Beatles News
Entertainment legend, global philanthropist and friend of Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey has achieved every dream she ever had — except for one.
In a Tuesday appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Winfrey spoke about how she’s been fortunate to have every one of her wildest wishes come true. The only one that never came to fruition was ending up with her teenage crush.
“Everything I ever wanted or dreamed came true,” Winfrey said. “Except, I did not marry Paul McCartney.“
The media mogul goes on to share that, growing up, she was the only girl she knew who loved The Beatles as much as she did. She even collected Beatles trading cards. And of course, like every fangirl she had a favorite member of the band.
“Of course Paul was my favorite Beatle. And I used to try to make him think of me,” Winfrey says, clutching her fists and remembering. “I used to wake in the morning and I’d stand on the stairs and say, ‘Think of me, think of me, think of me.'”
Unlike most other fangirls, however, Winfrey actually got to know her childhood crush one day. She shares that, years later, when she got the chance to interview the rock legend, she took the opportunity to ask him the question that’s been burning in the back of her mind since childhood.
“My first question to him was, ‘All those years, I was 14, and I was thinking of you. Did you ever once think of me?'” she recounts. McCartney’s reply is one that every fan hopes to hear one day: “Every day, babe, every day.”
Though Winfrey never got the chance to marry her favorite Beatle, the two of them did participate in a very special ceremony together one day. In 2010, both entertainers were awarded with Kennedy Center Honors. One of Winfrey’s favorite memories of that big night occurred not when she received her honor, but when The Beatles’ Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Hey Jude” began playing.
“[McCartney] took my hand,” she said. “And that was the dream I had all those years!”
Source: billboard.com/Annie Harrigan
Paul McCartney ranks as one of the most successful rock musicians of all time. He has earned that honor in several ways, as multiple acts he’s been a part of — The Beatles, Wings, and of course McCartney as a soloist — have enjoyed years-long runs as hitmakers and powerful sellers.
Later this spring, the celebrated rocker will deliver a new album titled The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The set, expected in late May, will mark his first solo release in more than half a decade, and it is bound to do great things on charts globally. The first single from the project, “The Days We Left Behind,” arrives on one Billboard tally this frame, and it earns the superstar one more American top 10.
“The Days We Left Behind” only manages to appear on a single list published by Billboard this frame, and while McCartney and his label were surely hoping for a more impressive response in America, the fact that the cut debuts inside the top 10 should be counted as a win. This frame, “The Days We Left Behind” opens at No. 7 on the Rock Digital Song Sales chart, which details the bestselling tunes classified by Billboard specifically as rock via platforms like iTunes and Amazon.
Source: forbes.com/Hugh McIntyre
Farhan Akhtar has been tapped to play Ravi Shankar, legendary sitarist and composer, in Sam Mendes' four films based on The Beatles singers. Netizens have been buzzing with enthusiasm ever since Sony Pictures, the films' distributor, announced the news. Funnily enough, some even mistook Ravi Shankar for the spiritual leader of the same name, wondering how Farhan would fit into the role because he hardly looks like the spiritual guru. Now that the record has been set straight, the question still remains as to what role Ravi Shankar played in The Beatles.
What is Ravi Shankar's connection with The Beatles?
The legendary sitarist had a decades-long history with The Beatles' guitarist George Harrison. He taught Harrison how to play the sitar. Interestingly, Ravi Shankar once did not know anything about The Beatles, not even about its existence. Ravi asked Harrison whether he would like to accompany him to India and learn the instrument, and he gracefully obliged. When Harrison came to India, he changed his identity to Mr Sam Wells, but he could not sustain the disguise because people here recognised him. Due to the constant attention, Harrison cut off his hair and grew a moustache upon Ravi's advice and accompanied the latter to Srinagar.
Source: cinemaexpress.com/Cinema Express Desk
What would an artist be without their first record? Although The Beatles would go on to have plenty of No. 1 albums throughout their career, it was Please Please Me that got them started and catapulted them into the spotlight forever. Here are three favorite tracks from the album that The Beatles put together while they were still figuring out what it even was to be “a Beatle.”
“There’s A Place”
“There’s A Place” is one of The Beatles’ more sing-alongy songs, in my opinion. The song actually draws inspiration from “Somewhere” in the musical West Side Story, where Tony meets Maria at her window after the Rumble, during which he kills her brother, Bernardo.
“Someday” sings, “Someday, somehow / We’ll find a new way of living / We’ll find there’s a way of forgiving / Somewhere / There’s a place for us / A time and a place for us /Hold my hand and we’re halfway there.”
“In our case, the place was in the mind, rather than round the back of the stairs for a kiss and a cuddle,” McCartney explains of “There’s A Place” in Many Years From Now.
“Baby It’s You”
“Baby It’s You” has this doo-wop groove that makes you feel like you’re listening to something straight from the jukebox. That’s probably because, before The Beatles did their own spin on it, “Baby It’s You” was first recorded by The Shirelles, a popular 60s girl group. The Beatles were big fans of that type of music, and so when they were finishing up Please Please Me, they chose to finish it off with a couple of covers. “Baby It’s You” made the cut.
“I Saw Her Standing There”
Source: americansongwriter.com/Kat Caudill
One has to wonder: Did the Beatles know they were about to record one of the most influential songs in rock history when they stepped into the studio 60 years ago this week?
"Tomorrow Never Knows," the last track on Revolver, was actually the first song to be recorded for the album, according to the Beatles Bible, with sessions taking place on April 6, 7, and 22.
The title (which doesn't actually appear anywhere in the song) came from one of Ringo Starr's sayings, while the lyrics were inspired by the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert.
In Leary's introduction, John Lennon read the words, "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" (which, of course, became the first line of "Tomorrow Never Knows").
As Paul McCartney recalled in Anthology, the song was "definitely John's."
"Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD," he explained. "John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book. For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting."
'Tomorrow Never Knows' helped shape the sound of modern music.
Source: yahoo.com/Jacqueline Burt Cote
The venue that hosted The Beatles' only concerts in Japan has released long-forgotten photos of the legendary British band six decades after the gigs.
At the height of Beatlemania in 1966, when the quartet was the world's most famous pop group, the Beatles staged five summer performances in Tokyo in front of screaming fans.
Crowds reportedly thronged their hotel, where they stayed in the finest suite.
Then in 2009, more than 100 photos shot during the gigs "were discovered on a shelf" inside an office at the concert venue Nippon Budokan, the arena's operator told AFP.
But the 19 rolls of negative film -- reportedly wrapped in paper and labelled in such a way that it suggested they belonged to Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun -- remained "stored as they were" until recently, the operator in a statement.
However, as the 60th anniversary of the Japan tour approached, the venue operator asked a Beatles expert to examine the negatives, and "his assessment revealed that the photos appear to have never been published" in newspapers or other media.
Among the photos released by the concert venue is a shot of John Lennon smiling beside a Japanese doll that resembles a figurine featuring on the album cover of the 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Source: thestandard.com.hk/The Standard 英文虎報
In a career of over 70 years, through bands and solo work, the five year gap in former Beatle, Paul McCartney’s discography is soon to be closed.
Word of the new album, "The Boys of Dungeon Lane," came on March 25 through a cryptic link texted to fans. The link taking them to a Google Maps page showing the album’s logo on a sign carried by a boy running on Dungeon Lane in Liverpool, England.
Tacked onto the announcement was the first single, "Days We Left Behind." Indicative of what’s to come with the 14-piece LP, the track is packed with nostalgia and introspection, as seen in the first line, "Looking back at white and black reminders of my past."
Having lived a life almost entirely in the spotlight, fans are able to speculate the meanings of McCartney’s songs in a personal manner.
"The first time I listened to it, I was trying to think of it in the perspective of The Beatles and the history of the band," political science freshman Henry Busse said. "Starting when they were like 15 and then becoming famous at like 20, Beatlemania and not having real life ever again. Obviously, that meant a whole lot coming from Paul, and that being the song chosen to release as a single. And then [on second listen] I started thinking about my own life and things that I’ve moved on from, it's a very emotional song."
Source: statenews.com/Julia Roeder
The Beatles are one of the bestselling musical acts in United Kingdom history, and the group may, in fact, be the single most beloved name of all time when it comes to that nation's music industry. The rockers have scored dozens of top-performing albums, between traditional studio releases and many compilations, live recordings, and other specials that have become immediate bestsellers in the U.K. The outfit regularly claims at least one top-performing album in the home country of the four musicians – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison – but those winning efforts don't always stick around for long stretches.
For just the third time, a Beatles collection hits a longevity milestone on the Official Albums chart, which ranks the most consumed full-lengths and EPs throughout the U.K. The Beatles’ 1967–1970 Reaches Three Years as a Winner
As is often the case, 1967–1970, which is usually referred to as the Blue Album, is the most successful Beatles release in the U.K. This frame, it is the only project by the band to appear on the Official Albums chart, where it dips from No. 42 to No. 53. As it holds on once more, 1967–1970 makes it to 156 weeks on the list, or exactly three years.
1 Remains The Band’s Longest-Running Collection
1967–1970 is only the third release by The Beatles to rack up 156 stays on the 100-space rundown. Another compilation, the simply-titled 1, stands out as the group's longest-charting by an incredible margin. That project, which is more than a quarter-century old at this point, has spent 467 stints as one of the 100 most consumed albums in the U.K. That effort doesn't land on the list as often as it used to, since sales and streams of the tunes that straddle the track lists of both releases can only favor one or the other at a time, not both. That has led to, in many instances, 1967–1970 winning and remaining on multiple rosters, while 1 has disappeared.
The second-longest-running Beatles project on the Official Albums chart remains Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That masterpiece has managed 277 weeks on the roster.
Source: forbes.com/Hugh McIntyre
The Beatles likely would have been extremely successful no matter who was producing their records. But there’s no doubt that George Martin, who got the producing gig, helped them elevate their music to heights they might not have otherwise have reached.
Martin’s stewardship while the band made Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was essential. But he was passed over by Paul McCartney for a role he normally would have filled on one of the album’s standout songs. And that turn of events caused hard feelings between the two men. Who Has the Score?
When it came to making Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967, The Beatles wanted every possibility on the table in terms of how the songs would be rendered. Having ceased touring, they had nothing but studio time ahead of them. And they could take as much time as possible to make the sounds in their heads come to life.
True-life events inspired “She’s Leaving Home”. Paul McCartney picked up the newspaper one morning and saw an item about a teenage runaway. With John Lennon assisting, he wrote the song by imagining the inner lives of the girl and her parents and how this happy family had reached this point.
McCartney envisioned the song almost unspooling almost like a television drama. As such, he knew that he didn’t want traditional rock instrumentation. Instead of playing on the song, The Beatles would hand the instrumentation over to hired string players. But a dispute between McCartney and Martin interrupted the band’s usual chain of command.
On previous occasions when The Beatles had used orchestral instrumentation, a la “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby”, George Martin had written the scores that the instrumentalists used to play their parts. McCartney didn’t have the technical know-how to pull off such a feat, although he’d still be involved in telling Martin what he preferred out of each part.
When he decided he wanted that kind of backing on “She’s Leaving Home”, he called Martin to see if he could come to Paul’s house the next day and work up the score. But Martin already had a previous engagement to produce a session for British singer Cilla Black. McCartney pressed Martin for a bit to see if he could make it work before hanging up.
Martin assumed that McCartney would just postpone the score-writing session for a day or two until George could do it. But Maccca’s simply couldn’t wait. He found another arranger named Mike Leander, who came in and wrote the lovely instrumental score for violins, violas, double bass, cellos, and harp that would adorn the song.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia
Typically, there are a handful of event movies whose release dates and perhaps general characters and plot are known years before their release—your Marvel movies, your Avatars, your animated sequels that take years to properly produce. But it’s unusual for a group of dramas to call their shot four years in advance. That’s just what Sam Mendes and Sony did when they announced in 2024 that a quartet of Beatles biographies were in the works. Currently due out on April 7, 2028—at least two Avengers movies from now—the movies sound sort of like the cinematic equivalent of that mix CD that Ethan Hawke makes out of the band members’ solo songs in Boyhood. Individual films will assume the perspectives of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, seemingly all during the band’s whirlwind decade together, from 1960-1970. Together, they’ll add up to a comprehensive biopic without favoring one band member in particular.
This could be an innovative and egalitarian approach to chronicling a seemingly impossible-to-define creative unit. Or, it could be the natural endpoint of the legal maneuvering that so obviously informs the final cut of so many musician-approved biopics, where narrative villains seem to be designated by committee. (Maybe that was the real reason Bohemian Rhapsody won that Best Editing Oscar: It felt like it must have had at least half a dozen interested parties and their lawyers in the editing room.) Regardless, having this insta-quadrilogy playing in theaters all-together-now will make this project unprecedented; as such, Beatles fans and movie people alike have been following various developments with great interest. The films are currently shooting in the U.K., with production expected to last for much of 2026. Here’s what we know about the cast and crew so far.
John Lennon was just 40 years old when he was shot and killed outside his New York apartment building. If the late 20th century had been as drunk on officially sanctioned musician biopics as the early 21st, we would have had a Yoko Ono-produced career-spanning Lennon movie by 1985 at the latest. That never happened, though Lennon has been played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the pretty decent early-years biopic Nowhere Boy; Paul Rudd, in the biopic spoof Walk Hard; and, in an alt-universe version, an oblique Robert Carlyle in Danny Boyle’s Yesterday.
Source: gq.com/Jesse Hassenger
