Beatles News
Here in the media-saturated 2010s, we get to relive the events of the momentous 1960s in an inexorable year-by-year march.
Last year, the Beatles re-invaded America. Next year, 50th-anniversary journalism will see to it that the miniskirt and Star Trek are born again. In 2017, we'll be tripping on a Summer of Love rehash.
This year, there's a lot on our plate - 1965 was a turning point in American history. As depicted in Ava DuVernay's Selma, it was the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights march to Montgomery, Ala., spurred Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act into law.
In a ceremony last year at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the Beatles’ original manager, Brian Epstein, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The honor was well deserved. Epstein’s early oversight of what many consider to be the most popular musical act of the 20th century led some to call him the fifth Beatle. Some of the strategies he used to propel the Beatles to prominence (while also probably costing them a fortune in lost potential revenue) would be ill suited to today’s world of digital streaming, music piracy and YouTube, which makes Epstein a case study in how much music management has changed since the early 1960s.
In a nondescript building tucked away on a quiet street in west London, Stella McCartney and her team are comparing the properties of a real leather shoe with the various non-leather swatches being considered for her brand’s winter 2015 shoe collection.
Women of differing ages, ethnicities and body types come in and out of the room with a constant flow of new ideas while McCartney acts as a kind of real-time editor, deciding what colours, materials and shapes feel right for the upcoming season.
An assistant is frantically taking notes to capture her feedback while snapping digital photos of the things that catch her eye.
McCartney does not use any animal products — no leather, no fur, no skins, no feathers.
When ‘Ravi Shankar: A Life In Music’, is unveiled at the Grammy Museum here, on April 29, it would mark the first exhibition in the United States to celebrate India’s most esteemed musician, who died on December 11, 2012, at La Jolla in San Diego, California.The date, April 29, would also be the renowned sitar player and Beatles’ inspiration Ravi Shankar’s 95th birthday.Through a collection of sitars, artifacts and rare photographs from the Shankar family, the exhibit will provide visitors with a one-of-a-kind glimpse into the Grammy-winning world music icon’s early life, the roots of his musicality and his vast impact on Western music, according to a press release.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have never shared an embrace at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony.
Call it a result of unique circumstances or bitter grudges. But it will all change on Saturday, April 18 when McCartney inducts Ringo Starr into the Rock Hall as a solo artist.
The Beatles were inducted as a band in 1988. Yet Paul McCartney chose not to attend. George Harrison, Ringo and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono were on hand to accept the honor.
Mick Jagger inducted the band. Ringo then came to the microphone to deliver a few jokes.
For almost 50 years she kept an astonishing secret, refusing to attack the woman who ruined her life. When Cynthia Lennon died aged 75 from cancer last week, the world believed her marriage to Beatles star John had been destroyed by Yoko Ono.
Yet the truth about John and his relationships with women is infinitely more complex, and vastly more revealing of his real character, than the enduring myth.
I know this because Cynthia told me herself. In a rare and never before published interview, she revealed that her former husband believed the true love of his life was not Yoko Ono, but Alma Cogan, a fading female singing star eight years older than himself.
One piece of paper signed by all four Beatles before their 1964 gig at Manchester's O2 Apollo and a fan letter addressed to George are on sale on eBay for £6,000.
The genuine autographs and letter – which is said to be from two fans from Derby, contain a six-verse poem about the fab four and has never been published or seen in public before – are being sold by Brian Higham.
Brian, who was brought up in Manchester during the 50s and 60s, used to work for a music shop on Oxford Road which is how he got so immersed in the industry that he got asked backstage before the Liverpudlian legends’ show.
Cynthia Powell Lennon’s influence an be heard in tender love songs, but also in the early vitriolic and sarcastic songs of The Beatles.
John and Cynthia met at art school in Liverpool and became a couple at Christmas 1958. She was a nice middle class girl and he was already a rocker, fond of fighting, drinking and sex. Friends said they were opposites.
Lennon in later life was nothing but disparaging about her and their time together. His letters from the time tell a different story, like this one from the Beatles’ long residency in Hamburg:
Ringo Starr didn't have to end up with The Beatles. He could have been a Texas factory worker moonlighting as a country blues player. He might have been a world-class knitter.
Thankfully, fate had other plans for the now-74-year-old drummer, who celebrates spring with his just-released album Postcards From Paradise and an induction April 18 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo act.
The Liverpool, England, native was 13 and hospitalized for tuberculosis when he first played the drums. "This woman would come in with maracas and tambourines and little drums. I played the drum the first time, and every time she came back, I wouldn't be in the bedridden band unless I got a drum," he says. During the long stay, "I learned to knit."
Cynthia Lennon, first wife of The Beatles' John Lennon, has died at her home in Spain, her family has announced.
A message on her son Julian's website said she died "following a short but brave battle with cancer".
It said: "Her son Julian Lennon was at her bedside throughout. The family are thankful for your prayers."
Julian also tweeted a picture of his mother, who was 75, inside a heart with the message "In Loving Memory".
