Beatles

There have been a number of eye-opening Beatles documentaries through the years, from the Beatlemania doc Eight Days a Week; a tribute to the Fab Four’s loyal secretary, Good Ol’ Freda; Martin Scorsese’s poignant George Harrison: Living in the Material World; and last but certainly not least, Peter Jackson’s recent 8-hour opus Get Back, chronicling the recording of the group’s final album Let It Be and subsequent demise. Now, we have what hopes to be the definitive documentary about the aftermath of Mark David…

In his book One Two Three Four, Craig Brown detailed the ways that the Beatles fleetingly touched and altered millions of lives. In that account, one figure occasionally steps out of the shadows: Mal Evans, bouncer at the Cavern Club, driver and bodyguard as the band travelled first down the newly tarmac-ed M6 and then way beyond. Evans was both a trusted insider to those helter-skelter years and, in some ways, the ultimate Beatles groupie. In this exhaustively detailed account of his truncated life – Evans died aged 40…

Ringo Starr is brushing off “terrible rumors” that he and Paul McCartney used AI to recreate John Lennon‘s voice for their newly released Beatles song “Now and Then.” The Beatles drummer addressed the issue in a new interview with AARP magazine about his life during and after his time in the iconic band and his reunion with McCartney to produce an unfinished track. While Starr and McCartney, along with the late George Harrison, had teamed to release other demos featuring Lennon back in the…

Philip Larkin famously located Britain’s sexual revolution in 1963, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” Until that cork‑popping moment, sex for the repressed people of these islands meant only “a wrangle for the ring”, and “a shame that started at sixteen”; whereas after it, “every life became / A brilliant breaking of the bank”. The fact that Larkin, then in his early 40s, felt this had come “rather late” for him personally didn’t stop him naming the year an Annus Mirabilis.The year 1963…

In the Peter Jackson-directed video for the just-released “Now and Then” — touted as the “final Beatles song” — present-day Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are pleasantly haunted by the ghosts of John Lennon and George Harrison, and even their own younger selves. It’s hard not to think that life inside McCartney and Starr’s heads is a little bit like that on a daily basis, burdened as they are by the weight of history. And they may not be alone: “I walk the city at midnight/With the past strapped to my back,” Mick…

Last night, BBC One shifted its schedules to broadcast a film about the making of the “final” Beatles single, Now and Then. It was brief and rather moving, but it offered a tactfully bowdlerised version of events, understandably stepping around the parts of the story that might cause anyone to regard Now and Then with a wary eye. It talked about the surviving Beatles’ initial attempts to work up John Lennon’s late 70s demos in the mid-90s, but didn’t mention the slightly muted response the completed versions of Free as a…

It was a very musical Saturday Night Live this week, as host Timothée Chalamet celebrated the end of the 118-day actors’ strike by singing a portion of his opening monologue as Willy Wonka and then brought back his obnoxious SoundCloud rapper Smoke Chedda Tha A$$ Getta during a “Rap Roundtable” sketch honoring hip hop’s 50th anniversary.   Trending Taylor Swift Changes ‘Karma’ Lyric in Sweet Nod to Boyfriend Travis Kelce…

The Beatles have broken UK chart records as they return to No 1 with their “final” song together, Now and Then – their 18th chart-topper in total.Their 17th No 1 was The Ballad of John and Yoko in 1969, meaning they are now the artists with the longest gap between No 1 singles: 54 years, smashing the record set last year by Kate Bush when she reached the top with Running Up That Hill, 44 years after her No 1 with Wuthering Heights. Neither of the new songs the living members of the Beatles released in 1995 and 1996, Free…

Breadcrumb Trail LinksMusicCelebrity'With the world in the state it is, we need the Beatles to appear again,' Lord of the Rings filmmaker says Get the latest from Mark Daniell straight to your inbox Sign Up Published Nov 06, 2023  •  Last updated 5 days ago  •  4 minute read The Beatles perform on BBC TV show 'Top Of The Pops' in London on June 16, 1966. Photo by File photo /RedfernsArticle contentGet Back director Peter Jackson, who helped utilize the AI technology that allowed the two surviving Beatles — Paul…

Were it not for WingNut Films’ machine assisted learning tech, Peter Jackson’s 2021 The Beatles: Get Back Disney Plus docuseries might not exist the way it does today, and that very same artificial intelligence that made that project possible is why the music group’s final song will soon be available to the public for the first time.Earlier this year, Paul McCartney teased that the same tech Jackson used to de-mix and isolate all of the Beatles’ speaking voices in old footage had also made it possible to recover John…