In 2007 british actor Peter Serafinowicz made some funny sketches about the Beatles for his “Peter Serafinowicz Show” on BBC, playing the role of all of them.
Here you are the ones you can watch on internet. They’re great, aren’t they? I laughed to death.
For the Beatles, Across the Universe was rather an odissey than a song. More than two years passed from the very first recording to the release of the most famous remix. In the meantime, there were six takes, a lot of rehearsals and at least three mixings. All of it with without making its author satisfied.
Paul McCartney’s passion for jazz and swing music is well known. It was a family heritage, his father having been a pianist in a little band back in the 40s. Paul himself had began playing the trumpet.
So it’s no surprise some of his songs recall that style: the famous “When I’m 64” from Sgt. Pepper, “Honey Pie” from the White Album, not to forget “You Gave Me the Answer” from his solo album Venus and Mars.
Of all these, “When I’m 64” was written during Beatles’ very early years. Some remember them playing it in Hamburg, as a quite break of their show.
But there was another Paul’s song the Beatles used to play in those years: it was called “Cat Walk”.
Just like Lennon’s Rickenbacker, the viola bass is Paul McCartney’s instrument par excellence, so much that he still plays it. And yet it has to be said that he chose it for several reasons, not all of whom concerning music.
Most people agree that the fourth Beatles album, called for a joke “Beatles for sale”, is not one of their best ones at all.
Explications talk about the hurry and the stressed mood the Beatles were involved in during recording sessions. When the four came in studio on August the 11th 1964, they came from mounths over mounths of hard work with no break at all. On June they had finished “A Hard Day’s Night”, new album and soundtrack of their first movie. Then they had travelled around the world for a couple of mounths, playing from June to July in Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zeland, Sweden and doing a lot of performances for radio and tv shows. In the meantime, on July the 6th there had been the premiere of the movie in London. All this effort led to another great ammount of success: at the beginning of August “A Hard Day’s Night” was on the top of the UK and US charts. And there was a tour in the United States to be done between August and September.
Look at this font: do you recognize it?
It’s the exact reproduction of the one used for the logo on Ringo Starr’s basedrum. You can donwload it for free here.
Beatles’ story it’s not just the one of a rock band: for more than a reason it’s the story of contemporary music itself and of its technical progress.
The years of activity of the band saw an autentic revolution of studio recording technics, passing soon from primitive overdubbing methods to modern multitrack machines.
When the double-album “The Beatles” was released (or the White Album as soon was called from its cover), the press and the fans took it as a new masterpiece. Writing on The Observer, Tony Palmer suggested the Beatles to be the greatest songwriters ever since Schubert. That article soon became well-known for this phrase, but actually it was moved by a great appreciement for the musical variety of the record: “do you want some rock n’ roll? The Beatles have done it and better… do you want some blues? The Beatles have done it and better…”
The press and the fans didn’t know, anyway, that the record was what came out of several mounths of discussions between the Beatles themselves and between them and their technicians, of drug intake and nights over nights spent doing nothing but losing time. What seemed to be just the new masterpiece was actually the first step on the way to the break-out.
According to the Daily Mirror Paul Mccartney is about to announce for the next autumn the start of his last tour ever.
It will be a colossal two-years tour across all the five continents, after which Paul is going to stop touring to spend more time with his family (he got a four years old daughter to grow up, anyway).
If so, we’re going to learn more in the next weeks.
In the meantime, what do you think about? Dont’you think is normal being bored to travel around the world for a 66yo man which is always been too busy - as John Lennon once said - having 25.000 children and 25 album to promote at a time?
One of the main problems Beatles’ fans are involved in is which is the best or “authentic” version of their records: mono or stereo? Nowadays you can buy only stereo albums, as we use to; but during the 60s you could choose between both formats.
A solution is suggested by Mark Lewisohn - what a great man! - in his famous book. Talking about “Sgt. Pepper”, Richard Lush, second engeneer for that album, told him drastically: “The one and only version of Sgt. Pepper is the mono one, ‘cause all the Beatles worked on mixing. We made the stereo version later, faster and without them”.
