Beatles News

WHENEVER Lady Catherine Mancham hears The Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand, she thinks of Paul McCartney — with good reason. He once held her hand in a suite at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Hotel. Back then, Lady Mancham was Catherine Olsen, a young reporter with The Sun, and she had talked her way into a private audience with the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania, just hours after they touched down in Melbourne on June 14, 1964 for a series of concerts at Festival Hall as part of their world tour. Like any great reporter, she came to work on her day off on the off chance she might get the story of the day.

In 1963, The Beatles began a festive residency of Finsbury Park. We found it was an era when all the best bands played in Seven Sisters Road. Every town or city where The Beatles played one of their early shows likes to claim the same thing: “Beatlemania started here.” There is Liverpool and Hamburg, of course. Hell, even some people in Romford claim Beatlemania started there after a couple of shows in 1963. In that case, we might as well add Finsbury Park to the list. This week 53 years ago, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr began “The Beatles Christmas Show” – their residency of Finsbury Park Astoria in Seven Sisters Road. Rick Burton, an expert on the theatre’s history, insists: “That was the start of Beatlemania. The shows were from Christmas Eve 1963 until January 11, but sold out instantly.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 9: James Woodall on celebrating the musical contribution made by the forgotten Beatle: Ringo Starr ‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best. ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.’

This wasn’t the first time we’d shared a bill with the Beatles. A few years earlier, they were our warm-up band, when we headlined the Cavern in Liverpool. We really admired them. I was the trombonist in the Mike Cotton Sound, a footnote to the 1960s music scene. On this occasion, we were their support band; we are pictured here at the press call for Another Beatles Christmas Show, a follow-up to their successful production a year earlier. The show opened on Christmas Eve and ran until 16 January, and consisted of variety performances, with sketches and comedy that seemed anachronistic even then. Produced by a friend of Brian Epstein, it was lavish, with cascading waterfalls that flooded the stage. We started the night on a revolving podium and the leads kept getting tangled up. Jimmy Savile was compere; none of us liked him. He was an awful show-off.

As has already become clear during Wonder Week, Stevie Wonder is pretty much better than all other pop musicians at all the stuff that pop musicians do. Concept albums? Stevie did ‘em the best. Funky jams and schmaltzy love songs? Yeah, he nailed ‘em both. Oh, you thought it’d be fun to dabble in drumming? Self-taught Stevie only became, like, the best drummer on Earth. And, of course, everyone covers the Beatles. Everyone. But it’s notoriously hard to cover the Fab Four, because they tended to perform definitive, unimprovable versions of their own tunes. The only exception? Stevie Wonder and his cover of “We Can Work It Out,” not only the best Beatles cover of all time but the only one that is definitively better than the Beatles’ original.

Sir Paul McCartney and wife Nancy Shevell supported his son-in-law on Monday in New York City. The 74-year-old rock legend and Nancy, 57, attended a screening of the upcoming British romantic drama This Beautiful Fantastic written and directed by Simon Aboud. Simon and Paul's daughter Mary McCartney, 47, married in June 2010. The Beatles singer and songwriter kept it casual with a white shirt under black denim jacket and black trousers for the event at Park Hyatt. Nancy went with the casual chic look in a long-sleeved white blouse with gold trim.

George, John, Paul, Ringo: they’ve all made solo albums, now. Listening to them all, all through, it’s difficult to believe that they were made by four men who once formed a band together. I hear no important points of connection. I guess this is partly because each bottled up his personal ideas during the Beatles’ latter, bad days; and now the cork is out. I think there’s another reason, too. A couple of years back, reviewing the white album, I suggested that the magnetism of the Beatles could be seen in terms of the temperament of each man corresponding with the four elements (Harrison, fire; Starr, earth; Lennon, water; McCartney, air), and also the four humours. So that, working together, they could work for any listener, whatever his nature and mood. It would follow that, separate, their temperament would clearly be very different each from the others.

IT WAS 50 years ago today ... when an 18-year-old Richard Lush was learning his craft as a sound engineer and working on the iconic Beatles album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Having started off his career mixing small sections of records such as Rubber Soul and Revolver, little did he know he was about to be become the chief sound engineer at Abbey Road Studios in London on an album, which not only came to define the 1960s, but is now arguably considered one of the greatest records of all time. Mr Lush, who has called Sydney home since the 1970s, and fellow engineer Geoff Emerick, who now resides in Los Angeles, will take part in a 50th anniversary retrospective, discussing the legendary Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album at a Q & A event in Melbourne in February. Mr Lush, who spoke exclusively to Leader, said the first song he worked on was A Day In The Life, which at the time was considered an ambitious recording.

A painting of Sir Paul McCartney by a Liverpool Beatles fan was given the thumbs up by the music legend himself. Sir Paul, pictured below, shared the colourful piece by talented Kevin Allen on his social media pages as part of his regular “Friday fan art” feature. The image – which uses bold shades of purple, yellow, blue and pink to make up the music legend’s face – has so far been liked a staggering 36,000 times on Instagram and 14,000 times on Facebook. Fans have heaped praise on Kevin’s work, with one calling it “a fantastic psychedelic painting” and another hailing his “fantastic imagination”. Kevin’s sister Maria Dillon, 56, from Aigburth, submitted the photo on Twitter as a surprise – and said she was delighted Sir Paul had picked it out of the thousands submitted every week.