It is difficult to imagine it now, in the age of music streaming, when we all have virtually every song ever recorded at our beck and call, but for over 40 years, the prevailing method of music consumption in the United Kingdom was Top of the Pops – at its prime, this televisual cultural institution […]
Continue Reading
It appeared without warning and without ownership. No name. No explanation. Just scanned pages circulating online, their edges uneven, the handwriting personal and unmistakably human. Within hours, excerpts attributed to George Harrison were being shared across continents, passed from screen to screen with a mix of disbelief, reverence, and unease. By morning, the posts had […]
Continue Reading
On August 20th, 1969, the four members of The Beatles gathered in Studio 2 of Abbey Road with producer George Martin. They were putting the finishing touches to a song as they often did, overdubbing harmonised backing vocals and instrumental takes the same way they’d done since their early singles. At the time, though some […]
Continue Reading
From day one, The Beatles never intended to be the best band in the world. While they probably had their eyes set on being big enough to rival their idols like Elvis Presley and Little Richard, none of the Fab Four could have predicted their music being revered as one of the most perfect bodies […]
Continue Reading
In the early hours of his final day, while the room remained still and the world continued unaware, George Harrison reached for a small bedside tape recorder. There was no studio waiting, no engineers adjusting levels, no audience in mind. What he captured in those moments was fragile and unguarded, shaped by breath rather than […]
Continue Reading
Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s place in the pantheon of music greats is as good as confirmed. In fact, not only is it confirmed, but they are likely the leaders of whatever hall of fame they find themselves in, for together they represent the very best of music history. Yet somehow, despite their perceived bulletproof […]
Continue Reading
March 1964 arrived with the force of cultural change. America was listening, watching, and deciding what would last. On live television, before nearly thirty million viewers, Frank Sinatra stood on the stage of The Hollywood Palace and dismissed a rising sound from across the Atlantic. He spoke of noise, of a fad, of something loud […]
Continue Reading
For all John Lennon’s painfully authentic realisations of his deepest emotions and sentiments in song, he probably never wrote anything quite as tragic as Paul McCartney’s meditation on loneliness: ‘Eleanor Rigby’. The Beatles released the track as a single alongside the far happier ‘Yellow Submarine’, and the two of them became one of the strangest […]
Continue Reading
It might be assumed that if any one person completely and utterly understood The Beatles, it must surely have been George Martin, but even he was just as lost as everyone else in moments. Martin was uniquely placed to understand it all, though, and he might not have been there from the very start in […]
Continue Reading
While working out the details for their second feature film, The Beatles had to decide what they were going to call it. A Hard Day’s Night had set a precedent for loopy malapropisms, and with a basic idea of bringing in a Hindu cult, the title Eight Arms To Hold You was tentatively bandied about. […]
Continue Reading