Tag: The Beatles

Dalek tripper?

Going through my download folder, I was reminded that I grabbed this off Bluesky a few months ago… two of my favourite 1960s British pop culture icons together? Amazing. But today I suddenly had an attack  of “oh no, what if this is actually a Photoshop job or, worse, AI?”; I couldn’t imagine why someone would do such a thing, but at the same time it also feels like the exact sort of thing someone would do… So, quick research ensued, and lo, this bloody thing is apparently authentic; apparently it was taken at the Cannes Film Festival, the Fabs had just finished making Help! so they had a film to promote… and so did Milton Subotsky, that being Dr. Who and the Daleks, the big screen version of a certain BBC show that I suppose Amicus/Aaru thought they should make a film of while it was still popular and before it faded from TV screens, never to be remembered again… So yeah, evidently a Dalek did have a close encounter with Lennon, at least; both films came out within a few weeks of each other, too. I just wonder now who the guy lurking ominously to the back and left of the photo is…

Can’t buy me a DVD release

Here’s a fascinating story. I enjoy the Parlogram channel every once in a while, probably should watch it more often, but he has a particularly intriguing offering posted earlier today… I only very dimly recall ever seeing this when I would’ve been very little, quite possibly when I was still only aged in single digits. I can’t remember anything about them beyond that, and I could even be misremembering having seen them at all (though I am fairly sure I would’ve done; I at least remember them being a thing from that time). And I really knew nothing about them, they’re not a piece of Beatles media I’ve ever given any thought to. Because they just vanished for decades, they’ve never had a legit re-release unlike (most of) the films the band did, and there’s no sign of them ever getting one… So this look at their making was quite educational; I obviously never knew Norman McLaren had a small part in its history cos he recommended the production team use his old NFB associate George Dunning’s TVC Animations company, which was how the latter then came to helm Yellow Submarine a few years later. At least he succeeded in getting the involvement of the actual band, however briefly, in that film, which is more than the series did…

Calm down, Grandad

Well SOMEONE wasn’t a fan of the Fabs, was he? From what I can gather about Paul Jones, he was 67 when he wrote this (and died in 1974 just a few days before Ed Sullivan did), and I would boldly assume he was not exactly JPG&R’s target demographic. I feel like he wasn’t Sullivan’s target demographic in general either, for that matter… Wonder what Paul made of Elvis on the Sullivan show a mere eight years earlier when he was only 59? What about the black artists Sullivan insisted on supporting? Why do I feel like he’d only just got used to jazz being a thing and rock’n’roll was just too much for him to cope with? As for the vast millions, well, nearly seventy-four million people apparently watched that episode, and I presume at least a few of them enjoyed it more than Paul did…

The Red and the Blue

So a few weeks ago I heard there was some Beatles reissues news, and was, frankly, unexcited by the news that it was going to be these two. These were both released in 1973 to counter some pirated best-of that was circulating, and I never felt much need for them… if you had the albums and Past Masters like I did, they weren’t really necessary. So I didn’t see much point to these new editions, but then they said 1) this will have “Now and Then” if you don’t want to pay the extortionate vinyl release prices and 2) a bunch of songs not on the original versions in new mixes. With that in mind, I downloaded the things tonight to satisfy curiosity. (The Fabs have had enough of my money over the years; I’ve got both the stereo and mono boxes from 2009 plus several of the albums that I’d bought separately before those came out *and* Abbey Road on vinyl—a weird Australian pressing without “Her Majesty”—and there’s only so much duplication of contents I’ll pay for.)

And, I must concede, having listened only to the red album thus far, I’m actually kind of impressed. They’re using the anniversary remixes made over the last however many years for the later stuff (and I’m not always happy with some of the judgement calls made in those cases), but the pre-Revolver material hasn’t had the Giles Martin treatment yet and hearing that’s been interesting. I said a while ago that if you’re listening to music recorded before about 1969 on less than 8-track you’re usually better listening to it in mono rather than stereo, but I will confess to finding the remix results here interesting, especially on the really early songs that weren’t even done on 4-track.

Did a proper headphones listen, which I’ve never really done with the Beatles before, so maybe up close all these details have always been discernible, but on listening tonight, wow. Lots of little parts and bits that, like I say, were already there but I’ve never picked up on them. Now they’re unburied and separated out. Haven’t played the blue album yet, but I was greatly amused by part of the tracklisting… I could criticise some of the song choices among the many additions to the original compilations, but I am intrigued that they’ve picked some rather less obvious and perhaps slightly more out there titles, the red album now finishes with “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and the blue album now has “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” on it.

I have mentioned this song on here before, it’s one of my favourite Fabs songs, but it’s a different experience depending on how you listen to it. On vinyl, as the end of side one of Abbey Road*, it’s one thing. You have to then pick the record up and flip it over to hear the rest of the album, with side 2 beginning with “Here Comes the Sun” as a bit of a relief. On CD, it just goes straight into “Here Comes the Sun” like some sort of weird, sick joke. It’s just… really something else when you play the album like that. But now it’s on the blue album, too, where it’s followed by “Let It Be”. Of all the songs that could’ve followed it. That is FUCKING HILARIOUS. I mean, THE RIFF has just built up and built up over the previous three minutes and achieved critical mass and it comes to its famously cut-off end and then it’s the big piano and mother Mary. Amazing.

* “I Want You” was, of course, nearly the end of side two until, at the end of proceedings, they decided to flip the album sides so that the album now ended with “the long one” and “Her Majesty” (except, as mentioned, on my copy). Just imagine if the record had ended with “I Want You” instead? What a fuck-off ending to the album and, effectively, to their recording career as a whole that would’ve been…

“Now and Then”, again

So the official video for “Now and Then” got released a day or so after the song was finally unveiled:

…and… fuck. The whole thing with the SAG-AFTRA strike in the US over the last few months and the union’s fear of actors being exploited by the studios using AI-generated copies of them makes a LOT of sense after seeing this. Peter Jackson made the video using archival footage of the Fabs, and it’s the way he uses some of that footage, particularly the stuff from the “Hello Goodbye” film shoot, that suddenly made me realise just why the union is wary of this shit. It’s come a long way from Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain. Still maybe some way to go, in that the 60s film footage of John and George doesn’t quite gel with the new HD video footage of Paul and Ringo, but the bit where John “conducts” the string players just leapt out and slapped me in the face somehow…

Anyway, now the song’s out there’s also a bunch of YT videos about it too, and this is my favourite now:

Amazing. The song’s actually growing on me the more I hear it, but I still feel like it’s not a “real” Beatles song somehow. It’s the sort of song that you’d put somewhere in the middle of side two of the album, if that makes sense as a description. This, on the other hand, DAMN. It’s one guy doing a cover the way the Beatles might’ve done it in their early style (with an amusing parody of John & George’s appearances in the official video), and though he doesn’t sound vocally like John as such, and “Paul” plays right-handed for some reason, he still nails the overall sound and feel of 1964-era Fabs, the vocal harmonising… it almost feels more like the Beatles than their own version does.

Habemus Fabs

So the much-anticipated “new” Beatles song is out. I actually just discovered a few days ago that it was actually originally going to be the single from Anthology 3 way back in 1996, but they couldn’t get satisfactory results from it back then (particularly in George Harrison’s opinion, he apparently called it “fucking rubbish”); technology has progressed sufficiently that now they can. And it’s out at last after quite a few months of hyping it up as the “last” Beatles song and all the talk of using AI to separate John’s voice out from the demo and…

…and it’s OK, I suppose.

I don’t know, for some reason I expected something more upbeat than it is, and I think I expected it to sound more “Beatles”. It’s nice but it sounds less like a Beatles song and more like what it is, i.e. a late 70s John Lennon solo demo recorded when, let’s face it, he was far from his peak that his two surviving former bandmates and Giles Martin have buffed up a bit. “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” started out the same way and both ended up sounding like the Beatles in a way this didn’t somehow, even though all of them (yes, even George, who appears via parts recorded during their initial attempts to finish it) are present and correct. It’s not “fucking rubbish” but it’s not particularly special in and of itself. Giles Martin’s string arrangement is nice, but I suspect it might actually have been better as a John Lennon solo song or given a more minimal treatment.

Look, it’s good. It’s fine on its own terms, and I think the hype around it will ultimately hurt it. I think It’s an album track, not a single. And ultimately a footnote. I think that’s how I feel about it.

Dynamic indeed

Ah, the days (said days being March 1963) when the “dynamic” Beatles were just the support act for fucking Tommy Roe and Chris Montez… apparently no one at the time guessed just who on this bill was really about to explode in popularity; after just the first night the Fabs were elevated to set-closing stars by the tour promoter, and messrs Roe and Montez were not happy; George Harrison said the former threatened to quit the tour, and apparently the latter came to physical blows at some point with John Lennon (over what exactly I don’t know). Montez apparently had no idea who the Beatles were before the tour started, but he certainly knew by the end of it…

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club… Trio?

This is possibly the strangest Beatles-related story I’ve ever read, cos it contains a theory I’ve somehow never heard of until now… namely that Paul McCartney wasn’t present for the Sgt Pepper album cover photoshoot and was added in later, and that someone stood in for him on the back cover in which he is noticeably not facing the camera.

What?

The really odd thing is that the Graun is telling this story—which is actually about an interesting bit of memorabilia, a press pack for the never released Sessions collection, going to auction—as if the mystery were only being solved now rather than… decades ago. Behold, if you will, the inner gatefold picture from Sgt Pepper as it appeared in 1967 (picture ganked from Discogs):

So, if Macca wasn’t there for the album photoshoot… who’s this in between John and George? Did they secretly arrange another photoshoot that he did turn up to for some reason (given that pretty much every day of the Fabs’ activity is on record somewhere, it’d have to have been secret or we’d have known long ago)? Did they make unusually sure that his apparent stand-in for the back looked exactly like him from the front too? If he wasn’t at the photoshoot but they had a perfect indistinguishable stand-in for the gatefold photo, why not just use him on the cover photo rather than paste the real one in later?

And if it’s been a mystery since then about whether or not Paul was present, why does Mark Lewisohn’s book about the Fabs’ recording sessions (published in 1987 and which I’ve had since about 1991 or 92)  have so many outtakes from the photoshoot in which Paul is, frankly, right there? And why does the Graun article acknowledge there’s other photos of him proving Paul was there when they’re trying to sell this story as finally solving the mystery? None of this makes sense…

Heavy!

Fucking stunning. This has always been one of my Fabs favourites, and I’ve always thought Paul’s bass on this was good, lovely fills and so forth… but fucking hell, listening to the isolated bass track has given me an entirely new understanding of just how good, and now I’m hearing the full song again with a different appreciation… I think because the bass gets a little lost in the mix during THE RIFF in the last three minutes or so, it’s a bit overwhelmed by the guitars and the white noise, it’s hard to actually hear what he’s doing, so hearing Paul by himself is just… oh my. Obviously what he’s doing during THE RIFF is repetitive cos that’s the point of that section, but he finds so much room for variation in that repetition even so; and in the earlier part of the song where he’s more easily audible, you can hear how much work he’s doing to make the bassline melodic. Amazing. I think “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is now even more of a favourite of mine…