Steven Soderbergh directs a documentary using John Lennon's last radio interview.  The film emphasizes Lennon and Ono's openness and relevance of their discussion.  Lennon was tragically killed hours after the upbeat interview session.

Just before his life was cut short on December 8, 1980, John Lennon spent the day giving a remarkably open radio interview. Now, director Steven Soderbergh is bringing that conversation to life in a new documentary that explores Lennon’s final hours in his own words.

Soderbergh spoke with Variety about the upcoming film, which centers on the interview Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono recorded that fateful afternoon on RKO Radio.

“I’m excited about it… The job is to obviously present it in such a way that it enhances the interview and doesn’t distract from it,” he said. “I’m just hoping to create a film that gets as many people as possible to hear what John and Yoko had to say on that afternoon before he was killed.”

The Oscar-winning director said he was struck by how Lennon and Ono “were both so free in their discussions.”

“I was surprised at how open and excited they were to talk,” Soderbergh added. “You would think they had never been interviewed before. So I want that to come across to the audience. Everything that they said 45 years ago is not just relevant today. It’s even more relevant in terms of relationships, politics, how we treat each other. How systems work on the individual and above all on the importance of love in our daily life and our world.”

At the time, Lennon and Ono had recently released Double Fantasy, their first project together in years. Yet, despite the excitement surrounding it, they chose to give only a single radio interview.

The three-and-a-half-hour session with RKO reporters Dave Sholin and Laurie Kaye reflected a Lennon who seemed happier than he had been in years.

“He had arrived at the Dakota somewhere around noon. The visual of John opening up the door, literally jumping up, leaping into the room and extending his arms like, ‘Hey folks, I’m here!’” Sholin said on 20/20 in 2020. “He had just turned 40. As he said, this was like he was opening up a new chapter. That was the mood of the day, and he could not have been more upbeat.”

Source: Isabella Torregiani/parade.com

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In the middle of the celebration at TD Coliseum in Hamilton, playing the longest list of greatest hits any artist has ever had, Paul McCartney paused to talk about Blackbird.

That’s the song he wrote after being inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s. On Friday night, in front of a sold out crowd, he told the story of how the Beatles were asked to play a show in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1964.

The promoter said the show was segregated. Black people on one side and white people on the other. The Beatles refused, McCartney recalled, saying "well that's stupid... and he must have realized there was a bit of money involved so he integrated the show. It was the first one."

McCartney led the grateful crowd on his magical history tour starting in Liverpool and their first number one hit single, From Me To You, with stops at the first song the Beatles ever recorded, In Spite of All the Danger and the first song they played for legendary producer Sir George Martin, Love Me Do.

He paid tribute to his Beatles bandmates, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. He played 1982's Here Today that let him say how much he loved and missed Lennon, easier than saying it in person, face-to-face. He played the ukulele Harrison gave him, to start McCartney's version of Harrison’s Something. McCartney, 83, kept going and going through his list of hits with the Beatles, Wings and as a solo artist.

He went from Get Back to Let it Be. He performed Mull of Kintyre with help from the local 25-member Paris Port Dover Pipe Band. Live and Let Die, a classic from his Wings years, nearly set the house on fire. “He hasn’t taken a sip of water,” said Hamilton's Mike Guyatt. He was there with his wife Mary and their friends. The tickets were a gift for their 70th birthdays from daughters Sarah, Amanda and Alyson.

"Thank you for the music and thank you for the memories," Guyatt said on his way out. "He’s a genuinely good person."

Paul McCartney sings two songs from his days as a Beatle, during his Nov. 21, 2025 show in Hamilton, including 'Drive My Car' and George Harrison's 'Something."

'I'm going to be a grown man crying,' fan says. Before the show, Tim Potocic, owner of Hamilton's Sonic Unyon Records, said he had been waiting just about all his life for this moment to arise.

"I have been told by people that I'm going to have all the feels," Potocic said. "I'm going to be a grown man crying. I've prepped myself for that."

"I'm a guy that loves live music," said Potocic, the organizer behind Supercrawl, Hamilton's annual free music, arts and culture festival, now in its 15th year.

"I think it will be an earth-shattering moment for me to be in the room," he said, adding he just wanted to enjoy the experience. "I'll take a couple quick photos then put my phone away."
A man with grey hair wearing a dark suit sings into a microphone on stage while strumming a bass guitar with one hand and giving the peace sign with the other. A man plays the drums behind him.  McCartney last played in Hamilton in 2016. 

McCartney — with Starr, the last surviving members of The Beatles — might be the world's most famous living musician.

After two shows in Montreal, his sold-out Hamilton show — his first in the city since 2016 — is the last Canadian stop on his Got Back tour, which began in 2022 and ends in Chicago on Tuesday.

After that, who knows?  Abbie Jolly was excited McCartney is in Hamilton, even though she couldn't go — tickets were too expensive, going for between $265 and $5,000 each.

Source: Conrad Collaco/cbc.ca

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Back in the mid-1990s, The Beatles released an eight-part Anthology series featuring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr telling their own story outside of the traditional narrator and talking heads structure.

The series was accompanied by three volumes featuring the Fab Four’s albums, complete with all sorts of extras, and an official Anthology book.

Following the recent re-release of all three with extended content is Anthology 4, a special addition featuring “13 previously unreleased demos and session recordings and other rare recordings.

"It also includes new mixes of The Beatles’ Anthology-associated hit singles: the GRAMMY-winning Free As A Bird and Real Love, given new life by their original producer, Jeff Lynne, using de-mixed John Lennon vocals.”

Released today, the 36-track Anthology 4 can be listened to below on Spotify or purchased as a CD & Vinyl here. But that's not all.

The original Beatles Anthology documentary series is set to hit Disney+ with a three-episode premiere on November 26.

Restored by Peter Jackson's team, a brand-new ninth episode has been created for this new presentation, too. Beatles fans rejoice!

Some mental images are inextricable from The Beatles’ legacy, not the least of which include John Lennon holding down rhythm guitar, Ringo Starr smiling and head-wagging behind the kit, Paul McCartney plunking out bass lines on his Hofner viola bass, and George Harrison playing lead guitar. But all that could have looked remarkably different—perhaps excluding Harrison altogether—if it wasn’t for one particularly bad bout of nerves at a show.

Bass players are often also guitar players, and McCartney is no exception. Songs like “Blackbird” and “Yesterday” proved that Sir Paul could work his way around a fretboard years before he would establish Wings, the band in which he played the most guitar. And as one of The Beatles’ principal songwriters, it stands to reason that McCartney might have ended up on lead guitar. At least, that’s what they were planning on in their earliest days of playing out.

As McCartney recalled in a 2025 edition of Anthology, he had a guitar solo on deck during his first gig with The Quarry Men. The young musician planned to take the lead on “Guitar Boogie”, but when the time came for his feature, McCartney’s hands froze. “I got sticky fingers,” he recalled, per Guitar World. “I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” He said he was “too frightened” and that he never played a guitar solo again until years later.

Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com

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Harry Lloyd, the British actor best known for playing Viserys Targaryen in the first season “Game of Thrones,” is set to portray George Martin in the upcoming four-part Beatles biopic by director Sam Mendes.

Lloyd joins Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harrison Dickinson as John Lennon and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison in Sony Pictures‘ “The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event,” due for release in 2028.

The casting is being revealed by Martin’s son, Giles Martin, in a pre-recorded interview going out on the Ryan Tubridy Show on Virgin Radio U.K later on Friday. “He’s really good. He’s very committed,” he said. Variety has since confirmed the casting with the production.

A classically trained musician, Martin was commonly referred to as the “fifth Beatle” for his extensive involvement in each of the band’s original albums. He wrote most of the orchestral and string arrangements and also played piano or keyboards on a number of their tracks. Once described as “the world’s most famous record producer,” across a 60-year career Martin produced 30 number one hit singles in U.K. and 23 in the U.S., winning six Grammys. He passed away in 2016 at the age of 90.

Alongside “Game of Thrones,” Lloyd has appeared in major shows such as “Wolf Hall” and “Legion,” playing Charles Xavier. He is due to star in the upcoming sixth season of “Slow Horses.”

The much-discussed Beatles films are now in production and being directed back-to-back by Mendes, with a trio of award-winning writers — Jez Butterworth, Peter Straughan and Jack Thorne — having penned the scripts. Production is expected to carry on into late 2026, with Sony releasing all four movies simultaneously in April 2028.

Source: Alex Ritman/variety.com

There are few albums in the history of music, let alone The Beatles’ discography, that hold as much cultural significance as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was the beginning of the band’s new studio-bound experimentation, particularly for Paul McCartney, who reveled in the opportunity to illuminate The Beatles’ kaleidoscopic psychedelia. However, it also faced a dimming opinion from John Lennon. Despite Sgt. Pepper’s being arguably the most mythical prevalent album by The Beatles, Lennon had complicated thoughts that some of the record’s results were “garbage.” Lennon felt creatively detached from the artistry of the record when McCartney took control, and felt the music on records like The White Album was “far superior.”  What Led The Beatles to Create 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band'

McCartney wrote over half of the album’s material, and with that, his creative control over the actual recordings was also increased. McCartney confirmed this by sharing in the ‘90s that “If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed Pepper.” But not every band member was exactly thrilled with the new direction.

In all fairness, it wasn’t just Lennon who had negative feelings towards Sgt. Peppers. George Harrison’s take on the recording of the album was that “It became an assembly process—just little parts and then overdubbing.” With McCartney carefully supervising the technical aspects, the other members’ creativity was somewhat diminished.

Source: Fiona MacPherson-Amador/collider.com

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