Beatles
james.woodall
It could be a book, film, TV or radio piece, essay or exhibition. If it’s about or based on The Beatles, the question is always the same: how on earth can anything new be said? In the case of Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, surprisingly quite a lot, is the answer.Factually, there’s little with which the Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind director can grab even the most noddingly acquainted. Four boys from very modest backgrounds test themselves as a band in the early 1960s in Europe’s raciest city (Hamburg), get noticed in a scuzzy Liverpool basement by a posh shopkeeper (Brian Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A decade ago I was sent to interview George Martin and his son Giles about Love, the remarkable remix of the Beatles catalogue which they created for Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show in Las Vegas. After the interview proper, in which both talked about collaborating with each other and with Paul, Ringo and the widows of John and George, I asked Sir George Martin if we could talk about an area of particular interest to me.I was working at the time on a book about the French horn, and part of the idea was to visit all the big moments in horn history. One of those was “For No One” (from Revolver) Read more ...
james.woodall
For many pop-pickers, the presiding image of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee will be Brian May (he – yes, of course – of Queen) grinding out the national anthem on the roof of Buckingham Palace. For me, there was a much more meaningful moment later the same evening when Paul McCartney, Her Majesty and a tall grey-haired man gathered on the party stage, rubbing shoulders and so magically recreating a little trope of our recent cultural history. The grey-haired man was George Martin, who for a generation of Beatles fans was That Name printed on the back of most of their albums, certainly all the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Arena is the longest-running arts documentary programme for television at the BBC, and perhaps the world: as the BBC itself phrases it, this compendium celebration presented 24 hours in 90 minutes for 40 years, marking the show's latest anniversary. Conceived by the ever-creative and energetic Humphrey Burton all that while ago, Arena has made over 600 films, looking at high and low culture with equal curiosity, alacrity and even audacity.This visual anthology was a slightly queasy trip down memory lane, dizzying and provoking as we heard TS Eliot himself reading The Waste Land to visuals Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Critic and popular historian Dominic Sandbook understands the power of the soundbite, so he supplied one of his own to sum up his new series: "We do still make one thing better than anybody else – we make stories."This is a companion piece to Sandbrook's new book, The Great British Dream Factory, in which he upset a few readers by daring to criticise John Lennon. The thesis remains the same, however – Britain has been in decline since 1945, with the Empire gone along with our manufacturing base, but has compensated by applying the energy and ingenuity that made the Victorians great to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Not just a mere rock star but spiritual guru, peace campaigner, political icon, thorn in the flesh of Richard Nixon and the CIA, and ultimately martyr. John Lennon, who would have been 75 today (9 October), has proved an impossible act to follow. Even his former songwriting partner Paul McCartney, who's hardly been deprived of adulation over the last few decades, can't get over the fact that Lennon has achieved that mythic status known only to a rarefied handful. "The fact that he's now martyred has elevated him to a James Dean, and beyond," Macca moped in a recent Esquire interview. We can Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though packaged as a tale of an ageing rock star, Danny Collins is really an autumnal comedy-drama about regret, redemption and trying to seize life's second chances. As the title character, a cheesy AOR veteran pitched somewhere between Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, Al Pacino demonstrates why he and rock'n'roll have never been intimately linked – he can't sing, he can't dance, and he hasn't a clue what to do with a baying live audience.Nonetheless this is Pacino at his warmest and most soulful, and, abetted by such wily old veterans as Christopher Plummer (as his manager Frank Grubman) and Read more ...
james.woodall
Half a century ago today, on a warm August Sunday night in New York, The Beatles played a 30-minute concert in a baseball field. Home to the New York Mets the venue was called the William A Shea Municipal Stadium and had opened in spring 1964.In January 1965 Beatles manager Brian Epstein and US promoter Sid Bernstein had struck a deal to present the boys in the largest space they’d played in: it would be the first gig of the third US tour, and remained, by far, the biggest live event The Beatles ever did. It was, indeed, at the time the biggest instance of outdoor entertainment in history. A Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of vinyl’s more controversial corners is the postal subscription club. Sign up to one of these and, for a fee, a number of records are sent to your home. The draw is supposed to be exclusivity of content or simply trusting the taste of a faultless musical guru. Subscription is thus, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. Sites such as Wax&Stamp are typical. Their policy is to send two-per-month, one chosen by them and one by a guest selector. Most of the real success stories, though, are labels with solid reputations, such as the longstanding Fortuna Pop and Too Pure singles clubs. Flying Read more ...
james.woodall
Summer was nigh. In May 1969 the Lennons bought Tittenhurst Park, an 85-acre estate in the same stockbroker belt as John’s first Beatles home, Kenwood. It needed work and a while would pass before they moved in. At EMI, John and Yoko busied themselves with their resistible third LP, The Wedding Album. Heroin intake was vigorous.There were many soi-disant Apple-Allen Klein business meetings through April and May, most of which went nowhere. One of them, however, at Olympic Studios in Barnes in south-west London (on 9 May), was overshadowed by three Beatles having, the previous day, pledged Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Choosing the cutesy-pie “Fwends” – as The Flaming Lips have before – for the title rather than "friends" instantly suggests this track-by-track revisit to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band isn’t going to be entirely reverential. It isn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. No music is sacred and reinterpretations can indeed be interesting and fun. Occasionally, they can even be revelatory. In this case, The Residents’ “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life” is the exemplar: a cover version of a song from Sgt Pepper's which took The Beatles to places so far-out Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jacques-François Gallay: Chamber music for natural horn ensemble Les Chevaliers de Saint Hubert (Resonus)Shove a funnel in one end of a length of hose pipe, and explore the quirks and thrills of the natural horn. Namely that most of the low notes are missing or out of tune. The higher harmonics are closer together, making accurate pitching a bit like throwing a dart whilst wearing a blindfold. Getting round the instrument's limitations requires much jiggery-pokery of right hand and lip. A side-effect of the period performance boom is that modern brass and winds can end up seeming just a Read more ...