Beatles FAQ

Paul & Mary McCartney Paul McCartney has recently suggested a ‘subconscious’ inspiration for the line I said something wrong/Now I long for yesterday  was his regret at once chiding his mother for ‘talking posh’:

  A special Christmas present

  In Glass Onion John Lennon writes 'Here's another clue for you all/The Walrus was Paul'. What did he mean?

The Beatles leave Candlestick Park On August 29, 1966 The Beatles played their last (official) live concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.  The Candlestick Park concert was on the surface the triumphant finale of another record-breaking tour. But as Paul McCartney has recently said, it also proved a crisis point: By then we were totally fed up and then they put us in the back of a stainless steel box { the armoured car they used to leave the Candlestick Park gig }...  Now this is like some weird sci-fi thing form 2001 or something. We’re suddenly sliding around in the back of the van...The guys, John [Lennon] and George [Harrison], had been a little {fed up} about touring and, finally, all of us, were like ‘Fuck this!’ So that was the moment. There was no public announcement and no definitive decision to stop all live performance at some point. But The Beatles would never play a scheduled concert again. Back to Abbey Road Liberated from their grueling tour...

B eatlemania in the UK spread with astonishing rapidity.

There are 87 people and props on the cover of Sergeant Pepper

John Lennon never showed much affection for The Beatles most celebrated album. Was this because the  Sergeant Pepper concept was Paul's?  Not according to what John says in this interview, recorded in 1971, at the height of his feud with his former song-writing partner: 

'We were cowards when we sacked him'  John Lennon

Wimpole Street  “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head.  I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’  There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window.    I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E.  It all leads forward logically.  I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it I couldn’t believe I’d written it. 

Graphic designer Viktor Hertz has created a remarkable tribute to The Beatles. Each pictogram represents a song.  How many Beatles songs can you identify?

In 1962 Capitol Records, the sister company of EMI, were offered the opportunity to release the first Beatles singles in the USA. But because British acts typically had little success in the American market Capitol turned the opportunity down.  It was two small  companies Vee-Jay Records and Swan who saw some potential for American sales.  Vee-Jay Records? Vee-Jay Records were a small Chicago label, specialising in soul records. They signed The Beatles in order to secure a bigger star: Frank Ifield. As part of the deal Vee-Jay released Please Please Me in February 1963.  With promotion on local radio stations Please, Please Me crept up to number 35 in the Chicago chart. But the song did not register nationally Cold Feet Despite this Vee-Jay scheduled the release of the first album ('Please Please Me' in the UK) for July 1963. With Beatlemania building in Britain, This seemed a very shrewd move until the release was suddenly cancelled without warning. I...

In June 1966 the great Indian musician Ravi Shankar visited George Harrison at his Surrey home - and played for the assembled Beatles. Two months later they recorded George's composition I WANT TO TELL YOU.  Harrison later explained that the song expressed 'an avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say' and Ian Macdonald spots the 'underlying Hindi outlook in the lyric - a karmic reference to time in the final lines ... confirmed by a descending melisma in the fade out'.  Neil Innes - who later collaborated with George Harrison on the celebrated Beatles spoof mockumentary  The Rutles   - happened to be in Abbey Road Studio as they were recording. He tells the story here:

George Martin was initially unconvinced that Lennon & McCartney could consistently write hit songs. For their second single John Lennon put forward Please Please Me - his attempt to channel Roy Orbison. Again the verdict was a resounding thumbs down: I listened to it and I said: 'Do you know that's too boring for words? It's a dirge. At twice the speed it might sound reasonable.' They took me at my word. I was joking and they came back and played it to me sped up and put a harmonica on it. Impressed by the dramatic improvement, George Martin agreed to give the song a second chance. He was not to regret his decision:  We worked for ages on their new version of 'Please Please Me', and I said: 'Gentlemen, you're going to have your first #1. Source: Interview with George Martin, The Observer Music Monthly, 2006

On October 22 1969 Paul McCartney tried to end a month of fevered press speculation started by  a story published in a tiny Des Moines student magazine on September 17 .

According to the delightful May Pang (John's girlfriend during his 'lost weekend') they did:

Saturday. "Friday Night arrives without a suitcase/Sunday morning creeping like a nun." Perhaps its part of that eight-day-week the Beatles introduced. Lady Madonna was McCartney's 'come-back' single after critics savaged Magical Mystery Tour. Musically, it's an impressive response, the boogiewoogie piano and handclaps combining to create an infectious driving sound.  Lyrically, it is less successful. The title was inspired by a magazine photograph of an African mother and child captioned Mountain Madonna. This image immediately runs into trouble with a very British reference to paying the rent. Then it turns bizarrely accusatory ('Did you think that money was heaven sent?') before losing all coherence in what Ian MacDonald calls 'acid tinged unreality'.  Macdonald particularly disapproves of the 'pointless allusion to I Am the Walrus' suggesting that this 'wanton self-mythologising ... in the context of the developing 'Pa...

1962 would be the key year in the history of The Beatles. But it got off to a very bad start. In the early hours of New Year's Day they drove  to London. They were heading for an audition at Decca Records - then the most prestigious record company in the UK. After battling through a snowstorm they finally arrived the studio at the appointed time of 11.00 - only to find that there was nobody there to meet them.  Then they were told that they could not use their own amplifiers.  But the session went ahead? Over the next hour they recorded the following songs, which included three Lennon and McCartney originals: Like Dreamers Do Money (That's What I Want) Till There Was You The Sheik Of Araby To Know Her Is To Love Her Take Good Care Of My Baby Memphis, Tennessee Sure To Fall (In Love With You) Hello Little Girl Three Cool Cats Crying, Waiting, Hoping Love Of The Loved September In The Rain Besame Mucho ? The Beatles did not perform well. T...

  'Words are pouring out like endless rain into a paper cup' In 1970 John Lennon gave a series of confessional interviews to Rolling Stone Magazine. Rather ungallantly, he revealed the source of the opening line of Across the Universe as a scolding from his then wife Cynthia in 1967.  I was lying next to my first wife in bed ... and I was irritated. and I was thinking. She must have been going on and on about something and she'd gone to sleep and I kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. I went downstairs and it turned into a sort of cosmic song rather than an irritated song, rather than a "Why are you always mouthing off at me?"... [The words] were purely inspirational and were given to me as boom!   The tune also appears to arrived in an unusual way.  Hunter Davies recalls that he was walking (in silence) with John around the garden of his Weybridge mansion.  Suddenly they heard the sound of a siren from passing police c...

The Beatles first flew into New York in February 1964 to find an adoring new audience. To American ears their new music came with a charmingly fresh approach to the  English language.  Interestingly, this initially came across more in their spoken interviews than their song lyrics - the early ones followed the established 'American' style ('I want to hold your hand'). But success gave them the confidence to draw on British cultural and linguistic references. Many were unknown to most American listeners. the  National Health Service  (from ‘Dr Robert’) or the  News of the World  (‘Polythene Pam’), and British English vocabulary like ‘ ring  my friend’ (‘Dr Robert’ again: Americans would say  call ), ‘time for  tea ’ (‘Good Morning, Good Morning’: see sense 3  here ), and  dressing gown  (‘She’s Leaving Home’ – it’s a  bathrobe  in American English). Not to mention those  plasticine  porters in ‘Lucy...