Beatles News
PAUL McCARTNEY HELPS MOJO celebrate 50 years of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with an exclusive interview in the magazine that hits UK shops on Tuesday, April 25. He recalls the circumstances surrounding the group’s most groundbreaking album and gives his verdict on the new stereo mix designed to add legs to one of popular music’s key benchmarks.
But as McCartney reminds MOJO, before Sgt. Pepper became an icon, there was a period of critical bemusement. How dare Beatles band go all weird?
“We were always being told, ‘You’re gonna lose all your fans with this one.’” McCartney tells MOJO. “And we’d say, ‘Well, we’ll lose some but we’ll gain some.’ We’ve gotta advance.”
In 1967 The Beatles ran the gauntlet of a media gripped in a moral panic over the younger generation’s embrace of drugs, and others who regarded Pepper’s stylistic smorgasbord and hints of thematic coherence as evincing ideas above the group’s station. The Lovable Moptops stereotype died hard.
“Sgt. Pepper did actually get a terrible review in the New York Times,” recalls McCartney. “The critic [Richard Goldstein] said he hated it, thought it was a terrible mess, and then he was on the streets all week and heard the talk, heard what people were saying, and he took it back [in a subsequent Village Voice piece], recanted after a week: ‘Er… maybe it’s not so bad.’ But we were used to that. She Loves You was ‘banal’. But if we liked it and thought it was cool, we would go for it.
By: Mojo Staff
Source: Mojo
Part of what established The Beatles as the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time was the prolific nature of their early work.
When “Beatles for Sale” released on Dec. 4, 1964, it became the Fab Four’s fourth album in less than two years’ time. And it came out only 21 weeks after the band’s third album, “A Hard Day’s Night.”
Some might view “Beatles For Sale” as a placeholder between “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!,” both of which were attached to eponymous films. And while “A Hard Day’s Night” featured all original Lennon/McCartney compositions, only eight of the 14 tracks on “Beatles For Sale” were written by the band — a track listing similar to their first two albums, “Please Please Me” and “With The Beatles.”
Like other early Beatles albums, “Beatles For Sale” did not appear in the United States as an album until 1987 when the band’s catalogue was standardized for CD release. However, eight of its tracks appeared on the U.S. album “Beatles 65” and others were later released on “Beatles VI.”
The mood here is a bit somber. The lads were in the midst of an exhaustive schedule that included writing, recording, touring and filming. Even the cover photo, captured at Hyde Park, appears bleak. And John Lennon’s own songwriting had become darker, from the jilted lover of “No Reply” to the sad-sack songs “I’m A Loser” and “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party.”
By: Brian Passey
Source: The Spectrum
Julian Lennon is thinking about putting his life story down on paper.
During an interview with The Huffington Post at Build Series, the musical artist and environmental activist said he’s interested in writing a memoir because, after all, “Who knows how long we’ve got?” He added with a smile, “I am hopeful, by the way.”
Lennon, 54, admits that he doesn’t have the best memory, so he’d have to rely on others to fill in the blanks of his life.
“I’d like to get around to that because there are so many memories that a lot of my friends or colleagues that I work with have that I don’t recall because of the time and the place and because of where my focus was as opposed to theirs,” he said. “Even hearing the stories myself that my friends have told me and I’m going, ‘Really? I did that? OK, right.’ So, I’m just as curious, to be honest.”
Some of those fuzzy memories date back to when he was a child, growing up as the son of John Lennon.
“He walked out the door when I was about 3 or 4 years old and we only saw each other a few times,” Julian said of his father.
When asked what kind of impact his dad had on him, Julian said, “As a father, not so much. We tried to make that up toward the end. But musically and as an artist — him along with the rest of the boys [the Beatles] — there’s probably nobody better. So they’ve always been an influence.”
One thing his late father said, though, has stuck with Julian.
By: Lauren Moraski
Source: The Huffington Post
Scots author Davies, 81, reflects fondly on his first experimentation with “drugs” in his new book The Co-Op’s Got Bananas! — his memoir of growing up in the 50s and 60s.
He says: “This one day Ringo gave me a ‘reefer’ to try in the 60s. I don’t smoke and I’d never taken any drugs my whole life, but I took it home to my wife.
“Well, we closed the curtains, took the phone off the hook and puffed away for half-an-hour, but felt no different and worked for the whole evening.
“The next time I saw Ringo I said, ‘I didn’t think much of your reefer’. That’s when he told me it was just cabbage leaves.”
Davies, who was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, was given permission to pen his biography of The Beatles as they recorded the iconic Sgt Pepper’s album.
Davies says: “I lived with them for 18 months and I was in Abbey Road during the whole making of Sgt Pepper’s.
“You know the famous photograph on Sgt Pepper? I was there in the studio at the time when it was being shot and they were going to have Hitler and they were going to have Jesus — but at the last minute people said it might be bad taste.”
By: Lisa Boyle
Source: The Scottish Sun
Since we’re talking Record Store Day this week, I thought I’d rave about two new, high-end Beatles-related gems that emerged recently, perfect for digging up this Saturday. They'll keep you more than a little occupied while you wait for the 50th anniversary reissue of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," due out May 26.
In honor of the late George Harrison’s birthday in February, an extended edition of his book, "I Me Mine," was published in an absolutely stunning package.
First produced by Genesis Publications in 1980, "I Me Mine" was packed full of photos, reminiscences and hand-written song lyric sheets, reminding us that for all his serious spiritual side, George never stopped being the fun-loving Liverpool kid with a razor wit.
This new hardcover "extended" version includes another 59 handwritten lyrics and more content that will thrill Harrison fans.
It makes the perfect accompaniment to the sprawling box set that arrived at the same time, collecting all of Harrison’s 13 solo outings on vinyl. "George Harrison - The Vinyl Collection" also adds 12" picture discs of "When We Was Fab" and "Got My Mind Set On You."
By: Bobby Tanzilo
Source: On Milwaukee
In her screenplay "Revolver," Kate Trefry captures an extraordinary day in the life of Anchorage.
"It's based on my mom and her friends' experience when the Beatles landed in Anchorage in 1966," said Trefry, 30, who is from Anchorage. "My mom was 13, so my grandma locked her in the house like a lot of moms did. But a few of her friends escaped and went to the hotel where the Beatles were staying and actually got to the floor where their room was, but didn't see them."
The script is getting some industry buzz, and later this month, stars including Olivia Wilde and "Saturday Night Live" standout Beck Bennett will participate in a live table reading of "Revolver" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
"We're inviting financiers and producers and a lot of people that we hope want to invest or be involved in some way," said Trefry, who lives in Los Angeles.
"Revolver" also earned a spot on the 2016 Black List, a compilation of industry executives' favorite unproduced screenplays of the year. Trefry's husband, also an Alaska-born screenwriter, has a script on the list as well.
Trefry's career is getting better all the time.
Right now, she is working on the second season of "Stranger Things," an eerie Netflix hit set in the 1980s and starring Winona Ryder. Trefry was on the show's set when she spoke to Alaska Dispatch News.
Pete Paphides goes to Abbey Road to listen to the new anniversary edition of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and marvels at the charge of the "psychedelic light brigade" that is hearing the tweaked versions of songs.
I'd heard that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the best album of all time, so when I happened upon a picture disc, displayed behind the counter at Birmingham record shop – a snip at £2.99! – it was a no-brainer. This was 1983. I was 13. My pocket money was £5 a week. Every penny went on records, so the fact that I still had £2.01 change from the best album of all time felt like an absolute triumph. Plus! Picture disc! It would take years for me to realise that the version of Sgt Pepper I bought that day is almost certainly the most substandard one in existence. Showing a picture disc to a committed audiophile is an act comparable to showing a shower head to a cat or a picture of Les Dennis a picture of Amanda Holden. Even worse, the version of Sgt Pepperavailable to record buyers in the early 80s was the stereo one, famously mixed in less than an hour without the band even present. It was the mono one that the band wanted to get right: the one which matched the hardware that most people would use to listen to it.
But I didn't know any of that in 1983. Because Sgt Pepper was the best album of all time, I knew I needed to listen reverently, so I waited until the house was empty and then, in the lull between Bruce Forsyth's Play Your Cards Right and Juliet Bravo, I took the record out of its bag, placed it on the stereo in the posh room that no-one ever used, plugged in my headphones and reallyconcentrated. I didn't give myself the option of not liking it because cleverer people than me had already decided that it was the best album of all time, but I was expecting this record to transform me, to push me a significant distance in the direction of adulthood.
By: Pete Paphides
Source: The Quietus
Unlike John Lennon, the chronic oversharer avant la lettre, Paul McCartney has always been guarded about his interior life, rarely using his songs to deliver the gossip about what it’s like being Paul McCartney. For McCartney, the entertainer’s imperative is to entertain, not broadcast his angst. Moreover, he seems to find it necessary to guard, to fence off, his actual self, forever presenting himself to the world as relentlessly afflicted by goofy joy. In the immortal phraseology of a now-defunct music magazine, he is Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft. Yet on his 1989 album Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney showed, in the track “Don’t Be Careless Love,” a tormented side. The speaker, noting “the midnight lamp” burning down, resolves to stay up until his love returns home.
He continues:In my dream you’re running nowhere Every step you’ve taken turns to glue Walking down a spiral staircase Falling through, falling through. Later the singer worries about his companion being “chopped into little pieces / by some thugs.” It might be the most haunted, introspective song McCartney has ever written. For the man with everything, only one thing really mattered: Linda, his wife from 1969 until her death in 1998. McCartney used to say that all the love songs he wrote during their relationship were about her, and in this fragile yet sweeping spiritual he told us everything about what she meant to him.
Fine as it is, though, “Don’t Be Careless Love” isn’t even one of the five best songs on the masterly Flowers in the Dirt, one of the handful of great albums McCartney did after the 1970s (along with 1982’s Tug of War, 1997’s Flaming Pie, and 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard). Flowers has just been rereleased in various formats, including a sumptuous boxed set containing the original, remastered album plus unreleased demos (some of them collaborations with Elvis Costello), gorgeous artwork, and charming facsimiles of handwritten letters to McCartney, including one from his new songwriting partner. “Greetings from dirty old Dublin,” Costello wrote in an undated note reprinted on pink paper. “We are in our last couple weeks here and the place is going upside down with U2 fever.”
By: Kyle Smith
Source: National Review
Of all the art that the Beatles brought into the world, their cinematic misadventures are probably less fondly remembered than their music. But in addition to 12 studio albums, 13 EPs, and 22 singles, the Fab Four also released five films in their comparatively few years together. These efforts comprised two feature films, a TV movie, a cartoon, and a documentary, all of admittedly inconsistent quality. Looking back now, these films provide a fascinating insight into the phenomenon of Beatlemania.
For Beatles fanatics such as myself, the music alone makes them a joy to watch and re-watch, but as pieces of cinema in their own right there’s plenty to still be enjoyed and appreciated. Their influence on modern culture can be felt from music videos to animated films - perhaps not quite as iconic or ubiquitous as the band’s songwriting, but nonetheless essential in the story of British cinema.
The first Beatles film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, was conceived by United Artists as a cheap cash in on The Beatles’ exploding popularity, and was shot in black-and-white for a limited budget of £500,000. Thanks to director Richard Lester, however, it’s probably the band’s most artistically successful live-action film. These days, Lester is often derided as the man who ruined Superman II, but it’s difficult to fault his work in elevating A Hard Day’s Night into something cinematically spellbinding.
The film ostensibly portrays a day in the life of the world’s four most famous musicians, with Steptoe And Son’s Wilfrid Brambell playing Paul McCartney’s mischievous grandfather. It has a realist, almost faux-documentary style that’s clearly rooted in the British New Wave, but whenever the music kicks in the film veers into hyper-real montage sequences. As the four lads play cards on a train, the first bars of I should Have Known Better drift onto the soundtrack and suddenly their instruments are in their hands, playing along to the beat. These interludes are beautifully shot and edited in a way that captures the energy of the Beatles’ music - it was a new and dynamic style of film-making which crystallised the carefree spirit of sixties Britain.
By: Mark Allison
Source: Den of Geek
Ringo Starr is a fan of Justin Bieber.
The 76-year-old music icon - who is best known for being the drummer in the Beatles - has admitted to liking the 'Sorry' hitmaker, but Ringo doesn't think Justin is as big as his band once were.
During a conversation with a reporter, Ringo was asked: "If the Beatles and Justin Bieber were touring together in their prime, who would open?"
And Ringo - who appeared in the legendary group alongside Sir Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison - had little hesitation in replying: "Justin."
Then, the reporter said: "Beatles all the way, right?"
To which Ringo nodded and added: "All the way, brother."
Despite this, Ringo admitted to being a fan of Justin, whose most-recent album 'Purpose' earned him widespread critical acclaim and commercial success.
Ringo told TMZ: "But we love Justin. That's the second question I'm not going to answer."
Meanwhile, Ringo previously revealed the crucial role his former bandmate Sir Paul played in him being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 2015.
The iconic band entered the Hall of Fame back in 1988, but Ringo was the last member of the group to be inducted as a solo artist - and he had his long-time friend Sir Paul to thank for the recognition.
He explained: "[Paul] talked to somebody and they're going to put me in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he's going to give me away like I'm the bride and I will accept."
Source: Brampton Guardian
