After 24 years of researching Beatles news, I have decided that Andrew's "Mind Games" review [from Parlogram Auctions] will be the last entry to be made on the OBS news page. And Andrew's video is really a good one for me to go out on. I hope you will come back from time to time to read these wonderful stories on John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, these musical geniuses of rock music. − John Whelan, Ottawa Beatles Site, June 30, 2024.

June 30, 2024

Does The New John Lennon Mind Games Box Set Live Up To The Hype?

By Andrew from Parlogram Aucitions

In this view we take a deep dive into the new Mind Games Ultimate Collection Review 6 CD Set. We look at its contents, hidden tracks and surprises and how it sounds compared with earlier issues of this album. If you're on the fence about buying this set, this video might help you make up your mind.

June 29, 2024

"I'll Give You A Ring"

Mind Games Super Deluxe Unboxing (The Cube!)

By Andrew Dixon

Photo credit: Screen grab from Andrew Dixon's video.

June 28, 2024

"Live and Let Die" pop art from The Beatles Kingdom Page on Facebook

1964 The Tribute brilliantly covers the Beatles "Anytime At All"

Aisumasen (I'm Sorry) (Ultimate Mix) - 1973 Portapak home video filmed by John Lennon

JOHN LENNON MIND GAMES (The Ultimate Collection) - In May 1973, three months before work would begin on John Lennon's Mind Games album, John & Yoko moved into their newly purchased apartment in the Dakota building on West 72nd Street, high above Central Park and with a beautiful view over the area that would later be dedicated to John and named Strawberry Fields, where the now world-famous 'Imagine' circle mosaic now resides.

In this video - with footage entirely filmed by John Lennon in black and white on an early Sony Portapak camera and reel-to-reel recorder, we see Yoko giving interviews for her well-received Approximately Infinite Universe album, John filming himself (and the camera) in a mirror in the bedroom, playing in the Music Room with a transistor radio, and various views in and around their new apartment and out of the sash windows and through the railings ('Rear Window'/'The Conversation'-style) capturing people walking in Central Park and on W72nd Street.

Featured inside the apartment are Yoko's artworks Forget It, 1966, Wrapping Piece, 1966, a poster from her exhibition This Is Not Here at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, 1971, a Sohmer & Co. Cabinet Grand upright piano, her Fender Rhodes Seventy Three keyboard, a harmonium, various percussion instruments and a host of their recording and playback equipment. Also in evidence is their TV with a 24 hour rolling text news service - ten years before the birth of the internet - and bookshelves full of their current reading materials and a polaroid portrait of Yoko by John he called 'the real deal'.

It was a period of great upheaval. Yoko had been awarded custody of her ten-year old daughter Kyoko, who had then disappeared - unbeknownst to them abducted by her father Tony Cox into hiding in a religious cult. John & Yoko were in the process of ending their relations with Allen Klein, Joko Films and Elephant's Memory and looking for pastures new. The war continued in Vietnam, the troubles continued in Ireland and John was fighting with Immigration for his right to stay in the USA - a landmark case he would eventually win, paving the way for many more creative people to legally work in the country.

Despite the legal battle with immigration, John & Yoko both continued their optimistic manifestations - peacefully protesting against the wars and campaigning for feminism, attending the National Organisation of Women's First International Feminist Planning Conference in June at Harvard where Yoko had previously studied.

GEORGE HARRISON & RAVI SHANKAR ON ‘BANGLADESH’ & FRIENDSHIP

By Harvey Kubernik for Music Connection

August 1, 2021, marked the 50th anniversary of the Concert for Bangladesh, a pair of benefit concerts organized by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison that took place in New York City at Madison Square Garden. The shows were staged in order to raise awareness and fund relief for millions of East Pakistan refugees, after the Bangladesh Liberation War-related genocide.

But it was in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1971, that Harrison was first alerted by his friend and sitar teacher Shankar to the scale of suffering. Before long, Harrison, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Eric Clapton, Jim Keltner, Jesse Ed Davis, Klaus Voormann, Badfinger, Shankar and others had agreed to donate their services.

Following the performances, Shankar partnered with Harrison to produce a film and album from the event, which raised funds for UNICEF.

In 1997, this writer interviewed Harrison and Shankar in Southern California. Portions were first published in HITS magazine.

“His music was the reason I wanted to meet him,” said Harrison at that time. “I liked it immediately; it intrigued me. I don’t know why I was so into it—I heard it, I liked it, and I had a gut feeling that I would meet him. Eventually, a man from the Asian Music Circle in London arranged a meeting between Ravi and myself. Our meeting has made all the difference in my life.”

Harrison commented on his own sitar playing. “I’m not a very good one, I’m afraid. The sitar is an instrument I’ve loved for a long time. For three or four years I practiced on it every day. But it’s a very difficult instrument, and one that takes a toll on you physically. It even takes a year just to learn how to properly hold it. But I enjoyed playing it, even the punishing side of it, because it disciplined me so much, which was something I hadn’t really experienced to a great extent before.”

Harrison went on to describe his earliest attempt at playing the sitar with the Beatles. “Very rudimentary,” he revealed. “I didn’t know how to tune it properly, and it was a very cheap sitar to begin with. So ‘Norwegian Wood’ was very much an early experiment. By the time we recorded ‘Love You To,’ I had made some strides.”

Harrison put his sitar experiments with the Beatles in perspective. “That was the environment in the band. Everybody was very open to bringing in new ideas. We were listening to all sorts of things: Stockhausen, avant-garde music, whatever, and most of it made its way onto our records.”

During that interview, Harrison and Shankar also discussed their just-issued Chants of India album on Angel Records.

“In a way it represents the accumulation of our ideas and experiences throughout our 30-year relationship,” said Harrison of the album. “But to put it into a slightly more commercial aspect, the record label asked us to do this and that would never have happened 15 years ago. Because of the fact that multiculturalism has become more accepted, and more people are interested in what this music offers, this project has become more commercially viable. And this music is very close to me; this is something I very much wanted to do.

“I actively read the Vedic scriptures and I’m happy to spread the word about what this project is all about. People also need an alternative to all the clatter in their lives and this music provides that. Whether it’s Benedictine Monks chanting or ancient Vedic chants, people are searching for something to cut through all the clatter and ease stress.”

“Chants of India… I have done so much programming in my life,” said Shankar, “starting from my early days in All India Radio. Being a director there, the psychology of programming, or sequencing, as you call it, comes very easily for me. Give them a bang, then after that you pull them, build it up. That sort of natural tendency I learned from my brother, who was a great dancer and had great stagecraft, which I learned from my childhood. George went through the sequencing with me and agreed with what I made from the buildup when I did the programming. The package is so beautiful, and George was very enthusiastic.

“George is a very rare person…it is something so special,” Shankar continued. “There are many other people who could do what George does, but they don’t have that depth. He’s so unusual. What has clicked between him and me, what he gets from me, and what I get from him, that love and that respect and understanding from music and everything, is really the most important thing. It’s not the money, or him helping me to record, that’s not the main thing. But it’s the very special bond between both of us.”

Shankar and I then discussed the genesis of the landmark 1971 event, often acknowledged as rock’s first major benefit concert. “The Concert for Bangladesh came about when I told George, and George wanted to help me,” said Shankar. “I was planning to do a benefit concert for Bangladesh, because I was very hurt that this whole thing was going on. To help this refugee problem, I wanted to raise some money. Everybody, every Indian, was thinking about doing that. And then, when I thought about it, I knew I could do more than any other Indian musician. Still, how much can you send? $20,000? $25,000, at the most? At this time of turmoil I was having, George was there.

“I told him what I was planning. At the same time, I never wanted to take advantage of him. I did not want to say, ‘Would you help me?’ But, somehow, it came very naturally. He was so sympathetic. ‘Well…let’s do something.’ And you know, that made me feel so happy. What he did, he immediately started phoning and booking things up. He phoned and got Madison Square Garden,” said Shankar. “Later he contacted Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, and a few of his friends. Somehow, it was done (snaps his fingers), like that.

“Within three weeks or so, we gave a performance and it was sold out. So, they had to schedule a matinee. As you know, the first half was me. I called my guru’s son, Ali Akbar Khan, who plays the sarod. We were the first part. I composed the first lines for the items played, as we always do, and we improvised and then intermission.

“It went beautifully. It was a young audience, especially because I had this existing audience already, who were mature listeners. This audience was the same type of audience as the [1967] Monterey International Pop Festival, but they were very attentive and there was no problem at all.

“After our segment, I went to see the second half. Their program was very complementary, because they chose the numbers that were very soulful in the sense that they weren’t hard rock. ‘My Sweet Lord,’ ‘That’s the Way God Planned It.’ Bob Dylan had his harmonica and did ballads. George sang ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ and the song he composed, ‘Bangla Desh.’ There was harmony and it wasn’t so different. It went off beautifully.”

The Concert for Bangladesh (originally titled The Concert for Bangla Desh) was a live, triple album, commercially released just before Christmas in 1971 in the U.S. and after New Year’s Day 1972 in the U.K. It immediately became a bestseller, landing at #2 for several weeks in the U.S. charts and becoming Harrison’s second #1 U.K. album. The multi-disc soundtrack set won the Grammy award for Album of the Year of 1972 for music producers Harrison and Phil Spector. Regrettably, it’s been out-of-print for years.

Shankar was born April 7, 1920. He died on Dec. 11, 2012, at age 92.

June 27, 2024

60-year-old previously unseen live film of The Beatles discovered in Australia

By Lucy Harbron for Far Out

An Australian man has stumbled upon the purchase of a lifetime for only $11 at a flea market. What he thought was simply a box of eight-millimetre film turned out to be 60-year-old unseen live footage of The Beatles.

Musician Greg Perano was shopping at a market in Sydney when he came across a box of film. After paying $11 for the box, he discovered that one roll was inscribed with the band’s name.

When he played the footage, it contained close-up clips of The Beatles playing live at Sydney Stadium way back in 1964. “I sat down, and I went, ‘the guy’s on stage. He’s filming on stage’,” Perano told A Current Affair, an Australian news show, as the footage was even better than he could have expected. “It’s really good, beautiful black and white, 8mm quality. It just brought back all those memories because it’s not like a big band now playing up to the cameras,” he continued.

Not only was it a thrill for Perano to see the band in action, but it was made extra special as it truly captured The Beatles at their best. “It’s a band who look like they’re in a small club really enjoying playing. You see a band in its formative stage where they were really good live,” he said.

It has since been discovered that the footage was shot by Gil Wahlquist, who was a music journalist for Sydney Morning Herald and sadly died in 2012. Perano has been given the blessing of his family to keep the film, allowing the appreciation of his efforts to live on.

While the footage on the tape is silent, Perano said it’s easy to figure out some of the songs they’re playing. It includes a clip of the band playing their breakout hit, ‘Love Me Do’, with the buyer spotting one giveaway moment. “There was that moment where George and Paul, like everyone who watches it, goes ‘woooooooo’, so you know exactly what the song is,” he said.

The footage is now 60-years-old. The Beatles toured Australia for the first, and only, time in 1964. It was part of their huge world tour which saw Beatlemania break out globally.

Perano’s purchase also has a deeply personal connection to it as he tried desperately to get to the band’s show as a young kid. When he was 11 years old, the band played in his home country of New Zealand on that same tour. Just to try and hear even a snippet of the concert, Perano climbed a hill in Picton, on the north end of the South Island, in the hope that he’d be able to hear the show in Wellington, which was 100km away at the south end of the North Island.

“Of course we couldn’t hear them, but it was just that we knew that they were 100 kilometres away doing our show,” he said. However, in an unlikely turn of events, he now gets to own a special piece of that tour, all thanks to a random flea market purchase.

− End of article.

"Paul & Ivan" culled from the Beatles and Cavern Club Photos Facebook pages...

It took a long, long time: The only song Paul McCartney wrote with Ringo Starr

By Arun Starkey for Far Out

While Paul McCartney has demonstrated over the years that he is a master songwriter and musician in his own right, his story is often intertwined with that of his late Beatles partner, John Lennon. Together, they formed the most successful musical duo of all time. By throwing the rulebook out the window, their innovations created history, and much of modern rock can be traced back to their efforts.

While each member of the Fab Four would have a hand in songwriting over their decade of existence and play a role in their artistic advancements, it’s demonstrative of the cooperative power of Lennon-McCartney that the majority of their most culturally significant work was born from their partnership.

While many crucial aspects contributed to The Beatles’ success, one of the most significant was the rhythm section of bassist McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr. The former remains one of the most influential to have ever picked up the four-string, with his busy, melodic approach taking cues from Motown hero James Jamerson and The Beach Boys’ own singular force, Brian Wilson. It had a defining impact on the future styles of the likes of Geddy Lee and Sting.

Starr’s position has always been much more contested. There is a long abounding narrative that he was the weakest musician in the Liverpudlian quartet and a lousy drummer. It is simply not true, though, with a host of subsequent heroes, such as Dave Grohl and Phil Collins, noting his pioneering approach. Without his indifference to tradition, contemporary rock percussion would be a thoroughly barren landscape.

Together, McCartney and Starr formed a formidable rhythm section and forever changed the face of their respective instruments and this characteristic of the rock band. What is truly astounding, though, is that they didn’t write a song together until 1996. The first number credited to McCartney-Starkey is ‘Really Love You’ from the former Beatles bassist’s tenth solo effort, 1997’s Flaming Pie.

The track emerged from a jam the pair burst into when Starr was enlisted to help record another from the album, ‘Beautiful Night’. In the liner notes for Flaming Pie, McCartney explained: “Doing ‘Beautiful Night’ with Ringo wasn’t enough. I wanted more fun. So we jammed. The actor’s worst dream is being on stage not knowing what play he’s in – doing this vocal was like that, you can go anywhere. You’ve got to clear your mind – and play bass – let your head to and ad-lib it all.”

When he was invited to play on ‘Beautiful Night’, Starr knew he could not spurn the opportunity to link up with his old friend once more. The drummer recalled: “He had a few ideas for a jam, playing his bass. I love to play drums when Paul’s playing bass – he’s such a fine player, still the most melodic.”

Despite being well into their 40s at the time, the pair rolled back the years. As they launched into the jam, McCartney started shouting while guitarist Jeff Lynne contributed choppy guitar riffs that augmented the bass groove. Although it sounded different from anything McCartney and Starr might have conceived with The Beatles—bearing more in common with Talking Heads and other funky new wave outfits—the connection between the former Fab Four members was unmistakable.

Furthermore, Starr admitted that he was surprised at being co-credited for the song because “we did just make it up as we went along.” Although there had long been a tacit understanding between the pair that if one played on the other’s album, the favour should be returned, McCartney went one step further with actual remuneration. This bolstered their friendship after years of hanging out in non-musical environments. 

June 25, 2024

REVIEW! 6 CD/2 Blu Ray John Lennon MIND GAMES Ultimate Collection

By Andrew Dixon

John Lennon MIND GAMES Ultimate Collection out on July 12th, here's my full review of all music within, including the hidden tracks!

Andrew Dixon illustrates by way of ultra-violet light where you can find the listing of hidden tracks.

Olivia Harrison, widow of George Harrison, visits two of last 'Beatles LOVE' shows

By NBC News 3 staff

LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — Olivia Harrison, the wife of the late George Harrison, attended two of the last "The Beatles LOVE" shows at The Mirage last week.

Harrison sat in the audience for the shows on Thursday and Friday, according to a spokesperson for Cirque du Soleil.

After the shows, she went backstage to meet the cast and posed for photos.

George Harrison was the lead guitarist for The Beatles and wrote several of their songs, including "Within You Without You," "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun." He died from cancer in 2001 at the age of 58.

Olivia Harrison is the latest celebrity to catch one of the final performances of the Cirque show.

Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr visited in May, and Las Vegas icon Celine Dion stopped by a few days later.

"The Beatles LOVE" is scheduled to conclude its run on Saturday, July 6, ahead of The Mirage's closure on Wednesday, July 17.

June 24, 2024

One Hand Clapping | One of Paul McCartney's Best Albums?

By Andrew for Parlogram Auctions

After years circulating on bootlegs, Wing's 1974 One Hand Clapping has now been officially released. With Paul on top form, he and his new band perform what is essentially rehearsals for the following year's the Wing Over The World Tour. In this video we take a close look at the record and the events which led up to its recording and find out why it maybe one of his best albums ever.

‘I couldn’t really hear anything’: The Beatles in Wellington, reviewed 60 years later
By Alex Casey for The Spinoff

It was 60 years ago today… that The Beatles played to a roaring crowd in Wellington’s town hall. Alex Casey’s dad was there, straining to hear a single note. 

Normally my Dad answers my calls with a cheery “Sunny Takeaways” – a reference to the local fish and chip shop that hasn’t been called that for about two decades. But this week, he was trying something new. “Cavern Club”, he answered, referring to the iconic Liverpool bar that played host to hundreds of early Beatles gigs. Given that today marks 60 years since my dear old Dad went to see the fab four live in Wellington, it was a fitting way to start our interview.

As he fussed about the kitchen, I asked what his pop consumption was like prior to Beatlemania. Having moved to Petone in the early 1960s, he recalled weekends at the roller rink listening to The Yardbirds and The Animals. “Strap on”, he said. Pardon? “Strap-on roller skates.” His first movie was Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock, first record was Doris Day’s ‘Everybody Loves a Lover’ and he watched TV through the window of Hanlon’s radio shop. 

I told him it sounded like he grew up on a different planet. “It sort of was, really,” he said. 

Born in 1950, Dad was a bit young for the trendy teenage gangs of Bodgies, Widgies and Bikies, but he did have an early passion for music. He funded his habit through a paper round, delivering the Sports Post around Petone at six o’clock every Saturday night. “You always took it right up to the door, and because it was six o’clock closing back then, quite a lot of them would be pissed,” he laughed. “So they’d give you extra money, really good tips.” 

He used those tips to buy a homemade Fender Stratocaster and a subscription to the UK music magazine Beat Instrumental, which arrived every month into his special file at the local shop. It may have been in those pages where he first encountered The Beatles, or maybe it was on the Saturday night radio countdown. To be honest, he was getting distracted during the interview by his loaf of bread in the oven (“seeds in it and rock salt on the top, gives it a little bit of edge.”)

“I do remember when the new tunes came out,” said Dad. “I think the first one was ‘She Loves You’ and it just totally exploded.” He was 13 at the time, the ideal age for a severe case of Beatlemania, but Dad remained relatively aloof about his relationship with the band as a youngster. “It was just sort of a fad that you got caught up in and went along with,” he recalled. “I don’t remember harping on about them or anything, it all just sort of happened to me.” 

What also “happened” to my dad was the purchase of a giant plastic Beatle wig. “They came like a big black plastic helmet, and you had to get a Stanley knife and cut out the face so there was just the hair left,” he recalled. “I don’t think I ever wore it in public, a bit naff really.” Still, there was enough enthusiasm there that his then 50-year-old mother, who had never been to a concert before, sought out tickets to the much-anticipated Wellington show. 

“I must have asked for them, but I don’t remember nagging or saying please, please me,” he said, slipping in an annoying joke I would only catch when listening back through the interview. “I have no idea how Mum got the tickets, you must have had to buy them in person because it was all cash and cheques back then.” With The Beatles scheduled to play two shows a night in Wellington over two nights, his mum nabbed tickets to the very first show. 

Miraculously, Dad can still remember what he wore that night: “A dark brown Beatle jacket with a black check through it, a shirt, trousers and my pointy winklepicker shoes.” His pride and joy was a studded belt that his mum had found for him during her weekly shift at the City Mission Jumble Sale. “Very flash belt, not pointy studs, more like little rosettes,” Dad explained, the bread fumes momentarily allowing him to recall the most minute of details from six decades ago.

Accompanied by his mother, he caught two buses from Petone to the Wellington Town Hall on Monday June 22, 1964. They had seats high up in the organ loft behind the stage, and Dad remembers a line of policemen facing the throng of screaming young women. “It was really, really noisy,” he said. “You couldn’t really hear anything because of all the screaming. If you put your fingers in your ears, it sort of filtered out the screaming and you could hear the singing.”

The stage set up was relatively simple – no fancy lighting or set pieces. But when The Beatles walked out in their matching suits and their bowl hair cuts, Dad recalled complete chaos throughout the town hall. “I later found out that somebody fell off the balcony, right over the edge onto the stage. People were standing on their seats and puncturing them with their heels, the whole town hall was just in uproar,” he said. 

There was a technical issue with the sound that saw John Lennon storm off stage. “Probably wouldn’t have mattered with all the noise going on anyway,” said Dad. They played 10 or so songs back to back, and didn’t have time for idle chit chat. “There wasn’t any banter there, I don’t remember them being on stage for very long at all. It was almost quite clinical, in a way, but I still felt very privileged to be there and grateful to my mother for enduring it.” 

Dad remained a fan of The Beatles throughout his teens, but also moved on to the likes of The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, embracing the velvet suits and shaggy hair. “I definitely remember the Sgt Peppers era and ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’,” he paused. “… And the other experiences that go with that era.” I asked what he meant by “other experiences”. “… And the other experiences that go with that era,” he repeated slowly. 

His only souvenir from the Beatles concert was a Parlophone Records postcard promoting Teal Airlines. And, as someone who has never discarded a single margarine container in his entire life, of course he still has it 60 years later. On the front, the lads are all smiling behind their reproduced signatures. “You don’t need a Prominent Musician’s income to beatle off to FARAWAY PLACES”, the back reads. “Ask TEAL about it!” 

Six decades on, Dad draws parallels between Beatlemania and Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. “What’s so different now is the scale of it all,” he said. “I was listening to the radio the other day talking about when Taylor Swift goes to a country, and the GDP actually increases just because of the money she generates.” Could he be bothered waiting in a virtual online ticket queue for hours? “Back then I would have, but not today.” 

While he is grateful for the experience of seeing all four Beatles live in the flesh, Dad wouldn’t be interested in seeing the surviving band members should they ever return to Aotearoa – in fact, he didn’t even realise Ringo Starr was still alive. “No, I don’t think so. They are sort of superannuation tours aren’t they? Just the hassle of getting there… no, no, no,” he said, admiring his freshly baked loaf. “I’m old, I’d much rather stay home.”

− End of article.

On this day, John Lennon releases "A Spaniard In The Works"

The Beatles Kingdom Page on Facebook posts a pop art parody of "I Am The Walrus"

June 22, 2024

On this day, Peter Asher celebrates his 80th birthday!

On June 11, 1964, the Beatles arrived in Australia

June 21, 2024

The Lennon estate announces 2 LP Zoetrope picture discs available only in the Super Deluxe Box Set of Mind Games

From Facebook...

June 20, 2024

Paul Announces his European Got Back Tour 2024

⁠PAUL ANNOUNCES GOT BACK TOUR 2024 Paul and the band will visit Paris, Madrid, Manchester and London this December TICKET INFORMATION HERE!   Wednesday 4th December - La Defense Arena, Paris, FRANCE ⁠Thursday 5th December - La Defense Arena, Paris, FRANCE ⁠Monday 9th December - Wizink Centre, Madrid, SPAIN ⁠Tuesday 10th December - Wizink Centre, Madrid, SPAIN ⁠Saturday 14th December - Co-op Live, Manchester, UK ⁠Sunday 15th December - Co-op Live, Manchester, UK ⁠Wednesday 18th December - The O2 Arena, London, UK ⁠Thursday 19th December - The O2 Arena, London, UK

Paul will bring his acclaimed Got Back tour to Europe this December!

Fulfilling his promise to 'get back', Paul will return to France, Spain and the UK with his Got Back tour. Earlier this month, Paul announced his first live shows of 2024 with the next leg of the tour launching in South America this October. 

With songs like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Band on the Run’,  ‘Let It Be’ and so many more, the Paul McCartney live experience is everything any music lover could ever want from a rock show: hours of the greatest moments from the last 60 years of music – dozens of songs from Paul’s solo, Wings and of course Beatles catalogues that have formed the soundtracks of our lives.

This will mark Paul’s first European show since his iconic Glastonbury headlining performance in 2022. Hailed as “one of the greatest gigs of all time” by The Times and “a masterclass from the greatest living cultural figure in this country’s history” by The i, it was also Paul and his band’s 500th show together! These dates will see McCartney return for his first live performance in Paris in six years - in 2018 he played at La Defense Arena, where he is making his return. The wait has been longer for Spaniards, where he last played eight years ago, in 2016 at Estadio Vincente Calderon.

Paul launched his Got Back tour in 2022, completing 16 huge shows across the US before performing his history-making set at Glastonbury in June 2022. In 2023 Paul performed 18 incredible shows as the Got Back tour rocked through Australia, Mexico and Brazil.

Billy Joel wishes Paul McCartney a "Happy Birthday" on the Beatles Official Facebook page...

Paul McCartney celebrates 82nd birthday with Beatles reference

Paul McCartney rang in his 82nd birthday on Tuesday, June 18

By News International

Paul McCartney just completed his 82nd trip around the sun!

On Tuesday, June 18, the iconic musician took to his Instagram to ring in his 82nd birthday.

Referencing The Beatles’ classic Birthday, he playfully declared, "They say it's my birthday, and I’m looking forward to being spoilt rotten by my loved ones!"

Birthday wishes poured in on social media from his children. James, 46, shared a heartfelt photo of him hugging Paul, writing, "Happy Birthday Dad. You are my guiding light, teaching me how to move forward with love."

Mary, 54, created a touching slideshow of her father's photos, expressing her love with, "Happy Birthday Dad x with all my love x."

Stella, 52, honored her father with nostalgic photos captured by her mother Linda, adding, "PAUL’S BIRTHDAY: Looking at my Dad @PaulMcCartney through my Mum’s lens today… His day… Happy birthday, Papa Smurf xx."

Amidst his ongoing Got Back Tour, spanning North America, Europe, Oceania, and South America since April 2022, McCartney recently announced additional performances in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Peru for October 2024. The tour will conclude with shows across Europe, including stops in France, Spain, and England.

− End of article.

Happy Birthday Paul from the Ottawa Beatles Site

June 19, 2024

Did the Beatles legend George Harrison accidently rip off his biggest hit? Professor of rock investitages (video)

Professor Of Rock has released the new video below, along with the following introduction...

"When one of the biggest bands in history, The Beatles, broke up, all the members of the band released solo projects almost immediately. The first of the band to have a number-one hit was a bit of a surprise though... George Harrison. He ended up having one hell of a solo run but his biggest hit, 'My Sweet Lord', would also become his greatest trial. Harrison got sued for sounding too much like another big hit from years before… It was a catastrophic lawsuit that nearly destroyed George and plagued his career for years because it put him in a never-ending bout with writer’s block. And it stopped him from recording for years. But in the end, Harrison would have the last laugh. Rock’s most honest songwriter dealing and allegations of plagiarism... This is a story you have to hear to believe, next on Professor Of Rock."

Retro Irish Chart 1969: Final Beatles’ Irish number one hit the top 55 years ago

By the Irish Independent

7 Man Of The World Fleetwood Mac

8 The Boxer Simon and Garfunkel

9 Galveston Glen Campbell

10 Love Me Tonight Tom Jones

It’s hard to believe today, but this chorus from The Beatles’ “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” resulted in some serious censorship in 1969:

Christ you know it ain’t easy

You know how hard it can be

The way things are going

They’re gonna crucify me.

Several radio stations in the US, including major broadcasters WLS in Chicago and WABC in New York, refused to play the song because of the words ‘Christ’ and ‘crucify’. In Australia, the word ‘Christ’ was bleeped out when the song was played and in Spain The Spanish government under Franco objected to the track because of the phrase “Gibraltar near Spain”. The status of Gibraltar is a long-running subject of debate between Spain and the United Kingdom.

“The Ballad Of John And Yoko” holds a special place in Beatles history. It was the band’s 17th UK number one and their final chart-topper for 54 years until last year’s “Now And Then”, John Lennon’s unfinished 1977 demo completed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr using overdubs and guitar tracks by the late George Harrison from an abandoned 1995 session.

In Ireland, this was The Beatles’ 13th and final number one. (U2 hold the record for most No. 1s here, with 19 in total).

John Lennon wrote the song while he and Yoko Ono were on their highly-publicised honeymoon in Paris. On his return, he took it to Paul McCartney at his home, eager to record the track. Though alarmed by the references to Christ, after the debacle over Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” remarks in 1966, McCartney agreed to the session.

Neither Ringo Starr nor George Harrison were available for the recording, but Lennon and McCartney decided to go ahead without them. As noted by music critic Richie Unterberger, the seven-hour session has historical significance, producing “probably some of the final tapes of Lennon and McCartney working closely together, alone”.

The release was delayed to allow for The Beatles’ April 1969 single “Get Back”. The latter spent six straight weeks at the top of the Irish charts before being replaced at number one by “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” on June 19.

As well as topping the chart in Ireland and the UK, “The Ballad Of John and Yoko” reached the top in Australia, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, West Germany and Switzerland. It peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US with sales of 1.25 million.

A 2.5 million seller worldwide, the single was ranked as the 404th best classic rock song of all time by New York’s Q104.3. Rolling Stone has rated it the 48th best Beatles song.

June 18, 2024

The Tragic Story of Jimmie Nicol - The Real 5th Beatle

By Andrew of Parlogram Auctions

Sixty years ago, in June 1964 on the eve of The Beatles' first world tour, Ringo Starr fell ill. Instead of cancelling the tour, small time drummer Jimmy Nichol was drafted in to take his place. For 10 days in Denamrk, Holland, Hong Kong and Australia Nicol got to experience what it was really like to be a Beatle, but the experience ruined his life. In this video we tell you how his story unfolded and why he disappeared.

#1316: From Me To You By Del Shannon/The Beatles

By Ray McGinnis for Vancouver Pop Music Signature Sounds

Peak Month: July 1963
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #14
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #77 (Del Shannon)/ #116 (the Beatles in 1963)
Youtube.com “From Me To You” The Beatles
Youtube.com “From Me To You” Del Shannon
Lyrics: “From Me To You”

Charles Weedon Westover was born on December 30, 1934. He was known professionally as Del Shannon. Westover was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He learned ukulele and guitar and listened to country music. He was drafted into the Army in 1954, and while in Germany played guitar in a band called The Cool Flames. When his service ended, he returned to Battle Creek, Michigan. There he worked as a carpet salesman and as a truck driver in a furniture factory. He found part-time work as a rhythm guitarist in singer Doug DeMott’s group called Moonlight Ramblers, working at the Hi-Lo Club. Ann Arbor deejay Ollie McLaughlin heard the band. In July 1960, Westover signed to become a recording artist and composer on the Bigtop label. Westover changed his name to Del Shannon. It was a combination of Shannon Kavanagh (a wannabe wrestler who patronized the Hi-Lo Club) with Del, derived from the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which Westover’s carpet store boss drove.

Apparently, Charles Westover asked a girl named Karen to go with him to the Senior Prom. She said yes, but two weeks later dumped him for another guy who was Westover’s rival. Westover, who was 140 pounds and 5’6” was devastated and never got over it. Almost all fourteen of Del Shannon’s singles released from “Runaway” (1961) to “Two Kinds Of Teardeops” (1963) were about sadness, break-ups, and loneliness. Song like “Swiss Maid” were full of longing. A summer 1962 hit, “Cry Myself To Sleep“, found the songs’ character lonely and in misery. Though “Runaway” was a #1 hit and Del Shannon had several more songs in the Top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100, his star was on the wane. “Two Kinds of Teardrops” only peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at #50. During his career Del Shannon had just three songs in the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100 and four more singles that reached the Top 30. While in Vancouver he charted three songs to #1, six more songs into the Top Ten and seven more songs into the Top 30. In Vancouver any Del Shannon 45 RPM had a good chance at being a big seller.

Del Shannon

Del Shannon appeared in concert at the PNE Auditorium in Vancouver (BC) on June 30, 1962.

In 1963 Del Shannon flew to England where he toured heavily on the success of “Little Town Flirt” and to push “Two Kinds of Teardrops”. He also visited Sweden, where he was popular. By the spring of 1963 Del Shannon had only managed to chart two Top Ten singles in the USA. But in the UK he had seven Top Ten hits, including “Two Kinds of Teardrops” which peaked at #5 in the US. On 18 April 1963, the Beatles were one of 15 acts to play at Swinging Sound ’63, an all-star concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. They played “From Me to You”, a song just released earlier that week,  and “Twist and Shout”. Del Shannon was also on the line-up that night. When the concert was over Shannon told John Lennon that he was going to record “From Me to You” to give the group some exposure in America. At first, Lennon was flattered, but he quickly changed his mind. Lennon was aware that a cover version by Del Shannon might hurt the Beatles’ chances of having a hit with “From Me to You” in America.

In early June, Bigtop Records released Del Shannon’s version of “From Me To You” as the follow-up to “Two Kinds of Teardrops”.

On June 29th it entered the Billboard Hot 100 and became the first Lennon–McCartney song to chart in the USA. Shannon’s cover spent four weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and peaked at number 77. It owed its lowly climb in part to WLS in Chicago where it climbed to #15. Del Shannon recalled “At that time no one had heard of the Beatles here (America), but I knew they were great writers so I just picked up on one of their songs.”

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were riding on a bus to Shrewsbury to perform at a concert as the opening act while The Beatles were on a tour of England with Helen Shapiro. While on the coach they started to write “From Me to You.” They took the title as a variant of the letter to the editor section of the pop music magazine, New Musical Express. That section was named “From You To Us.” Paul McCartney recalled that many of the songs they wrote in their early years included “I,” “me” or “you” as a way of making them more direct and personal. John Lennon recalled that the initial tune for the lyrics relied heavily on the blues and initially The Beatles decided to record it. But when their manager, George Martin, added harmonica to the tune, it seemed to be just right.

On the bus with McCartney and Lennon was a black British singer named Kenny Lynch who had recently had a Top Ten UK hit with a cover of The Drifters song “Up On the Roof.” He tried to Lennon and McCartney write lyrics for “From Me to You.” When they sang the song and included “ooh” as a bridge, Lynch was outraged. He told them “You can’t do that. You’ll sound like a bunch of fucking fairies!” Soon afterwards he stormed off, ranting “Well, that’s it. I am not going to write any more of that bloody rubbish with those idiots. They don’t know music from their backsides. That’s it! No more help from me!” Lynch would later write “Sha-La-La-La-Lee”, a #3 hit for the Small Faces in 1966.

On April 11, 1963, Parlophone Records released “From Me to You” in the UK as a single, with “Thank You Girl” on the B-side. On April 20th it began a 21 week run in the British charts, reaching number one on May 4th, and remaining there for another six weeks.

“From Me To You” featured Lennon playing harmonica in a blues style he was taught by Delbert McClinton. McClinton was the harmonica player on the 1962 #1 hit “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel. On the same bill with Del Shannon and The Beatles, Bruce Channel sang “Hey Baby” with Delbert McClinton playing harmonica.  “It’s chiseled in stone now that I taught Lennon how to play harmonica,” McClinton said. “John said, ‘Show me something.’ I was in a pretty unique position, because there just weren’t a lot of people playing harmonica in popular music.”

The song was a very straightforward pitch to love, satisfy and be faithful. “From Me To You” was the first Beatles song to reach number one in Britain, and the first of eleven consecutive British number one singles by the group.

Cash Box magazine called “From Me To You” a “Pick of the Week” when it was released on May 27, 1963, in the USA. However, in 1963 the American record-buying audience was not ready for The Beatles. Their previous single release in the USA, “Please Please Me” had sold only around 5,000 copies. “From Me to You” had only 4,000 sales by the end of June ’63 and didn’t chart anywhere except in Los Angeles. In Vancouver Del Shannon’s cover of “From Me To You” debuted on the June 29/63 C-FUNTASTIC FIFTY at #35. But for the next 7 weeks of its chart run both the original version by The Beatles and Del Shannon’s cover were listed as artists across from the song. A sign of how unfamiliar even DJ’s in Vancouver were with the “Fab Four” is exhibited in how the band was listed with Del Shannon during the chart run of “From Me To You” in July and August of ’63. The Beatles were misspelled with two t’s on CFUN’s record survey as “The Beatles.”

“From Me To You” by Del Shannon peaked at #4 in Muskegon (MI), #13 in Toronto, #14 in Vancouver, #15 in Chicago, and #16 in St. Louis. While the Beatles Vee-Jay release of “From Me To You” in 1963 peaked at #7 in San Bernardino (CA), #8 in Duluth (MN), #13 in Akron (OH), and El Cajon (CA), #14 in Vancouver, #15 in Seattle, and #18 in Winnipeg (MB).

Photographed By J.T. Lambrou, July 12, 2021

The Beatles were from Liverpool and formed in 1960. They charted dozens of singles onto the pop charts in Vancouver between the summer of 1963 and the spring of 1970. Numbers of these songs were much more popular in Vancouver than in the USA. One of these was a German version of “She Loves You” titled “Sie Liebt Dich“. It was a Top Ten hit for the Fab Four the following summer. One of the features of The Beatles was that they mostly recorded singles and tracks from their albums they wrote themselves. The exceptions were songs like “My Bonnie”, “Please Mr. Postman”, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Ain’t She Sweet“. The band would become the most influential rock ‘n roll band of the 20th Century. They have sold over one billion records. They began recording elemental love songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and later composed more complex songs, such as those on their award-winning 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles were on the cusp of whatever was new and were often the trend-setting reason for the next new thing. In 1967 they got involved with Transcendental Meditation. When they released “Hey Jude”, they had one of those rare singles that was longer than 7 minutes climb to the top of the charts. At the time, the standard formula for singles was around two to three minutes in length.

The Beatles split in 1970 after the release of the Let It Be album. All four enjoyed success as solo recording artists. Ringo Starr had a number of Top Ten hits including “Photograph” and the “No No Song”. Paul McCartney had numerous hits that included “Live And Let Die” and “Silly Love Songs”. George Harrison had hits with “My Sweet Lord” and “Give Me Love”. While John Lennon’s hits included “Imagine” and “Woman”. Hopes for a Beatles reunion were dashed when John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, outside his New York City apartment near Central Park. George Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. Starr and McCartney have continued to tour. Paul McCartney was in Vancouver in April, 2016.

In the winter of 1964-65 Del Shannon had his last notable hit titled “Keep Searching (We’ll Follow The Sun)”. It spent six weeks in the Top Ten on the CKLG Boss 40, including three weeks at #6. On May 26, 1965, Del Shannon returned to perform at the PNE Forum in Vancouver (BC). His appearance was as part of the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars. Others on stage included The Zombies, Shangri-Las, Dee Dee Sharp, Jewel Aikens, Tommy Roe and others. Del Shannon struggled with alcoholism and still managed to pursue a career despite having no hits after 1965.

In 1968 Shannon became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous vowing to quit his addiction to alcohol. Shannon and Bryan Hyland were roommates for several years in the late 60’s when Shannon tried to help Hyland who was in his own career slump. Shannon produced Hyland’s comeback hit in 1970, “Gypsy Woman”, a remake of a 1961 R&B hit by The Impressions written by Curtis Mayfield.

After a rare concert at The Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood in 1976, The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Shannon’s haunting vignettes of heartbreak and restlessness contain something of a cosmic undercurrent which has the protagonist tragically doomed to a bleak, shadowy struggle.” Years later he was sought out by Tom Petty who had discussed with Shannon joining the Travelling Wilbury’s after the death of Roy Orbison in December 1988. Shannon declined. Del Shannon next cancelled a revival tour to England. In mid-January 1990 he was prescribed Prozac by his therapist and began taking the medication. He grew steadily more agitated, paced around as his hands trembled. Without leaving a note, Shannon died by suicide three weeks later in early February 1990.

November 24, 2016
Ray McGinnis

References:

Del Shannon Biography, Del Shannon.com.
The Beatles, Rolling Stone.
From Me To You, The Beatles Bible
From Me To You, Songfacts.com
“C-FUNTASTIC FIFTY“, CFUN 1410 AM, Vancouver, BC, July 27, 1963.

The Beatles 'If I Needed Someone' 3 Part Harmony Vocals Separated Wider In 2024 Remix 

By Britt2001b

Experience a new twist on The Beatles' classic "If I Needed Someone" from the 'Rubber Soul' album.

In this 2024 true stereo remix, Paul sings in the left channel, George takes the lead in the center, and John harmonizes on the right.

This track originally appeared in 1965, but American fans had to wait until 1966 to hear it on the 'Yesterday & Today' album, as Capitol Records excluded it from the U.S. release of 'Rubber Soul'.

Using the Giles Martin 2023 mix as my source, I moved the guitars towards the center to make room for a wider stereo spread of the vocals. I also enhanced the drums and bass for added punch and energy, complementing George's iconic, jangly 12-string Rickenbacker guitar.

No artificial effects were added; this is a pure de-mix and remix of the original elements, staying true to the 1960s style.

Thanks for listening!

Mission Director of Strawberry Field, Major Kathy Versfeld said the vinyl is a rare gift

Proceeds from ticket sales will help support Steps at Strawberry Field, which helps people with learning difficulties or other barriers to employment.

 

Josh, who has been enrolled on the Steps to Work programme for the past six months, said: "I have been working in the shop, helping people find their way around, buying and selling multiple things to members of the public, with that my confidence has grown."

 

 

The Strawberry Field attraction tells the story of Lennon's childhood and also includes the piano on which Lennon composed and recorded Imagine.

 

Visitors can see archival footage and photographs and find out what happened behind the famous red gates and in the gardens where Lennon played and climbed trees as a child.

 

"Music is still so important, that we all join together in doing our bit in giving peace a chance and in celebrating love," added Ms Versfeld.

 

"I know many will be interested to come and see this but to also support us."

 

While Strawberry Fields has changed since John Lennon played there as a young boy, the gardens still "provide a place for sanctuary and peace", Ms Versfeld said.

 

She said: "We are meeting the needs of a new generation now.

 

"We have the garden, a serene sanctuary where people can reflect on their own lives and perhaps the life of John as a young lad."

 

Listen to the best of BBC Radio Merseyside on Sounds and follow BBC Merseyside on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk

 

− End of article.

 

Flashback: EMI Electrola/GEMA releases "Give Peace A Chance" and "Remember Love" on their Oldie-Collection series

 

• June 15, 2024
• Paul McCartney and Wings' pristine "One Hand Clapping" is a superior sonic experience

By Kenneth Womack for Salon

Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney (1941 - 1998), Jimmy McCulloch, Denny Laine and Geoff Britton of Wings in 1974. (Michael Putland/Getty Images)

When it comes to the former Beatles and their solo output, we are living in an age of abundance. For the past several years, the archival releases have been arriving hot and heavy. And while there has been plenty to enjoy, few releases have been as intriguing as Paul McCartney and Wings’ "One Hand Clapping," a 1974 project that has been making the rounds in the form of unauthorized bootleg releases for decades.

In its new, highly polished form, "One Hand Clapping" m makes for a superior sonic experience, to be sure. Originally recorded by Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, the tracks sound positively pristine in this state-of-the-art, 21st century production. But the real story exists in the tracks themselves.

"One Hand Clapping" was filmed and recorded at Abbey Road Studios in August 1974. Directed by David Litchfield, the project was envisioned as a TV special. But McCartney had something far more pressing in mind. In the four years since he announced the Beatles’ disbandment, he had been carefully remaking himself. While he had scored plenty of hits during this era, battling his way back through an, at times, hostile press had been an ordeal.p>

During one of his last interviews, John Lennon gave his former bandmate significant props for founding Wings and transforming the band into bona fide hitmakers. “I kind of admire the way Paul started back from scratch, forming a new band and playing in small dance halls,” John remarked in 1980, “because that’s what he wanted to do with the Beatles — he wanted us to go back to the dance halls and experience that again.”

By the summer of 1974, there was little doubt that McCartney had made it happen. He had beaten the odds — not to mention the defections of several Wings members along the way — and scored a megahit with the "Band on the Run" LP. The praise was nearly universal, with Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau writing that it was “the finest record yet released by any of the four musicians who were once called the Beatles.”

But to his credit, McCartney knew that his long-simmering triumph had only just begun. To really conquer the world — to get back on top, as it were — he needed to hit the road. And no slapdash tour of dance halls and universities would do. Indeed, in many ways, "One Hand Clapping" served as McCartney’s well-produced audition for taking Wings on the road. 

And it was an audition, in many ways, that his Wings bandmates passed with flying colors. There were blemishes along the way — at one juncture, wife Linda misses her keyboard cue on “Band on the Run,” while newly minted lead guitarist Jimmy McCulloch was still finding his way among McCartney’s voluminous back catalogue.

But the energy of a live show is on full display in such standout cuts as “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” and “Soily,” the song that would serve as the band’s high-octane closer during the eventual Wings Over the World tour. "One Hand Clapping" also finds McCartney auditioning several Beatles classics ranging from “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” through “Lady Madonna” and “Blackbird.” In short, the music, as "One Hand Clapping" dutifully reminds us, was fantastic.

The proof, as always, is in the pudding. "One Hand Clapping" demonstrated — perhaps most significantly for McCartney himself — that Wings had an enormous upside. Wings Over the World commenced in September 1975, eventually spanning 65 shows and six international legs. Along the way, the band performed before nearly a million people. When the sold-out tour made its way Stateside, McCartney landed on the cover of Time, with the magazine’s headline trumpeting “McCartney Comes Back.”

− End of article.

Posted on Facebook by Beatles and Cavern Club Photos: John and Paul perform at the Fox and Hounds on April 23, 1960

• June 12, 2024
• Andrew Dixon premieres the Mind Games ultimate collection (see the video down below)

• June 11, 2024 

John Lennon Mind Games (Elemental Mix) - from Mendips to The Cavern Club in John Lennon's Liverpool video is released

Buskin with The Beatles on Facebook reproduces the original cover of Disc and Music Echo's June 11, 1966 edition

Hello Goodbye: Alistair Taylor Reflections on Life with The Beatles

By Michael McCarty for Esoteria-Land

It was forty years ago this week (namely, Nov. 9, 1961) that a Liverpool furniture salesman/record retailer named Brian Epstein and his assistant, Alistair Taylor, went to a local club called The Cavern to see an unknown band called The Beatles.

Their drummer was Pete Best and the group wore greasy black-leather jackets, but otherwise the famous line-up was – Paul McCartney on bass, John Lennon and George Harrison on guitars.

You know the rest of the story….

Epstein became the manager but Taylor became known as “Mr. Fix-It” – solving all the little problems and generally keeping the Fab Four happy and contented on a daily basis.

Alistair Taylor has written a book called Yesterday: My Life with the Beatles which details his frantic years with and without the band, which includes the time he turned down a chance to own a percentage of The Beatles just before they got a recording contract.

MICHAEL McCARTY: What are your thoughts on Brian Epstein?

ALISTAIR TAYLOR: I loved Brian Epstein very dearly; we had a weird relationship. He was gay, I wasn’t, yet we worked so well together. Brian was the greatest record retailer the world has ever known. The guy could smell a hit a million miles away – even before The Beatles! It’s no wonder what he did with that.

McCARTY: You and Brian Epstein first went to see The Beatles perform on Nov. 9, 1961, at The Cavern club. How do you remember The Cavern?

TAYLOR: Hell on earth was a good description of The Cavern. It was small, smelly … water and condensation dripped down the walls. The stage was like five planks of wood, that’s it. I used to go there when it was a jazz club and a trombone player once told me it was like blowing into a wet blanket.

McCARTY: What did you think of The Beatles the first time you saw them?

TAYLOR: I thought they were absolutely awful. They looked awful, they had no discipline, they weren’t very good musicians and they behaved abominably.

McCARTY: What do you remember about the day that Epstein agreed to manage The Beatles?

TAYLOR: The day we signed, I witnessed the contract with Brian. Brian never signed it so there’s five signatures: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Alistair Taylor. My big claim to fame!

There was great excitement in the office. Everybody sort of patted each other on the back. It quieted down and Paul said, “I don’t know if we’re going to make it as a group but I’ll tell you what, I’m going to make it as a star!”

McCARTY: John Lennon claimed that The Beatles “sold out” when Epstein put them into suits and cleaned up their image. Do you agree or disagree?

TAYLOR: I’ve read the supposed quote from John about “selling out” and I just don’t go with this argument that they resented what Brian did to them – because if he’d have said, “Jump off the pier, it’ll make you a hit record,” they’d have done it.

We put them into suits. We never interfered musically, but we took them to hairdressers. We bought them ties and shirts. I don’t think they’d ever worn ties before, but at the time the boys would have done anything to become successful.

McCARTY: What kept Epstein going on, even after The Beatles had been rejected by every record company in England?

TAYLOR: Belief. We believed they would happen. He’s quoted as saying that “They’ll be bigger than Elvis.” I never heard him say it but he knew they were going places.

McCARTY: Is it true that Epstein threatened to pull all EMI products out of his family’s chain of record shops in England if EMI didn’t sign The Beatles to a recording contract?

TAYLOR: That is my belief. I’m sure he did.

McCARTY: In your work with The Beatles, you were known as “Mr. Fix-It,” the problem-solver. Which Beatle gave you the most trouble?

TAYLOR: In the early days, George used to be the troublemaker. He hated being a Beatle. I’ve been sent off in taxis to find him while they were off on tour and there was no George. Paul was always the guy that cared about image – all the way through, he was a public relations man. John couldn’t give a damn.

McCARTY: What is your recollection of The Beatles’ songwriting?

TAYLOR: When Paul and Jane Asher spilt, we used to sit at Paul’s place on Cavendish Avenue drinking Scotch and Coke. We started chatting about music and Paul asked, “Do you know anything about writing music?” and I said “Good God, no!”

“It’s dead easy, there’s nothing to it!” he said.

In Paul’s dining room, he had this little church organ and he said, “You get on that end, I’ll get on this end and run down the keyboard. I’m going to shout out a word and you shout out the opposite and keep this noise going.”

So we went bang, bang, bang, “Yes!” “No!” “Hello!” “Goodbye!” for half an hour. Two months later he came waltzing in and he’d just cut “Hello Goodbye” and I didn’t dare say, “Hey mate, I wrote that.”

McCARTY: Are The Beatles aware of all the Beatle conventions? What do you suppose they think of all the fuss?

TAYLOR: Yes, they are aware. I would imagine, quite honestly, that Paul would not approve because Paul’s got this thing that everybody’s living on his back. Unless he’s changed dramatically, he would imagine this is just a fast buck-making thing.

McCARTY: Why do you think it took so long for Liverpool to honor The Beatles and what they accomplished?

TAYLOR: My own theory is, they resented the boys moving to London (from Liverpool). I think it’s getting better because Paul took the trouble to add “Let It Be Liverpool” to the World Tour, and he did Liverpool proud. Standing on the banks of the Mersey on a warm June evening with 26,000 people singing “Give Peace a Chance,” I shall never forget it as long as I live.

McCARTY: What have you been doing since leaving The Beatles?

TAYLOR: Basically, a very ordinary job. I had possibly one of the top jobs in pop music. What happened was, everybody disappeared into the woodwork. Everybody had assumed that I had earned such a vast sum of money that they were scared stiff they couldn’t afford me!

I couldn’t get a job. The only job I could get was a pot washer in a big hotel in England. In hotel hierarchy, nothing comes lower than a pot washer. It is the bottom!

I did that for nine months, then I managed to move up. I went back into the hotel business and became an assistant manager. Just recently, I’ve been managing a warehouse for a computer company.

As I say, just routine jobs.

McCARTY: When Brian Epstein first decided to manage The Beatles, he offered you two percent of them but you turned him down. Any regrets?

TAYLOR: Just a little bit, yes! The biggest mistake of my life, looking back on it. At the time it didn’t seem important.

• June 9, 2024 

Old Brown Shoe Deep Dive: Who Played What? 

By Gear, There and Everywhere

In the 24th episode of Gear, There and Everywhere, we take a deep dive into the George Harrison song "Old Brown Shoe." Who plays which instrument? What goodies are

buried within the track? Can the guys survive an episode without GigaChad? Watch and find out!

Ottawa Beatles Site Parental Advisory: This video contains explicit language...

• A book Beatles fans must have ASAP
• By Terri Schlichenmeyer for The Guam Daily Post

THE WRITER: Ken McNab, author of "Shake It Up, Baby: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963." Photo courtesy of Ken McNab

It was like squashing a cockroach, they said.

Put your toe down in one spot, rotate your hips and your ankle, shimmy them shoulders and snap your fingers to the beat. That's how you kill a bug, and it's how you do The Twist – but beware. In the new book “Shake It Up, Baby” by Ken McNab, there are some Beatles you really want around.

The first day of 1963 was remarkable for one thing: Great Britain was in the midst of “an extraordinary polar plunge that would last three long, depressing months.” Also on that day, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr arrived on a plane home from Hamburg, “just four nameless faces in the crowd.”

They had no idea that this would be the year “when everything changed.”

They were still getting used to one another, jostling for control. Their manager, Brian Epstein, was toiling to make the four men famous: constantly calling record companies, landing gigs, booking recording studios – one at which the Beatles would record an entire album in a single day. They toured constantly, dozens and dozens of concerts with one reward: their song “Please Please Me” started to rise on the British music charts.

Despite the official word that the “boys” were single, John Lennon welcomed his son Julian into the world in April 1963. Before the month was out, Lennon left for a vacation in Spain with Epstein, who was gay, almost creating a scandal.

By the end of the summer, it was obvious that that didn't matter. Fans – especially female ones – didn't care what the Beatles did. Screaming fans, fainting fans, obsessive ones met the Beatles wherever they went … except in America. Curiously, there seemed to be a resistance to the Fab Four's music on this side of the ocean.

But Epstein was tenacious, Harrison's sister was dogged in her devotion, and DJs began to talk. And at the end of the year, Ed Sullivan said “yes” to a booking.

Charts don't lie; neither does endurance, and those two things make many people swear that the Beatles were one of the best bands the world has ever seen. “Shake It Up, Baby” puts an exclamation point on that notion.

It'll be hard not to sing the songs to yourself or check your record collection while you're in the middle of this book. The mix list here is made of classic Beatles and stories that even the most die-hard fans might not have heard (yet) – but while music and the love of the Fab Four are the mainstay, author McNab puts the Beatles and Epstein in focus by pulling outside influences into his narrative. Readers are also reminded of historical events in that pivotal year, as well as the many tunes that made you dance and shout.

Absolutely, this is a book Beatles fans must have ASAP. Any music lover will enjoy it, and it might start a new obsession. You need your music, so find “Shake It Up, Baby.” Missing it will really bug you.

− End of book review.

Members of The Beatles wave to fans as they arrive at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong on June 8, 1964. Photo: Handout

This article was first published on June 9, 1964

Hundreds of screaming teenagers in Hongkong yesterday gave Britain’s Beatles a wild welcome.

More than 1,000 young boys and girls waited in the rain at Kai Tak airport for the plane carrying the long-haired pop singers, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Jimmy Nichol.

Two hours before, nobody could have guessed the Beatles were coming. There were the few that had waited since early morning, but most arrived at the airport a short time before the plane was due.

As the plane approached the runway, one English girl said: “I told myself I wasn’t going to scream, but I think will.”

A Chinese girl, asked if she too was going to scream, replied: “Of course.”

And scream they did. As the four young Liverpudlians stepped from the aircraft, an enormous cry went up from the airport’s observation platform as the teenagers strained over tops of heads in front of them to see their singing idols.

Then they rushed in a wave from point to point to catch a glimpse of the Beatles as they walked to their transport.

Just in case the fans got out of hand, 13 police vehicles stood by at the edge of the tarmac. But one police officer said it was a good crowd and gave the authorities no trouble.

Among the more dedicated Beatles fans were two young Chinese girls who had spent all day Sunday at the airport and would have stayed overnight to get a good welcoming position had their parents not taken them home at nightfall. They were among the first on the spot yesterday.

Three English girls were the first at the airport yesterday. They arrived at 9.20am completed with sashes on which were inscribed the names of the Beatles.

South China Morning Post issue of June 9, 1964, with front page story about The Beatles.

The fans milled about the terminal concourse even after the loudspeaker had announced that the Beatles had left for the city.

Britain’s top “pop” group left their mark on Hong Kong traffic, too.

Roads leading from the airport were clogged with city-bound traffic crawling at a snail’s pace.

Then came the press conference at the President Hotel and more chaos. The Beatles had to push their way through more screaming teenagers to get to the conference room to face scores of jostling photographers and reporters, all shouting at once.

As the pressmen pushed in upon him, John Lennon yelled: “Everybody from the press here?”

Jimmy Nichol, the young drummer replacing the ailing Ringo Starr, said it was a most exciting experience to be thrust so quickly into the bustling limelight In which the Beatles moved.

When Ringo rejoins the group in Australia, Jimmy will return to England and some television appearances.

Question: Why did you call yourselves The Beatles?

Paul McCartney: We thought it was a good name–at the time.

Q: How do you get time to rehearse?

George Harrison: We don’t.

Q: What do you think of the “Mods” and the “Rockers”?

Lennon: Good publicity, aren’t they?

Q: Would you like to go to China?

McCartney: I thought this was China.

Lennon: I could have sworn...

Harrison: We got on the wrong plane.

Q: Are you going to do any shopping in Hong Kong?

McCartney: Yes.

Q: How often do you have a haircut?

Harrison: It all depends. Usually once in a blue moon.

Q: We heard that you were bringing your mothers on this trip.

Harrison: We heard that too.

McCartney: No, they’re not here.

Q: Which of your records do you like best?

Lennon: Our latest one, “Long Tall Sally.”

Fans of the Beatles wave as the band members Jimmie Nicol (drummer replacement for Ringo Starr), Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison arrive at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong on June 8, 1964. Photo: Handout

Looking tired and drawn after the long trip, the Beatles seemed pleased when the questioning was over.

A British journalist travelling with them said the boys were amazed with their receptions along the way. Teenagers fought with police in Beirut, crowds of girls were waiting when their plane touched down at dawn in Calcutta and there were also crowds to greet them at Bangkok.

The journalist said it had come as a surprise to the Beatles that their appeal was so international.

Two of the Beatles, Lennon and Nichol, made a brief appearance at the ‘Miss Hong Kong’ semi-final at the President Hotel last night.

The two spoke to the large audience briefly, then shook hands with all the beauty contestants.

The two other Beatles, McCartney and Harrison, did not appear as they were resting after their long journey.

Promoters of the concert tonight at the Princess Theatre report that there are still some $75 seats available.

− End of article.

• June 8, 2024 
• The newspaper article that inspired John Lennon to write Mean Mr. Mustard...it actually dates back to June 1967!

• June 7, 2024 
• The Lennon estate releases "You Are Here (The Ultimate Mix)" video

When I was a teenager, I wrote many lyrics. I drew upon John Lennon's lyrical creativity for poetry ideas. Lennon's "You Are Here" deeply inspired me to compose "A Rich Man's Dream" which was published in the Kemptville Advance on April 17, 1974. A Canadian copyright was later secured under a collection of poems entitled "Mirrors of A Rogue." I hope you enjoy my poem. John Whelan Ottawa Beatles Site

• June 6, 2024 

Tony Bramwell, who was a childhood friend of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, has passed away at the age of 78, with the music world now in mourning

By Dan Laurie Assistant Showbiz and TV Editor, Zoe Delaney Assistant Showbiz Editor, and Mia O'Hare for the Daily Star

Tony Bramwell, centred wearing a blue jacket and a tie, watches Paul McCartney conducting an orchestra.

Tony Bramwell has died aged 78.

The music industry legend, who played a crucial role as The Beatles' tour manager and discovered rock icons Queen, passed away on June 2 after a short illness.

A friend of John Lennon, Sir Paul McCartney, and George Harrison since their schooldays, Bramwell was at the heart of the Fab Four's rise to stardom, taking on the gig as their road manager before becoming a heavyweight in the music industry.

He was part of the band's' inner circle long before they took the world by storm and etched their names into music lore. Sir Paul shared a touching tribute to his old pal, describing him as a "good companion" during the heady days of Beatlemania.

The official Beatles Instagram page also posted a heartfelt homage, saying: "Tony worked on many NEMS and Apple projects, from music videos to photo shoots, PR and more and will be missed by many friends and colleagues.", reports the Mirror.

Even in his twilight years, Bramwell was a familiar face at Liverpool's famous International Beatleweek. The Liverpool Beatles Museum also paid its respects to the "lovely man", with a statement reading: "Everyone at the Liverpool Beatles Museum- Mathew Street is saddened to hear of the recent passing of Tony Bramwell. He was a lovely man. We enjoyed his company on many occasions. Condolences to his family."

In a touching message on the Strawberry Field website, Lennon's sister Julia Baird said: "Tony was the 'man in the know' as he was around for the bulk of the Beatles journey. He will be missed at Beatle Week."

Bramwell witnessed the historic moment when McCartney met Lennon for the first time and later became The Beatles' road manager and a key figure to Brian Epstein. Climbing the ranks, he eventually co-led Apple Records and penned down his memories with the Fab Four in his 2006 memoir - Magical Mystery Tours.

In it, McCartney is cited saying, "If you want to know anything about The Beatles, ask Tony Bramwell. He knows more than I do." This music maestro even popped up at the tail end of the All You Need is Love music video, having played a pivotal role in the band's pioneering approach to creating song clips.

Bramwell's knack for talent spotting led him to work with Epstein in discovering acts like Paul Simon, Queen, and Eva Cassidy. He notably brought Queen to Apple Records during The Beatles' tumultuous split. However, Queen ultimately inked a deal with Parlophone Records. Bramwell's 2014 autobiography offered fans a unique glimpse into the inner workings of The Beatles, including anecdotes about Yoko Ono and the band's dynamics.

Tony Bramwell

• June 5, 2024 

The Beatles are a pop culture phenomenon that will unlikely ever be touched by any musical opponent. They created countless songs that inspired other great artists and still live and breathe as freshly today as they did in the ’60s. From unbridled experimentalism and pushing artistic boundaries to crafting some of the best love songs of all time, they truly accomplished it all. But what about the women behind The Beatles?

The group might be portrayed as a tight-knit boy’s club, but it was far from the truth. Feminine energy played an undeniable role at every stage of The Beatles’ career from inspiring love songs to introducing them to new concepts and even shaping their image as a band. Here are all the women behind The Beatles.

Pattie Boyd

English model and actress Pattie Boyd first met her soon-to-be husband, George Harrison, on the set of the 1964 promotional film, A Hard Day’s Night.

“On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute, and George, with velvet-brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I had ever seen. At a break for lunch, I found myself sitting next to him. Being close to him was electrifying,” Pattie would later recall of the fateful meeting.

Whilst Pattie eventually became George’s wife, inspiring songs like Something and I Need You (as well as an infamous rock love triangle with Eric Clapton), one of her biggest contributions to The Beatles is often overlooked.

It’s no secret that LSD played an integral role in The Beatles’ discography, but it was Pattie Boyd’s dentist, John Riley, who first introduced the band to it. The unassuming dentist laced John, Cynthia, Pattie and George’s coffees with the psychedelic during a dinner party in 1965.

“We were just insane… we were just out of our heads… we all thought there was a fire in the lift, but it was just a little red light, and we were all screaming, all hot and hysterical!” John recalled of the night.

Meanwhile George said of the experience: “I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass,” he said. “It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours.”

Pattie also was responsible for The Beatles’ introduction and deep interest in Hinduism and Indian culture. She had been previously introduced to Transcendental Meditation by her sister, and convinced the band to join her to watch a lecture by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1967. This interaction sparked the famous trip to India the following year which had a monumental impact on the band’s music and direction.

Cynthia Lennon

By the time The Beatles made it big, Cynthia Lennon was a veteran of the group, having been there since meeting John back in 1957 at Liverpool Art College. As other girlfriends and wives entered and exited the tightknit foursome, Cynthia proved to be a grounding force that helped them adjust into the fold.

Often to the detriment of her happiness and wellbeing, Cynthia also stoically braved loneliness, affairs, single-handedly raising a child, and at times, violence, as John and The Beatles’ career flourished. Eventually, it was John’s spiral into LSD that caused a rift between the pair.

“John needed to escape his reality. I understood completely but I couldn’t go along with him.” Cynthia later said of John’s experimenting with drugs.

She and Julian Lennon directly and indirectly inspired many great Beatles tracks including You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Across The Universe, Hey Jude and Julia.

Linda McCartney

Though Paul and his long-term girlfriend, Jane Asher, broke up in 1968, the Beatle wasn’t single for long because he quickly met the love of his life, Linda Eastman. The pair met at the Bag O’Nails nightclub in London in May 1967 and again for the launch of The Beatles’ latest record, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

From the moment they got together, Paul and Linda became an inseparable force. Though Linda only saw the last few years of The Beatles, she’s credited with guiding Paul through the emotionally tumultuous breakup of the band and the ugly ensuing legal battles that followed.

With a trusty Nikon camera by her side, Linda snapped some of the band’s most candid and authentic moments in the final years of their time as a group. She continued to photograph Paul through his solo career and in the Wings era giving Beatles fans a comprehensive visual narrative to pore over for years to come.

Yoko Ono has continually proved to be one of the most misunderstood characters of 20th century pop culture having faced unrelenting waves of misogyny, hate and blame for the breakup of The Beatles. This is something that constantly overshadows her positive contributions to the band’s musical direction.

When a married John Lennon step foot into the Indica Gallery in 1966, he wasn’t aware that the woman he was about to meet would irreparably set The Beatles on a different musical path. Yoko Ono’s avant-garde approach to art quickly spilled into John’s creative processes, which undeniably exasperated tensions within the group, but ultimately pushed John to create some of The Beatles’ best music.

“She wanted more, do it more, do it double, be more daring, take all your clothes off,” Paul explained during an interview with Barry Miles for his book Many Years from Now. “She always pushed him, which he liked. Nobody had ever pushed him. Nobody had ever pushed him like that. We all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far out.”

Paul and John had both previously experimented with tape loops and other sound engineering marvels in songs like I’m Only Sleeping and Strawberry Fields Forever. However, the White Album saw John’s experimentalism reach new heights on songs like Revolution 9 which, thanks to Yoko’s influence, is eight straight minutes of unbridled cacophonous mayhem. Unlike John, who was a self-taught musician, Yoko was classically trained which also saw her lend a hand to composing songs like Because and The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.

Though Yoko is often unfairly cast as the villain who broke up The Beatles, it’s well-documented by the band themselves that factors like Brian Epstein’s death and the ravages of fame and time had eaten away at their comradery long before Yoko entered the picture. But what Yoko did do was open John’s mind to endless musical possibilities which made for boundary-pushing art and music.

Though she’s often overlooked when standing in the shadows of the likes of Yoko Ono and Pattie Boyd, Maureen Starkey was the most enduring feminine force behind The Beatles. She met Ringo back in 1962 and stayed married to him through Beatlemania, the breakup of The Beatles all the way through to 1975 when the pair divorced.

As a 15-year-old trainee hairdresser in Liverpool, Maureen was a regular at the Cavern Club where she quickly became acquainted with The Beatles and other skiffle groups. It was here where she met Ringo as he was standing on the precipice of unprecedented fame and adoration.

“Richy was just the drummer at the time,” Maureen recalled in a 1988 interview with the French magazine Le Chroniqueur. “I don’t remember when he first asked me out on a date, but he did just after he left the Hurricanes and joined the Beatles.”

Maureen and Ringo became a couple as The Beatles fame soared and the pair married in 1965 after learning they were pregnant with their first child. Along with the other Beatles and their partners, Maureen joined Ringo in India in 1968 where their musical prowess was opened up to unlimited bounds. Though she didn’t directly inspire any officially released Beatles tunes, that’s not to say she wasn’t a muse.

George Harrison, who would later have an affair with Maureen to the horror of his other bandmates, once sang a pointed song titled ‘Maureen’ during the 1969 Get Back sessions. Though he claimed the track was penned by his pal Bob Dylan, sceptics and die-hard Beatles fans argue otherwise. Ringo also commissioned Frank Sinatra to sing a special rendition of The Lady is a Tramp for Maureen’s birthday in 1968 with the song title being changed to ‘The Lady is a Champ’.

Besides this, Maureen was arguably the most die-hard Beatles fan who was present for every stage of the band’s lifespan from Cavern Club rockers to global music phenomenon. Her unwavering adoration is best seen in the Get Back documentary where she can be seen head-banging and cheering on the band during their rooftop performance.

In 1963, The Beatles played an iconic set at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It was here, where Paul would meet his muse for the next five years, actress Jane Asher. Jane, who was the sister of Peter Asher (from the band Peter and Gordon) met Paul and the rest of the band backstage. As Cynthia recalled in her memoir, “Paul fell like a tonne of bricks for Jane.”

Some of Paul’s greatest love songs including And I Love Her and Here, There and Everywhere were inspired by his whirlwind relationship with Jane. The pair also had quite the tumultuous relationship which saw Paul pen some of The Beatles’ best melancholy tracks like You Won’t See Me and I’m Looking Through You. But Jane’s impact wasn’t just being a muse, her high-profile career and London abode introduced Paul to a range of new experiences including the theatre – which may have played a part in Paul’s burgeoning interest in fusing operatic orchestras with his rock music.

As well as this, Paul lived with Jane in the family’s attic where he scrawled out the lyrics to songs such as Yesterday and Yellow Submarine. However, the pair’s relationship became rocky and was fettered with arguments and affairs. It ended with Jane dumping Paul live on television in 1968 some weeks after she claimed to have found him in bed with actress Francie Schwartz.

The perhaps the most overlooked feminine force behind The Beatles was a woman that wasn’t romantically involved with them at all (if you don’t count Stuart Sutcliffe, whom she was engaged to prior his untimely death).

In 1960, The Beatles, then consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best, made the first of several pilgrimages to Hamburg, Germany. Here, the band would transform artistically, socially, and physically thanks to the effervescent counter-culture.

When 22-year-old Hamburg native and budding photographer, Astrid Kirchherr, walked into the Kaiserkeller bar in 1960, she unwittingly stumbled across her future muses.

“I was amazed at how beautiful they looked,” she later recalled. “It was a photographer’s dream, my dream.”

Astrid Kirchherr was the definition of nuance and counterculture and she is largely credited with carving The Beatles’ early image that set them apart back in England. Whilst most men were donning carefully crafted pompadours, Astrid introduced The Beatles to their iconic shaggy, mop-top haircuts.

“All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of what you call Beatles haircut,” Astrid told the BBC in 1995. “And my boyfriend then, Klaus Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart liked it very very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and asking me to cut his hair for him. Pete has really curly hair and it wouldn’t work.”

Kirchherr also boosted The Beatles’ cool factor by introducing them to European fashion trends such as leather jackets, collarless shirts, tailored trousers and slim-fitting shirts – all of which became integral to the band’s visual identity. Though her influence was mostly concentrated during the band’s early years, her impact set them apart and was undeniable to their meteoric rise to fame.

• June 4, 2024 

The true story about the campaign to get Ringo into the White House as President

Ringo Starr releases his "Crooked Boy" video Canadian songstress Céline Dion makes a visit to Cirque du Soleil

• June 3, 2024 

On June 2, 1960, the Beatles perform at the Neston Institute

Smiths Falls' little-known connection with The Fab Four

Collectors in Eastern Ontario knew early about The Beatles, often because their records were manufactured just down the road.

By Joanne Laucius for the Ottawa Citizen

When the RCA Victor record plant in Smiths Falls pressed Love Me Do by the Beatles in February 1963, the plant became part of music history.

The manufacturing town west of Ottawa was ahead of the pop culture phenomenon that would become known as Beatlemania. It was almost a full year before the Beatles wave would sweep across North America.

The Smiths Falls-pressed Beatles’ single Love Me Do was not an instant success, selling only 170 copies shipped under the Capitol label, noted Piers Hemmingsen in his 2015 book, The Beatles in Canada, The Origins of Beatlemania. The next two Beatles singles, Please Please Me and From Me To You, didn’t do much better.

The Fab Four were already a hit in the United Kingdom in 1963, though, and Beatlemania hopped across the Atlantic Ocean after the four mop-tops appeared on the Ed Sullivan TV show in February 1964.

But collectors in Eastern Ontario already knew about the Beatles, often because their records were manufactured just down the road.

“It was like a pre-Beatlemania cult following,” said Megan McIlvenna, communications officer at the Smith Falls Heritage House Museum.

“Everyone either worked (at RCA) or knew someone who worked at RCA.”

Beatlemania and the role that the Smiths Falls plant played in it are the subject of a summer-long exhibit at the museum that kicked off Saturday with music from the Beatles cover band Beatlejuice and a visit from a taco truck.

RCA Victor introduced vinyl long-playing records around 1930. (The “Victor” in RCA Victor stood for victrola, the first consumer phonograph, first demonstrated in 1925.) 

RCA purchased two buildings and a vacant lot on Cornelia Street in Smiths Falls in the early 1950s. In the days when music was sold through radio play and fans who bought records, Smiths Falls was considered a strategic spot to press records, located halfway between markets in Toronto and Montreal.

The plant, which opened in 1954, employed as many as 350 people at a time, sometimes using three shifts a day, McIlvenna said. About three-quarters of the employees were women. 

The plant also pressed specialty records with images of the artist to be distributed as promotional items. Over time, the plant churned out records by Elvis Presley, The Monkees, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Led Zeppelin.

The first Beatles 45s pressed in Smiths Falls included Love Me Do with P.S. I Love You on the B side; Please Please Me with Ask Me Why; From Me to You with Thank You Girl and She Loves You with  I’ll Get You.

Staff at the museum, along with local volunteers, worked together, calling out to collectors for memorabilia of the plant and CJET, the local radio station. A statue of the RCA mascot “Nipper,” the dog listening intently with a cocked head, holds a prominent place in the exhibit.

Collectors also shared photos of the Beatles from their personal collections by Lynn Ball, a retired Ottawa Citizen photographer who was working with The Canadian Press when Beatlemania hit Canada.

On Labour Day 1964, Ball was assigned to cover a Beatles concert at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

“They had two shows and in between they had a press conference,” Ball recalled this past week. “We didn’t know what it was going to be like.”

Fans who couldn’t get inside were crowded around Maple Leaf Gardens, he said. Inside fans were screaming so loudly that it was impossible to hear the band. Another news photographer borrowed two bullets from a police officer to plug his ears.

St. John’s Ambulance workers helped fans who had collapsed in hysterics out of the building.

“It wasn’t until years later that you realized you were at a historic event,” Ball said.

The RCA plant closed in 1979. The RCA plant building is still there, but it’s now home mostly to medical offices.

“Smiths Falls was a victim of its success,” said William Manhire, the exhibit’s project co-ordinator. “Where it was located became less important as transport became easier.”

It has been a long and winding road for vinyl, Manhire explained.

There’s been a resurgence in interest in the format, with audiophiles arguing that vinyl has a more nuanced sound, but there is also the pleasure of having a product you can hold, Manhire said.

“To hold something in your hands, that’s something to enjoy.”

The Beatlemania exhibition runs through Sept. 1 at the Smith Falls Heritage House Museum, 11 Old Slys Rd. The museum is open Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

• June 2, 2024 

By Andrew from Parlogram Auctions

Bonus feature: Capitol Records finally releases in true stereo, Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys. It was recorded during the Pet Sounds sessions.

• June 1, 2024 

While The Beatles may arguably be celebrated more for their extraordinary innovations in the studio, they honed their craft as youngsters performing to live audiences night after night. Before they were famous, and even during the first years of Beatlemania, they would play more than one set on the same day.

The rare clips we do have of the band performing before their chart-topping heyday show a group of performers as tight-knit and hard-edged as any rock and rollers out there at the time. Then there are the remarkable shows caught on camera between 1963 and 1965, which are notable for the deafening screams from the audience as much as the performances themselves.

Following the first-ever stadium gig played to a world-record crowd at New York’s Shea Stadium in August 1965, the quality of The Beatles’ live performances started to wane. The group were tired of the travails of touring, being unable to hear themselves at concerts over the sound of screaming and fans chasing them everywhere they went. Recordings from this period depict a live band whose heart simply isn’t in it anymore.

Run-ins with Filipino royalty and violent threats made against their performances by fundamentalist Christians in the United States were the final straw. The band stopped touring after the final performance of their 1966 US tour at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

During their six years touring as a band, The Beatles played thousands of gigs across 15 different countries. But which venue did they play more than any other?

Hailing from Liverpool at the height of Merseybeat music, it’s only natural that the venue where The Beatles played more than anywhere else was The Cavern Club. This small, literally cavernous warehouse in the heart of the city’s dockland centre began as a jazz venue before becoming Liverpool’s main centre for rock and roll music at the end of the 1950s.

The Beatles played there at least 292 times between February 1961 (during their first “tour” of the Liverpool area) and August 1963. The club is also where Beatles manager Brian Epstein first saw the band play and agreed to sign them to his NEMS agency. He dropped by to watch a lunchtime performance on November 9th, 1961.

Today, the club is a major tourist attraction for Beatles fans and, having been redeveloped and reopened in 1991, is still a venue for live music.

The Beatles really knocked their live performances into shape away from the attention of home crowds in Liverpool. For three successive years between 1960 and 1962, they visited the German city of Hamburg to perform.

On their second, third and fourth visits, they undertook mammoth club residencies, performing up to four shows a night for months on end while pumped up on amphetamines given to them by the club owners.

Their longest run was at the venue that hosted the second-highest number of Beatles live shows. The band played a whopping 98 consecutive nights at the Top Ten Club on Hamburg’s famous Reeperbahn strip between March and July 1961.

That 1961 stint featured original Beatles drummer Pete Best and bass player Stuart Sutcliffe. By their final trips to Hamburg, Sutcliffe had left the group and sadly passed away, and Best had been replaced by Ringo Starr.

The band then played two 14-day residencies at The Star-Club, in November and December 1962. They even played shows on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. These 28 dates at The Star-Club mark the most performances by The Beatles’ final line-up at any international venue.

Back in the UK, London’s Hammersmith Odeon (now the Hammersmith Apollo) holds the record, hosting The Beatles for a total of 22 dates between December 1964 and December 1965. This venue hosted the group’s penultimate show in England, excluding their impromptu rooftop concert in 1969.

And leaving Hamburg aside, the international venue to host the most Beatles performances was the Olympia Hall in Paris, where the band played for 20 successive nights in January and February 1964. The gigs were the group’s first abroad, too, outside of Hamburg and five shows in Sweden the previous summer.

No wonder they were exhausted by the time 1966 came around.

− End of article.

• May 31, 2024 

Lennon’s 12-string Hootenanny, heard on Help! album and film, had not been seen or played for half a century

By Nadeem Badshah for The Guardian

A guitar used by John Lennon has sold for $2.9m (£2.3m), setting what organisers have called a new world record for the highest-selling guitar at auction in Beatles history.

The 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar, used in the recording of the Beatles’ 1965 Help! album and film, had not been seen or played for more than 50 years.

The instrument had been owned by the Scottish guitarist Gordon Waller, known for being one half of the pop duo Peter and Gordon, who later gave the item to his band’s road managers.

Decades later, new owners living in the rural British countryside rediscovered the guitar in the midst of their move and put it up for auction with an estimate of between £485,000 and £647,000.

The guitar was bought through a telephone bid at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York on Wednesday as part of a two-day music icons sale by Julien’s Auctions.

David Goodman, the chief executive of the auctioneers, said: “We are absolutely thrilled and honoured to have set a new world record with the sale of John Lennon’s lost Hootenanny guitar.

“This guitar is not only a piece of music history but a symbol of John Lennon’s enduring legacy.

“Today’s unprecedented sale is a testament to the timeless appeal and reverence of the Beatles’ music and John Lennon.”

John Lennon's Framus 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar on display in the music icons sale at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York. 

Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Rex/Shutterstock

The guitar, made by the Bavarian firm Framus in the early 1960s, was seen in the Help! movie when the group perform You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.

It was also used during the recording sessions for Help!, It’s Only Love, I’ve Just Seen a Face and Girl, and on the rhythm track for Norwegian Wood played by George Harrison.

Darren Julien, the co-founder and executive director of Julien’s Auctions, said he had travelled to the UK to verify the guitar at the house it was being stored in and salvaged the original case, which had been thrown in a bin.

Julien said he had confirmed the instrument’s provenance via the Beatles historians Andy Babiuk and Danny Bennett.

In 2015, Julien’s sold another Lennon guitar: a J-160E Gibson acoustic guitar stolen from him and unwittingly bought by a musician in the late 1960s, which fetched $2.4m (£1.6m at the time).

The company sold a drum kit used by Ringo Starr for $2.2m, and a copy of the White Album owned by him.

• May 30, 2024 

The Beatles' 'Love' closes July 6. Why Ringo Starr says 'it’s worth seeing' while you can

By Melissa Ruggieri for USA Today

For 18 years, all Cirque du Soleil needed was "Love."

But in a few weeks, the kaleidoscopic fever dream known as “The Beatles Love by Cirque du Soleil” will go dark on the Las Vegas Strip.

No more skate ramps and curlicue airborne tricks to imbue “Help!” with the joviality to match the music (if not the lyrics).

No more graceful trapeze routines to the heart-fluttering “Something.”

No more venue-size bedsheet to appear out of nowhere, flap over the heads of the audience and get sucked into the vortex of the stage while the mashup of “Within You Without

 You/Tomorrow Never Knows” envelops your eardrums, inviting striking sensory overload.

The end of Cirque’s groundbreaking production – it was the first to feature all prerecorded music and fixate on a singular music act – is July 6. A private performance will take place July 7, and considering the opening of “Love” on June 30, 2006, attracted Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Julian Lennon, Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison and Dhani Harrison among other VIPs, odds for prestigious sightings are high.

Endings are emotionally turbulent, and for the cast, crew, creative team and fans of “Love,” this finale triggers an ache.

“To this day when I hear a Beatles song, my heart goes directly to the show,” said Kati Renaud, senior artistic director at Cirque du Soleil who has worked with “Love” for the majority of its nearly two-decade run. “I see the scenes and the dancers and the choreography. (Original director and “Love” writer) Dominic (Champagne) would say, this is a rock ‘n’ roll poem and it’s this beautiful marriage of rock and poetry.”

Rumblings of the shuttering of “Love” started two summers ago when MGM Resorts International offloaded The Mirage – home to the show and its $100 million custom-built, sonically superior 2,013-seat theater – to Hard Rock International.

Changes typically accompany acquisitions and “Love,” never the top ticket seller among Cirque’s Las Vegas ecosystem of six shows despite its devoted base, was ripe for axing.

“The Hard Rock, you would think would keep the show (because of the music connection). But no,” said Beatles icon Ringo Starr in a recent interview with USA TODAY. “Honestly, we’ve had a good run.”

The transformation from The Mirage to Hard Rock will begin July 17, when the casino-resort closes. No reservations are being accepted after July 14. The Hard Rock Las Vegas, including a 700-foot guitar-shaped hotel tower, is expected to open in spring 2027.

Officials at the Hard Rock declined to comment on the closure of “Love” or future entertainment plans when contacted by USA TODAY.

A Grammy Award-winning soundtrack of Beatles songs intricately knitted by Giles Martin is the spine of the colorfully chaotic production. Not only was “Love” the first Cirque show to utilize prerecorded music but it spawned other music-based Cirque productions.

“Viva Elvis” closed in 2012 at Aria Resort & Casino after a disappointing two-year run, but “Michael Jackson ONE,” with its spiffy choreography and another heady catalog, continues to thrive at Mandalay Bay after 11 years.

“Learning to produce a show with no live music was a new world for the artistic team of Cirque,” said Renaud. “This was definitely new territory for us and Giles played such an integral part in finding solutions and being such an advocate.”

Martin told USA TODAY in 2022 that when he first began work on the soundtrack to “Love” at Abbey Road Studios in the mid-2000s, “I was vilified by people there. They’re going ‘What is George Martin’s son doing, chopping up Beatles songs?’ The whole idea sounds ridiculous, especially if you’re a purist.”

But even the most devout Beatles fanatic had to acknowledge the magic of hearing some of the band’s most familiar pieces dissected and reconstructed for “Love,” starting with the chilling harmonizing on the opening “Because” to the snippets of “In My Life” and “Penny Lane” embedded in the psychedelic bubble-isciousness during “Strawberry Fields Forever” to the jaw-dropping mashup of “Drive My Car,” “The Word” and “What You’re Doing.”

In all, the show and soundtrack contain elements from 130 Beatles recordings.

Tweaks were continual throughout the show’s existence. A facelift took place in 2016 for its decade anniversary and the nearly 17-month pandemic-related shutdown allowed for some other modifications before "Love" reopened in August 2021.

The conclusion of the Cirque show also ends the only live production anywhere in the world licensed by The Beatles’ parent company, Apple Corps.

Is there a future for The Beatles’ ‘Love’?

A modified “Love,” perhaps as a touring production or at another permanent location, has been vaguely discussed, but nothing is imminent.

“To recreate something as it was created isn’t realistic, but to be inspired by it is definitely something Cirque thrives on,” Renaud said. “Because of The Beatles’ music aspect of it, there is something quite popular and inviting in any discussions (about the show’s future).”

Starr also hopes that “Love” might live on in another form, but he isn’t bullish.

“It may happen again. But I’m making this up – there are no rumors going on. But it’s worth seeing,” he said. “We did keep the business open all this time.”

The “Love” cast of 60 includes longtimers Jimmie Cervera (as the distinctively dome-topped Dr. Robert) and Eugen Brim (as the wild-haired Father McKenzie), who left the production in 2016 but returned in February to reprise his role until the show is buried along with its name, as Eleanor Rigby would appreciate.

They and other "Love" employees have been meeting with Cirque brass to try to find other places in the company to fit their unique talents, including auditions for the “Love” dancers to potentially slide into the “Michael Jackson ONE” team, said Renaud.

As for those who might still be uncertain about whether or not to catch the show as its final dates tick down, Renaud has some motivating words.

− End of article.

• May 29, 2024 

Why Paul McCartney Made A Cameo In Pirates Of The Caribbean

Paul McCartney of the British band, The Beatles, explains why he made a brief appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

By Jordan Iacobucci and Cassidy Stephenson for CBR

Sir Paul McCartney isn't just known for rocking with The Beatles but also for starring in several films throughout his career. McCartney starred as himself in the 1964 film A Hard Day's Night alongside his former bandmates John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. The British boy band also appeared in Help! and Magical Mystery Tour.

Apart from sharing a screen with his bandmates, McCartney also made an unexpected cameo in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Considering the former Beatle's star power, it's not surprising McCartney found his way into a Disney film. However, producers and cast members kept his Pirates of the Caribbean cameo secret until it premiered. McCartney can thank his good friend Johnny Depp for his voyage on the high seas.

Updated by Timothy Blake Donohoo on May 27, 2024: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was one of Hollywood's most unexpected success stories, with the former ride becoming an action-adventure smash hit. Beyond talents like Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, Paul McCartney was another celebrity in Pirates of the Caribbean. Many fans have wondered why Sir Paul McCartney was in the movie series, but he was actually one of several such celebrity "cameos." With the series over 20 years old, many have completely forgotten that Paul McCartney was in PotC.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Johnny Depp and Sir Paul McCartney have been friends for many years. Director Espen Sandberg recalled brainstorming with the Fantastic Beasts actor on who to fill Keith Richards' shoes for Dead Men Tell No Tales, as the musician could not reprise his role. Depp had McCartney's phone number and gladly texted him about the opportunity. "And it went a little back and forth, and their lingo got more and more pirate-y, and it was like, well, this is going to happen," Sandberg said.

Depp has appeared in three of McCartney's music videos, including the song "My Valentine," alongside Natalie Portman. According to an interview with series producer Jerry Bruckheimer, McCartney returned the favor to Depp by making a cameo in the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean franchise film. Fortunately, the former Beatle was already a Captain Jack Sparrow fan and was happy to hop onto the swashbuckling franchise.

•  + Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales was released on May 26, 2017.
•  + Dead Men Tell No Tales is the lowest-rated Pirates of the Caribbean film on Rotten Tomatoes, with a Freshness Rating of 30%.
•  + Despite its low critical score, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales has an audience rating of 60% on Rotten Tomatoes.

McCartney Isn't The Only Musician To Appear In The Pirates Series

In Dead Men Tell No Tales, McCartney makes a cameo as Uncle Jack, who sings an old Liverpool sailors song — where the former Beatle is from. This cameo helps give some much-needed backstory to Captain Jack Sparrow by introducing a member of his family. Paul McCartney's Pirates of the Caribbean character Uncle Jack is Jack Sparrow's uncle, who looks exactly like his nephew. Uncle Jack is a prisoner at Saint Martin's, but viewers are unaware of his fate. Due to Richards' unavailability, the studio had to find McCartney to keep up the Sparrow family tradition.

Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, makes his first Pirates of the Caribbean appearance in At World's End, the third installment of the film series. The musician plays Captain Teague, Jack Sparrow's father, a role he reprises in On Strangers Tides. Just like Paul McCartney's role in Pirates of the Caribbean, the character looked just like Jack Sparrow, to an almost humorous degree. While Richards expressed interest in returning for Dead Men Tell No Tales, his touring schedule with the Rolling Stones prevented his involvement.

• + Keith Richards originally appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
• + Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End was released on May 25, 2007
• + At World's End is the third-lowest rated Pirates of the Caribbean film on Rotten Tomatoes, with a Freshness Rating of 44%.
• + Despite its low critical score, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End has a much higher audience rating of 72%.

As noted, the cameos of various celebrities, such as Paul McCartney in Pirates of the Caribbean, were essentially jokes, with their characters being there to look like Jack Sparrow. Uncle Jack and Captain Teague weren't really full-on characters with much narrative purpose. What role they did play could have been applied to other characters entirely, and they were simply there to bank off the success of Jack Sparrow by being "Jack Sparrow, but older." This only exacerbated the issues with the series, which continually focused more and more on Depp's Sparrow character. While he was always the draw, making him too integral to the formula was likely a big reason for the series' current status.

Despite the relative failure of Dead Men Tell No Tales, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is likely to continue in some way, shape, or form. However, Disney has struggled to decide the best path forward for the franchise. While there were plans for a sixth Pirates film after Dead Men Tell No Tales, the public controversy between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard made the future of this project uncertain, to say the least. Disney ended up severing ties with the lead actor of the hit franchise, effectively canceling the sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film in the process. Even with Depp's firing, Disney has consistently proven its commitment to keeping the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise afloat.

Despite all of these conflicting reports regarding the future of the beloved sea-faring franchise, the most exciting news suggests that Johnny Depp may return to Pirates of the Caribbean after all. Although the actor and Disney had a falling out, it seems they have managed to repair their relationship and may finally be working on a sixth entry in the franchise together. If this proves true, it would be the best-case scenario for Pirates of the Caribbean, as Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow has been the consistent highlight of all five films so far and remains incredibly popular with fans. Moreover, this sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film could finally deliver on the tease at the end of Dead Men Tell No Tales, which hinted that Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner could finally reunite with Jack Sparrow on another mission against the deadly Davy Jones.

As confusing and conflicting as the different reports may be concerning the future of Pirates of the Caribbean, fans can rest at ease knowing that their favorite franchise isn't finished yet. With a star-studded cast itching to get back to set, it is only a matter of time before the next entry finally washes ashore, perhaps bringing a few more guest stars along with it.

− End of article.

• May 28, 2024 

Yoko Ono’s Mind Games—And Her Lasting Legacy

A show at London’s Tate Modern reveals the astonishing breadth of a career often shadowed by questions about fame, celebrity,

and a certain collaborator-husband.

By Mark Rozzo for Vanity Fair 

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at the Tate Modern in London.DANIEL LEAL/GETTY IMAGES.

As anyone who has given Ono’s fascinating career consideration since the late 1960s—when she and Lennon became pop culture’s Heloise and Abelard—can tell you, the conversation tends to run along a squeaky axis that begs extreme opposite conclusions: Did Ono’s marriage to the world’s biggest rock star make her career or ruin it? Did that relationship afford her a level of fame almost unimaginable in the art world or bury her efforts under an avalanche of celebrity, gossip, and entertainment-world triviality?

You try to wish such conjecture away, but then comes a swarm of pesky subconcerns, such as: Had Ono not become the world’s foremost widow in 1980, after Lennon’s murder (she has been known to compare herself to Coretta Scott King and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), would the general public care about her work? Does Ono deserve to be considered, as she often is, a footnote in postwar art, a minor figure cited in catalog essays about Fluxus or conceptualism or performance art? Or a brief mention in the context of avant-garde music, a secondary player in the exalted milieu of John Cage and La Monte Young? Or a passing reference in conversations about 1960s art films, which inevitably focus on Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner?

If we can imagine an alternative art history in which Ono did not become the iconic, reclusive queen in her Dakota tower, perhaps we can imagine her as a semi-obscure artist surfacing in oral testimonies about the New York art scene in the early 1960s—a reliably great, insightful interview. And maybe, in time, this boundary-pushing woman artist from an unabashedly patriarchal era—the creator of such performance works as Cut Piece and Bag Piece, and the conceptual films Fly, Bottoms, and Rape—would finally be getting her due, in the manner of the formerly undersung Judy Chicago and Niki de Saint Phalle.

If Ono’s marriage to Lennon is the water buffalo, then these other nagging questions are a swarm of gnats that is awfully hard to wave away. To walk through the new career-spanning retrospective Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, at London’s Tate Modern (on view until September 1), is to feel them nipping at you until they are practically an element of the art itself. As inconvenient as they are, they are an inescapable reality of Ono’s complicated, rich, many-chaptered life and career, and her enduring influence. (She has inspired generations of artists and musicians, from Pipilotti Rist to Sonic Youth to Lady Gaga to, well, John Lennon.) You may begin to feel that they make the experience of Ono’s work that much more complex—vexed, layered, frustrating, surprising. Until some distant, Ozymandian future, this is simply the fate of the woman Lennon himself described as “the world’s most famous unknown artist.”

Louis Menand once observed that “Ono may have leveraged her celebrity—but so what? She never compromised her art.” The Tate Modern retrospective shows a singular artist following a singular inner voice. As for her outer voice, there are opportunities to sample that as well: A room is outfitted with listening stations for visitors to get a taste of Ono’s long, parallel career as a classically trained musical explorer whose work has spanned genres, from experimental (before and with Lennon) to rock (with Lennon) to dance club (after Lennon). Ono, in fact, has gone on to score an astounding 18 Top 10 dance-club hits in the 21st century, the most recent being “Hell in Paradise 2016,” which reached number one. (Her son, Sean Lennon, may not have achieved that level of commercial success, but he is a similarly inventive and sui generis musician-songwriter, having recently collaborated with Paul McCartney’s son, James, on a song called “Primrose Hill.”) The ever-acerbic rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that Ono “couldn’t carry a tune in a briefcase.” But hearing—and watching—her wail, squeal, and yelp in, say, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, or during the Plastic Ono Band’s 1969 concert in Toronto, or on the 1981 downtown club staple “Walking on Thin Ice” (released two months after Lennon’s death), you can’t help but think that, compared to the posturing male rock stars surrounding her, Ono was just…beyond.

Taking in the more than 200 works marshaled here (a far broader scope than the 2015 Ono show at the Museum of Modern Art) gives a similar impression of Ono’s breadth as a fine artist. She is beyond categorization—a participant in the above-mentioned art-world developments of the ’60s (conceptual, minimalism, Happenings, sound art, experimental film) who roamed from installation work to filmmaking to photography to so-called instruction pieces, as in her foundational Grapefruit, a self-published book from 1964 that is at once a collection of micro-poems and a user’s manual for conceptual works. (The original typescripts are on display.) Some of these quiet, diffident entries could be attempted at home, DIY-style, such as Lighting Piece, which consists of a simple directive: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” (Ono turned this piece into a hypnotic film: a match in extreme slow-mo immolation.)

Many such Grapefruit pieces turn everyday acts, such as lighting a match, into art. A number of them, conversely, could never be everyday—or any day—acts, such as Sun Piece: “Watch the sun until it becomes square.” You could say that Ono, as a conceptualist, was determined to stage Happenings inside the human brain, a sly and ingenious innovation. (The exhibition’s subtitle, “Music of the Mind,” comes from a canny description of such “events” that her second husband, the filmmaker Anthony Cox, coined.)

At the Tate Modern, the piece that most riveted viewers, judging by the crowd clustered around it, was Cut Piece. It is arguably Ono’s best-known work, and it may be her best. In this performance piece, Ono kneels onstage with a pair of shears on the floor next to her. Audience members are invited to come up and snip off bits of her clothing in a slow-moving, collaborative, and subtly violent striptease. In black-and-white footage of the 1964 performance of Cut Piece at Tokyo’s Sogetsu Art Center, Ono appears to be somehow both meekly submissive and impassively defiant as a series of volunteers bound onto the stage to get into the act of disrobing her, cut by cut. (Another performance of Cut Piece was documented by the Grey Gardens documentarians Albert and David Maysles.) The work is a precursor to later performance pieces, most notably those of Marina Abramović. It must surely be a landmark in feminist art, even if Ono has spoken of its aims in terms that are more broadly zen-like and art-historical: “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” she once wrote, “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.”

Either way, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Milgram experiment, the notorious psychological study from the early ’60s in which volunteers, participating in a study examining how physical pain affected learning, were asked to deliver electric shocks to the test’s subjects. The volunteers were, in fact, the actual subjects of the experiment, which sought to show how readily people will follow directives from authority, even if the end result is human victimization and suffering. In Cut Piece, the occasion (art!) exercised its mute authority over willing participants who might have otherwise never dreamed of using scissors to render a defenseless stranger naked. Sixty years after Ono debuted Cut Piece, the work has the power to leave viewers discomfited—complicit, fascinated, aghast.

It has also been suggested that the work is a shrewd metaphor for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, and, by extension, the violence of total warfare and the vulnerability of its civilian victims. Ono, who was born in Japan, was 12 years old that summer and living in Tokyo (her father was a banker); she later said that “those experiences of the early days cast a long shadow in my life.” When Ono performed the work in 2003, it was in a post-9/11, post-second-intifada context. At that time, she mused about going to Palestine as a human shield, saying, “Cut Piece is my hope for world peace.” In the year 2024, it’s hard to know just what Ono is thinking about Gaza or other matters; she turned 91 in February, reportedly left New York City last year, and has mostly receded from public view, despite her active social media accounts.

Other pieces at the Tate Modern that have captured eyeballs are inevitably ones associated with Ono’s marriage to Lennon, beginning with works the artist featured in her famous November 1966 “Unfinished Paintings & Objects” show at the Indica Gallery in Mason’s Yard, London. It was there, during a preview, that the two first met, when Lennon—then working on “Strawberry Fields Forever”—gamely offered Ono an imaginary five shillings to drive an imaginary nail into her Painting to Hammer a Nail, thus keeping it pristine for the opening. Ono later said of their avant-garde meet-cute, “I met a guy who plays the same game I played.” The piece is replicated at the exhibition, with visitors lining up to hammer non-imaginary nails into a mounted board.

It would not be until 1968 that Ono and Lennon’s acquaintance ramped up into an affair that had Lennon leaving his first wife, Cynthia, and their son, Julian (and had Ono and Lennon offering their naked selves to the record-buying public on the cover of their experimental Two Virgins LP). That year also marked a moment when Ono’s work took a turn, with sonic explorations and big public events and art pieces devoted to the cause of world peace, the big theme that has dominated her work ever since. The most famous of these is Bed Peace (1969), equal parts publicity stunt, protest, and Happening, filmed in a Montreal hotel room and commonly known as the “bed-in,” in which Ono and Lennon stayed in bed for a week surrounded by a retinue of supporters (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory) and representatives of an oft-combative press corps. Watching the footage of Bed Peace, it’s illuminating to hear Ono and her husband arguing against direct political action on the grounds that, because everything is corrupt, you’ll only end up replacing the current corrupt system with another one. You know: You can’t change the world until you change your head, and all that.

In the era of “woke,” the position feels naive, easy, privileged—cringey. (You can’t help but remember Elton John’s friendly parody of Lennon and Ono’s 1971 utopian anthem, “Imagine”: “Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do / One is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes.”) Then again, plenty of demonstrations, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, and campus protests during the ensuing five decades have fallen well short of their goals. So perhaps Ono and Lennon were onto something, even at the modest level of offering an overly obvious choice—peace!—to the global public. As Ono put it, “We’re using our money to advertise our ideas so that peace has equal power with the meanies who spend their money to promote war.”

From room to room, there are other greatest hits to take in, including Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67), the artist’s 16-millimeter film documenting approximately 200 pairs of buttocks, which Lennon declared to be “as important as Sgt. Pepper,” and Fly (1970–71), a film directed by Ono and Lennon showing a fly traversing the body of a naked woman. (Liquid carbon dioxide was allegedly used on the insect to make it slow and dopey enough to remain in focus.) Not included in the show is the duo’s 1969 film Self-Portrait, a 42-minute close-up of Lennon’s penis. “The critics wouldn’t touch it,” Ono said, although whether this Lennon-esque turn of phrase was intentional has been an open question for more than 50 years. With their deadpan languor and blithe transgressiveness, Ono’s films may be indebted to Warhol. But, as with much of her work, they suggest a more pronounced willingness to be goofy, disarming the viewer with childlike humor and fixations. (Speaking of: Her “Toilet Piece” is an audio recording of a flushing commode that plays in an endless loop.)

A lot of Ono’s pieces play like one-liners. Which is to say that you might find them facile yet you can’t help but crack up. They are invitations to laugh or smile or just share a feeling. There’s a generosity to them. And yet there’s a rigorous specificity, a reduction of things to essences and simple gestures. (There’s also perhaps a tendency to oversimplify, which is why some critics have viewed Ono as a kind of Rod McKuen of conceptual art.) Even one of the later pieces, Add Color (Refugee Boat), first realized in 2016 and inspired by a dreadful global refugee crisis, emanates humor and optimism as it invites visitors to grab blue markers and scrawl on a white rowboat and surrounding white walls. Inevitably, many of the inscriptions are—people being people—irreverent and irrelevant: The non sequitur “EGG + CRESS SANDWICH,” for instance, was perhaps the most conspicuous contribution. Ono had to have known this outcome going in.

That lonely white boat and that white room slowly turning blue—it also feels like a metaphor for our collective public voyage with Ono, one that began almost 60 years ago. In terms of legacy, where that voyage leads next is a mystery. The questions return: Will Ono be remembered as an important, or at least fascinating, figure in postwar art? Or as the Japanese artist who married a Beatle? Can it be both? Could Ono’s legacy eventually outshine her spouse/partner’s? Historical memory is, after all, unpredictable. Time bends. Fame distorts. Notoriety, collaboration, personal history—when you consider Ono’s work, these elements become as tactile as paper, celluloid, and paint.

Ono and Lennon will likely remain inseparable in memory, collaborators who impacted each other’s creations and mirrored each other’s creativity. Ono and Lennon, after all, were both unabashed avant-gardists—and yet Lennon loved pointing out that “avant-garde is French for bullshit.” For him, it was an article of faith that the lower calling of rock and roll could transcend the high culture of art. He adored “Be-Bop-a-Lula” until the end of his days (in fact, he had his hair done like a Gene Vincent–style ’50s rocker on the very last day of his life)—and yet, contradictorily, he was the author of “Revolution 9,” probably the most outré recording in pop.

Coming from opposite directions, he and Ono met at the same place, as her work suggests a high artist searching for ways of liberating the avant-garde from arid intellectualism and going for the gut, the heart. Throughout “Yoko Ono: Music for the Mind,” pleasure comes into the equation, with works conceived to make you smile, giggle, or, perhaps oddest of all in the context of the art world, just feel warm. (Cut Piece is a notable exception.) With Ono, there’s always an impulse to embrace the unseriousness of the serious. In this way she’s not unlike the very best pop musicians. She was, after all, married to one, and perhaps it was he who said it best: “Her work is far out.”

− End of article

• May 27, 2024 

Mind Games | John Lennon's Most Underrated album?

By Andrew for Parlogram Auctions

May 26, 2024 

Did you know that The Beatles recorded It's All Too Much at De Lane Lea Studios?

Indeed they did! De Lane Lea is located on 75 Dean Street in the Soho district of London. Wikipedia has a brief overview of the recording studio: "Although the studios have mainly been used for dubbing feature films and television programmes, major artists such as the Animals, the Beatles, Herman's Hermits, Soft Machine, Queen, the Rolling Stones, Bee Gees, the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pink Floyd, Wishbone Ash, Renaissance, Electric Light Orchestra, Slade and Deep Purple recorded songs there, particularly at the studio's former premises at 129 Kingsway, Holborn, London, and at Engineers Way, Wembley, where Queen recorded demos in 1971.

"Major William De Lane Lea, a French intelligence attaché for the British government, founded De Lane Lea Studios in 1947 to dub English films into French. The studios were adapted according to the demands of the market, and expanded significantly on various sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Music recording increased dramatically, and the growth of commercial radio and TV also led to new work in advertising. De Lane Lea was succeeded on his death in 1964 by his son Jacques, who was also a film producer, director and writer. He left the company in 1978.

"De Lane Lea now specialises in sound post-production for cinema and television. It includes six individual studios, including Studio 1, the biggest in-town dubbing theatre with one of Europe's most powerful AMS Neve DFC mixing consoles, built on what was previously a TV studio and before that an orchestral recording studio. Recently the studios have been used for films by directors such as Nick Park, Tim Burton, Mike Newell, Guillermo del Toro and Chris Weitz.

"Warner Bros. purchased the studios in November 2012."

• 
• 
  May 25, 2024
  Blue plaque is unveiled at Beatles star George Harrison's childhood home in Liverpool - as the icon's widow says the guitarist would have been
  'touched' but would want visitors not to 'bug' current residents
  By Lara Olszowska for The Daily Mail
  
  + Olivia Harrison, 76, was in Liverpool today to unveil George Harrison's plaque
  + The Beatles star was born and grew up at 12 Arnold Grove in Wavertree
  

Photo credit: James Speakman for PA Media Assignments

George Harrison's widow has said her husband would have been 'touched' by his childhood home being honoured with a blue plaque but feels the Beatles star would be 'nervous' the current residents might get disrupted because of it.

Olivia Harrison, who married the guitarist in 1978, unveiled the plaque today at 12 Arnold Grove in Wavertree, Liverpool.

Harrison, who died in November 2001 at the age of 58 following a battle with cancer, was born on February 25 1943 at the two-up two-down Victorian terraced house and lived there until he was nearly seven years old.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Olivia said she felt the honour was 'great' as she recalled how George had 'fond and intense memories' of his childhood home where he would have to hide from bombings under the stairs with his mother and brother.

She added: 'In one of his books he wrote a lot about life in Arnold Grove.

'It was an insecure time, the war was on, but also it was a very secure time, his Nan lived down the alley, he could run and visit her and he used to.

'They were a very tight-knit family. So I think he would be pretty touched.'

In Harrison's memoir, I, Me, Mine, he recalled growing up in the street, which he described as 'just like Coronation Street' with 'no garden' and a 'door straight on to the street'.

He also said: 'It was OK that house, very pleasant being little and it was always sunny in summer.'

American film producer and author Olivia also revealed the street name became a moniker for the guitarist and they would be referred to as Mr and Mrs Arnold Grove on occasion.

Asked how she feels George would have reacted to the plaque, Olivia said: 'He would probably be more nervous for the people who live inside.'

She explained that George was 'always concerned about everybody else' and would have been hoping that visitors coming to view the plaque would not 'bug' the current residents.

The blue plaque is the third to be displayed outside of London after the scheme was recently extended beyond the capital, the previous two being awarded to Daphne Steele, credited as the 'first black matron' in the NHS, and 20th century ceramics designer Clarice Cliff.

Ahead of the unveiling, Olivia said the blue plaque at George's birthplace would be a 'source of family pride for all the Harrisons, and something that none of us, mainly George, would ever have anticipated'.

 

She had their only child, the musician and composer Dhani Harrison, in 1978.

 

Known as the 'quiet' Beatle, Harrison was the youngest of four children and embraced his love of music, learning guitar at around the age of 12.

 

His parents were born and grew up in the Wavertree area and his mother's parents lived in the adjacent road, Albert Grove.

 

The family departed the area in 1950 after they reached the top of the council housing list.

 

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, which runs the scheme on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), said: 'For many years, local residents and fans have longed for a blue plaque marking the place where George Harrison's exceptional life story began.

 

'I am thrilled that we can make that a reality and we are now inviting people across England to submit their own nominations for the person they would most like to see recognised in this way.'

 

At the age of 17, Harrison went to Hamburg in 1960 as the youngest member of The Beatles and though his songwriting was overshadowed by John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney's work, he contributed with Here Comes The Sun, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Something.

 

Following the Beatles' trip to India in 1966, he was greatly influenced by eastern music and philosophy, and he also wrote the Beatles songs Within You Without You and Only A Northern Song.

 

Steve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool City Region, said: 'Throughout his incredible life, George would often come home to Liverpool to relive the memories that shaped his childhood.

 

'His career might have taken him around the world - but he never lost his love for this city.

 

'He was also a deeply spiritual man who used his platform to spread a message of peace and acceptance, which are values that Scousers are renowned for.

 

'It is for that reason that George will always be regarded as one of Liverpool's greatest sons and it is wonderful to see a permanent tribute to his life in the community that helped to raise him.'

 

 

Following his band splitting, Harrison released his third album, the chart-topper All Things Must Pass, in November 1970, which included the song My Sweet Lord, and also co-founded Handmade Films, which released 1979 comedy Monty Python's Life Of Brian.

 

His charitable work included the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971.

 

In 1988 he formed the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne.

 

Previous plaques have been placed for Lennon at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, London, and 251 Menlove Avenue, Liverpool.

A bearded Roag Best speaks to Olivia Harrison.

Bruce Springsteen, holding his Ivor Award, poses with Sir Paul McCartney at the Ivor Novello Awards in London on May 23, 2024. Photo credit: Dave Hogan/Hogan Media/REX/Shutterstock

Bruce Springsteen became the first international songwriter to be awarded a fellowship of the Ivors Academy in its 80-year history – but he had to put up with some ribbing from one of his most famous peers first.

At the Ivor Novello Awards ceremony at Grosvenor House in London Thursday night, Springsteen was inducted into the fellowship by Paul McCartney, who was the academy’s first-ever fellow.

The ceremony wasn’t broadcast, but the BBC reported the former Beatle as telling the audience he “couldn’t think of a more fitting” recipient of the fellowship – “except maybe Bob Dylan … Or Paul Simon, or Billy Joel, or Beyoncé, or Taylor Swift.”

“When it comes to talent, he’d definitely be in the top five,” he added, imagining how Springsteen would have fit into the Beatles.

“He’s known as the American working man, you know?” a clip of the ceremony posted to social media showed McCartney saying. “But he admits he’s never worked a day in his life.”

“He’s a lovely, lovely boy,” he also said of the American musician.

The fellowship is the highest honor bestowed by the organization, which is the United Kingdom’s professional association for songwriters and composers.

“There is no one more fitting than Bruce Springsteen to be the first international songwriter inducted into our Fellowship,” Tom Gray, chair of the academy, said in a press release.

“Songwriters are powerful storytellers, who capture our lives, loves and hardships. Bruce has always told the greatest stories.”

Springsteen was met with a standing ovation, social media video of the ceremony showed, and he accepted the honor in a hoarse voice, which he attributed to an evening spent singing in the quintessentially British rain.

“I’m gonna sound really weird up here because I sang in the rain, all night last night,” he said in a speech.

He thanked his British fans and audiences, as well as musicians and artists in the UK for giving him inspiration.

“Their depth of knowledge of my work and their dedication constantly keeps me invested here, keeps me coming back to these shores,” said Springsteen of his fans. “So that I can dig deeper, and so that I can deal more faithfully with my audience’s joys and concerns.”

Springsteen rounded off his speech with a performance of his 1975 hit “Thunder Road” – considered by Rolling Stone to be one of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Other honorees at this year’s Ivors included Lana Del Rey, Skepta, KT Tunstall and Raye.

   May 23, 2024



May 22, 2024
The story of George Harrison's Bartell fretless guitar

May 21, 2024
Frank Ifield, ‘I Remember You’ singer who had The Beatles as supporting act, dead at 86

Photo credit: Paul Popper, Getty images

The country singer, known for yodeling in his songs, recorded 25 albums and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2009, according to the news outlet.

Ifield scored three consecutive No. 1 hits during late 1962 and early 1963, becoming the first British artist to achieve the feat, The Telegraph reported.

“I Remember You,” a ballad originally sung by Johnny Mercer, was No. 1 for seven weeks in the UK beginning in July 1962 and stayed on the charts for 28 weeks, according to the newspaper. It was the first single to sell more than 1 million copies in England was the top-selling British single during 1962.

It would hit No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1962.

Ifield followed with two more No. 1 hits -- “Lovesick Blues” (1962) and “The Wayward Wind” (1963) -- making him the second artist after Elvis Presley to have three No. 1 songs in the UK, the news outlet reported.

In Philip Norman’s book, “Shout,” the author wrote that Ifield was the headliner for a show on Dec. 2, 1962, at the Embassy cinema in Peterborough. The Beatles were one of the opening acts and “were an unmitigated flop,” Norman wrote.

But by Feb. 23, 1963, Ifield’s “The Wayward Wind,” was at No. 2 on the BBC charts behind The Beatles’ first No. 1 hit, “Please Please Me,” Bob Spitz wrote in his 2005 book, “The Beatles: The Biography.”

Ifield bounced back in July 1963 with his fourth No. 1 hit, “Confessin’ (That I Love You),” The Telegraph reported.

He was born in Coventry, England, on Nov. 30, 1937, to Australian parents, according to the BBC. His father was an inventor who created the Ifield pump, a device used in fuel systems for jet aircraft.

In 1948, the family returned to Australia, where Ifield received a ukulele for his birthday.

“It accompanied me to school one day, where the headmaster encouraged me to adapt Australian poetry to my own tunes and then perform them to the class,” Ifield wrote on his website. “This experience whetted my appetite for what I instinctively knew was to be my calling.”

Ifield moved back to Australia in the early 1980s, according to The Guardian. In 1986, an operation on his lungs damaged his vocal cords and he gave up live performances. He then began hosting radio shows and promoted country music festivals, the newspaper reported.

He regained his voice in 2016 and began touring again.

Ifield is survived by his second wife, Carole Wood, whom he married in 1992, The Guardian reported. He is also survived by two children from his first marriage to Gillian Bowden, which ended in divorce.

May 20, 2024
Beatles legend Paul McCartney named Britain's first billionaire musician

May 19, 2024
The Liverpool Beatles Museum presents the Beatles Fan Club Secretary Freda Kelly, Billy J. Kramer, and the Quarrymen
during the month of August 2024


I Want To Hold Your Hand (The Beatles Cover) - MonaLisa Twins (Live at the Cavern Club)

To celebrate our 10 year anniversary of stepping foot on that beloved stage, we’re sharing our performance of one of the most important songs of all time. 1963 changed the world of music forever … “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was The Beatles’ first American number-one hit which kicked off the British Invasion!

May 18, 2024
Ringo has a Sept. 22 date at Fallsview Casino's OLG Stage

Photo credit: Emily Butler

Ringo Starr says he’s always enjoyed crossing the border into Canada to play and rehearse with his All Starr Band.

This fall, after rehearsing in Los Angeles and a slew of spring dates, the 83-year-old Beatles drummer will  play at the new OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls, on Sept. 22.  He always appreciates getting a chance to stare at the mind-blowing falls.

“The hotel there just looks right on the falls; it’s incredible, and you can hear it all the time,” said Starr, in his L.A. home studio during a global zoom call on Wednesday afternoon.

“Water’s very big with me. You look at the ocean, it puts you in your place. And so we love that venue, and now you’re telling me they’ve built it up. OK, well, we’re ready. We’ll have fun being there. We were there (in 2012) when that guy (Nik Wallenda) was walking a tightrope across the falls and it was great because he was doing it outside our window.”

For this outing, the All Starr Band features saxophonist Warren Ham, Edgar Winter, Steve Lukather (Toto), Hamish Stuart (Average White Band), Colin Hay (Men At Work), and fellow drummer Gregg Bissonette.

“At the start of every tour, (I say), ‘I’m going to do my best for you and I hope you’ll do your best for me, let’s just support each other,'” said Starr. “So, we do that. Musically, it just falls into its right space. I’ve had some members that weren’t as giving as the rest of us, but that happens.”

Looking fit in all black, wearing sunglasses, and with a peace sign around his neck, the octogenarian said he’s feeling well.

“I put some time in,” said Starr. “I work out. I watch what I eat. I’m on the road. I’m making a record. I keep busy, so most of the time I’m in a good space.”

 "Love Comes To Everyone" − George Harrison

George Harrison and Olivia Harrison March 14th 1990

May 17, 2024
John Lennon - Oh, Yoko! (The Single's cover)





May 16, 2024
John Lennon’s ‘Mind Games’ To Receive New ‘Ultimate Collection’ Release
The new edition will arrive on July 12 via Capitol Records/UMe.
By Will Schube for UDiscoverMusic

On July 12, The John Lennon Estate and Universal Music will celebrate John Lennon’s pivotal and intensely personal 1973 album, Mind Games, with a suite of completely newly remixed and expanded Ultimate Collection editions, offering an immersive, deep listening experience and in-depth exploration of this classic, yet under-appreciated record.

Fully authorized by Yoko Ono Lennon and produced by Sean Ono Lennon—who oversaw the production and creative direction—the Ultimate Collection is from the same audio team that worked on the critically acclaimed Imagine and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band Ultimate Collections. This team includes triple Grammy-Award winning engineer Paul Hicks and mixers/engineers Sam Gannon and Rob Stevens.

The definitive Ultimate Collection from The Beatles icon puts listeners in the center of the studio and explores the album’s 1973 recording sessions at the Record Plant in New York City. The journey moves from inception to the final master, through scores of unreleased outtakes, unadulterated versions, instrumentals, stripped down mixes, studio chatter, and more.

Yoko Ono Lennon said: “John was trying to convey the message that we all play mind games. But if we can play mind games, why not make a positive future with it – to be a positive mind game? ‘Mind Games’ is such an incredibly strong song. At the time, people didn’t quite get the message because this was before its time. Now, people would understand it. I don’t think in those days people knew they were playing mind games anyway.”

Mind Games – The Ultimate Collection offers six different unique listening experiences that are at once immersive and intimate, ranging from the brand new Ultimate Mixes of the timeless album, which put John’s vocals front and center and sonically upgrade the sound, to the Elements Mixes, which isolate and bring forth certain instruments from the multitrack recordings to highlight playing previously buried in the original mix. Also featured is the Raw Studio Mixes, which allows listeners to hear the recording that John and The Plastic U.F.Ono Band laid to tape, mixed raw and live without vocals effects, tape delays or reverbs.

The Evolutionary Documentary is a unique track-by-track audio montage that details the evolution of each song from demo to master recording via demos, rehearsals, out-takes, multitrack exploration, and studio conversations. The outtakes allow listeners to hear compelling different takes of each song while the Elemental Mixes, a new set created especially for the Mind Games – Ultimate Collection, inhabit a world between the minimalism of the Elements Mixes and the Ultimate Mixes, stripping the songs back to simpler, lean-back arrangements with John’s voice to the fore, and without drums.

An array of listening options, including High-Definition, studio quality 192kHz/24bit audio in stereo and enveloping 5.1 Surround and Dolby Atmos mixes, are available on Blu-ray.

All of the tracks have been completely remixed from scratch from the 15 original two-inch multitrack session tapes using brand new 192-24 digital transfers. The Ultimate Collection includes previously unreleased out-takes and stems plus additional never-heard-before audio from archive ¼” reel-to-reels, cassettes, and videotapes.

Anchored by the buoyant peace-and-love anthem, “Mind Games,” John Lennon’s fourth album of the same name, was surprisingly written and recorded during an incredibly tumultuous time in the rock legend’s life. In 1973, at age 33, John found himself in personal and political upheaval.

A years-long deportation battle with U.S. immigration continued to rage on while his high-profile anti-Nixon campaigning, anti-Vietnam war activism, as well as the overtly political messages on his polarizing 1972 album, Sometime in New York City, made him a target of a newly elected Richard Nixon, leading to surveillance by the FBI.

This was the dramatic backdrop as John entered NYC’s Record Plant in August of 1973 with a select band of world-class session musicians (jokingly named The Plastic U.F.Ono Band), including drummer Jim Keltner. He was joined by guitarist David Spinozza, pianist Ken Ascher, bassist Gordon Edwards, pedal-steel player “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, saxophonist Michael Brecker, drummer Rick Marotta, backing vocalists Jocelyn Brown, Christine Wiltshire, Angel Coakely and Kathy Mull.

John would channel this period of extraordinary activity to make a deeply personal and engrossing album of self-reflection that explored themes of love, heartbreak, peace, spirituality and social injustice. The result is Mind Games, which gives listeners yet another window into his life and soul, and some of his best solo songs.

Bonus Feature:
John Lennon Mind Games (The Evolution Documentary) Official Lyric Video from The Ultimate Collection



The Beatles 'Get Back' 2024 More Kick Remix | Drums Boosted, Paul's Vocal Raised, John's Unlocked

May 15, 2024
Paul McCartney Is Auctioning Off the Iconic Beatles Boots He Wore at the 2012 London Olympics

These boots were made for collecting.

Paul McCartney is auctioning off the custom boots he wore for his performance at the London Olympics opening ceremony in July 2012 to raise funds for charity. The stage shoes, which will be offered as part of a Sotheby’s Sealed sale running May 24 to 31, are expected to fetch between roughly $12,500 and $18,800 (£10,000–£15,000). 

McCartney has been rocking boots since the 1960s. The British musician and his fellow Beatles bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr popularized what we now call the Beatle boot in the 1960s. Originally made by Covent Garden footwear company Anello and Davide, the black leather boot, known then as the Baba, was a twist on the classic Chelsea with a high Cuban heel that appealed to the four Liverpudlians and other style-savvy folks. The Beatles made a few alterations to the Baba, creating a namesake style that became a highly sought-after fashion accessory. 

The pair heading to auction this month are based on the iconic Beatle boots but showcase a new, more sustainable material. Shoemaker Steven Lowe of Eastbourne footwear shop Crispinians handcrafted the shoes from an alternative suede rather than traditional leather. McCartney sported the kicks on stage at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony and at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations the same year. He also wore them for his “On the Run” tour in Europe, South America, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

McCartney is selling the boots to raise money for Meat Free Monday. The Brit set up the nonprofit with his daughters Mary and Stella McCartney to encourage people to have a healthier diet and save animals by not eating meat at least one day a week.

“As it was time for me to get myself a new pair of boots, I thought this might be a good way to help our Meat Free Monday campaign celebrate its 15th anniversary,” McCartney said in a statement. “Me and my boots have great memories of that special evening at the Olympic opening ceremony in London. It was a high to be involved with such an awesome and spectacular event. Something I’ll remember forever.”

If you happen to be in the British capital, the boots will be on display in Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries in London before the auction at the end of May.

I've implemented two significant changes to Giles Martin's 2021 remix of The Beatles' 1969 release, "Don't Let Me Down." The primary alteration involves separating McCartney's backing vocal and granting it more prominence. Additionally, I've repositioned the kick drum and snare towards the center, eliminating the 'ping-pong' effect between them.

Upon isolating Paul's backing vocal from John's lead, I was pleasantly surprised by the distinct character it lent to the song. Thus, not only did I separate and shift the vocal to the left, but I also increased its volume. Paul delivered his vocal in a bluesy style, showcasing his prowess in the genre. This adjustment, in my view, transforms it into more of a duet performance rather than merely a backing vocal, although not entirely. While, I Believe, George also contributed backing vocals, they were largely obscured in all versions I've encountered.

I'm puzzled as to why Giles Martin retained the left positioning for the kick drum and the right positioning for the snare drum. This mixing setup was highly unusual, even during the original recording era. It likely stemmed from early experimentation with stereo drum mixing. Although Martin had the opportunity to rectify this in his remix, he chose not to. While some may appreciate this unconventional arrangement, I find it distracting. The alternating movement of the bass drum and snare feels unnatural, especially when using headphones. Additionally, I slightly boosted the bass guitar to better complement the kick drum's new position. I believe my remix significantly enhances the overall depth and weight of the recording.

As always, I've made no additions to the mix that weren't part of the original recording. I've refrained from using artificial pseudo-acoustics. Instead, I've strictly focused on de-mixing the vocals and instruments and remixing them in a style consistent with the era of the original recording. Thank you for listening!

In our final installment from Abbey Road Studios, the amazing Miles Showell helps me to transfer and my high-speed 1981 Sgt Pepper's master tape using the finest vintage reel-to-reel equipment. But things didn't go as smoothly as planned.  

EMI's tape technician Miles Showell

May 12, 2024
The Beatles Rehearse "Let It Be" and "Across The Universe" (earliest examples)

“I was always moaning about the original film, because there was no real joy in it,” Ringo Starr recalls to The Daily Beast of the 1970 documentary film Let It Be, which was released just weeks after news of the Beatles’ split had hit the press.

Since Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary premiered on Disney+ in 2021, even the most casual Beatles fan knows what Starr is talking about. The Let It Be film and album were a dismal affair for all involved. Salvaged from the ashes of Paul McCartney’s idea for the Beatles to “get back,” literally, to their roots by writing and recording a new album, the nearly 60 hours of footage filmed by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg during January 1969 chronicled the end of the greatest creative collaboration of the last century.

But Let It Be got only a limited theatrical release in 1970. Now, at long last, a restored version arrives on Disney+ this week.

“All these years, did I wish it to come out? Of course. Did I hope it would? Well, you know, hope is a like a candle: sometimes it flickers and sometimes it’s bright and sometimes it goes out,” Lindsay-Hogg admits. Dressed nattily and holding forth in a Disney conference room in midtown Manhattan, the 84-year-old director looked preternaturally youthful when we recently met to discuss Let It Be, which has been wonderfully restored by Jackson’s team after he used Lindsay-Hogg’s footage for Get Back. “The catalyst, really, was Peter Jackson. Right from the beginning, he was very direct and very respectful.”

Of course, back in 1969 and ’70, things didn’t go according to plan, either. John Lennon was preoccupied with his then-blossoming relationship with Yoko Ono (and dabbling in heroin), and George Harrison had finally had enough, having just returned from a visit with Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock, where he had been treated with the respect he no doubt felt he deserved. Even Starr, frustrated by the ever-increasing tensions among the band members, had struck out in films and began contemplating a solo career in earnest.

Meanwhile, as seen in Let It Be, McCartney had become the quartet’s de facto leader, much to the growing annoyance of his bandmates. It was a role he’d filled to an increasing degree since manager Brian Epstein’s death in August 1967, but by January 1969, with the others’ interest in the group waning, the Beatles had essentially become, for better or worse, his band.

“It was always Paul who would want to get back to work,” Starr recalls. “I lived near John, and so I’d be at his place, lounging and having a bit of a smoke in the garden, and the phone would ring. We’d know even before we answered that it was Paul, saying, ‘C’mon, let’s get in the studio and make a new record.’”

But this time, it was not just a new record he was after. McCartney wanted the band to get back on the boards, performing to a live audience for the first time since their last concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in 1966, for a television special to be broadcast worldwide. With a director needed to helm the special—as well as footage of the band rehearsing for promotional advertisements—he turned to a familiar face. “They had me shoot the promotional films for ‘Revolution’ and ‘Hey Jude,’ which was the first time they’d been in front of a live audience in almost three years,” Lindsay-Hogg recalls. “They really enjoyed it. And not long after, Paul called me and asked what I was doing in January.”

But the long hours of rehearsing a concert built around all-new material—which began just after the New Year in 1969 on a cold soundstage in the London suburb of Twickenham, at the very un-rock ’n’ roll hour of 10 a.m. each day—tested the patience of everyone involved.

“The issues they were having were that they were growing up, and they were making different choices in their lives as adults than they had made as teenagers, which affected their lives artistically, as well as the whole business dynamic,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “So even if we’d been in a warm, comfortable space, I don’t think the atmosphere would have been great. But Twickenham was a miserable experience for all of them, no doubt about it.”

“The history was always very negative,” adds Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin and the band’s go-to producer since 2006’s LOVE remix album, whose audio restoration work on the restored Let It Be is some of his finest to date. “Paul hated the finished product, and the album came out when they were suing each other.”

“It was all based on this little downer incident,” is Starr’s take, as he recalls a fight between Harrison and McCartney that was caught on film and was much discussed in the wake of the initial release of Let It Be (and then given more context in Jackson’s Get Back.) “But that’s just how it was; four guys in a room, you know?” he adds with a laugh. “You’re bound to have a few ups and downs.”

Lindsay-Hogg agrees. “They never commented on that scene as being in any way making the Beatles look bad, or making Paul look bad,” he says of the rough cuts he showed the band members before the film’s release. “Because it was just two musicians talking about the best way to work on a song, like actors do with a scene.”

In fact, he says, the Beatles were fully behind the film after he screened a lengthy rough cut for them in July of 1969.

“George came with his father, John and Yoko, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen Allen Klein, and the Apple team,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “Then, at the end of the evening, Paul asked me, ‘What are you doing? Why don’t we all go have dinner?’ So, dinner was Paul, Linda, John, Yoko, Peter Brown from Apple, and me and my girlfriend Jean. And we didn’t talk much about the movie, actually, because we all sort of regarded it as a promising work in progress. But if they hadn’t liked it, there would have been no dinner. And so I had a sense that everything was OK. In fact, they never interfered. I can’t think of anything, really, that they asked to be changed that I didn’t agree should be changed.’”

So what happened along the way to sour the band on the project?

“By the time it came out, in May 1970, the atmosphere had become poisoned,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “What was going on internally, which by then had become external, with the Beatles’ breakup, meant they didn’t support the movie at all. There was a screening in London, and in Los Angeles too, and none of them showed up. But it wasn’t because they didn’t like the movie. It was because they didn’t want to be with each other.”

Lindsay-Hogg adds that, if anything, Let It Be is proof that whatever was going on behind the scenes, once the Beatles strapped on guitars and stepped in front of a camera and an audience, they were an undeniable force.

“All that had been going on before—them not getting on or them having spats, like people who work together often do—[when] they started really playing and they knew there was a crowd down below, they were 16 again,” he says of the concert performed on the rooftop of the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters, which closes out Let It Be. “Once I got them on the roof—and that was the hard part, because they didn’t really make up their minds until they were standing down in the little cubby hole of a room about to go on the roof—they were great.”

It’s an arresting scene, especially after 50 or so minutes of meandering rehearsals, rough and ready run-throughs of half-formed originals, and 1950s cover songs. It’s also undeniable evidence of how remarkable the Beatles were as a live band, despite the January chill and the ramshackle, makeshift setup.

“Always, the Beatles were going to go to Turkey somewhere, or up Everest, or in a desert, or Hawaii. And then, suddenly, ‘Let’s just walk across the road,’” Starr says with a laugh of the way they ended up playing on the roof of their London HQ, which is broken up by police officers responding to noise complaints from other tenants in the bustling business district. “With this one, it was just, ‘Let’s do it on the roof.’ And that’s what we did. And it was great. I mean, the police played a huge part. Not that they did anything. But they were moaning at us. And they look really silly in the film now.”

The documentary’s re-release is just the latest in a spate of recent Beatles treasures. The Let It Be album, too, was recently given a full-scale restoration, courtesy of Giles Martin, and there was also a coffee table book full of photos by Ethan Russell and Linda McCartney showing the band at work during the making of Let It Be, and featuring transcripts of the hundreds of hours of audio captured by Lindsay-Hogg’s crew. Still, while Jackson’s Get Back is crucial to understanding the nuances of what was going on between John, Paul, George, and Ringo, it’s Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be that, after nearly half a century out of print, is finally taking its place as the centerpiece of these many releases.

“If we hadn’t met Peter Jackson, and if he and his team hadn’t developed the amazing technology they developed to restore the picture and sound of the original film we shot, I’m not sure how we would talk about Let It Be,” Lindsay-Hogg says, underscoring that, now, almost everyone who sees his 1970 film will be almost an expert on the period, and will be able to understand it better, free from the drama surrounding the band’s split at the time of its release. “Now, we talk about it in the context of Get Back. Peter said to me, ‘What I’m doing is making a documentary about making a documentary.’ And that’s what Peter did. So he did a lot of the legwork for the rest of us.”

Starr echoes that sentiment, saying Get Back finally set the record straight. Sure, it was the beginning of the end of our love affair with the greatest rock ‘n’ roll group ever, but it also showed the intimacy and comradery that made everything the Beatles accomplished possible. Seen alongside Let It Be, he says, Get Back gives a more complete picture of the iconic band.

“Now it’s got a start, a middle, and a finish. The start is very slow, and then we get into creating, and then we’re at it and then we’re out,” says Starr. “I love it. But I’m in it, of course, so six hours is never long enough.”

“I’d seen that cut that Apple had done about 25 years ago, and it was really shitty,” Lindsay-Hogg adds. “It was dark and boring and the sound was bad. And I was depressed about it. So the fact that it looks and sounds so great has a lot to do with Peter. It’s really helped Let It Be to have Get Back.”

Of course, the Beatles were in tatters by the time Let It Be was initially released. Still, Lindsay-Hogg was surprised by the eventual reaction to the film, recalling, “It really wasn’t a bad experience making Let It Be. But partly because of the way the band were treating each other in the press at the time, I think people saw it as very negative.”

And so, more than 55 years since the original filming began, and over 40 years since even the sub-par home video releases went out of print (“They were just awful,” Lindsay-Hogg says), Let It Be is finally back, for all the world to see.

“No, I’m happy with the balance,” Lindsay-Hogg replies when I ask if he’s now tempted to smooth out any of the film’s rough edges, or even revisit it for a director’s cut. “What I thought was right at the time is Let It Be. And I think the proportions are just about right. Besides, it wouldn’t be very smart to revisit the decisions of a 29-year-old, 55 years later.”

Personnel for this song:

George Harrison on acoustic and electric guitar (and vocals)

Paul McCartney on bass

Ringo Starr on drums

Nicky Hopkins on piano

Eric Clapton on lead guitar

Filmed in January 1969 during the rocky recording sessions for the band’s “Let It Be” album, the documentary showed the Beatles at their most fragmented.

The remastered documentary delves deep into Beatles lore.

Music documentary featuring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Billy Preston. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Streaming on Disney Plus beginning May 8. 81 minutes. STC

“Let It Be” is a 1970 music documentary about the Beatles, the most celebrated group in pop history. It’s also one of cinema’s most misunderstood and hard-to-find films.

This latter situation is about to change with the restored film’s streaming release on Disney Plus after years of being shelved in the band’s Apple Corps vaults. Which means it’s time to look at it again to see what a half century’s worth of context and reconsideration might bring.

“It really didn’t get a fair shake the first time,” director Michael Lindsay-Hogg says in a new intro. “But I think one of the things which excites me about ‘Let It Be’ coming out again, is that finally it’s going to get a chance to be embraced for the curious and fascinating character that it is, I think.”

Filmed in January 1969 during the rocky recording sessions for the band’s “Let It Be” album, the Beatles’ fifth and final movie debuted on May 13, 1970, in New York. The world premiere was just over a month after Paul McCartney publicly announced his departure from the group, although John Lennon had secretly quit months earlier and George Harrison and Ringo Starr had staged brief walkouts.

None of the Fab Four attended the “Let It Be” premiere. It was a far cry from six years earlier when the quartet’s presence at the London launch of “A Hard Day’s Night,” their first film, required a mob of police officers and ambulance personnel to handle thousands of overexcited fans.

“Let It Be” was immediately tagged as “the Beatle’s break-up movie,” a label that was as understandable as it was inaccurate. The band didn’t dissolve during its making and in fact went on later in 1969 to record and release its penultimate album, “Abbey Road,” which many fans consider the group’s best.

Originally titled “Get Back,” the “Let It Be” film (and album of the same name, also released in 1970) was an ambitious attempt by the Beatles to create and perform new music before the inquiring lens of Lindsay-Hogg, who had directed several of their music videos.

The film was meant to be aspirational, not funereal. Yet that didn’t come through thanks to its shrugged-off title, grainy 16 mm images, murky sound, ragged cinéma vérité editing and a tense scene of Paul and George bickering over the guitar parts on “Two of Us,” one of many tunes the band was working on.

“I’ll play, you know, whatever you want me to play,” Harrison tells McCartney through gritted teeth, after Paul complains he feels like he’s “annoying” his bandmate. “Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play, you know. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.”

The film, which also included a close-up a half-eaten green apple on McCartney’s piano (symbol alert!), was received by critics, fans and the band members themselves as the dispiriting end of Beatlemania.

“Let It Be” had a brief theatrical run and later home releases on the now-defunct VHS and Laserdisc formats. DVD and Blu-ray formats were reportedly nixed on the grounds they might hurt the group’s “global brand.” Dim and badly cropped versions would occasionally pop up in the dark recesses of the internet.

The film was entombed in the vaults, deemed best forgotten. But now there’s reason to think of it as buried treasure. As the restored version makes gloriously obvious, “Let It Be” also contains many moments of mirth and joy, especially the Jan. 30, 1969, rooftop concert atop the Beatles’ Apple Corps. London headquarters.

Before police arrived to unplug their amplifiers, the Beatles, along with newly conscripted keyboardist Billy Preston, triumphantly played five new songs that have since become standards: “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909” and “Dig a Pony.”

It would prove to be the Fab Four’s final performance — although they didn’t know it at the time — and it had the salutary effect of re-energizing the band, at least for a short while.

The images are crisp and the sound is impeccable in the restored “Let It Be,” thanks to the work of Peter Jackson and his team. “The Lord of the Rings” filmmaker, a lifelong Beatles fan, used the same advanced computer technology he employed on “The Beatles: Get Back,” an eight-hour steaming miniseries, released in 2021. It drew from 56 hours of unseen film and 140 hours of archived audio tapes that Lindsay-Hogg’s crew shot and recorded during the “Let It Be” sessions but didn’t use.

“The Beatles: Get Back” was a huge success but it ironically served to further blacken the eye of the “Let It Be” film. Jackson’s miniseries was made on the premise that history was ill-served by Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary because it was edited to show the Beatles at their worst instead of their best.

There’s some truth to this — Lindsay-Hogg was clearly looking for drama, not comedy — and the recording and filming conditions could hardly have been less conducive to artistic creation.

Lindsay-Hogg put the Beatles into Twickenham Film Studios in suburban London, a cluttered and harshly lit space that looked like a psychedelic aircraft hanger. The original plan was to document the band writing and recording new songs for a TV special and later live concert, but the Beatles arrived exhausted from recording their double-LP “White Album” a few months earlier. They weren’t the happy-go-lucky blokes of their initial fame.

Lennon, with his soon-to-be second wife Yoko Ono constantly by his side, was in the throes of a heroin addiction. Harrison was balking at the idea of a live performance, which the band hadn’t done since it stopped touring in 1966. McCartney reluctantly assumed the role of taskmaster while a worried-looking Starr loyally kept time on his drum kit.

Harrison at one point left the sessions, and briefly also the Beatles, but his departure wasn’t caught on camera. He agreed to return to both only if the filming was moved to the Beatles ’Apple Corps HQ in downtown London.

In a stroke of inspiration and good fortune, George also insisted on conscripting Preston, a brilliant keyboardist whom the band had met years earlier when he toured with Little Richard. Harrison later agreed to the rooftop gig, which delighted many Londoners on the streets below but also annoyed a few people, prompting a noise complaint and a police halt to the proceedings.

There’s a difference in mood between the Twickenham first part of the film and the Apple HQ second part, but it’s not as great a divide as history — and my memory from earlier viewings — would make it.

There are plenty of moments during the Twickenham sessions where the Beatles are just happily messing about, as they always did in the studio. They do an impromptu medley of old rock standards, smiling all the while, while also rehearsing the eventual “Abbey Road” songs “Octopus’s Garden” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” among other tunes.

There’s an amusing moment where a concerned McCartney tells a puzzled (or perhaps annoyed) Lennon that Harrison’s reluctance to perform live may be part of the band’s collective stage fright: “It’s like the hurdle of that nervousness is there,” he muses.

Viewed without the immediate drama of the band’s break-up, “Let It Be” indeed comes across as the “curious and fascinating character” Lindsay-Hogg has always maintained it to be. It proves that the Beatles were always able to rise to the occasion when making music, despite any personal or business differences they might have had.

“Let It Be” is far less indicative of a band in turmoil than “Gimme Shelter,” a documentary released the same year about friendly rivals the Rolling Stones. Albert and David Maysles’ chronicle of a disastrous free concert by the Stones at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco in December

1969 showed on camera the knife slaying of a gun-wielding concert goer by a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which the Stones had foolishly hired as security.

As rock ’n’ roll downers go, “Gimme Shelter” makes “Let It Be” look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

If you had done a survey of music fans at any point during the ‘70s and asked them what their biggest wish was, chances are The Beatles reuniting would have been at or very near the top of the heap. Some fans wanted it so bad that they were willing to suspend disbelief when a band named Klaatu arrived on the scene. For a minute, many actually thought that Klaatu were The Beatles in disguise.

So who were they actually? And how did this confusion ensue and eventually come to a conclusion? It starts with a humble three-man band from Canada, whose connection to this bizarre case of mistaken identity made their early career a rollercoaster.

Spoiler alert: Klaatu were not, in fact, the reunited Beatles. They were actually three Canadian musicians: Dee Long and John Woloschuk, who wrote most of the songs and played multiple instruments, and Terry Draper on drums. They had impressed the head of a record company in their native country with some sides produced by Terry Brown, well known for his work with the band Rush.

Their debut album 3:47 EST was released in 1976 and distributed by Capitol Records in America. The trio of men behind Klaatu didn’t care much for publicity, and they didn’t have plans to tour their music as it was a bit too ornate for three men to handle on stage. Hence, they decided to include no pictures of the band as part of the album art, nor did they leave any credits to reveal who was doing what.

Photo credit: The Klaatu Kon 2005, presented by Jamie Vernon, President of Bullseye Records. Seated are Klaatu band members from left to right: John Woloschuk, Dee Long and Terry Draper.

Those facts were crucial to what happened next. In early 1977, a sportswriter for a newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island named Steve Smith happened to scoop up an album that had been sent in for review. When Smith listened, he was struck by what he heard, which was a sound that reminded him of late-period Beatles.

When Smith found no information on the record about the players, his mind took off in a conspiratorial direction. This band worked for Capitol Records, which was also the American home of The Beatles. On top of that, he thought the band’s name might be no mere coincidence, as he remembered that Ringo Starr’s album Goodnight Vienna featured a cover which also referenced the sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was also the source for the name Klaatu.

Smith wrote a story about the album in his paper, in which he speculated that one of the possible explanations was that this was The Beatles recording under an alias. To his credit, he didn’t definitively state this, as he entertained other possibilities. But when this story was spread by other outlets, a slight ember of an idea became a relative inferno of speculation.

When that initial story started getting picking up, Klaatu was caught by surprise. Meanwhile, their record company realized that a golden marketing opportunity had plopped right into their lap. Other than issuing a cryptic statement saying that “Klaatu is Klaatu” they gave no further clarification.

Much like the “Paul is Dead” rumor, fans listening to the Klaatu album propped the theory up with increasingly bizarre clues they felt proved that The Beatles were behind this. (In some versions of the rumor, The Beatles were recording new music through this pseudonym, while in others, 3:47 EST was a “lost” Fab Four album from the ‘60s newly rediscovered.)

This silliness certainly helped Klaatu at first, as rubberneckers picked up the album to see what the fuss was about. But it wasn’t very long before enterprising reporters started to dig a bit deeper and find hard facts to disprove this myth. For instance, seeking out the publishing of the songs on the albums, they found the names of the Klaatu members and not Lennon/McCartney or George Harrison.

It should also be noted that many respected music publications immediately debunked this theory as hogwash even before the facts were out. Truth be told, the vocals on 3:47 EST don’t sound any more like The Beatles than, say, Badfinger’s did. “Sub-Rosa Subway,” the song that initially caught Smith’s attention and started the furor, actually sounds more like Ram-era Paul McCartney.

The unfortunate side effect of this craziness is that Klaatu’s image ended up tarred because of it. Many folks believed that they were behind the story in the first place. While it’s true they didn’t immediately identify themselves when they first heard it, they were mere innocent bystanders, especially when some media outlets lashed out at them.

Even though they released five albums in their career, Klaatu struggled to emerge from the rumor’s shadow. Which is a shame, because they’re quite a cool band. They were no Beatles, however, either literally or figuratively. The notion they accidentally sounded a shade too much like them just happened to expose just how much the public wanted the Fab Four back together.

Screen grab from the new Beatles "Let It Be" video on Vevo.

The music video features clips and outtakes from the 1970 documentary Let It Be, which has undergone a meticulous restoration at Park Road Post Production, the company founded by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson, best known for the The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.

Let It Be, the documentary, was filmed and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg in January 1969 and released to theaters in May 1970, one month after Paul McCartney announced he was no longer working with The Beatles, publicly acknowledging what insiders already knew: The Beatles were done.

The movie is widely thought to present a darker view of The Beatles’ waning moments as a working band than The Beatles: Get Back, a more uplifting 2021 docuseries directed and produced by Peter Jackson, which is also based on Lindsay-Hogg’s voluminous 1969 footage.

You can watch the music video here.

The Let It Be documentary was filmed during the making of what would be The Beatles final album of the same name and contains footage not featured in the “Get Back” docuseries, though there is overlap, such as the group’s iconic final live performance on the rooftop of the Apple Corps building in London.

In 2021, The Beatles’ Let It Be album was remixed in stereo, 5.1 surround, and Dolby Atmos by producer Giles Martin and mixing engineer Sam Okell for a range of Special Edition packages released by Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe. The album’s Super Deluxe CD, vinyl and digital collections also feature 27 previously unreleased session recordings, a four-track Let It Be EP, and the never before released 14-track Get Back stereo LP mix compiled by engineer Glyn Johns in May 1969.

May 8, 2024
Interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg


On this day, May 8th: The Beatles Final Album, Let It Be, Hits Shelves

May 8, 1970, was the end of an era. That was the day The Beatles released their final album, Let It Be. Even though they were having issues, they wanted to give fans one more album.

So they headed to the Apple Records studio and started to pump out tracks. The album got loaded with some of your favourites. Like “Let It Be”, written to tell people to chill out and let things happen. Or the change of pace “Get Back”, which gives you one last opportunity to dance to a new Beatles Groove. They follow it up with “The Long and Winding Road”, which some fans call the beautiful story of the band’s journey in song form. The end result was the band’s twelfth and final studio album.

Even though Let It Be was loaded with hits, it wasn’t an easy album for the band to make. The creative differences they were experiencing led to a lot of arguments. Meaning they couldn’t agree on how songs should sound, which led to a lot of heated arguments.

But as the old saying goes, the show must go on, so they pushed through and created the album anyway. On May 8, 1970, they released Let It Be. And you guessed it, people ate it up which made it one of the most talked-about albums of all time.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after the successful release that the band split up in 1974. [Ottawa Beatles site footnote: The legal dissolution was not formalised until 29 December 1974.] The album continues to be one of The Beatles’ biggest releases. It still inspires and reminds people that you can find beauty in even the roughest times.

Check out the video for the song “The Long and Winding Road”. Which we think captures the story of The Beatles perfectly:

Herman's Hermits singer Peter Noone on rivalry with Beatles and pal Elvis Presley

Herman's Hermits were part of the British invasion of American in the Swinging Sixties and the group were mates with Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and The Beatles

By James Desborough for the Mirror

 

 

It turns out when Herman’s Hermits star Peter Noone sang I’m Into Something Good, he was predicting the future.

Peter, now 76, is still going strong and loving performing – 60 years after the band’s jaunty debut single topped the charts.

Herman’s Hermits, along with The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were part of the British invasion of America in the Swinging Sixties.

And while every band had a wild side, Herman’s Hermits, with their neat suits and haircuts, were seen as the boys nextdoor. When the Stones were in town you would lock up your daughters – but you would invite the Hermits for tea.

However, frontman Peter is keen to set the record straight and reckons Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and co played the bad boy image “to the max – to our detriment”.

He said: “We were neck and neck with the Stones. But we were the boys next door, they were the boys your mum didn’t want you out with. 

“At the time, we were as good a hooligans as they were. They pret-ended to be hooligans when they really weren’t, they were grammar school twits, like us. We got on great with them.”

And, like the Stones, they are still going. Tonight, the Stones start their US tour in Houston, Texas, but workaholic Peter puts them to shame with his 100 live gigs a year. Not that there has ever been any rivalry, of course.

Speaking from his home in Santa Barbara, California, Peter said: “People believed there was competition between the Stones, the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits. But we were mates. Each of us was unique, you couldn’t get a record deal unless you were different.”

Peter is currently playing dates in Vegas and has no intention of ever hanging up the mic.

He said: “I don’t know what else I would do if I wasn’t working. You ask older people, ‘Why are you still doing it? Do you need the money?’

“They’ll say, ‘I can always use a bit more money’. But this is what’s keeping me alive. It is not making a living, it is making a life. My future is doing what I do now until I drop, like Eric Morecambe did on stage. I want to go out like that.

“I’ve tried lots of other things but really where I’m most at home is live concerts. Once upon a time I felt old. But then I see Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Frankie Valli, who are all older than me, still performing. One of the Stones said, ‘Peter, how many dates have you got this year?’ I said, ‘I’ve got 100. Every year I get about 100’. He said, ‘Well, remember, if you stop working, you’ll probably die.’ My grandfather stopped working and died. I’m not going to sit around like him, reading gardening books or learning Italian, pretending there’s a future.”

Peter, the son of two accountants, was born in Lancashire and raised in Urmston, Greater Manchester. He went to the local grammar, then drama school. In 1961, he played Stanley, son of builder Len Fairclough, in Coronation Street.

Peter formed Herman’s Hermits when he was 15 after being inspired by The Beatles. He said: “Our first gig was at Urmston Football Club. We were paid £4, which covered the petrol and a bag of chips.

“The Beatles showed how you could do it. Suddenly, everybody in my street was in skiffle groups. It felt like anyone could be lead singer, guitar player and drummer.”

Peter said his dad encouraged him. “He’d look at bands in the area and say, ‘He’s got talent. You are going to have to work much harder than him.’”

That hard work and enthusiasm paid off and the band had hits with Silhouettes, There’s a Kind of Hush, Mrs Brown, You Have Got a Lovely Daughter and I’m Henry VIII, I Am.

Peter became friends with Elvis Presley and visited him on the film set of Paradise, Hawaiian Style in 1965. He also met Stevie Wonder at Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan.

The band played in the US alongside The Who and shared backstage laughs with Dusty Springfield. Peter also hung out with the likes of Little Richard, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and the Stones’ Brian Jones and Jagger.

Such was their fame he made the cover of Time magazine and the Hermits appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, as well shows with comedian Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin and actor Danny Kaye.

In 1970 they opened the Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen Mother – and the band also appeared in three films.

Peter left to go solo in 1971 but was reunited with some of the Hermits in the mid-80s and began hitting the road again. And he has not stopped since. Peter, who married wife Mireille on his 21st birthday, said: “Every day, I feel I want to work hard. I drive my wife crazy because I’m a workaholic.

“I’m non-stop. I write personal letters to my fans. All working-class people from Manchester and ­Liverpool commit to it.”

And Peter is glad his voice has held up – having done vocal exercises for 45 minutes a day every day since 1983.

But while he used to always be striving for the next challenge, he is now happy doing what he loves. “I got to a point about five years ago where it turned back into pure fun. I walked onto the stage and I go, well, this is what you do. This song’s almost 60 years old. And look, that woman’s singing it!’”

In 2019, Peter won entertainer of the year at the Casino Entertainment Awards in Las Vegas.

But he remains connected to England, saying: “I miss it very much but I do go a lot to visit my daughter.

“I’m a tourist now and invisible. I once said, ‘How do you become ­invisible – you walk into a room with John Lennon or Elvis Presley, you’re invisible’. Now I’m invisible in England.”

Peter is on a US-wide tour. Details at peternoone.com/pages/concert-dates