Violin-shaped Höfner vanished around the time the Beatles split up but has now resurfaced after a global appeal
A Höfner bass guitar bought by Paul McCartney for £30 in 1961 has been returned to the former Beatle after a global search to find the stolen instrument.
The distinctively shaped guitar, bought by McCartney before his rise to stardom and reportedly his favourite, was last seen around the time the Beatles were recording their final album to be released, Let It Be.
Continue reading...AI-enhanced song released at 2pm GMT today, but Beatles experts are divided over how effectively it could capture the band’s spirit
George Harrison originally disliked it; fans had long assumed it would never be released. But the “final” song by the Beatles, Now and Then, is being released at 2pm GMT, an unexpected last flourish for arguably the UK’s greatest band.
“It’s a big moment,” says Dr Holly Tessler of the University of Liverpool, who specialises in the Beatles’ history and legacy. “It’s strange to think that a band that broke up more than 50 years ago is telling you that this is our last song … in a way, Paul and Ringo, who are both in their 80s, are drawing a line. It’s a very sweet moment I suspect for almost all Beatles fans; it feels like an ending. So I do think it’s significant.”
Continue reading...Audience comes to Scottish singer’s aid at Pyramid stage, while late-arriving US star performs a cappella after midnight curfew
As this year’s Glastonbury festival comes to a close, here is a look back at some of the weekend’s most memorable moments.
Continue reading...Ex-Beatle’s gig seen by many in huge festival crowd as ‘something to tell your grandkids about’
Paul McCartney’s history-making Glastonbury set was hailed as one of the greatest headline performances of this generation as a crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered at the festival’s famous Pyramid stage to watch him play.
He was joined on stage by Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl – and even sang a duet with his old bandmate John Lennon, using special effects pioneered by the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
Continue reading...Set at Cheese and Grain sold out in under an hour after being announced on Thursday night
Sir Paul McCartney delivered a surprise performance the night before his Glastonbury festival headline set, which had caused traffic congestion as fans tried to buy a coveted ticket.
The impromptu gig at the Cheese and Grain entertainment venue in Frome, Somerset, was announced on Thursday evening and sold out in under an hour.
Continue reading...Ex-Beatle turned 80 on Saturday, days after a brief US tour which saw him joined on stage by Bruce Springsteen
Sir Ringo Starr, Bruce Springsteen and Ronnie Wood were among stars who have been wishing Sir Paul McCartney a happy 80th birthday.
The ex-Beatle turned 80 on Saturday, days after finishing a brief US tour. The milestone comes the weekend before McCartney becomes Glastonbury’s oldest solo headliner, when he takes to the Pyramid stage on Saturday.
Continue reading...As the festival returns from Covid-enforced hiatus, over half of the acts announced so far feature women
Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar and Olivia Rodrigo have been announced as among the stars performing at this summer’s Glastonbury festival.
Out of the 89 names announced so far, 48 are women or acts that include female artists, meeting festival co-organiser Emily Eavis’s previously stated intention for Glastonbury to achieve gender parity on its bill. “Our future has to be 50/50,” she told the BBC in 2020.
Continue reading...Peter Jackson spent four years editing down 60 hours of unseen footage into the new three-part documentary series. Was it worth the wait?
As a younger Beatles fan who grew up with the idea that the band were falling apart in January 1969, Get Back was a joy. My immediate thought was how bright and vibrant everything looked, compared with the graininess of the original Let It Be film. It could have been shot yesterday – apart from the outfits and hairstyles. While not exactly a big revelation for those of us who never believed that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles, it’s great to see that her presence here didn’t upset Paul, George and Ringo nearly as much as it seemed to upset commentators. We see absolutely no evidence of her “interfering”, as has been claimed over the years, and I loved McCartney’s prescient remark that in 50 years’ time people would be saying the Beatles broke up “because Yoko sat on an amp”.
Continue reading...Diaries of band’s road manager, Mal Evans, revealing chaos at gig to feature in major biography
The police famously tried to shut down the Beatles’s rooftop concert on 30 January 1969, over concerns of breach of the peace, in what was to be the band’s final public performance. Now a further backstage drama has emerged with the revelation that Paul McCartney afterwards used his charm to stop a police officer from arresting their road manager and confidant, Mal Evans.
Kenneth Womack, one of the world’s foremost Beatles scholars, told the Observer: “It turns out that Mal was actually arrested that day but managed to get out of it only when Paul went into PR mode and changed the copper’s mind after the show.”
Continue reading...Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary on the Fab Four reveals Ringo is an amazing drummer, McCartney was a joy and their entourage were coolest of all
The concept for Let It Be was: no concept. The Beatles arrived in an empty studio and wondered where the equipment was. (And revealed that they knew very little about setting up PA systems.) What were they rehearsing for? A show on the QE2? A concert on Primrose Hill? A TV special in Libya? A film? What would the set look like? Would it be made of plastic? Why, George Harrison wondered, were they being recorded? Get Back makes clear that the Beatles didn’t have a clue what to expect from Let It Be.
Continue reading...‘I call our kid “Rambo Paul” in this one, because he reminds me of Stallone. I have no idea why George is pointing at his nipple’
I didn’t intend to pick up a camera. I’d been practising on drums that had fallen off the back of a lorry into our house on Forthlin Road, Liverpool. But when I was 13, I broke my arm at scout camp, so Pete Best got the job in our kid’s group. That’s when I started taking photos on the family box camera. It was fortuitous, though, because if I had become the Beatles’ drummer, we’d probably have gone the Oasis route.
I would go everywhere with the Beatles. I was part of the act. It’s like if Rembrandt’s kid brother was in the corner with a pad and paper, sketching his older brother. I was lucky – you couldn’t have had a better group to practise on, could you?
Continue reading...Rock history has painted Paul McCartney as the man who broke up the band. Now he reveals that it was Lennon who was first to look for a way out
It remains the most analysed break-up in rock history: the one that set the template. When the Beatles split more than 50 years ago and Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr went their separate ways, it was McCartney who shouldered most of the blame.
But now McCartney is setting the record straight for good. “I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny,” he has insisted in a candid and detailed interview to be broadcast later this month.
Continue reading...The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story
On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?
Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.
Continue reading...She’s the queen of the power ballad mega hit – and has even written songs for Biden, Harris and Ringo Starr. Now the world’s most successful female songwriter is finally releasing her own album
At the end of the 1990s, when Diane Warren was the unrivalled queen of the power ballad, her music publisher presented her with a quartet of gold discs and a plaque hailing her as “the career saviour of the 90s”. The discs celebrated the windswept mega-hits Warren had written for Toni Braxton (Un-Break My Heart), LeAnn Rimes (How Do I Live), Celine Dion (Because You Loved Me) and Aerosmith (I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing), the first two of which are still among the bestselling US singles ever.
To be imperial in one pop era is usually to be defined by it for evermore, but Warren has been writing hits for almost four decades, notching up nine US No 1s and 32 Top 10 hits. In 2015, Til It Happens to You, her potent Lady Gaga collaboration for a documentary about campus rape, made her once again the pop equivalent of the striker you turn to when you absolutely have to score a penalty.
Continue reading...The Lyrics will feature a ‘self-portrait’ in 154 songs, including the unrecorded Tell Me Who He Is
Paul McCartney will include the previously unseen lyrics to an unrecorded Beatles song in his forthcoming book The Lyrics.
On Monday, the former Beatle revealed the 154 songs to feature in the book, which will be based on conversations McCartney had with the poet Paul Muldoon. Described as a “self-portrait in 154 songs”, The Lyrics will feature songs from throughout McCartney’s career, including Blackbird, Live and Let Die, Hey Jude, Band on the Run and Yesterday.
Continue reading...From Neil Young to Keith Richards, a generation of musicians revered Phil and Don’s haunting music
• US music star Don Everly dies aged 84
Among the hundreds of hours of outtakes from the recording sessions that eventually became the Beatles’ Let It Be album, there is a version of Two of Us, taped on 25 January 1969. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney harmonise, the latter says to the former: “Take it, Phil”, a reference to Phil and Don Everly, the duo upon whom the pair had originally attempted to model themselves. On an early holiday, Lennon and McCartney attempted to impress local girls by telling them they had a band back home and they were “the British Everly Brothers”.
Shortly afterwards, the pair temporarily stopped working on the song entirely and began performing a ragged cover of Bye Bye Love instead. It’s both oddly sweet – a fleeting moment where the ill-tempered sessions actually achieved their aim of returning the Beatles to their roots – and oddly telling. At the end of a decade in which they had done more than anyone to alter rock music entirely, shifting its parameters until it was occasionally unrecognisable from the state in which it had started the 60s – and rendering the likes of Don and Phil Everly old news in the process – John Lennon and Paul McCartney still wanted to sound like the Everly Brothers. Throughout it all, McCartney later wrote, “their music echoed through my mind”.
Continue reading...Council workers take advantage of the empty streets to spruce up the crossing featured on the cover of the 1969 Beatles album
The iconic Abbey Road zebra crossing made famous by the 1969 Beatles album of the same name has been repainted while the streets of London are empty because of the coronavirus pandemic.
A highways maintenance crew quietly repainted the normally busy zebra crossing on 24 March, the day after the prime minister ordered Britain to go on lockdown in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus.
Continue reading...Mark Lewisohn knows the Fab Four better than they knew themselves. The expert’s tapes of their tense final meetings shed new light on Abbey Road – and inspired a new stage show
The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.
They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”
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