Lennon

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things musicGet our Now Hear This email for freeSean Ono Lennon already has some thoughts about the casting for Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Beatles films, where he will create four separate movies: one for each of the Fab Four. The musician and son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono attended the Oscars on Sunday (10 March) with his girlfriend, singer and model Charlotte Kemp Muhl. His project War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John &…

War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko scored the award for Best Animated Short War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko won the Oscar for Best Animated Short and Sean Lennon took the opportunity to celebrate his mom, Yoko Ono. Filmmakers Dave Mullins and Brad Booker took the stage alongside Lennon, who capped off the acceptance speeches by calling out, “Happy Mother’s Day, Yoko!” (For those confused by the shout out, today marks Mother’s Day in the U.K. while the…

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press NEW YORK — The Beatles are getting the big-screen biopic treatment in not just one film, but a Fab Four of movies that will give each band member their own spotlight — all of which are to be directed by Sam Mendes. For the first time, the Beatles, long among the stingiest rights granters, are giving full life and music rights to a movie project. Sony Pictures announced Monday a deal that may dwarf all music biopics that have come before it, with the stories of Paul McCartney, John Lennon,…

Just when we were getting sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe … Sam Mendes comes along with the Beatles Cinematic Universe. It’s a quartet of interlocking movies about the Fab Four, each centred on one band member, and with the fascinating promise of overlaps and POV shifts, perhaps inspired by Lucas Belvaux’s triple-decker Trilogy pictures or Joao Canijo’s mirror image films Bad Living and Living Bad. Mendes’s moptop movies may tag quadrilaterally around key moments … Shea Stadium, the Maureen Cleave interview,…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeJames Bond director Sam Mendes will direct four separate movies on the lives of each of The Beatles, it has been announced. Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison will each be the subject of their own feature films financed by Sony Pictures Entertainment.According to a statement from Sony, the movies are set to be released from 2027 and “will intersect to tell the…

Sean Ono Lennon may have initially rejected the astrology his family embraced growing up, but when it came to his new album, it felt like the very stars were against him. “I just felt like there was too much cosmic interference,” he tells Rolling Stone of Asterisms, a genreless wash of instrumental music that flirts with jazz, rock, and electronic. In the end, though, the planets aligned, and the record dropped Friday on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. But back in the days when Covid was rampant, the fate of the…

The archive of Stuart Sutcliffe, the original bassist with the Beatles, is up for sale, featuring more than 400 paintings and drawings – plus astonishing Beatles ephemera including an unfinished novel about John Lennon.Sutcliffe was a galvanising force in the Beatles, who met John Lennon when the pair were art students in Liverpool – after joining Paul McCartney and George Harrison in skiffle group the Quarrymen, it was Sutcliffe and Lennon who spliced a reference to Beat poets with a nod to Buddy Holly’s band the…

This immensely likable debut novel from Irish writer Ferdia Lennon opens in Syracuse, south-east Sicily, in 412BC. The city has lately defeated a military expedition from Athens and thousands of surviving invaders have been thrown into nearby quarries to rot. No Syracusans lament their fate until two locals visit one day with an idea to cast the prisoners in a play by Euripides.The two men are Gelon, a melancholy theatre obsessive, and his wisecracking friend Lampo, who narrates the novel in a distinctly un-Sicilian…

Stories about the power of stories are an easy sell; in part, I think, because they subtly ennoble the producer and the consumer of those stories, shedding a glow of valour on the profession of the former and chosen leisure pursuit of the latter. Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is very much a story about the power of stories – and the spiritual and emotional succour they give – though, fortunately, too much of a clever one to fall entirely into the mode of blithe self-congratulation.It is 412BC, the…

‘What’ve I done? Made an eejit of myself?” Terri Hooley snaps when I praise his myriad achievements. “I’m fed up being called The Godfather of Punk – I’m not. I’m just an old hippy and punk was hippies’ revenge, cos you didn’t listen to us first time round!”I had been warned Hooley might be cranky due to the dialysis he undergoes thrice weekly, combined with a busy schedule that involved DJing at recent gigs by the Northern Irish punk bands he brought to light – the Undertones and the Outcasts – and promoting the…