Beatles News
This week has turned out to be a very special one for The Beatles on the band’s home turf in the United Kingdom. The rockers appear on multiple albums rankings, as well as a tally dedicated to bestselling songs. That’s not unusual for one of the top-performing acts of all time, but what is notable about the group’s showing this time around is that it includes two brand new releases – from a band that hasn’t been properly together in more than half a century.
The Beatles collect not one, but two new hit singles this week. The titles are not actually individual tracks, but rather very short collections that the Official Charts Company classifies as singles instead of EPs – which many fans would argue they are.
A pair of closely related projects, Saturday Club 31st March 1964 Part 1 and Part 2, both manage to debut on the Official Physical Singles chart. The projects enter right next to one another, coming in at No. 81 and No. 82, respectively. Those two “singles” are actually EPs, and they both feature five songs apiece.
The Beatles on Saturday Club
Saturday Club 31st March 1964 Part 1 is made up of The Beatles covering tracks by American acts such as Carl Perkins and Chan Romero, paying homage to the rock and country tunes the musicians were loving at the time.
Source: forbes.com/Hugh McIntyre
There were many reasons behind The Beatles' split and relations remained strained for some time. Tensions ran high in the final years of the 1960s as creative differences emerged among the band.
They had retired from touring in 1966 and focused on recording innovative, boundary-breaking music in the studio. That began with the iconic 1967 album 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', which captured the zeitgeist of the so-called summer of love that year and spent 27 weeks on top of the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom.
The recording sessions of its follow up, known as 'The White Album', were notoriously feisty. Ringo Starr left the band for a period, fed up with the mood, as The Beatles clashed.
About that period of recording, Paul McCartney said: "There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". John Lennon later added: "The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album."
In September 1969, after the band had recorded the majority of what became 'Let it Be' (the 'Get Back' sessions) and 'Abbey Road', John told Paul, George Harrison and Ringo that he wanted a "divorce" from The Beatles. Paul went away to work on his first solo album 'McCartney', believing it was all over for the group.
Source: uk.news.yahoo.com/Dan Haygarth
The '80s were marked by dizzying highs and catastrophic lows for ex-members of the Beatles.
The horrifying first year of the decade saw John Lennon score his first U.K. No. 1 album in almost 10 years before being murdered by a deranged fan. Paul McCartney released his worst album ever but rallied late in the '80s amid a new songwriting partnership with Elvis Costello.
George Harrison experienced his own ups and downs. He took a long break after 1982's Gone Troppo failed to even chart in the U.K. then rallied with platinum-selling albums under his own name and with his Traveling Wilburys supergroup. Ringo Starr was actually dropped by his label before getting sober and founding his long-running All-Starr Band late in the '80s.
Lennon died before he could release a planned companion album to 1980's Double Fantasy, leaving his widow Yoko Ono to complete 1984's Milk and Honey. (She also oversaw a pair of archival projects, Live in New York City and Menlove Ave., both from 1986.) There were a few partial reunions in his absence, including "Take It Away" (featuring McCartney, Starr and former Beatles producer George Martin), "When We Was Fab" (Harrison and Starr) and, most memorably, "All Those Years Ago" (Harrison, McCartney and Starr).
Yet the group most associated with the era will always be Harrison's new star-studded amalgam. His rebound had also been spurred by a new collaborator, as Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra fame co-produced his comeback, 1987's Cloud Nine. He then rounded out an incredible Traveling Wilburys lineup that also included Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com/Nick DeRiso
If you had told me when I was a young teenager — swooning over a certain mop-topped quartet from Liverpool, like most girls my age at the time — that I would one day talk to Pete Best, the drummer often called "the fifth Beatle," I would have giggled in disbelief.
Even though my allegiance was clearly to John, Paul, George and Ringo, I had heard of the drummer who played with the Silver Beatles before Ringo joined the band.
Yet, there I was one afternoon last week, a teenager no more, on the phone with Best, laughing away at his stories and talking easily to the man who played drums before Ringo took the number four spot as he spoke about "The Best of the Beatles," his upcoming show at the United.
That's because Best — who turned 83 last November — was charming, entertaining, funny and easy to talk to.
"It will be my first time in Rhode Island," said Best, who formed the Pete Best Band in the late 1980s and has been touring ever since, bringing the "sound of the Beatles in their formative years" to audiences worldwide.
"It's a powerhouse of a show," he told me with enthusiasm. "There's lots of energy."
Source: thewesterlysun.com/Nancy Burns-Fusaro
On August 30, 1972, John Lennon played his only full-length post-Beatles concert at Madison Square Garden. But what led to that moment? One to One: John & Yoko, directed by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald, explores 18 pivotal months in Lennon and Ono’s life, from their move to Greenwich Village to their evolving approach to activism. The film immerses viewers in their world—restored concert footage, archival TV clips, and a meticulously recreated NYC apartment where they watched everything from Nixon’s speeches to The Price Is Right. With newly remixed audio by Sean Ono Lennon, this documentary is a seismic revelation that challenges everything we thought we knew about John & Yoko’s American journey.
Source: thatericalper.com/Eric Alper
Sean Ono Lennon was just five years old when his father John Lennon was murdered.
He has now opened up about how it felt to hear previously unheard recordings of his late dad during the production of new Kevin Macdonald documentary One To One: John & Yoko.
"I was completely floored," Sean told Mojo of listening to the box of tapes of conversations between John and drummer Jim Keltner, Allen Klein and MC5 manager John Sinclair that was only recently discovered.
"I think maybe not everyone realises how special it is for me to hear my dad talking or to see him.
"I grew up with a set number of images and audio clips that everyone's familiar with. So to come across things that I’ve never seen or heard is really deep for me, because it’s almost like getting more time with my dad."
Source: goldradio.com/Mayer Nissim
With a hit new album under his belt, a concert special filmed at the Ryman Auditorium now streaming and a slew of upcoming tour dates, Ringo Starr is as busy as ever. So it’s fair enough that when he brings up talk of slowing down, his three kids consider him something like the drummer who cried wolf.
“Sometimes when I finish a tour, I’m like, ‘That’s the end for me.’ And all my children say, ‘Oh, Dad, you’ve told us that for the last 10 years.’ And they get fed up with me,” Starr tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I do feel, ‘Oh, that’s got to be enough,’ and then I get a phone call: ‘We’ve got a few gigs if you’re interested.’ Okay, we’re off again!”
The drummer, 84, will set off again with his All Starr Band in June for a 10-date tour, and in September, they’ll play six shows as part of a Las Vegas residency at The Venetian Theatre. Starr — who is dad to sons Zak, 59, and Jason, 57, and daughter Lee, 54, with late ex-wife Maureen and stepdad to wife Barbara Bach's kids Francesca, 56, and Gianni Gregorini, 52 — has played with his namesake band since 1989, and the current lineup includes Steve Lukather, Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Hamish Stuart, Gregg Bissonette and Buck Johnson.
Zak Starkey and Ringo Starr in London in September 2016. David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty
“In those days, I had a phone book, so I found guys who were musicians and I’d call them,” he says of the band’s early days.
Source people.com/Rachel DeSantis
We know that The Beatles influenced rock and roll like no band or artist before or since. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how music might have progressed without the example they set. But it’s also important to note the Fab Four weren’t above borrowing what they liked from others.
John Lennon’s 6 Favorite Beatles Songs
“If I Needed Someone,” found on The Beatles’ landmark 1965 album Rubber Soul, features lyrics that owe a great deal to the unique sensibilities of the song’s writer, George Harrison. But musically, it’s indebted to another ‘60s band of note: The Byrds.
“Someone” Special
By 1965, George Harrison had developed a great deal as a songwriter, and his contributions to The Beatles’ albums started to become a bit more frequent. In the first four albums of the band’s career, he managed just a single solo composition. But on the group’s first album of 1965 (Help!), Harrison earned two writing credits.
He would also write a pair of tracks on Rubber Soul, released at the end of that same year. That was an album where the group took a huge leap in both their songwriting depth and studio wizardry. “If I Needed Someone” delivers on both counts.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
Across his time in The Beatles and as a solo artist, John Lennon wrote countless iconic songs. With Paul McCartney, he was part of the most legendary songwriting partnership of all time, which was the driving creative force behind The Beatles.
In the early days, the two wrote songs together at Paul's childhood home on Forthlin Road in Allerton. As they grew older and artistic differences within The Beatles emerged, the two tended to write independently before presenting songs to each other for final tweaks.
Speaking about working with Paul, John told Playboy in a 1980 interview: "(Paul) provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn't write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock 'n' roll.
"But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs - 'In My Life', or some of the early stuff, 'This Boy' - I was writing melody with the best of them."
About John and Paul's special working relationship, Wilfred Mellors wrote in 1972: "Opposite poles generate electricity: between John and Paul the sparks flew. John's fiery iconoclasm was tempered by Paul's lyrical grace, while Paul's wide-eyed charm was toughened by John's resilience."
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Dan Haygarth
One To One – the new film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s radical 1971-73 – is full of fear, intimacy and great music. “I was completely floored,” says Sean Lennon.
It’s 1972 and John Lennon is talking to drummer Jim Keltner on the phone, about a tour he’s planning that will end in Miami Beach to coincide with a protest at August’s Republican National Convention. The ex-Beatle’s ongoing challenge to President Nixon and the US political establishment has him buzzing, but Keltner sounds a note of concern. Does Lennon realise he’s playing with fire? Has he considered the risks?
Lifted from a recently discovered box of tapes, the audio is one of the stars of One To One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ vivid and visceral new film about Lennon and Yoko Ono’s period of controversial activism, 1971-73. The pair’s recorded phone conversations with Keltner, Allen Klein, MC5 manager John Sinclair and more provide some of the film’s most surprising insights. One viewer was particularly struck.
Source: mojo4music.com/Danny Eccleston
