Beatles News

Get ready for some new music from Paul McCartney. “I'm making a new album, which is great fun. I'm in the middle of that,” McCartney said during an interview with BBC Radio 6's Matt Everitt on Saturday (March 25). The new set is being produced by Greg Kurstin. “I'm working with a producer who I first worked with two years ago on a thing, a piece of music I'm doing for an animated film,” McCartney said. “And since then he went on to work with Beck and got best album of the year,” he continued. “Then he went on to work with Adele. He just got song of the year, record of the year with Adele. And just got producer of the year. So my only worry is people are going to go, 'Uhhhhh, there's Paul going with the flavor of the month.’ You know, I suppose you always think the worst of it. But he's a great guy. Greg is musical and he's great to work with.”

It wasn’t easy being John Lennon’s friend, and Yoko didn’t make things any easier. “If anyone was doing the hanging on, it was John. He hung on to me, always had done. He always made me feel special, made it clear he was desperate for my company, especially when he was depressed and fed up, which he was for many years. He used to say to me: ’I don’t want to be a Beatle any more, stuck in a bag marked Beatle. I want to open the bag and let the Beatles out. I want to be myself.’” – Pete Shotton (as told to Hunter Davies) As anyone who’s ever tried it will tell you, it’s hard to be a friend. However close or long term a friendship, there are always moments when a friendship is tested by actions or circumstances that make or break the friendship. In many, if not most, cases friendships fail these tests. Those few that survive (one hesitates to use the word pass, as friendships are acts of endurance rather than one-off events like tests) can reach a level of intimacy and trust that provide the persons involved with comfort on the long, hard road of life.

Sir Paul McCartney has revealed that he and John Lennon wrote their best tracks while sitting ‘opposite each other on twin beds’. The Beatles star recalled moments where the two of them would ‘spin off each other’ as they came up with new melodies. Asked about his experience of writing music, the 74-year-old, who formed the Beatles in 1960 with Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, said: ‘There’s a million ways to write, but the way I always used to write was with John and it would be across from each other, either in a hotel bedroom on the twin beds, with an acoustic guitar and we’re just looking at each other. ‘He’d make up something, I’d make up something and we’d just spin off each other. ‘It’s always my big memory, is seeing John there, him being right-handed, me being left-handed, it felt to me like I was looking in a mirror.’

Yes, we know that The Beatles are great. Yes, they are unarguably the most import band in musical history, achieved more in their brief period together as any band have before or since, and released a shed load of songs that are now stitched firmly into our cultural heritage. Yes, John Lennon is one of the UK’s true icons, Paul McCartney is the most beloved and revered songwriter of our time, George Harrison is an underrated genius and Ringo – erm- narrated Thomas the Tank Engine.

Tributes have been paid to Pete Shotton, the best friend of John Lennon, who has died aged 75. It is thought he died from a heart attack at his home in Knutsford, Cheshire and funeral arrangements are currently being made. Pete attended Dovedale Primary School and Quarry Bank High School alongside the future Beatle, and he later joined John – as a washboard player – in The Quarrymen. At school the inseparable friends came to be known as “Shennon and Lotton” or “Lotton and Shennon.”

It was a place where John Lennon was to bring his own children to share his love of long summers in the Highlands. The ex-Beatle was to be a regular visitor to Durness in Sutherland during his younger years after his dear Aunt Mater remarried a dentist called Bert who owned a home that overlooked Sango Bay. John, who travelled north with his cousin Stanley Parks, who lived in Edinburgh and later in Largs, would head to the coast for weeks on end, often being dragged into helping his uncle fix up the house. But fishing, walking and shooting were the norm, Parks later recalled, with a young Lennon heading up into the hills on his own. The musician has also been remembered for his high jinks in the Highlands, with the singer tying seaweed to shop doors to stop workers from leaving.

It was one of the most important days in pop history and in case you weren’t there it’s being recreated 60 years on. When St Peter’s Church in Woolton hosted a fete on the afternoon of July 6, 1957, the decision to have local bands performing for the amusement of the crowds led to a meeting which changed the direction of music in this country. This was the day when a young Paul McCartney was introduced to a 16-year-old John Lennon , who was there with his group The Quarrymen. To mark the diamond jubilee of the friendship which led to The Beatles being formed just a few years later, the fete is being staged again for a 21st Century crowd.

It was 50 years ago today — almost — that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. The English city of Liverpool is getting set to celebrate the half-centenary of “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” one of the most influential albums by local heroes The Beatles. The city announced Wednesday that it has commissioned 13 artists to create works based on the album's 13 tracks. They include choreographer Mark Morris' dance tribute to the title song, cabaret artist Meow Meow's “outlandish procession” based on “Lovely Rita” and a mural by U.S. artist Judy Chicago inspired by “Fixing a Hole.” There will also be a singalong by 64 choirs of the jaunty “When I'm Sixty-Four.”

By the late-1980s, Paul McCartney may have been the only artist on the planet uninterested in sounding like the Beatles. But then his new collaborator, fellow British superstar Elvis Costello, reunited him with an old friend: his iconic violin-shaped Hofner bass. The instrument had last seen action during the band’s final live performance on the roof of their London offices almost two decades before, and a faded setlist from their last tour remained affixed to the side with yellowed scotch tape. “He was a big Beatles fan and said, ‘Hey, do you still use your Hofner?’” McCartney tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I had semi-retired it. But he said I should get it out, and I rediscovered it.”

Saturday’s 2017 San Diego Beatles Fair comes 53 years and 45 days after The Beatles first performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” An audience of 73 million tuned in to watch that telecast on Feb. 9, 1964. The impact of the four-man band from Liverpool was profound for several generations of musicians and fans alike. How profound? These quotes from various Union-Tribune interviews help tell the story. “That one performance changed my life," Billy Joel recalled. “I was like every kid in America: I sat there, mesmerized, and it was life-changing,” said former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.