Posts

Showing posts with the label Beatle myths

Did all The Beatles come from poor homes?

Image
I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around... not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. In the class system, it was about half a class higher than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in government-subsidized housing. We owned our house and had a garden. They didn't have anything like that .  Playboy Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Published in January 1981  10 Admiral Grove where Ringo grew up - now owned by National Trust A slightly more accurate summary would point out that Ringo was at least  'half a class' lower than Paul and George and did not live in social housing or what the British call a council house. Dingle was one of the poorest areas of Liverpool and the Starkeys paid ten shillings (£0.50p) a week to a private landlord for 10 Admiral Grove, a terraced house without a bathroom or indoor toilet. It is also int

Which Beatles almost came to blows over a biscuit?

Image
Until 1968 it was an unwritten rule of The Beatles that wives and girlfriends did not attend recording sessions. This was unilaterally abandoned by John who insisted on Yoko being with him at all times. The others clearly resented this, especially when Yoko offered unsolicited advice on the music they were producing. Mostly this resentment was unspoken. But according to Geoff Emerick, it exploded into the open during one particularly fraught recording session for Abbey Road. On this occasion a bed had been introduced into the studio to allow a flu-stricken, Yoko to participate. "...I noticed that something down in the studio had caught George Harrison’s attention. After a moment or two he began staring bug-eyed out the control room window… Yoko had gotten out of bed and was slowly padding across the studio floor, finally coming to a stop at Harrison’s Leslie cabinet, which had a packet of McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits on top. Idly, she began opening the packet and delicately

What were the 'clues' on the Abbey Road cover?

Image
So here’s another clue for you all/The Walrus was Paul The Beatles  Glass Onion  (The White Album) There were conspiracy theories long before the internet. The Beatles, with their unprecedented fame and influence on popular culture, were particularly prone to them. Perhaps the most notorious began on   the night of January 7, 1967, when  ‘a rumour swept London that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on the M1’. - read the full story here. On 12 October, 1969 a bizarre on-air phone call to Detroit radio station gave new life (!) to the controversy. A caller, identified only as ‘Tom’, had some startling new information. He revealed that The Beatles had been sending secret messages through their recorded songs. ‘Play ‘Revolution 9’ backwards,’ he said mysteriously. ‘And you’ll hear what I mean!’ The DJ duly spun the disk (backwards). After somehow deciphering discordant wailing, he pronounced judgement. ‘Wow! John is saying “dead man!” He’s trying to tell us that

Which Beatle supposedly 'died' in 1966?

Image
One of the most enduring legends surrounding The Beatles is that the Fab Four became the Fab Three in November 1966.