Beatles News

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.

Lennon and McCartney: One of the most famous songwriting partnerships in pop music history, and this year on July 6th, it will be 60 years since the two first met at a church fete in Liverpool, England, back in 1957. John Lennon was 16 Paul McCartney, 15, and since then, it's become Beatles lore that over the years they had their ups and downs. The question for fans has always been, how did these differences effect their songs? To mark the anniversary, and their relationship as creative duo, composer Dr. Alexis Kirke from Plymouth University has used an algorithm to "chart the emotional development of their friendship through their lyrics." For a new piece, Come Together: The Sonification of McCartney and Lennon, Kirke will take the data he's gathered to create a classical duet of emotionally-annotated words from 156 McCartney songs and 131 Lennon songs.

A Beatles-inspired hotel in Liverpool is up for sale. The Penny Lane Hotel, in Smithdown Place facing Penny Lane, is on the market for £950,000. The three-story Mossley Hill hotel has been decorated with a Beatles theme to reflect its famous location. All 17 bedrooms, as well as the reception and breakfast room, feature Fab Four works of art and memorabilia. From their windows, many guests can look straight out at the “shelter in the middle of a roundabout” that features in Paul McCartney’s song Penny Lane. McCartney and John Lennon would often catch buses from that bus stop, which later became Sergeant Pepper’s Bistro and is undergoing a slow renovation.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of when Beatlemania hit Sevenoaks. The legendary British band recorded promotional videos for their double A-side, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, from January 30, 1967. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr visited the deer park on three occasions in January and February that year, each time accompanied by Swedish film director Peter Goldmann and a camera unit from Don Long Productions. And Kent Live has been given access to some brilliant images of that nostalgic time.