While Liverpool holds a totemic presence in Fab Four lore, Los Angeles glows with an Emerald City allure during the peaks of Beatlemania. Naturally, it’s their hometown’s suburban features and streets that form essential alleys and landmarks among the John Lennon and Paul McCartney songbook. The Strawberry Field Salvation Army’s surrealist retreat, ‘Penny Lane’s kaleidoscopic […]
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No compilation of Jimmy Page’s best work, whether created by a record label or a fan on a streaming app, is going to front-load his 1980s material. After the death of John Bonham brought an end to Led Zeppelin at the start of the decade, Page was slightly adrift for a while; there were moments […]
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When breaking America, a lot of artists will want to start as they mean to go on. Except, if the first time Queen went Stateside was anything to go by, they would have always been destined to fail. Picture the scene: the year was 1974, and although the success of Queen and Queen II was […]
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As far as business deals go, passing up on the opportunity to sign one of the most successful, beloved bands in history is the kind of nightmare that keeps music industry executives up at night. Yet, during the early 1960s, multiple record labels turned The Beatles away from their roster, with one infamously noting that […]
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When the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, rock and roll largely carried on its course. The music grew heavier and new subcultures emerged, but it was more evolution than revolution. The shift from the 1970s to the 1980s, however, was a different story. Suddenly, many rock stars were experimenting with questionable new directions, and […]
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There’s a certain magic that came whenever The Beatles that wasn’t lost on Paul McCartney. He may have been the one who wrote all of those classic songs with John Lennon at the start of their career, but if it wasn’t for all of them finding their place in every single one of their tunes, […]
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All of The Beatles were usually more than happy to give some of their songs to Ringo Starr. The drummer wasn’t known to be the most ambitious songwriter that the world had ever seen, and since he only managed to crank out two and a half songs when he was with the group, it was […]
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Released in January 1969, Led Zeppelin‘s eponymous first album featured long, exploratory tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’ and was rooted heavily in electrified Chicago blues, with one eye still cast towards late-1960s psychedelia. For those recordings, Page even wielded a psychedelically painted Fender Telecaster, a fitting emblem of a band still emerging from the technicolour […]
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It was never going to be easy for John Lennon to backpedal from being one of the biggest enemies of Christianity circa 1966. He had picked the wrong faith to mess with once he went back to the US, and he was more than happy to apologise at every opportunity for his remarks about the […]
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Like all British acts, The Beatles would have told anyone how important it was for them to break America. It can be a Herculean task for anyone to become the biggest pop musician in the States, and the Fab Four didn’t even want to set foot on American soil until they had an actual hit […]
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