Beatles News
It has to do with prank calls.
Way before they ever thought of forming a band called The Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney all knew each other in freaking high school. And, during this time McCartney has just revealed why he and Lennon didn’t write down or record their earliest songs. When presented with an opportunity to use recording equipment, the pair apparently decided to create material for prank call instead.“We borrowed one once, and put a few songs on it,” McCartney told Jarvis Cocker in a Facebook Live interview on Wednesday when asked how he and John Lennon remembered their early songs. McCartney explained that recording equipment was expensive, and when they used a borrowed huge tape recording machine, they didn’t really spend much time putting their music on it.
Source: By Ryan Britt/fatherly.com
Sir Paul McCartney was almost known by a different name, he has revealed as he visited his old school.
The Beatles singer told a Q and A session with students at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (Lipa) on Wednesday he had considered a stage name of Paul Ramon in an effort to appear more glamorous and joked he might return to it.
The star, who also announced he would play a secret gig somewhere in Liverpool on Thursday, said while the band was on tour with singer Jonny Gentle in Scotland he began introducing himself to girls with the alternative name, while band mate George Harrison would introduce himself as Carl Harrison and John Lennon would call himself Long John Silver.
He said: "We did think we had to be more glamorous."
Source: belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Paul McCartney has returned to the famous Liverpool club credited with being the birthplace of the Beatles.
The 76-year-old played an exclusive performance Thursday at the Cavern Club — the cellar bar where the Fab Four played in their early years.
Some 270 fans packed into a sweltering room to watch McCartney after lining up for free tickets at the Echo Arena box office after the gig was announced.
“Liverpool. Cavern,” McCartney said as he opened the show. “Those are words that go together well.”
McCartney played the guitar and the keyboard in a performance which lasted almost two hours. He played Beatles classics including “Love Me Do,” ″I Saw Her Standing There” and “Get Back,” as well as songs from his new album “Egypt Station.”
The Beatle dropped a hint about the gig during an appearance on Wednesday at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. Word spread, and fans gathered outside the club before running to the arena to seek tickets.
Source: apnews.com
The Beatles icon shared his thoughts on formal music education, new music and how the toilet is a good place to write music...
Paul McCartney took part in a Q&A with Jarvis Cocker today at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), a school he founded in 1996.
Offering a “new approach to performing arts training” LIPA offers arts training that is both different and out of the ordinary – a bit like McCartney’s own music training which had little formality.
In his chat today, McCartney shared his wisdom on why old school recording techniques are still the best, why musicians should return to making “concept albums” and why, crucially, the bathroom is the best place to write your music.
Here is, the wisdom of Macca…
Source: Elizabeth Aubrey /nme.com
If the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” was the first pop song to make artful use of feedback, their next #1 holds its own historical production distinction. “Eight Days A Week” is the first song to open with a fade-in. Spending hours recording the song over and over, the band tried to figure out how to open it up. They settled on that sound: acoustic and electric guitars getting louder and louder, like the sound of a train approaching. They’re playing a riff together, one that sounds a bit like the one Rod Stewart would use on “Maggie May” years later, one that they abandoned as soon as the song kicks in. And maybe it’s too exciting, since the rest of the song never quite measures up.
Source: Tom Breihan/stereogum.com
In 1968, The Beatles got in a yellow submarine and sailed away to the sea of green – on screen at least – in an animated caper designed to fulfil their three-picture contract for United Artists, without much effort on their part.
It could have sunk without a trace, a cinematic curio of the flower power age. Yet Yellow Submarine has become an enduring cult classic. The yellow sub can be found on all sorts of merchandise, from socks and tea infusers to Lego sets and Monopoly boards. Rumour has it, it’s even one of the Queen’s favourite films.
It may boast almost absurdly of-its-era psychedelic visuals and a tripped-out narrative, but its appeal isn’t as the stoner’s background movie of choice: Yellow Submarine has also become a children's favourite. “That film works for every generation,” George Harrison himself decreed.
Source: Holly Williams/bbc.com
As part of a well-choreographed promotional campaign for his upcoming studio album, Egypt Station, and accompanying “Freshen Up” tour, Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool today (July 25) for an interview at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. The wide-ranging “Casual Conversation” (in Macca speak), streamed live via Facebook, covered his schooldays there when he would occasionally be caned by a tormenting headmaster known as “the Baz,” sharing pranks and collaborating on songs with John Lennon, musicians he admired (notably Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra) and, of course, his new album.
Earlier this week, McCartney reenacted the Beatles famous walk across Abbey Road and followed it by playing a surprise concert at London’s Abbey Road Studios. He’s said he plans to do several club dates this year and revealed to the crowd assembled at LIPA’s auditorium that there would be another surprise concert in Liverpool the next evening, which turned out to be at the Cavern Club.
Source: Best Classic Bands Staff/bestclassicbands.com
Yoko Ono has announced the impending release of a new album, Warzone, that finds her revisiting and re-imagining tracks she recorded from 1970 to 2009, with the addition of one cover song — a new take on her husband John Lennon’s iconic “Imagine.”
Warzone will be released Oct. 19. The 85-year-old Ono announced no plans to tour or otherwise promote the album.
The album's title track is a new version of the opening song from Ono’s 1996 album, Rising. You can listen to it below.
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The inclusion of “Imagine” on Warzone comes at an appropriate time. Ono made headlines last year when the National Music Publishers Association awarded her a co-writing credit, more than 45 years later, on “Imagine,” as part of the association’s Centennial Song Award.
The NMPA made the decision after coming across an interview with Lennon in 1980, in which he said he took the concept and lyric for “Imagine” from Ono’s book Grapefruit, and that credit for the song should thus be shared between him and his wife.
“Those days, I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution,” Lennon said in the interview.
Source: wpdh.com
By our calculations, the Beatles recorded 227 songs that were officially released over the years, not including BBC or live tracks.
Still, things get a little complicated in our list of All 227 Beatles Songs Ranked Worst to Best. We've included a handful of demo-like tracks featured on the Anthology collections that were originally intended as group songs but never fully recorded by the band at a time when the four Beatles – George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr – were working independently from one another, anyway. We also included the two newly assembled songs found on the first two Anthologys that the surviving Beatles based around a pair of Lennon demos.
Source: ultimateclassicrock.com
When the Beatles played Comiskey Park on Chicago’s South Side in the summer of 1965, Carol Tyler was just an awestruck kid. At 13, the now-established painter and award-winning cartoonist’s relationship with the Fab Four was uncomplicated: She was one of more than 70 million television viewers who watched the British act’s life-affirming performance on The Ed Sullivan Show a year earlier. From there, she morphed from reasonable Catholic school student to starry-eyed, madras-clad Beatles devotee who hoarded 45s, led a fan club chapter, and perfected a British accent. When the St. Bede nuns confiscated her fan magazines, Tyler amassed more, pasting up photos in her bedroom until a curated shrine to the band watched over her as she slept. The Beatles were her everything.
Source: hyperallergic.com
