Beatles FAQ

'Love Me Do' is Paul's song. He wrote it when he was a teenager. Let me think. I might have helped on the middle eight, but I couldn't swear to it. I do know he had the song around, in Hamburg, even, way, way before we were songwriters"  John Lennon in David Sheff's : All We Are Saying). [8]   For their first single, George Martin wanted The Beatles to record a promising song by Mitch Murray, a young British songwriter.   I was convinced that How Do You Do It was a hit song. Not a great piece of songwriting, not the most marvellous song I had ever heard in my life, but I thought it had that essential ingredient which would appeal to a lot of people.   The boys stubbornly refused, 'We couldn't sing that in Liverpool,' they told him. 'We want to record one of our own songs.' Reluctantly, Martin allowed them to record LOVE ME DO - the song he considered the best of a bad bunch.   Read full story (free) on Medium (3 minutes)

The Beatles collect their MBEs - contrary to myth they were  thrilled to get them Paul McCartney has often expressed his admiration for Queen Elizabeth, who came to power five years before he joined The Quarrymen.  We all kind of liked the Queen. It’s an age thing. We were kids when she was crowned, so to us she was like a glamorous film star. We identified with her. She’s ours. She’s the Queen.   Interview with the Radio Times, September 2019 The Beatles with Princess Margaret. The four Beatles tracks which mention the late Queen Elizabeth II are:  Penny Lane For You Blue Mean Mr Mustard Her Majesty Read more  (free) Free Beatles Teaching Materials

The Beatles recorded four songs in German, though only two were officially released. 

Pete Best was The Beatles drummer from August 1960 until August 1962. He was with them in Hamburg and at their first Abbey Road recording session. He played an important role in establishing The Beatles popularity in Hamburg and Liverpool, but had a slightly distant relationship with the others. By the summer of 1962 the other Beatles were plotting against him. Using the pretext that George Martin had rejected his drumming as sub-standard they approached Ringo Starr, an old friend of the band from Hamburg.  Read the full story behind the sacking of Best (free on Medium 6 mins) The Beatles: free teaching materials

Paul soon abandoned the trumpet

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

The songwriters in surprisingly small writing How did Lennon & McCartney end up writing I Wanna be your Man for the Rolling Stones? There are at least three different versions of what happened.

The 'Paul is Dead' conspiracy was fuelled by supposed clues hidden in the recordings I told you about strawberry fields ... You know the place where nothing is real...Well here's another clue for you all ... The walrus was Paul.

 It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage...from a Kellogg’s cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over ...{ i n this } song .  During his Weybridge years, John Lennon was a British version of Benjamin Braddock in  The Graduate  (1967). Though extraordinarily privileged in material terms he felt alienated: a rich, successful young man angry at the suburban world he found himself in. This anger was largely expressed through petty acts of passive aggression against those surrounding him.   In the conventional Beatles narrative, John Lennon was the wild man, with an artistic bent and a taste for the avant garde.  Paul, in contrast, was the son-in-law choice: cute, sensible and with the common touch.  In reality, the roles were reversed. McCartney spent his Beatle downtime careering around  Swinging London in his Mini Cooper, the pop world's Toad of Toad Hall. He was a fixture of the hip clubs, fashionable parties and talked-abo