Search Results for: The Beatles

Angst-ridden Mancunian rock quartet The Smiths have beaten off competition from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to be declared music bible NME’s most important rock group of the last 50 years. The band, renowned for its fatalistic lyrics and fronted by the misery-wallowing Morrisey, have not troubled the pop charts for more than a decade, but NME – the fanzine formerly known as New Musical Express – ranked them as more important than Elvis, the Sex Pistols and Madonna. Bands were assessed on the number of front covers, letters and features they generated as well as end-of-year polls. Beatle… Read more »

‘N Sync is attracting a new kind of fan with their Beatles and Temptations medley at their show – the parents. Singer Joey Fatone says that the group is just paying homage to groups who influenced them. Even more surprising for the band is seeing that their younger fans know all the lyrics to the oldies. The group is also still playing their own hits. They retooled their song “I Want You Back” so the concert version is a blues song.

Michael Jackson could be forced to give up his share of the Beatles’ song catalog to Sony Music Publishing. Jackson famously bought the catalog for $47.5 million in 1985, and then sold half of it to Sony in 1991 for a reported $100 million. In the last several years, stories have circulated that Jackson is having money troubles. In the mid-’90s, the “King Of Pop” asked Sony to guarantee a $200 million loan from lenders, using his 50-percent ownership in the Beatles catalog as collateral, notes foxnews.com. It has been reported that Sony Music Publishing’s president Richard Rowe is in… Read more »

Album sales of the music of George Harrison and the Beatles surged following his death last week at age 58 of cancer, album retail tracker SoundScan reported Wednesday. The Beatles’ “1” – a collection of the 27 Fab Four singles that reached No. 1 in the United States or Britain – sold nearly 31,000 copies in the week ended Dec. 2, almost double the previous week’s total. Those sales drove “1” to No. 73 on the latest U.S. pop album charts, up from No. 146 a week earlier. The album topped charts around the world when it was released last… Read more »

Paul McCartney’s wife-to-be Heather Mills knows next to nothing about the Beatles and does not recognize their songs, the ex-Beatle told a German magazine on Wednesday. “She doesn’t know a single song. Heather grew up with classical music and had friends who listened to hard rock such as AC/DC. She had no Beatles records at home,” McCartney said in an interview in Stern. “Once I was sitting at my piano and was humming a new song. Heather said ‘Oh, a nice song. Which Beatles piece is that?’ None at all, I said, I’ve just written it. I named the song… Read more »

He was called the “Quiet Beatle,” but “Frustrated Beatle” may have been a better tag for George Harrison, who found himself overshadowed in the Fab Four by two of the most important songwriters in history. Still, the guitarist managed to create a memorable body of work with the Beatles, and he notably turned his bandmates onto Eastern mysticism. Harrison, who died in Los Angeles Thursday after a long battle with cancer, wrote and sang such Beatles nuggets as “Something,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Here Comes The Sun” and “Taxman.” After the Beatles broke up, he embarked on a patchy… Read more »

The birthplace of the world’s most famous band the Beatles remembered George Harrison on Saturday as an inspirational musician, a spiritual man of conviction and a reluctant celebrity. Outside the Liverpool house where Harrison was born 58 years ago, fans from as far afield the United States and Australia braved the northern English cold to pay tribute to the man known as the “Quiet Beatle.” “George: a man of conviction along with John. Rest in peace,” said a note written by a fan placed with a bunch of flowers on the windowsill of the tiny house in Arnold Grove. Eddie… Read more »

The minute he heard that Beatle George Harrison was dead, George Metropolis rushed to Hollywood Boulevard Friday to say goodbye – to his look-alike. There, Metropolis, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the “Quiet Beatle” who died on Thursday of cancer, joined teary-eyed fans, many of them middle-aged ex-hippies, who gathered near the Beatles’ star on Hollywood’s “Walk of Fame” to leave flowers, candles, and silently pray for the rock icon who was so much a part of their youth. “I met him once in 1979. He walked into this bar and saw me and said to his bodyguard, ‘That… Read more »

Eddie Vedder, Sarah McLachlan, the Black Crowes and 14 other artists will deliver their takes on Beatles classics for the soundtrack to the Sean Penn drama “I Am Sam.” The album, due January 8, also features Ben Folds, the Wallflowers, Paul Westerberg, Nick Cave and Ben Harper, among others, according to a V2 Records spokesperson. All of the covers were recorded for the soundtrack album and eight are featured in the movie, which stars Penn as Sam, a mentally handicapped father fighting to keep custody of his seven-year-old daughter, Lucy. “I Am Sam,” due in theaters December 28, has several… Read more »

A lost 1960s audio recording of the Beatles playfully reviewing rock ‘n’ roll singles and chatting about Elvis Presley on a television program has been presented to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The recording of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison speaking on a December 1963 broadcast of the BBC’s “Juke Box Jury” was made by a viewer using reel-to-reel tape, the state broadcaster said Sunday. A BBC spokeswoman said the tape was not of broadcast quality, but was “marvelous to have.” The BBC said it would try to match the recording with a silent film of the same program… Read more »