Beatles News

Washington — We’re told that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but what planets do Democratic and Republican supporters in the midterm elections come from?

Culturally speaking, they sometimes hail from completely different worlds, Facebook revealed in a set of charts on Tuesday. Democrats, for instance, groove to the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, and Alicia Keys. Republicans vastly prefer the country scene: Miranda Lambert and her husband, Blake Shelton, as well as the ever popular “king of country,” George Strait.

Recent Beatles Radio Poll

News reports say they can tell how you lean politically by what music you listen to. How Do You Lean Politically?

Left - 42.0%
Middle  - 31.9% 
Right  - 26.0%

A letter written by John Lennon to the radio and television host Joe Franklin to endorse Yoko Ono's music sold for $28,171, flying past its presale estimate of $15,000-20,000. It went under the hammer at the Marvels of Modern Music sale hosted last Thursday by RR Auction in Massachusetts, Art Daily reports. The two-page handwritten letter is dated December 13, 1971. In it, Lennon makes a passionate case for his wife's musical talents, writing: "I know you're a musician at heart! And especially I know you dig jazz. Well, Yoko's music ain't quite jazz but to help you get off on it, or understand it, please listen to a track on the Yoko/Ono/Plastic Ono Band, called 'AOS,' which was recorded in 1968 (pre Lennon/Beatles!) with Ornette Coleman at Albert Hall London, you could call it free form, anyway Yoko sits in the middle of avant-garde, classic, jazz—and now through me and my music—rock 'n' roll!" 

A PAIR of John Lennon’s iconic glasses, which he lent to a flirty girl who had pinched his bottom during a conga, will go on sale for £25,000. Wendy Baker sat with the late Beatle in a Soho, London, club in 1966. He joked that the bottom pinch had been “lovely” and asked for another. Wendy, now 75, used his “granny” specs to read the menu – and he left without them. Bournemouth-born Wendy said: “It’s hard to imagine someone as cool as John doing the conga, but it happened.”

For the last 30 years, the Flaming Lips have been one of the predominant torch-carriers to the psychedelic music movement of the ’60s. So it’s fitting that they’d try to tackle the Beatles psychedelic classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in its entirety. The band recorded over the last year with a host of different artists like Miley Cyrus, My Morning Jacket, Tegan & Sara, Tool‘s Maynard James Keenan and many more. They’re calling the resulting effort “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” a track-by-track recreation of the 1967 record, with a Flaming Lips twist at just about every turn. The band has done this before. In 2009, they released a cover version of Pink Floyd‘s“Dark Side of the Moon” and this time last year, a recreation of Brit-pop band theStone Roses self-titled 1989 debut. This of course isn’t their only means of making music these days; in 2013, the band released their 13th studio album of original material called “The Terror.” Earlier this week, Speakeasy talked with the Flaming Lips’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, while he was cruising around his hometown of Oklahoma City,

Researchers who discovered a new species of tarantula in Western Amazonia, Brazil, named it after one of their musical heroes: John Lennon. Fernando Pérez-Miles of the University of the Republic, Uruguay, and Alexandre Bragio Bonaldo and Laura Tavares Miglio, both of Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Brazil, named the new tarantula species Bumba lennoni. The proposed genus name, Bumba, is taken from Brazilian theatrical folk tradition of the popular festival called Boi-bumbá ("hit my bull"), which is celebrated annually in north and northeastern Brazil. As for the species name, the researchers explain their choice in a study published in the journal Zookeys: “The specific name is patronymic in honor of John Winston Lennon (1940–1980), the legendary creator of The Beatles, who contributed to make this world a gentler place.”

BAY CITY – For Brad Wilderman, it's not just coffee and specialty drinks he and his wife, Peggy, sell from their shop in downtown Bay City.

Their business stands as a virtual time machine, offering patrons transportation to the mid-1960s, when four lads from Liverpool were in the midst of changing the course of history.

"We touch people's lives every day," said Wilderman, sitting inside Espresso Express Presents Beatles and Beans Coffee Emporium. "They come in here and they think they're back in 1964. All they did was walk through that portal there and I transported them back to 1964. They all have memories, too. I've had people start crying in here, just from Beatles memories."

Nearly every inch of wall space is covered with Beatles memorabilia, affixed by about 500 miles of fishing line and 10,000 binder clips. The ceiling has roughly 5,000 vinyl 45s covering it. From the shop's speakers, music from the Beatles or their solo material plays exclusively.

"A lot of this stuff is authentic vintage memorabilia, a lot of it is reproduction stuff, and a lot of it is stuff I've personally made," Wilderman said.

Kevin Roach says many don’t know the true story of Julia Lennon, and he hopes his new interactive book will set the record straight

Most Beatles fans know stories about John Lennon’s mother Julia, whose early death in 1958 scarred him for life and inspired his music.

On his 1970 song Mother, he sang “You had me but I never had you”.

But Kevin Roach says many don’t know the true story – and he hopes his new interactive book, Julia, will set the record straight.

Walton-born Kevin, who has already written about George Harrison and Paul McCartney, wanted to tell the hidden story of John’s roots rather than repeating stories of John’s fame.

He says that the idea of Julia as an irresponsible “good-time girl” who couldn’t look after her son came from Aunt Mimi, who raised John in her house in Menlove Avenue.

But over time a more nuanced portrait of Julia has emerged, helped by John’s half-sister Julia Baird publishing her story in Imagine This in 2007.

The Liverpool ECHO is given a guided tour of Mendips on Menlove Avenue, where John Lennon was raised, and 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton, the teenage home of Paul McCartney

Over 50 years after they first took the charts by storm, The Beatles are still as strong a draw as ever.

Millions of tourists flock to Liverpool each year, eager to take in the birthplace of the Fab Four and see where it all began, and there is no better way to immerse yourself in the history of pop's greatest band than with a tour of the childhood homes of John Lennon (Mendips on Menlove Avenue) and Paul McCartney (20 Forthlin Road in Allerton), operated by the National Trust.

Yoko Ono, John Lennon's widow, bought Mendips in 2002 when the previous owner died. She then donated the property to the National Trust, and asked them to "restore the house to what it once was, and tell John's story". 20 Forthlin Road has been within the ownership of the National Trust for 16 years.

Each home has been meticulously restored to the homes that Lennon and McCartney would recognise from their younger years, using photographs and eyewitness accounts to restore original fixtures and fittings, and source identical items of furniture.

There are only so many times you can interrupt traffic to walk over a busy London road to have your picture taken before you become a public nuisance – even if you are the Beatles.

Six, in fact, as shown by these rare photographs, one of which became one of the most famous album covers of all time.

In what is believed to be an auction first, the full set of six photographs of John, Paul, Ringo and George striding over Abbey Road is to be sold along with the picture of the street sign that was used on the back cover.

“They are incredibly rare,” said Sarah Wheeler, head of photography at Bloomsbury Auctions. “I’ve spoken to other music dealers and no one has been able to find a complete set on the market for at least 10 years.”

The shots were taken by the photographer Iain Macmillan, a friend of Lennon and Yoko Ono, on 8 August 1969. He had his Hasselblad, a stepladder and 10 minutes.

It was the fifth of the six shots that was chosen by McCartney for the album and it’s easy to see why as all four men are in step and nicely spaced.

It’s been 50 years since screaming fans watched The Beatles perform on Liverpool’s Town Hall balcony.

When the Fab Four returned home for the northern premier of A Hard Day’s Night, thousands lined the streets on July 10, 1964 to watch John Lennon, Paul McCartney , Ringo Starr and George Harrison.

Half a century on, their music is still played around the world, but how well do you know their lyrics?

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