shows conclusively that he was in actual fact the son of Thomas Millward, head gardener to Sir John Hay Williams, High Sheriff of Flintshire, and that John was born in the stately surroundings of Dolben Hall, in the mid 1830s, whilst his father was employed in service there.
“Apprenticed as a solicitor’s clerk to the Williams family as a teenager, in his early twenties John Millward suffered a serious mis-hap during a hunting expedition, when the locking mechanism of his gun failed and the weapon discharged into his body at close range, leaving him near death, and forcing the amputation of his entire left arm.
“Whilst recuperating from this dreadful accident, in a guest house at Rhyl, he met the twenty-year-old Mary Morris, and love blossomed.
Dolben Hall Estate (Credit: Richard Edmunds)
“Mary had left her parent’s farm at Lysfaen shortly before, in disgrace, after giving birth to a child out of wedlock with a neighbour, who had subsequently refused to acknowledge her or the child. Eager to avoid further scandal, when she fell pregnant again to John, the unmarried couple crossed into England, giving birth to John Lennon’s grandmother, Annie Milward, in rented lodgings at the Bear and Billet Inn, Chester, in 1871. They set up home together, in Liverpool, shortly after.
“Unfortunately, the relationship between the couple did not last. John Millward ended his life living alone and in poverty, estranged from Mary and their daughters, freezing to death on the floor of a dilapidated Liverpool bedsit, after suffering a stroke in his mid-fifties, his body lying undiscovered for several days.”
Source: David Owens/nation.cymru
A first-time encounter between John Lennon and Paul McCartney left the former impressed with the latter’s musical talents.
The two would go on to found The Beatles with George Harrison and Pete Best, later replaced by Ringo Starr, and the rest is history. But even from their first meeting, it appeared the two were destined for greatness thanks to a mutual respect for one another’s abilities. The pair would recall this meeting in the Anthology documentary, with McCartney saying he figured out what had really impressed Lennon during the initial encounter. The meeting would come at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool. McCartney and Lennon were both impressed with one another’s musical talents, with Lennon inviting McCartney to join what was, at the time, The Quarrymen.
Lennon’s reason for doing so was relatively simple. Lennon said: “We met and talked after the show, and I saw he had talent and he was playing guitar backstage and he was doing Twenty Flight Rock by Eddie Cochran.” McCartney’s impressive guitar playing would be enough to seal his spot in The Quarrymen, which eventually evolved into The Beatles.
A shared interest in Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly helped, but McCartney believes it’s the Woolton performance which proved crucial in forming their friendship. Ultimately, it came down to what McCartney perceived as better playing than was expected at the time. Lennon saw McCartney performing the Cochran hit, but it was more than just a cover.
McCartney did not dismiss his guitar-playing skills but did suggest there was a more important reason at play for his invitation to join The Quarrymen. He said: “But the thing that I think impressed him most was that I knew all the words.”
It makes a remarkable difference in how Lennon and McCartney would play together during their debut down south. Pete Best recalled: “Halfway through one number, George and Paul put on their overcoats and took to the floor to dance a foxtrot together, while the rest of us struggled along, making enough music for them and the handful of spectators.
Source: cultfollowing.co.uk/Ewan Gleadow
“They basically declared war on him after these shows were broadcast”: When John Lennon alarmed the FBI after platforming radical political ideas in a week-long takeover of American TV.
It’s difficult to conceive of just how shocking it was for the Nixon-led US government of the early '70s, when John Lennon - erstwhile Beatle and now a counterculture firebrand - and his wife Yoko Ono, took over over one of America’s biggest daytime television shows. Recalibrating a family-friendly programming touchpoint into a showcase of progressive, left-wing ideology.
The week allowed many with then-radical ideas to reach millions more ears than ever before. But they were ideas that some saw as an existential threat to the nation.
John and Yoko's aim was to present middle-American viewers to counter-arguments against the government line on numerous social and political themes. Topics spanned feminism, race, the right to protest and government overreach.
Perhaps the most popular daytime television show in America at the time, The Mike Douglas Show reached upwards of 40 million viewers on a regular basis, many of whom lived in the heartlands of the US. Far from the more liberally-minded coastal regions.
Its titular host wasn't unsympathetic to the pair’s politics, but was really more energised by the scale of Lennon’s audience, which could bolster his own viewership considerably…
Envisioned as a fusion of political and social conversation - interspersed with music, of course - the opportunity served as a potential a win-win for both parties. For the Lennons, it provided a much-needed conduit to the deeper parts of America, allowing new intellectual arguments to bypass the conservatively-angled press's editorialising and be presented in a mainstream space.
The week's thrust was an overt rejection of the Nixon administration’s uber-conservative policies, continuing on from Lennon’s fiercely anti-Vietnam stance in the late '60s.
Source: Andy Price/musicradar.com
When death and celebrity mix, it can make for an especially compelling narrative, as was the case for a story involving John Lennon’s ghost making itself known in the studio during The Beatles’ mid-1990s reunion. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (or the “Threetles”) met in February 1994 to work on an unreleased Lennon demo that would become part of the band’s Anthology 1 compilation album.
Some corners of the internet suggest Lennon’s ghost was there in the studio with the rest of his bandmates. But are we really to believe a dead rockstar was lurking in the shadows?
The Story of John Lennon’s Ghost in the Studio
In August 2025, The Mirror published a story that cited an unlinked interview with Paul McCartney conducted by OnHike.com. For whatever it’s worth, this writer was unable to track down the primary source of this interview. But for context purposes, we’ll repeat the narrative published in the British tabloid. In the alleged conversation, McCartney recalled a series of uncanny occurrences happening mid-recording sessions.
“There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio,” he said of the sessions for Lennon’s demo, “Free As a Bird”. “Noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things. There was just an overall feeling that John was around. We put one of those spoof backward recordings on the end of the single for a laugh to give all those Beatles nuts something to do. I think it was the line of a George Formby song. Then we were listening to the finished single in the studio one night, and it gets to the end, and it goes, ‘zzzwrk nggggwaaahhh jooohn lennnnnon qwwwrk.’ I swear to God. We were like, ‘It’s John. He likes it!’”
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
A “lot of money” borrowed by George Harrison landed him his first musical instrument.
Even before he bought his first guitar, Harrison was obsessed with the instrument. His attention at school would suffer because he was “drawing guitars” and he eventually managed to convince his mother to purchase him his first guitar. It marked quite an expensive purchase too, with the £3.10 loaned to Harrison for a “little acoustic” instrument. The Beatles‘ Harrison said: “When I was thirteen or fourteen I used to be at the back of the class drawing guitars, big cello cutaway guitars with F holes, little solid ones with pointed cutaways and rounded cutaways.
“You know, I was totally into guitars. I heard about this kid who had a guitar and it was £3.10 it was just a little acoustic round guitar and I got the £3.10 off my mother, that was a lot of money in those days.” It was a similar story for McCartney, who shared early musical influences with Harrison and would end up trading his way to a guitar.
McCartney said as much on the Anthology documentary, and recalled his early years of musical influences. He said: “My dad bought me a trumpet for my birthday, at Rushworth & Draper’s (the other music store in town), and I loved it.
“There was a big hero-thing at the time. There had been Harry James – The Man With The Golden Trumpet – and now, in the Fifties, it was Eddie Calvert, a big British star who played Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White – all those gimmicky trumpet records. There were a lot of them around back then, so we all wanted to be trumpeters.
Source: Ewan Gleadow/cultfollowing.co.uk
George Martin had a natural flair for music. He was fascinated by orchestras from a young age and studied oboe at Guildhall before working in the BBC’s classical music department. After not long doing that job, Martin found his true calling at EMI in Abbey Road as a record producer. He was head of Parlophone at 29 and, in 1962, he met a band from Liverpool that had been rejected by pretty much every label in the country, one he remembered as "Not very in tune. They weren't very good." But they were special, they were the Beatles. Over the next eight years, Martin became the architect who made the ideas of the Beatles become a reality. He experimented endlessly and crafted a sound of depth for the band that would catapult them into global sensations.
George Martin Brought Class to the Beatles
Martin’s classical training was invaluable, but perhaps an initial shock to the pop system. Paul McCartney recalled the time he presented the classic “Yesterday,” and discussed the arrangements with Martin. In this talk, Martin calmly suggested putting a string quartet on the record, and McCartney responded, thinking it was a bad idea, as they were a rock and roll band. Ultimately, McCartney shared that “with the gentle bedside manner of a great producer [Martin] said to me, ‘Let us try it and if it doesn’t work we won’t use it and we’ll go with your solo version.’" This attitude from Martin shows his gentle approach as a producer, perfectly balancing his own ambitions with an artist-first mindset. A touch of class indeed.
Source: Fiona MacPherson-Amador/collider.com
The guitar featured on All My Loving was a “last-minute” idea, according to songwriter Paul McCartney.
The Beatles‘ hit would have a recognisable guitar line throughout the track, but it would be added at the very last moment. John Lennon would play the riff on the With The Beatles song, and McCartney would say this instrumental addition was a difference-maker. In his book, The Lyrics, McCartney shared the help Lennon offered to the song with the instrumental addition. While it’s difficult to pin down when the Wings frontman wrote the song (he has said he thought of the lyrics while shaving, and also wrote it on a tour bus), the song is one of the many great hits of The Beatles. It drew consistent wordplay and, released on November 22, 1963, became one of the Fab Four’s biggest, early hits. Though it has the Lennon-McCartney writing credit, it’s the latter name which is behind the song.
Lennon was full of praise for the song even after the band had broken up, saying All My Loving is a “damn good song” in an interview given months before his death. Speaking to Playboy in 1980, Lennon said: “[I]t’s a damn good piece of work … But I play a pretty mean guitar in back.”
That guitar line was a last-minute addition, according to McCartney, who needed a strong riff to carry his With The Beatles track. He wrote in his book, The Lyrics, that the triplets chord structure was a spark of genius which gave the song its unique sound. He wrote: “The thing that strikes me about the All My Loving recording is John’s guitar part; he’s playing the chords as triplets.
“That was a last-minute idea, and it transforms the whole thing, giving it momentum. The song is obviously about someone leaving to go on a trip, and that driving rhythm of John’s echoes the feeling of travel and motion. It sounds like a car’s wheels on the motorway, which, if you can believe it, had only really become a thing in the UK at the end of the fifties.
All My Loving is a historic release from The Beatles, with it being the first song the band played on American television. Their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show saw the Fab Four play the McCartney-penned track. McCartney would suggest it was the song which catapulted The Beatles into their global success.
Source: Ewan Gleadow/cultfollowing.co.uk
