Beatles News

The film's bosses were initially keen to secure Rolling Stones' Keith Richards to play a pirate rocker in the latest instalment of the adventure movie but when he was unable to film the part, the team were thrilled to secure the Beatles star.

Co-director Espen Sandberg said: "So we needed another rocker and on top of our list was Paul McCartney. And Johnny said, 'Well, I have his number.' And of course Johnny has Paul McCartney's number. So he started texting him. And it went back and forth. And then [Paul] said yes. So we were super happy."

Whilst co-director Joachim Ronning added to USA Today: "It was fun. And there we went."

Keith - who was unable to make a cameo in the most recent film due to "touring commitments" - had previously made an appearance as Captain Jack Sparrow's (Johnny Depp) father Captain Teague in 2007's 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End'.

Sir Paul McCartney's involvement in the fifth installment of the pirate franchise was revealed in March 2016 when a source said bosses had approached the musician about the role and directors Ronning and Sandberg had decided to add an extra scene just for him.

Source: Sunday World

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The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone named as the best album of all time, turns 50 on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for each of the album's tracks, excluding the brief "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary and beloved record. Today's installment tells the story of how a school drawing by a three-year-old Julian Lennon inspired "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."

"I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD," John Lennon insisted to Rolling Stone in 1970 of the title of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." In interview after interview, Lennon begged listeners to accept that the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band standout was "not an acid song." The public, for their part, merely rolled their eyes.

Until the end of his life, Lennon maintained that the song was actually inspired by a painting that his three-year-old son Julian had made of Lucy O'Donnell, his classmate at Heath House nursery school. "This is the truth: My son came home with a drawing an details

We're just eight days away from the release of the 50th anniversary edition of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which was painstakingly remastered and expanded by Giles Martin, the son of the Fab Four's original producer, George Martin.

Giles has now revealed (and retracted somewhat) that he is ready to move on to his next project, the Beatles' 1968 album The Beatles (aka The White Album)

The White Album was an oddity for the band. It was their only double album and the only one where a single was never released to radio; however, you would never know it from listening to classic rock stations who still play a wide selection from the set as if they had been chart toppers including Back in the U.S.S.R., Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Blackbird, Rocky Raccoon, Birthday and Helter Skelter. The album also contains a trio of songs that could be placed among the most beautiful from the Beatles catalog, Julia, Good Night and I Will.

Martin told the BBC on Thursday morning "The White Album, which is the next release – that is where they started becoming indulgent. There are 70 takes of Sexy Sadie, for instance. The efficiency went slightly out the window. There’s details

The summer of love began on Thursday, June 1, 1967, a day that now lies closer to World War I than to our time. As London sweltered and swung, two LPs landed in the record stores—one each from the two acts now rated the greatest in the history of British pop music.The first was the debut album by David Bowie, which was a resounding flop: “I didn’t know,” Bowie said later, “whether to be Max Miller or Elvis Presley.” (Miller was a British music hall comedian of the 1930s, known as the Cheeky Chappie.) If you’d asked for Bowie’s record that day in 1967, the shop assistant might have scratched her head. And you would have had to fight your way through the throng trying to buy the other new release. Bowie, later celebrated for his sense of theater, had chosen a terrible moment to make an entrance.

That other album was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles, which had aroused feverish expectations and lived up to all of them. For 50 years now, it has been more than a record. It is the high-water mark of hippiedom and a landmark in the history of music. It was the first rock record to capture album of the year at the Grammys, a bastion long held by the forces details

If you’re getting bored of the free pianos in St Pancras station, there’s now a new way to make music while you wait for your train. They’re installing a retro-style jukebox, so commuters can play every top 40 hit from the past 50 years for free. That means you can choose from a whopping 57,000 tunes to entertain (or annoy) you and your fellow passengers with, including 1,255 number ones and 18,162 artists from Frank Sinatra and David Bowie to Ed Sheeran and, er, The Cheeky Girls.

After tallying up the tunes, The Beatles claimed the most top 40 tracks on the music box – a huge 280 – and so to mark the jukebox’s launch it will be covered in colourful crops of hollyhock in a throwback to the Liverpudlian band’s iconic ‘Mad Day Out’ photoshoot, as some of the pix were taken just around the corner from the station almost 50 years ago.

The jukebox will be a permanent fixture underneath Southeastern train platforms 11 to 13, but to catch it sporting its floral Beatles tribute head there from Wednesday May 17 to Saturday May 20, when Londoners will be encouraged to play out classic Beatle beats.

Source: Timeout London

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It was 10am on Easter Sunday, 1974, and Iovine had just received a call from Roy Cicala, John Lennon’s go-to engineer at Record Plant Studios in New York.

Cicala had explained that the ex-Beatle urgently needed someone to man the phones… as in, five minutes ago.

Iovine, Record Plant’s always-willing 21-year-old gopher, unquestioningly did as he was asked – but not before informing his mom he wouldn’t be attending church that morning.

Maternal tongue-lashing survived, Iovine pitched up at Record Plant, only to find Cicala and Lennon laughing in his face.

The punchline: this was a test of his dutifulness… and he’d passed.

Jimmy Iovine had just bagged himself a job as John Lennon’s new Assistant Engineer.

This was the moment that Iovine says his life changed forever.

Before he was taken under the wing of Cicala (and Lennon), the now-Beats/Apple Music chief was working go-nowhere jobs in various New York recording studios – while expecting a far less cushy professional destiny to take over.

Having left school with no real qualifications, Iovine believed he’d end up doing what many young men from Red Hook, Br details

Does the world really need another book about the Beatles? The people behind “In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs” think so, and they’ve come up with a seemingly irresistible wrinkle: Ask a lineup of literati to choose the Beatles song that means the most to them. Since everyone likes the Beatles, the results are practically guaranteed to please.

Well, maybe. But the most predictable thing about this endeavor is how predictable it is. The Rule of Themed Anthologies says that one-third of such collections will be thought-provoking and insightful, one third will be just okay, and one third will be tossed-off words from writers too guilty or desperate to say no to the commissioning editor. “In Their Lives” satisfies this formula with eerie precision.

The only sensible approach to evaluating such a book is to enumerate the successes, of which there are several. Writing about “Eleanor Rigby,” Rebecca Mead notes, with typical clarity and grace, that the song, “which so perfectly captures the pathos of loneliness, was generated in an atmosphere of intimacy and friendship . . . a product of the extraordinarily fruitful four-way marriage that was the Beatle details

The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone named as the greatest album of all time, turns 50 on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for each of the album's tracks, excluding the brief "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary and beloved LP. Today's installment focuses on how Paul McCartney's solo travels after the end of the Beatles' final tour inspired the title track and gave Sgt. Pepper its famous "alter ego" concept.

"Right – that's it, I'm not a Beatle anymore!" George Harrison was heard to exclaim as the band concluded their touring career on August 29th, 1966, with a set at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. His remark bore a touch of hyperbole, but for the next few months, the Beatles effectively didn't exist. That fall afforded the foursome the most substantial stretch of personal time they had ever known as adults, allowing each to finally get to know the man he had become after four years as part of a collective identity.

John Lennon had been the first to venture out, accepting a par details

As San Francisco gears up to celebrate the golden anniversary of the Summer of Love—where, in 1967, an estimated 100,000 youths, sporting flowers in their hair and LSD on their brains, converged in the Haight-Ashbury sparking the hippie social movement—scores of city structures and buildings will pay tribute to that patchouli-laced era.

One venue’s celebration promises to be especially noteworthy. The landmark Conservatory of Flower building in Golden Gate Park will light up in a myriad of colors.

Illuminate, the group behind the Bay Lights, and Obscura Digital, a creative studio focusing on light-based art, will transform the stark white landmark with a series of illuminated scenes, which according to the conservatory, are “inspired by the rare tropical flowers within and the legacy of San Francisco’s flower children.”

Ben Davis, Director of Illuminate, said in a press release, “We are bringing that light back to where it all began in Golden Gate Park fifty years later with an electrifying, contemporary tribute.”

Groovy.

Light show can be seen nightly from sundown until midnight from June 21 through October 21.

Beatles fans, get your credit cards ready: On May 26, the Fab Four is unleashing a lavish revamp of 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in honor of the landmark album’s 50th anniversary. Among the notable features of the reissue are outtakes and alternate versions of songs from the vaults — including the “Pepper”-era double-A-side single “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” — and a new stereo mix of the record that producers claim buffs up the painstaking vibe of the original mono mix.

“They were trying to create this immersive world that the stereo didn’t have,” Giles Martin, the man responsible for the new stereo mix (and, incidentally, the son of the late Beatles producer George Martin), recently told Rolling Stone about the original mono mixing sessions. “Nobody paid much attention to the stereo mix. What we did [today] was work out what they were doing in the mono mix and apply it to stereo.”

It’s a no-brainer that the Beatles team would choose to release a deluxe reissue of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The LP has sold over 11 million copies in th details

Unseen footage of the Beatles on the set of their 1965 movie Help! will soon go on sale after the 8mm film was unearthed after 50 years in storage.

Actor Leo McKern, who played the evil swami Clang in the Beatles' second feature-length film, shot the 8mm film while on the set of Help! The Beatles appear in 10 minutes of the footage, which has an asking price of approximately $45,000.

"This is footage taken in 1965 of people who at the time were the most famous people on earth at the pinnacle of their collective career," books dealer Neil Pearson, who is selling the footage, told Reuters.

McKern reportedly filmed the Beatles during the Help! "snow scenes" in the Austrian Alps, with the group tobogganing and messing around with their stunt doubles on set.

There is also footage of candid behind-the-scenes moments between band members, including Paul McCartney smoking a cigarette and taking photographs.

The 8mm reel contains footage of McKern playing with his then-10-year-old daughter Abigail on the Help! set, as well as the Beatles' then-wives and girlfriends on set, the Guardian reports. Leo McKern died in 2002. The "snow scenes" footage remained in the family's garage until Pearson unearth details

Last year, Stella McCartney launched her first millennial fragrance POP, a fresh and feminine scent that champions the notes of tuberose and sandalwood.

It was deemed more than just a fragrance, as the brand wanted to push a message across to the younger generation: ‘It is about a mindset rather than an individual woman,' they declared. 'Bold. Authentic. Irreverent.’

The campaign was equally impactful with millennial stars including Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon, the musician Grimes, animal activist Kenya Kiniski Jones, and actress and campaigner Amandla Stenberg taking centre stage. In an era where designer perfumes are declining in favour of niche fragrance houses, it was a clever move for McCartney to delve into a younger market, which amounts to over 13.8 million potential customers.

It was clearly a success though as today, McCartney is unveiling a sequel scent, POP Bluebell, from £44. The fragrance promises to be delicate yet distinctive with the British bluebell note bringing a depth and personality to the collection.

“As human beings, we’re always changing, and POP is evolving with its wearers," the British designer explained. "I really love these gir details

Paul and Linda McCartney weren’t the only ones John Lennon had harsh words for in letter form.

An angry letter that Lennon wrote concerning the distribution of his and Yoko Ono’s experimental album “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins” is being auctioned off by Boston-based RR Auction.

In the handwritten piece of correspondence, addressed to Martin George of Rock Ink & Roll Ink, the rock icon expresses frustration with difficulty in getting the 1968 record out to the masses.

“Yoko and I got Two Virgins out in spite of being past owners of Apple [the Beatles’ record label]. We made it in May and they f–ked us about till November! Then E.M.I. (who have the real control) wrote warning letters to all their puppets around the world telling them not handle it in any way,” the letter reads.

The album was the first music released by Lennon following the breakup of the Beatles. E.M.I., Apple’s parent company, refused to distribute it due to the fully nude photo of John and Yoko that adorned its front and back.

By: Bryan Hood

Source: Page Six

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A collection of sixties memorabilia is being sold off by Welsh singer Mary Hopkin - one of the first artists to be signed to The Beatles’ Apple label.

The Pontardawe -born star, who shot to fame with 1968 UK number one single Those Were The Days, is auctioning off a collection of clothes she wore at the height of her fame, including designer stage dresses when she sang with the stars - and a rare Beatles poster from the cusp of the Fab Four’s superstardom.

The poster is advertising the Beatles’ August 1963 gig at The Pier Pavilion in Llandudno, North Wales, and is expected to auction for £400 to £800.

The same month the band went straight to number one with their second hit, “She Loves You”, marking the eruption of Beatlemania across the world.

The small concert in the north Welsh seaside town was priced at 4/6d, 6/6d and 8/6d, and was part of the Beatles’ tour of smaller venues around the UK. Auctioneer Ben Rogers Jones said: “It was right that the poster should be delivered to our auction rooms in Colwyn Bay, only three miles from the venue where The Beatles played that night.

Source: Wales Online

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The timing could not be better for the WAVE 3 News Abbey Road on the River to pay homage to the iconic and acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album was released by The Beatles 50 years ago in 1967, and is set for the much anticipated re-release on May 26, which coincides with the five-day festival, coming up May 25-29, 2017.

Sgt. Pepper, regarded as one of the first concept albums, is known for being one of the most influential and innovative albums of all time. It won four Grammy’s, and included hits like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “With a Little Help From My Friends,” and “A Day in the Life.”

The new, remixed special anniversary edition of the Sgt. Pepper album includes previously unreleased takes from their recording sessions.

More than 15 events will celebrate the groundbreaking album throughout the weekend, including 9 concerts, a presentation by internationally recognized Beatles expert Scott Freiman, and a “Pepper at 50” panel discussion with author Bruce Spizer, Beatle best friend and long-time aide Tony Bramwell, and “Beatle Brunch” Radio Host Joe Johnson.

On Saturday, May 27 at 11:45 p. details