1. 17:14 26th Feb 2013

    Notes: 3

    Tags: The White Albumwhite albumsRutherford ChangBeatles

    While at Recess, I’m listening to and recording the albums and documenting the covers. The albums I listen to get put up on the “staff picks” wall. At the end of the exhibition, I will press a new double-LP made from all the recordings layered upon each other. It will be like playing a few hundred copies of the White Album at once, each scratched and warped in its own way. 

     Rutherford Chang – We Buy White Albums : Dust & Grooves ~ Vinyl. Music. Culture)

    Via things magazine.

     

  2. 14:34 16th Feb 2013

    Tags: James BradleySergeant PepperBeatlesDerek TaylorIan McDonald

    With Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band finished, the group left Abbey Road at dawn bearing an acetate and drove to ‘Mama’ Cass Elliott’s flat off the King’s Road where, at six in the morning, they threw open the windows, put speakers on the ledge, and played the album full blast over the rooftops of Chelsea. According to Derek Taylor, ‘all the windows around us opened and people leaned out, wondering. It was obvious who it was on the record. Nobody complained. A lovely spring morning. People were smiling and giving us the thumbs up’.
    — 

    Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. 

    From a blogpost, ‘When The World Was Young’, by James Bradley, Australian critic and writer, at City of Tongues.

     

  3. 19:47 15th Oct 2012

    Tags: BeatlesJohn Harris

    Such is the remarkable pace of a story that has been told by scores of writers, a story about four young musicians but no end of other things: the cities of Liverpool, Hamburg and London; class, and the shaking of English hierarchies; pop’s transmutation into a global culture; and the western world’s passage from a world still defined by the second world war and its aftermath, to the accelerated modernity we know today. Everything in the tale pulses with significance and drama. It seems barely believable, and in the best Beatles books, it still burns.

    Philip Norman’s Shout! was first published in 1981, and remains a glorious example of how to write about music, while also writing about much more. Of the Beatles in the mid-1960s, and their phenomenal success a mere three years or so after “Love Me Do” appeared, he wrote this:

    “Only in ancient times, when boy emperors and pharaohs were clothed, even fed with pure gold, had very young men commanded an equivalent adoration, fascination and constant, expectant scrutiny. Nor could anyone suppose that to be thus – to have such youth, and wealth, such clothes and cars and servants and cars – made for any state other than inconceivable happiness. For no one since the boy pharoahs … had known, as the Beatles now knew, how it felt to have felt everything, done everything, tasted everything, had a surfeit of everything; to live on that blinding, deadening, numbing surfeit which made each, on bad days, think he was ageing at twice the usual rate.”

    — 

    The best books on the Beatles | Books | The Guardian

    This article’s author, John Harris, owns 67 books on the Beatles.

     

  4. 11:58 23rd Aug 2012

    Tags: Beatles

    “It was just a photo session. I wasn’t there thinking, ‘OK, this is the last photo session.” ~ Ringo Starr (via August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ Final Photo Shoot | Brain Pickings)

    “It was just a photo session. I wasn’t there thinking, ‘OK, this is the last photo session.” ~ Ringo Starr

    (via August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ Final Photo Shoot | Brain Pickings)

     

  5. 11:51 22nd May 2012

    Tags: Beatles

    image: Download

    Taschen have published a new collection of Beatles photographs, taken by Harry Benson at the height of their early fame. Via the magnificent Brainpickings blog. Harry Benson’s Luminous Black-and-White Photographs of The Beatles, 1964-1966 | Brain Pickings

    Taschen have published a new collection of Beatles photographs, taken by Harry Benson at the height of their early fame. Via the magnificent Brainpickings blog.

    Harry Benson’s Luminous Black-and-White Photographs of The Beatles, 1964-1966 | Brain Pickings

     

  6. 19:34 4th Oct 2011

    Notes: 4

    Tags: Beatlesphotos

    Here’s a shot of the Beatles in Hamburg that I either haven’t seen before, or have forgotten about - from Olivia Harrison’s book, Living In The Material World, which accompanies Scorsese’s documentary screening in the UK tonight only. More images here.

    Here’s a shot of the Beatles in Hamburg that I either haven’t seen before, or have forgotten about - from Olivia Harrison’s book, Living In The Material World, which accompanies Scorsese’s documentary screening in the UK tonight only. More images here.

     

  7. 14:34 3rd Jul 2011

    Notes: 2

    Tags: Beatles

    Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs is published by Taschen and reviewed at that link by Brainpickings.

    Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs

    is published by Taschen and reviewed at that link by Brainpickings.

     

  8. 18:05 27th Sep 2010

    Notes: 4

    Tags: Beatlesphotos

    image: Download

    John Lennon, Hamburg, 1962: “I’m telling you now – this is it. If we ever come back here, you’ll have to roll out a fucking red carpet.” The Quietus | Features | At The End Of The Grosse Freiheit: The Beatles In Hamburg On the last day of 1962, The Beatles’ last night at the Star-Club – the night you hear on those live recordings - Horst Fascher and John Lennon were sat at a table in a quiet corner, sharing a noisy drink. Back in England, The Beatles’ first single had already been and gone, having lightly grazed the Top 20; their second, ‘Please Please Me’, was recorded and due for release in the cold new year. Horst raised a glass and toasted his old mate - see you again soon, eh? Lennon laughed and slapped the table. “Horst, we’ll never come back,” he said. “I’m telling you now – this is it. If we ever come back here, you’ll have to roll out a fucking red carpet.” “I couldn’t believe what he was saying to me,” Horst whispers, shaking his head. “But he was right. I never saw him again in my life.” He turns his head to look out of the window, into the cooling Reeperbahn air, and blinks away some tough-guy tears. I really enjoyed this article (thanks to givemesomethingtoread), and am not happy that it’s fifty years since the Beatles arrived to play grotty bars in Hamburg and let Astrid take those delectable photographs. I’m just about fifty myself which probably has something to do with that, hasn’t it?

    John Lennon, Hamburg, 1962: “I’m telling you now – this is it. If we ever come back here, you’ll have to roll out a fucking red carpet.”

    The Quietus | Features | At The End Of The Grosse Freiheit: The Beatles In Hamburg

    On the last day of 1962, The Beatles’ last night at the Star-Club – the night you hear on those live recordings - Horst Fascher and John Lennon were sat at a table in a quiet corner, sharing a noisy drink. Back in England, The Beatles’ first single had already been and gone, having lightly grazed the Top 20; their second, ‘Please Please Me’, was recorded and due for release in the cold new year. Horst raised a glass and toasted his old mate - see you again soon, eh? Lennon laughed and slapped the table. “Horst, we’ll never come back,” he said. “I’m telling you now – this is it. If we ever come back here, you’ll have to roll out a fucking red carpet.” “I couldn’t believe what he was saying to me,” Horst whispers, shaking his head. “But he was right. I never saw him again in my life.” He turns his head to look out of the window, into the cooling Reeperbahn air, and blinks away some tough-guy tears.

    I really enjoyed this article (thanks to givemesomethingtoread), and am not happy that it’s fifty years since the Beatles arrived to play grotty bars in Hamburg and let Astrid take those delectable photographs. I’m just about fifty myself which probably has something to do with that, hasn’t it?