Beatles News

Despite every attempt to marginalize and discredit him, John Lennon still matters and always will. ” I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.” – John Lennon Mark Twain once described his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as “A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.” Twain’s quote sums up the complex personality of our newest Scrogue, John Lennon – a sound heart often in collision with a deformed conscience.

"'A Day in the Life' – that was something," John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1968, setting up a classic bit of understatement. "I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me." The Beatles' catalog brims with legendary tracks, but the epic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band finale has long towered above the rest, a fact made official in 2011 when Rolling Stone named it as the group's single finest song. Studio recordings for "A Day in the Life" commenced 50 years ago, on January 19th, 1967. Here we look at 10 things you might not have known about the Fab Four's most glorious achievement.

We were greedy for our fix of non-stop beat music. The club didn’t look like much from the outside. After dodging the lorries deliver­ing fruit to the Fruit Exchange opposite and the lunchtime shoppers, we queued to get in through a small door in the wall of a towering brick warehouse at 10 Mathew Street. Once inside we descended a steep flight of well-worn stone steps to a small landing, where a few more steps led to a man seated at a small wooden table taking the entrance fees. I paid an extra shilling to become a member of the Cavern Club entitling me to an admission discount at each visit — which in my case was most days. The heat and noise would send your senses reeling as you stepped through those cellar arches. It was enthralling and unbearably hot.

The big legal story of the last ten days or so is Paul McCartney’s announcement of his intentions to sue Sony/ATV (the music publishing division of Sony) in order to reacquire the rights to the songs he wrote and co-wrote during the first half of the Beatles’ career. Unless you’re a hardcore Beatles fan, you might not have known that Paul doesn’t receive any publishing royalties from songs like “Yesterday.” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “She Loves You.” Those were all part of the Northern Songs catalogue that slipped away from the Beatles in 1969 as a result of the debacle known as Apple Corps.

The photos feature in an exhibition taking place at Proud galleries in Chelsea in March. Photographer David Magnus bore witness to some of the band’s greatest moments and the set of previously unseen photographs, which were taken at the world famous EMI Studio 1 in Abbey Road, offer a fascinating and candid insight into The Beatles during a historic time. In 1963, at the age of 19, David Magnus was invited to photograph the band, who were relatively unknown at the time, during a concert at Stowe School.

And speaking of the Beatles (carrying over from last week), it may sound crazy but this column is about a guitar chord. That’s right — just one chord, so if you’re not into the guitar or Beatles music or whatever, so sorry. And yet it might help that this is one of the most famous chords in popular music history, a beautifully sustained and shimmering blast from George Harrison’s Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string guitar, a singularly bold, riveting and spine-tingling opening statement. The chord has entered music immortality and is instantly recognizable to almost everybody of that generation.

The Beatles may have claimed all you need is love but fans wanting to own an iconic bit of the band's kit which has just gone on sale will need more than just love. The drum kit used for the recording of the band's first US number one has been put up for auction with bidding beginning at $75,000 (£60,598). The kit was used by Andy White, often known as the 'Fifth Beatle', on the recording of Love Me Do, which became the band's first number one in the US.

“Now the Time Has Come,” a song featuring Ringo Starr that debuted last September for the annual International Day of Peace, is being made available as a free download for the first time. “Now the Time Has Come” shines a light on peace initiatives and drops this Friday (Jan. 20), the date of the inauguration of president Donald Trump. Its lyrics include the line: “Now the time has come/Time has come for everyone/To lay down all your guns/And let the light of love shine on and on.” The song was created by Starr and producer Bruce Sugar and two versions are available to stream online, one by Ringo and friends Richard Page, Colin Hay and Billy Valentine, and another with Ringo and friends and Latin artist Fonseca.

It could become one of the most important legal battles in music - Sir Paul McCartney is suing Sony over control of The Beatles' back catalogue. The star has gone to a US court, seeking to regain the publishing rights to 267 of the band's classic songs. He's been trying to get them back since the 1980s, when Michael Jackson famously out-bid him for the rights. Jackson's debt-ridden estate sold the songs to Sony last year, along with others including New York, New York. Sir Paul's legal case, filed in a Manhattan court on Wednesday, is over what is known as copyright termination - the right of authors to reclaim ownership of their works from music publishers after a specific length of time has passed. It was part of the US 1976 Copyright Act and, in recent years, performers like Prince, Billy Joel and Blondie have used it to regain control of their work. However, Duran Duran recently lost a similar case - when the British High Court ruled that the contracts they signed in the UK took precedence over their rights in the US.

The Quarrymen's Rod Davis remembers Woolton Church fete 60 years on. The Cavern isn’t the only 60th anniversary taking place in Liverpool this year. On July 6, it will be 60 years to the day that John Lennon was introduced to Paul McCartney at the Woolton church fete. The 16-year-old Lennon was playing at the summer event with his group The Quarrymen, a line-up of school friends from the near by Quarry Bank High School. On banjo was Rod Davis, whose dad took one of the few images of that day – that of the Quarrymen’s float, with Lennon and the rest of the group on board.