Beatles FAQ

George Harrison bought what he later called a 'terrible..cheapoo guitar when he was thirteen. His mother, Louise Harrison has confirmed that learning to play it didn't come easily George tried to teach himself [the guitar]. But he wasn’t making much headway. ‘I’ll never learn this,’ he used to say. I said, ‘You will, son, you will. Just keep at it.’ Progression With characteristic determination, George stuck to the task, literally making his fingers bleed.  Once he had the core chords memorised he move onto a Spanish guitar manual  'Modern Guitar Chord Progressions'.  Around this time he noticed an older boy carrying a trumped on his bus journey from school. The budding musicians fell into conversation   Read more

The Beatles were paid the same as performers (and in repeat rights etc).

In 1954 twelve-year old Paul McCartney notices a younger boy with a guitar on his bus journey to school.

For what was intended to be their final studio album, The Beatles decided to break with George Martin and the EMI/Abbey Road to approach to making records. They were open to new ideas - and with the characteristic abandon of the era went with one of  the maddest  proposed to them- a making-of-the-album documentary culminating in a live concert from Roman ruins in Tunisia.   “The Beatles were to start playing as the sun came up,” explained director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, “and you’d see crowds flocking towards them through the day.” Within weeks, however, this Spinal Tap style project had to be abandoned. Not only were they not flying out to Tunisia, they were even refusing to go to Twickenham to rehearse.  This left the film without big finish or indeed any finish at all. And the one thing everyone agreed upon was that filming needed to end quickly.  Then someone suggested "Why don't we do the concert right here?" So on the 30th of January 1969 the group - plus

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

Photo by  Serena Repice Lentini  on  Unsplash I'd like to be under the sea In an octopus's garden in the shade Abbey Road was not a happy working environment during the recording sessions for The White Album. Ringo, the least involved in the squabbling and backbiting, suffered the most from the emotional fall out: I couldn't take it any more. There was no magic and the relationships were terrible. I'd come to a bad spot in life. It could have been paranoia, but I just didn't feel good – I felt like an outsider. Ringo, Anthology Things came to a head during  a recording session for  Back in the USSR on the 22nd of August, 1968. The precise trigger point is unknown but at some point Ringo snapped. After telling John and Paul he was leaving the group, he walked out of the studio. At first, Ringo's departure seemed to confirm the underlying reason for it. The others assumed that their drummer's 'resignation' was not seriously intended. The

"Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout' Early Lennon & McCartney songs contained few direct references to their home city. The aim was to produce music that would appeal to a global rather than local appeal. The culmination of this approach was I Want to Hold Your Hand - written  with the express intention of appealing to the US market.  The formula worked - I Want to Hold Your Hand became the biggest selling single of all time. It was however, limiting artistically. By 1965, The Beatles success - and that of the openly introspective Bob Dylan - encouraged Lennon & McCartney to draw on more autobiographical material.  In My Lif e Lennon refers  generally to the 'places I remember'.  Strawberry Fields Forever, names one of these, a local Salvation Army Children's home, and weaves it into a hallucinatory dreamscape. On the surface McCartney takes a more functional approach:  Penny Lane" was kind of nostalgic, but it was really