Beatles News

AN artist has painted a striking portrait of Beatles legend John Lennon. Leigh-based artist Paul Karslake is currently exhibiting at Southend Central Library with a vivid Rolls Royce car door and the painting of Lennon, who would have been 73 this year.

He was inspired to paint the two pieces to mark the rock star’s role in music history. The car door is painted the same as Lennon’s psychedelic car which he bought in 1965 and shipped to America in 1970, when he moved there with Yoko Ono.

They rarely used it, but often lent it out for special occasions to rock stars such as the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues and Bob Dylan.

Source: Echo

From the moment Paul McCartney, coolly holding his iconic, beat-up Hofner bass guitar, plucked the first notes of the "Out There" tour kickoff in Brazil, the audience must have recognized something momentous was happening.

He was playing "Eight Days a Week," the 1964 rocker that is one of the Beatles' most memorable No. 1 hits. And yet, until that show, the song, penned by McCartney and John Lennon, had never been played onstage. Lennon thought "Eight Days a Week," which the group struggled to write, was "lousy."

It's one of a handful of never-performed Beatles treasures that McCartney exhumed for his "Out There" tour. The nearly 40-song set list starts almost every night with "Eight Days a Week," then slips in four more rarely performed numbers from the Beatles catalog.

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Julian Lennon’s White Feather Foundation charity has been gifted by a signed boxset from Paul McCartney to raise money to help people who are dying from lack of clean water and sanitation.

The White Feather Foundation was named after something Julian’s father, Beatle John Lennon, once said to him if he should ever pass away. To let Julian know he was OK, John promised to send a message in the form of a white feather.

“Then something happened to me, whilst on tour with the last album, Photograph Smile, in Australia. I was presented with a white feather by an Aboriginal tribal elder, from The Mirning people, which definitely took my breath away. The White Feather Foundation was created for the purpose of giving a voice and support to those who cannot be heard.

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I remember when Paul was dead. It was the fall of 1969 — my first year at the University of Victoria — and I, like the rest of my generation, was stunned at reports that the real Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident two years earlier and replaced with a look-alike.

Like many others I hunted for hints of his death in the lyrics of earlier Beatles albums — “turn me on, dead man” in the White Album’s Revolution 9, and John Lennon’s supposed phrase “I buried Paul” in the song Strawberry Fields Forever. It was a hoax, of course, but it persisted for weeks until Life magazine reported that “Paul is still with us.”

And, happily, he’s with us still, as the now 71-year-old ably demonstrated at his three-hour concert in Ottawa on Sunday. Certainly, he’s not the rocker of yore with smooth cheeks and a dense mop of hair — neck wattles, sagging jowls and dyed can’t be denied — yet by all accounts those who saw his performance were amazed.

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BOSTON – Somewhere in a musty attic in Liverpool there has to be a portrait of an aging Paul McCartney because the guy who rocked out Fenway Park Tuesday night sure didn’t act like a 71-year-old.

The former Beatle played for two hours and 40 minutes at the venerable ballpark and treated fans to 38 songs. (A far cry from the 11-song set The Beatles played during a half hour show at Suffolk Downs back in 1966).

One of the richest men on the planet, a knight of the realm, and driving force behind some of greatest songs ever recorded, McCartney surely doesn’t need the cash or adulation he received at the sold-out show. Clearly, Sir Paul still finds joy in playing out.

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When Paul McCartney left The Beatles in 1970 he decided to drop out of public life for a while. Taking his wife and children Macca headed off to his newly bought farm house in the Mull of Kintrye to raise sheep, walk on the beach and pen gentle folky ditties.

It wasn’t until a year later in 1971 when the former Beatle raised his head above the parapet again with the release of the album that had largely been written on Kintrye – Ram. He probably wished he hadn’t bothered. When the press compared Ram with the output of his former sparring partners they found it to be twee, slight and a tad half-baked. It was no match at the time for Lennon’s primal screams or Harrison’s spiritual ditties. Although it sold well Ram became a exhibit A for Macca detractors.

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Source: brandish

Half a century after they had their first hit and four decades after they split up there remains an insatiable appetite for tales about The Beatles. And amazingly, even now they keep on coming.

Thus the burgeoning success of Standing in the Wings: The Beatles, Brian Epstein and Me – the memoirs of Liverpool’s Joe Flannery which recall the Fab’s formative years on their way to pop superstardom.

The book is barely off the presses and its publishers are talking of a second print run, while its author is preparing for a nationwide promotional tour – and with the tantalising prospect of America, Canada and even Japan to follow.

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Source: Liverpool Echo

Fenway Park is preparing for thousands of spectators in the next five days, none of whom are coming to see any home runs. As the Red Sox begin a new series in Seattle tonight, their home plate is currently being converted into a concert venue to host two of Boston's biggest concerts of the summer: Paul McCartney and Jason Aldean.

Rock legend Paul McCartney will take the stage tomorrow night for a record-breaking crowd. Tickets for tomorrow's show sold out in a whopping five minutes back in April, making it the fastest-ever sellout for a concert in Fenway history. McCartney is returning to perform in Boston for the first time since 2009, when he broke another attendance record for drawing the largest crowded the ballpark had ever seen for a two-day concert.

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Source: Bostlnno

In early December 1961, Brian Epstein drew up a contract that bound The Beatles to him for five years. Only Paul McCartney was hesitant about signing it. McCartney told Epstein that he hoped The Beatles would make it big, as Howard Sounes recounts in Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. “But I’ll tell you now, Mr. Epstein,” McCartney declared, “I’m going to be a star anyway.”

Macca was 19 at the time. He turned 71 last month and the steely resolve he showed Epstein has never wavered.

McCartney, worth about $650 million according to Forbes magazine, is on the road this summer to burnish his musical legacy. Not only his own, but The Beatles’ legacy, too. The plan is to cement his place in pop history by giving fans what he calls, with Liverpudlian understatement, “a good night out.”