Beatles News
A tribute show will honour a music icon from one of the biggest bands in history.
The George Harrison Project, a live music tribute to the Beatles' guitarist, will perform at The Muni Theatre in Colne on March 1, 2025.
The show features some of Harrison's most popular hits from his time with the Beatles, his solo career, and his stint with the Traveling Wilburys.
Alongside John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, Harrison was an integral part of the best-selling music act of all time with 600 million units sold worldwide.
After the Beatles disbanded, he formed the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty.
Harrison, who died in 2001, also enjoyed a successful solo career, releasing 12 studio albums, including Living In The Material World, Cloud Nine, Brainwashed, and the classic triple album All Things Must Pass.
The 2025 tour of the George Harrison Project aims to authentically recreate some of his best-loved hits.
The show is packed with favourite songs such as All Things Must Pass, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes The Sun, Taxman, My Sweet Lord, and many more.
Source: Tabitha Wilson/uk.news.yahoo.com
The Beatles beefed with each other quite a bit through music. It’s not entirely surprising, either. When you’ve been with the same people in a band for the better part of a decade, it only makes sense to get a little bit toxic about your grievances through song. Without further ado, let’s look at four songs that The Beatles wrote about each other!
1. “How Do You Sleep?” by John Lennon
This is probably the most famous Beatles-related diss track out there. John Lennon wrote this song as a response to a few tracks on Paul McCartney’s solo album, Ram, which Lennon believed were digs at him.
Lennon does not hold back at all with “How Do You Sleep?” Some of the lyrics go beyond tame, poetic jabs at his former bandmate. “You live with straights who tell you, you was king / Jump when your momma tell you anything / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day” is aparticularly brutal line.
2. “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” by George Harrison
When McCartney broke off from The Beatles, quite a few legal battles were fought. The first few years after The Beatles called it quits were rife with lawsuits, mostly between McCartney and Lennon. George Harrison, watching it all unfold, wrote the melancholy “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” about the depressing courtroom experiences that McCartney eventually won.
Source: Em Casalena/americansongwriter.com
It’s like the light came on, after total darkness,” is how author Joe Queenan remembers the arrival of Beatlemania in America at the dawn of 1964. He’s not alone in citing the coming of the Fab Four as the true beginning of the 1960s, of the modern era, of a transformative period driven in no small part by the music, words and actions of four young lads from Liverpool. But if you were a teenager in America when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived on Boxing Day 1963, then it’s personal. And if you caught any of the concerts on their first US tour in February 1964, or watched their performances on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, or stood outside Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel hoping for an autograph, it’s likely you’ve never forgotten their impact.
That first US tour and the special relationship between The Beatles and America are explored in depth by the new documentary Beatles ’64. “The trip was a dream come true for [them],” says the movie’s producer, Margaret Bodde. “They’d always loved American music, and now they were coming to the home of everything they’d dreamed about.”
But America was going through some issues. The nation had spent a bleak winter mourning its princelike president John F Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas that November. “JFK represented hope, youth, the future,” says the movie’s director, David Tedeschi. “A gloom had descended upon the US. One interviewee told us his girlfriend locked herself in her room for four days after the assassination.” But just as it seemed like this grief would never abate, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived, topping the charts. “From that gloom,” says Tedeschi, “there was this spark of life and optimism and joy.”
Tedeschi’s movie chronicles this cultural moment through the words of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (and, via archival footage, the late John Lennon and George Harrison) as well as interviews with Beatle heroes such as Smokey Robinson and Ron Isley and the then teenaged Beatlemaniacs like Queenan and Jamie Bernstein (daughter of composer Leonard). Much of the film originates from footage shot during the tour by Albert and David Maysles, later recognised as pioneers of the modernist documentary form via masterpieces like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, but only just beginning their careers when Granada TV commissioned them to film the 1964 documentary What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA.
Source: Stevie Chick/the-independent.com
Likely most people have seen iconic footage of the Beatles performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But how many have seen Paul McCartney during that same U.S. trip feeding seagulls off his hotel balcony?
That moment — as well as George Harrison and John Lennon goofing around by exchanging their jackets — are part of the Disney+ documentary “Beatles ’64,” an intimate look at the English band’s first trip to America that uses rare and newly restored footage. It streams Friday.
“It’s so fun to be the fly on the wall in those really intimate moments,” says Margaret Bodde, who produced alongside Martin Scorsese. “It’s just this incredible gift of time and technology to be able to see it now with the decades of time stripped away so that you really feel like you’re there.”
“Beatles ’64” leans into footage of the 14-day trip filmed by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, who left behind 11 hours of the Fab Four goofing around in New York’s Plaza hotel or traveling. It was restored by Park Road Post in New Zealand.
“It’s beautiful, although it’s black and white and it’s not widescreen,” says director David Tedeschi. “It’s like it was shot yesterday and it captures the youth of the four Beatles and the fans.”
The footage is augmented by interviews with the two surviving members of the band and people whose lives were impacted, including some of the women who as teens stood outside their hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of the Beatles.
“It was like a crazy love,” fan Vickie Brenna-Costa recalls in the documentary. “I can’t really understand it now. But then, it was natural.”
The film shows the four heartthrobs flirting and dancing at the Peppermint Lounge disco, Harrison noodling with a Woody Guthrie riff on his guitar and tells the story of Ronnie Spector sneaking the band out a hotel back exit and up to Harlem to eat barbeque.
The documentary coincides with the release of a box set of vinyl albums collecting the band’s seven U.S. albums released in ’64 and early ’65 — “Meet The Beatles!,” “The Beatles’ Second Album,” “A Hard Day’s Night” (the movie soundtrack), ”Something New,” “The Beatles’ Story,” “Beatles ’65” and “The Early Beatles.” They had been out of print on vinyl since 1995.
Source: wbrz.com
In the mid-1960s, America found itself in the grip of a public health crisis.
“The British Beatles broke out here in New York [like] an epidemic of the German measles,” announced a breathless American TV newsreader. “Unlike measles, Beatles strike teenagers almost exclusively but the symptoms are the same – fever and an itching rash that produces contortions on behalf of the victims.”
It was February 1964 and The Beatles had touched down in the States for the first time. The band’s 14-day trip kickstarted American Beatlemania and the subsequent British invasion of bands including the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five. The Fab Four’s appearance on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9 broke TV records with a staggering 73 million viewers – more than 40 per cent of the entire US population.
Hysteria swept Manhattan. Around 50,000 fans applied for the 728 places at the Broadway theatre where Ed Sullivan was recorded. The band were pursued everywhere by screaming fans, kept – with limited success – at bay by cordons of arm-linked policemen. Banners appeared saying “Ringo for President”. A national obsession had begun – an obsession that had a lasting impact on people who were there.
“It’s like the light came on,” says American writer Joe Queenan in Beatles ’64, a new Martin Scorsese-produced documentary on Disney+ about the band’s landmark first trip Stateside. It was a revelation for the band too. “This was ‘Give us your huddled masses’. This was to us the land of freedom,” Paul McCartney recalls in the documentary of his expectations of that first trip.
The Beatles appeared on two more Ed Sullivan episodes that February before heading home. That same month I Want to Hold Your Hand started a seven-week stint at number one in America, only to be knocked off by another Beatles song, She Loves You.
Source: James Hall/telegraph.co.uk
Sean Ono Lennon has shared an insight into the relationship between his parents John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
In an interview with PEOPLE Magazine, Lennon spoke about his father ahead of the box set release of ‘Mind Games’, the fourth album by the Beatle first released in 1973.
Sean, who was born in 1975, oversaw the production of the ‘Mind Games’ boxset, and he calls the era during which the album was made as “really terrifying” for both his parents.
This fraught period led to a temporary separation between John and Yoko – however, Sean disagrees with fans who call ‘Mind Games’ a breakup album.
“My mother is this giant mountain in the distance,” he explained to PEOPLE, referring to the ‘Mind Games’ album art, “and dad is this diminutive little man receding into nowhere.”
He added: “His entire life and art was infused with his relationship with my mom,” emphasizing that ‘Mind Games’ is “mostly love songs about her”.
“My dad declared to the world that ‘John and Yoko’ were one word. I think he always had his heart set on her. He was so in love with her. They had a legendary love and I think that this album is infused with that love. You can hear it.”
He also shared that ‘Mind Games’ was an album that saw the couple “stepping away from radical activism a little bit”.
“I think they felt like they didn’t want to be in that world anymore. They realized that it was not a fun road for them and so they wanted to make music that was less directly attacking the establishment and focusing more on peace and love again.”
Sean was recently nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for the ‘Mind Games’ reissue, for which Sean oversaw new “meditation” mixes.
Earlier this week, the young Lennon revealed that he started making music in order to “fill the void” left by the death of his father.
“I never played music because I was good at it,” he explained. “I lost my father and I didn’t know how to fill that void. Learning how to play his songs on guitar was a way to process the loss with an activity that made me feel connected to him.”
Source: Daniel Peters/nme.com
John Lennon was a beloved musician, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t attract a few enemies here and there. There are several artists that entered into feuds with Lennon–though he may not have been an active member in them. Find three such feuds, below.
1. Joni Mitchell
John Lennon felt that Joni Mitchell was a product of an “overeducation.” Mitchell has long been known for her visceral tracks that speak to the human condition. While that practice is what she’s made her name on, Lennon felt it was too good to be true.
“I played him something,” Mitchell once said, referencing her first time meeting Lennon. “[He said] ‘Oh, it’s all a product of over-education. You want a hit, don’t you? Put some fiddles on it!’”
That comment was enough to sour the Beatle in Mitchell’s eyes. Her reverence for him (that we can only assume she had at least a portion of before this incident) was forever sullied.
2. Elvis Presley
All of the Beatles loved Elvis Presley. Like all burgeoning rock stars of their era, they found Presley to be a deity of the genre. You’d be hard-pressed to find a rock n’ roller who wasn’t obsessed with The King in the ’50s and ’60s. Unfortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual–at least after the band became more involved with America.
Presley famously spoke with the president, offering to become a spy on his behalf. He planned to be dedicated to snuffing out whatever “Anti-American” propaganda the Fab Four were behind.
“Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit,” a member of the White House council, Egil “Bud” Krogh, once said. “He said that the Beatles came to this country, made their money and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme. The President nodded in agreement.”
Of all his bandmates, Lennon was arguably the most political. As such, we have to assume Presley had a proportionate problem with him.
3. Paul McCartney
This wasn’t always the case. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were once as close as two songwriters could be. Unfortunately tensions within the Beatles drove a wedge in their relationship. In the wake of their breakup, Lennon spent much time bashing his former bandmate–both in press and in song.
Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com
A handwritten letter that John Lennon wrote to Eric Clapton inviting him to be part of a new supergroup is to be offered at auction next month.
The eight-page letter sees Lennon express his heartfelt admiration for Clapton and his music, as he outlines his vision for a musical project that he hoped would have a “revolutionary” effect on live performances.
Dated September 29, 1971, the signed draft — which features several corrections and deletions — sees Lennon outline his plans for a “nucleus group” that would include musician and producer Klaus Voormann, drummer Jim Keltner, pianist Nicky Hopkins and producer and songwriter Phil Spector, all of whom had previously worked with the Beatles.
Lennon told Clapton he believed the prospective group, which would also be joined by his wife, Yoko Ono, would “bring back the balls in rock ‘n’ roll.”
The letter is expected to fetch up to €150,000 (around $158,000) when it goes up for auction on December 5. International Autograph Auctions Europe SL, which is holding the online sale, described it in a media statement as “one of the rarest forms of Lennon’s personal communications available.”
Lennon wrote: “You must know by now that Yoko and I rate your music and yourself very highly. You also know the music we have been making and hope to make. Anyway… after missing the Bangla-desh concert we began to feel more and more like going on the road but not the way I used to with the Beatles, night after night of torture.”
Source: Lianne Kolirin/cnn.com
The Beatles‘ George Harrison released his third studio album, the triple album All Things Must Pass, which would go on to spend seven weeks on top of the Billboard Album chart.
The record, co-produced by Phil Spector, was Harrison’s first full-length album following the breakup of The Beatles and featured guest appearances by Harrison’s Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr, as well as Eric Clapton, Billy Preston and others.
All Things Must Pass contained the #1 single “My Sweet Lord,” which made Harrison the first former member of The Beatles to score a solo #1 in the U.S. The track, which was released as a double A-side single with “Isn’t It a Pity,” also went to #1 in several other countries, including the U.K. and Australia.
A commercial success for Harrison, the record has been certified seven-times Platinum by the RIAA.
Source: Jill Lances/1430wcmy.com
Many rightly recognize All Things Must Pass as George Harrison’s solo masterpiece.
But Harrison followed it in 1973 with Living in the Material World, which details his personal and spiritual struggles. The recording differs from the dense and ambitious production of All Things Must Pass with its stripped-back and earthy performances of Harrison contemplating a higher power.
Mostly self-produced, Harrison also returned to the sitar, which he’d abandoned for years. Apart from the religious pronouncements, Harrison’s life had descended into an abyss of sex and drugs. Legal issues surrounding The Beatles and mismanaged funds raised from his Concert for Bangladesh left him in despair. So he turned his despair into yet another great work.
Though it was a commercial success upon release, Living in the Material World was quickly forgotten. And its 50th anniversary arrived last year without recognition. But Dhani and Olivia Harrison have overseen the release of a newly mixed and expanded version of the album, shining a light on an overlooked masterpiece.
Here are three classics from Harrison’s equally timeless Living in the Material World.
“Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)”
In 1971, Harrison raised awareness and money for millions of refugees fleeing East Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War with a pair of benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden. Then he took a break. During this period, the former Beatle also dedicated himself more fervently to Hinduism. “Give Me Love” lives in the same spirit as “My Sweet Lord,” and Harrison said the song just fell from his lips. “Sometimes you open your mouth, and you don’t know what you are going to say, and whatever comes out is the starting point,” he said in his 1980 autobiography I, Me, Mine.
Source: americansongwriter.com
