Beatles News

After wowing audiences at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and King’s Head Theatre, London in 2015, where one of the audience was Neil Aspinall’s widow Suzi, Davide Verazzini’s charming play A Life With The Beatles is to be staged at various venues as part of a 15-performance Scotland-wide tour in February and March, including The Catstrand in New Galloway on February 21. Told from the unique perspective of Neil Aspinall, the only one who was always by their side and who knew everyone and everything. Yet where thousands of books have been written by people who never even met The Beatles, Neil’s steadfast loyalty meant he took his secrets to his grave when he died in 2008.

Ahead of Paul McCartney's Flowers in the Dirt reissue, the rollicking "Twenty Fine Fingers," an unreleased demo featuring McCartney singing alongside Elvis Costello, has been unveiled. "Twenty Fine Fingers," often bootlegged but never officially released, is presented twice on the Flowers in the Dirt reissue. The version above is the "original" take on the track, while the song's 1988 demo is also included among a batch of 18 demo recordings featuring Costello unearthed for the reissue. The massive Flowers in the Dirt deluxe box set, featuring three discs, a DVD and a 112-page hardcover book, is due out March 24th. The reissue will also be available in other formats. McCartney recruited Costello to collaborate on the 1989 album, with Costello's co-written "My Brave Face," "Don't Be Careless Love," "That Day Is Done" and "You Want Her Too" making the cut. Other demoed tracks like "The Lovers That Never Were," "So Like Candy" and "Playboy to a Man" ended up on other albums by both artists, while "Twenty Fine Fingers" and "Tommy's Coming Home" remained unreleased.

The best thing people can hope for, in regards to new music each year, is that The Arctic Monkeys get in the studio, next big thing emerges, or Kanye West postpones his next album. However, could this year see the release of material from the likes of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones? Intrigued? Let us explain. For this article, we’ve purposely focused on The Fab Four, or we’d be waffling all day, but the same theory applies to any band of that era. Chances are you don’t know much about copyright law. It’s pretty complicated and tedious. Heck, not even the artists know the rules, cue Paul McCartney suing Sony for clarification after Duran Duran’s interpretation of the laws was “rejected.”

Almost everyone knows that The Beatles are one of the most acclaimed bands in rock and roll history because their music has the hypnotic qualities that make teenage girls scream and artists today and yesterday cite them as one of their influences. While many of us don’t have the opportunity to see the two surviving Beatles Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr live in concert these days, the closest thing to watching an actual Beatles concert will be In My Life – A Musical Theatre Tribute to the Beatles at The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts - Zilkha Hall at 7:30 pm. The Houston show is part of a 125 city tour of the U.S., Canada and Australia. You mean just another tribute band? No, because not all tribute bands are alike.

We’re waiting now for word from Apple Records and the Beatles. The most important rock album of all time, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” turns 50 on June 1st this year. So far word has been scarce, but the thinking is that there will some kind of anniversary edition and more than just a nod to an album that literally changed everything in popular music. In the meantime, we’ve got the 51st anniversary of “Revolver,” the album that preceded “Sgt. Pepper” and was up until then the greatest rock or pop album of all time. Klaus Voorman, bass player and artist, a Renaissance man, designed the cover of “Revolver.” So now he’s issuing “Revolver 50: Grammy Edition,” on March 2nd through Genesis Publications.

It was 20 years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play and it will be 50 years ago this year that the Beatles first recorded their epic concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Among the many classics on the album, one of the most intriguing and haunting is the dreamy, psychedelic Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite, which promises a "production second to none" on trampolines, with "somersets through hoops and garters and hogsheads of REAL FIRE" and with dancing by a colourful cast of characters, including the talented Mr Kite, the Hendersons and Henry the waltzing horse. The story behind the song is even more curious and astonishing. On 31 January that year, John Lennon walked into a Sevenoaks antique shop where a poster advertising a February 1843 benefit for Mr Kite — "celebrated somerset thrower, wire dancers, vaulter, rider etc etc", pictured balancing on his head on a 12-foot-tall pole, playing a trumpet, of course — by Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal caught his eye.

The Beatles blasted the London financial district for their last lunchtime concert. The Beatles ended their concert history the way it began. Before the four Beatles were fab, there were five of them and they played to swinging teens during their midday breaks at the famous Cavern Club and the Casbah, an obscure performance space painted in day-glo colors by art students Stuart Sutcliff and John Lennon, in Liverpool. This was before and after the band pulled eight hour live shifts in Hamburg, Germany.

From Barbie and the Care Bears to The Beatles! It’s been an incredible journey for comic book novelist Jason Quinn. Jason, 52, from Crosby, is the author of a Fab Four book with a difference – a graphic novel called The Beatles: All Our Yesterdays . Now living in Tunbridge Wells and the editor of the hit BBC magazine Doctor Who Adventures, Jason’s working life has been fascinating to say the least. And explaining how it all began, he says: “I grew up reading Marvel comics – I think I learned to read with Spider-Man! Later, my brother Tim was working for Marvel UK – and it’s who you know so he got me in.

We seem to be living in what the Chinese curse calls “interesting times.” 2016 was one of the most turbulent years in modern American political history, and the turmoil attendant to the presidential election felt exacerbated by the deaths of some of popular music’s most important figures. The list still seems breathtaking: inimitable talents David Bowie, Prince, and George Michael; Eagles founder Glen Frey; Jefferson Airplane founder Paul Kantner; both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of ELP; songwriter extraordinaire Leonard Cohen; funk genius Maurice White…. I’ll stop here out of a kind of emotional fatigue. For one like me, it was at the least a trying year, one which left me feeling that I was losing my country to people possessed by greed and at the same time losing so many musicians whose work provided me with joy, solace, and inspiration. Yes, anyone and everyone have to die. Like many others, I suspect, I have questioned why it had to be these anyones and everyones. (My apologies to both you and ee cummings for the digression.)

Before they took the world by storm, the Beatles were influenced by Buddy Holly and the Crickets (where do you think their name came from?), Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers and more. And while the Beatles would not have existed in the form they did without taking bits and pieces from those who came before them, they did an incredible amount of things no musicians before them ever did.