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rico

The Beatles

By rico, in Music and Gaming

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davieG

davieG

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On this date in 1963, The Beatles performed two sets at Sheffield's Azena Ballroom, where they were introduced onstage by promoter and future London-based nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow.
After initially agreeing a £65 booking fee, Brian Epstein had tried upping it to £90 in light of the Please Please Me album's chart success before settling on £85. Not that Stringfellow was overly concerned. Having originally intended to showcase the group at his smaller Black Cat Club inside St Aidens Church Hall on Sheffield’s City Road, he'd followed police advice to switch locations because of the anticipated deluge of fans by hiring the Azena for £29 - and had then sold 2,000 tickets despite the larger venue's 500-person capacity... while raising the ticket price from four to five shillings as the big day approached.
Paul wrote the two set lists on the back of a Parlophone promotional postcard that was astutely retrieved backstage at the end of the evening by Roy Simmonite, the drummer with support group Mark Stone and The Aidens. Also on the bill: Count Linsey III And The Skeletons.
 
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Free Falling Foxes

Free Falling Foxes

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I consider myself a Beatles nerd, they would definitely be my specialist subject on Mastermind.

Then, just when you feel there isn't much more to know, you discover something that was obvious for the very first time.

On Paperback Writer, John and George aren't harmonising/repeating the words paperback writer, but actually singing Frere Jacques - the old French children's song.

Dunno how I hadn't that heard that before. :blink:

Edited by Free Falling Foxes
  • 2 weeks later...
davieG

davieG

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Abbey Road Tribute ·

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The Song George Martin Rejected—and What It Revealed About the Beatles
During the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions, George Harrison brought in “Only a Northern Song.”
Harrison’s publishing position within Northern Songs was markedly smaller than that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The track is unstable by design—detuned brass, drifting pitch, no fixed tonal center. Instruments enter without alignment.
In the context of Sgt. Pepper, where sequencing and cohesion were being closely managed, the track did not meet the same standard of construction as the surrounding material.
In its place, Harrison completed “Within You Without You,” recorded separately with Indian musicians and structured with precision. That track remained.
“Only a Northern Song” reappeared on Yellow Submarine, where its looseness was less exposed by context.
“The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles,” Martin said. “Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30% of whose shares belonged to John and Paul with Ringo and George owning only 1.6% each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the group’s main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was merely a contracted writer.”
“I realized Dick James had conned me out of the copyrights for my own songs by offering to become my publisher,” remembered Harrison of the track later. “As an 18 or 19-year-old kid, I thought, ‘Great, somebody’s gonna publish my songs!’ But he never said, ‘And incidentally, when you sign this document here, you’re assigning me the ownership of the songs,’ which is what it is. It was just a blatant theft.”
With a lesson in music business learned, Harrison decided to aim a barbed track squarely at those who had done him wrong, a trick he would pull off many times in the future: “By the time I realized what had happened, when they were going public and making all this money out of this catalogue, I wrote ‘Only A Northern Song’ as what we call a ‘piss-take,’ just to have a joke about it.”
Martin would later say that it was the “track he hated most [from Harrison].”
Was Martin right to exclude “Only a Northern Song” from Sgt. Pepper — or does its absence leave out an essential piece of Harrison’s story?
SpacedX

SpacedX

Posted
Posted
11 hours ago, davieG said:

Abbey Road Tribute ·

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The Song George Martin Rejected—and What It Revealed About the Beatles
During the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions, George Harrison brought in “Only a Northern Song.”
Harrison’s publishing position within Northern Songs was markedly smaller than that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The track is unstable by design—detuned brass, drifting pitch, no fixed tonal center. Instruments enter without alignment.
In the context of Sgt. Pepper, where sequencing and cohesion were being closely managed, the track did not meet the same standard of construction as the surrounding material.
In its place, Harrison completed “Within You Without You,” recorded separately with Indian musicians and structured with precision. That track remained.
“Only a Northern Song” reappeared on Yellow Submarine, where its looseness was less exposed by context.
“The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles,” Martin said. “Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30% of whose shares belonged to John and Paul with Ringo and George owning only 1.6% each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the group’s main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was merely a contracted writer.”
“I realized Dick James had conned me out of the copyrights for my own songs by offering to become my publisher,” remembered Harrison of the track later. “As an 18 or 19-year-old kid, I thought, ‘Great, somebody’s gonna publish my songs!’ But he never said, ‘And incidentally, when you sign this document here, you’re assigning me the ownership of the songs,’ which is what it is. It was just a blatant theft.”
With a lesson in music business learned, Harrison decided to aim a barbed track squarely at those who had done him wrong, a trick he would pull off many times in the future: “By the time I realized what had happened, when they were going public and making all this money out of this catalogue, I wrote ‘Only A Northern Song’ as what we call a ‘piss-take,’ just to have a joke about it.”
Martin would later say that it was the “track he hated most [from Harrison].”
Was Martin right to exclude “Only a Northern Song” from Sgt. Pepper — or does its absence leave out an essential piece of Harrison’s story?

Ha! yes, whether Dick James was a "con artist" is subjective, but he was widely considered an ruthlessly effective music publisher who exploited common 1960s industry practices to his advantage. While he played a pivotal role in launching the Beatles' career, he later secured control of their songwriting copyrights and sold them for a massive profit without their consent.

 

Regarding the last sentence of this piece, absolutely. It was relegated to the Yellow Submarine soundtrack and like 'It's All Too Much' became more of a curiosity than a song cemented in Beatles lore. Whereas 'It's Only a Northern Song' was completed early in the Sgt Pepper sessions and quickly forgotten about, the latter was recorded after the completion of the album in the main at De Lane Lea Studios in Soho, not Abbey Road, and very little is known about the process. particularly what the spoken intro actually says and who was responsible for the sustained, feedback-heavy whammy bar G major chord - ( I reckon Lennon on his '61  sonic blue strat that had been purchased at his decree by Mal Evans during the Help sessions). What is said at the start is debatable, and isn't even discernable through isolation. It sounds like conversation to me cut off prematurely, although some suggest it's John saying “To Jorma,” in reference to Jorma Kaukonen of the Jefferson Airplane, who he was hanging with in London the time. 

 

There are other tracks that could have been left off Sgt. Pepper too in my opinion.. At the time it was a singles dominated market, so there was always pressure from EMI for another chart topping product which often meant their best material at any given time. Picture how much better the album would have been with the inclusion of Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields and the omission of the throwaway 'Good Morning Good Morning' and the somewhat banal 'Fixing a Hole'. Imagine Revolver with 'Paperback Writer' and 'Rain' as opposed to 'I Want to Tell You' and 'Good Day Sunshine' or Rubber Soul with 'Day Tripper' and 'We Can Work it Out' replacing 'What Goes on' and 'Run For Your Life'. 

davieG

davieG

Posted
Posted
Every song written by The Beatles that charted in the UK for either them or other artists up to March 1984…

 

May be an image of text

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NJFox

NJFox

Posted
Posted

Paul played 3 songs (all Wings and solo material) on Saturday Night Live last night, still sounding good. Chad Smith on drums was a neat touch, especially if you know anything of the history between Chad Smith and Will Ferrell, who hosted the show.

 

 

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NJFox

NJFox

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Looks like several unreleased performances from last weekend are out on YouTube. The Help bit with Will Ferrell is a play from a famous comedy sketch from decades ago, with Christopher Walken. Also, Paul was the final guest on last night’s Colbert show from the Ed Sullivan Theater.
 

So much can be said about the circumstances surrounding the final performance and the cancellation of that show, but what a treat it is for Paul to still be making music. Can’t help but smile.
 

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
davieG

davieG

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Abbey Road Tribute ·

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The A-Side War of 1967: How One Paul Track Broke John’s Spirit
In late 1967, the Beatles were deep in the "Studio Years," completely insulated from the madness of live touring and free to reshape pop music through pure studio experimentation. But beneath the kaleidoscope surface of the Magical Mystery Tour project, a power struggle was brewing over a critical decision: choosing the album's lead single.
John fought bitterly for his acid-drenched masterpiece "I Am the Walrus" to take the top spot, but Paul pushed aggressively for his own creation, "Hello, Goodbye". McCartney eventually won the boardroom battle, relegating Lennon's track to the B-side—a commercial calculation that left deep, permanent scars on their writing partnership.
The two tracks couldn't have represented a sharper artistic divide. "Hello, Goodbye" was born in the wake of manager Brian Epstein's tragic overdose, written by McCartney on a harmonium as a simple exercise in word association and black-and-white dualities.
Lennon absolutely loathed it, later dismissing it as "three minutes of contradictions" and a blatant, calculated attempt to manufacture a pop single.
Meanwhile, Lennon had constructed "I Am the Walrus" over multiple acid trips, intentionally weaving together nonsensical verse fragments and schoolyard rhymes specifically to mock the academics who insisted on over-analyzing Beatles lyrics.
Though Martin and the label favored McCartney's safer, chart-friendly track, history has vindicated Lennon, with modern rankings routinely placing the surrealism of "Walrus" far above its A-side companion.
Many music historians argue this specific single selection was the true catalyst for the Beatles’ ultimate collapse. Reeling from the loss of Epstein's guiding hand, the choice of "Hello, Goodbye" signaled to Lennon that the band had implicitly chosen McCartney's commercial direction over his own avant-garde vision.
According to biographers, the defeat caused a disillusioned Lennon to "submerge" and mentally check out, setting off a wave of resentment and creative drifting that ended with his departure from the group in 1969.
If "I Am the Walrus" had been released as the official A-side single instead of "Hello, Goodbye," do you think it would have energized John enough to keep the Beatles unified into the 1970s, or was their creative split already inevitable after losing Brian Epstein?
davieG

davieG

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🎸 Written as a message to Black Britons being told to go home — and Lennon thought it was about him.Get Back began its life as something far more pointed than the joyful rocker the world knows. Paul McCartney's original draft — recorded in January 1969 during the Let It Be sessions — contained verses directly satirising anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, referencing Enoch Powell's notorious Rivers of Blood speech. The satirical edge was eventually stripped back, leaving the universal groove. 🎸🎶Paul McCartney - Get Back 🎶 💖 Find the song in the 𝟏𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭! 👇👇

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