Beatles News
In early December 1961, Brian Epstein drew up a contract that bound The Beatles to him for five years. Only Paul McCartney was hesitant about signing it. McCartney told Epstein that he hoped The Beatles would make it big, as Howard Sounes recounts in Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. “But I’ll tell you now, Mr. Epstein,” McCartney declared, “I’m going to be a star anyway.”
John Lennon‘s widow, Yoko Ono, may be 80 years old, but she remains as creative and active as ever. The avant-garde artist and the latest incarnation of her Plastic Ono Band have recorded a follow-up to their 2009 album, Between My Head and the Sky, that’s scheduled for a September 17 release.
OTTAWA — Fifty-six years to the day after Sir Paul McCartney met his former Beatles bandmate John Lennon in a church hall in a suburb of Liverpool, England, the legendary rocker was in Ottawa preparing to play the nation’s capital for the first time in his career.
ARTISTIC culture separated by hundreds of years will be coming together during a performance at Gosden House School next month.
Pupils at the Bramley special educational needs school will be performing Shakespeare’s classic comedy, Twelfth Night, to mark its ten-year collaboration with Globe Education.
Fans of the Beatles have always been a passionate bunch. But few can rival Ottawa’s Yvan Tessier. He bought his first Beatles album, Yellow Submarine, in 1968. Since then he’s amassed one of North America’s largest collections of vinyl Beatles records. He owns around 5,000 of them, worth an estimated $70,000.
Paul McCartney has carried more tunes in his day than a pallet full of iPods. Music, says drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., is in “every fiber” of McCartney’s being: “Even if he’s making a little fruit salad, he’s humming a tune or whistling away. The music doesn’t stop around him. It’s beautiful.”
Hand-signed memorabilia from the Beatles, particularly the late John Lennon and George Harrison, get more and more rare every year. That only makes events featuring them more and more special.
Nearly 50 years after writing the conceptual art book Grapefruit, writer, artist and peace activist Yoko Ono has released a sequel that she hopes will inspire people and get them thinking and reading. Acorn, a book of 100 "instructional poems" and drawings that will be published on July 15, goes back in time, according to the widow of Beatle John Lennon, because it is something she originally created for the Internet in the 1990s.
July 7 is Ringo Starr's birthday and since 2008 the world has been celebrating with him by sharing a moment of "Peace & Love" at Noon. When Ringo is on tour during the summer we join forces with the Hard Rock who have generously hosted many of his birthdays.
Chris Purcell's lyrical short film, Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? explores a regular old crosswalk in the St. John’s Wood district of London — the place where the Beatles took a few short steps into pop culture history. Yes, it’s that crosswalk — the one where the fab four are captured for all time on the cover of the Beatles’ famous album. The image was the result of a quick 10-minute photo session back in the summer of 1969, turning a pedestrian area into a full-fledged tourist attraction.
