Paul McCartney, opening Golden 1 Center, has been a road warrior most of his professional life

www.sacbee.com
Paul McCartney, opening Golden 1 Center, has been a road warrior most of his professional life
BY MARCUS CROWDER
SEPTEMBER 29, 2016

Sacramento Kings announce Paul McCartney to be the first show at Golden 1 Center. Hector Amezcua The Sacramento Bee

The hyperbole surrounding the opening of the Golden 1 Center will reach a climax on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

Paul McCartney, arguably the world’s biggest rock star (Mr. Springsteen, you’ll stand down for this moment, won’t you?) will christen the state-of-art venue with two highly anticipated sold-out concerts.


Sir Paul McCartney REX/Shutterstock AP

McCartney, 74, needs little introduction; calling his catalog of achievements “imposing” barely approaches his significance. Much of his gravitas comes from being a member of the Beatles and co-composer and co-lead voice of their genre-defining songbook.

To gently refresh your memory, the Beatles are the best-selling music artists in the United States, having sold 178 million certified units. With McCartney, co-composer and vocalist John Lennon, guitarist and songwriter George Harrison, and drummer Ringo Starr, the Beatles were active between 1960 and 1970 and recorded 12 original studio albums from 1963 to 1970. The band had more No. 1 albums on the British charts and sold more singles in Britain than any other act. It owns a record 20 No. 1 hits on Billboard’s all-time Hot 100 chart. The Beatles account for three of the top five albums in Rolling Stone’s Top 500 albums of all time: 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (No. 1); 1966’s “Revolver” (No. 3) and 1965’s “Rubber Soul” (No. 5).


The Beatles, from left, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and John Lennon in 1967. Linda McCartney Copyright The Estate of Linda McCartney

McCartney’s Beatles song “Yesterday” has been recorded more than 2,200 times. His post-Beatles band Wings released “Mull of Kintyre,” one of the all-time best-selling singles in Britain. A 21-time Grammy Award winner, McCartney wrote or co-wrote 32 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts.

Those are just numbers, though.

The Beatles’ global cultural impact may never be exceeded simply because of how much they dominated worldwide consciousness when they were a performing band. Beyond era-defining music, the Beatles with their clothes, movies and cheeky engaging public personas changed the world.

McCartney has remarkably forged a Hall of Fame career beyond the Fab Four, and his live performances justly celebrate that legacy and the considerable body of work he has created since.

McCartney’s Wings, formed with his late wife, Linda Eastman, and guitarist Denny Laine, also lasted a decade, and McCartney has had a solo career lasting twice as long as either band.


Paul McCartney, left, and Ringo Starr performing in 2009 Stephen Chernin AP

McCartney has been a road warrior most of his professional life. While touring is now incredibly different from the early Hamburg residency days or even the Beatles stadium tours, the road is the road, and he doesn’t have to do it.

There was time when he distanced himself from the Beatles legacy, but the band’s music makes up over half of the expansive set list on his current One On One Tour.

When the Beatles stopped touring, they had logged 166 concerts in 15 countries and 90 cities. Their final concert took place Aug. 29, 1966, in San Francisco at Candlestick Park. That performance came as the pressures of constant touring, recording and simply being Beatles had exhausted the four members of the band. The band gave one more performance, on Jan. 30, 1969, with keyboardist Billy Preston, on the roof of their Apple Corps offices at 3 Savile Row. For 42 minutes they played nine versions of five songs, which appear on their second-to-last album, “Let It Be.”

That giddy last performance works as an oddly bright coda to Ron Howard’s just-released documentary film called “8 Days A Week: The Touring Years.” The film focuses on the early Beatle years – 1962 through 1966 – and features new interviews with McCartney and Starr, along with archival news conferences and interviews with Lennon and Harrison. There is also newly released material from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison.

Released in theaters for a day and available on the streaming service Hulu, the film serves as both fascinating cultural anthropology and functional primer for McCartney’s upcoming concerts, which will unwrap Golden 1.

Made for both longtime and newbie Beatles fans, the film offers fascinating details about the group, to which public access was astonishingly available:

They played a lot of music before they ever recorded an album. They gigged hard and long. The tough, tight-knit live band they eventually became evolved from slogging through endless nights at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and the marathon residency sessions in Hamburg. All that paid off at the end of their live-performance careers.

When playing stadiums through rustic equipment, often a hundred yards from the 20,000 screaming fans, they couldn’t really hear a thing. Still, for the most part, when they bounded onto the haven of the performing stage, they could do what they’d been doing all along – play some rock ’n’ roll songs.

They trusted and relied on each other. They made group decisions, and everyone had to be on board with whatever it might be before they went forward. Unanimously they insisted on not playing segregated venues, and had that written into their contracts.

Beatlemania was a real thing, and we have never seen anything close to it since. The phenomenon was worldwide. The weight became unbearable, but in beginning, they bore it with wit and equanimity, often in the face of a disapproving press, which vocally wondered how they’d react when the bubble inevitably burst.


ASSOCIATED PRESS

Manager Brian Epstein was in many ways the fifth Beatle. He launched them to next level and then the level beyond that. Epstein turned them from rockers in leather jackets and pompadours into pop stars with suits and smiles. His death in 1967 was the beginning of the end for the band. along with everything else that was happening to them.

McCartney was always very proud of the songs. They evolved from teenage concerns to appropriately adult ideas, and obviously the body of work endures.


PAUL MCCARTNEY
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday, Oct. 4-5

Where: Golden 1 Center, 547 L St., Sacramento

Cost: The concerts are sold out

Information: golden1center.ticketoffices.com

Swedish EP inspired Pepper LP?

wogew.blogspot.com
Swedish EP inspired Pepper?
Posted by Roger Stormo
Thursday, September 29, 2016


The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Was the famous cover photo of The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" inspired by a Swedish EP-cover?

Swedish record store owner Jörgen Johansson developed this theory when he came across an EP from 1964 with the student band Mercblecket, by a group from the Stockholm School of Economics. The EP contains parodies of four Beatles songs. Just like on the Sgt-Pepper albumet, the cover photo depicts members of the band grouped around a bass drum, holding similar instruments as in The Beatles' photo. In the spring of 1963, Mercblecket acquired a large number of operatic fancy dress jackets, dolmans, from the Oscars Theatre. They are wearing these uniforms on the cover photo.


Mercblecket - Beats The Beatles

What further lends credibility to the theory, is Paul had the record. Mercblecket showed up at the airport to entertain The Beatles as they arrived in Stockholm in late July 1964 to give concerts at the Johanneshovs Isstadion, and a representative of Mercblecket, English exchange student Roger Wallis handed Paul McCartney a copy of the EP. In the news film below, the uniformed Roger Wallis walks up to McCartney on his way out of the plane at Arlanda airport, around the 27 second mark. After this, Mercblecket starts to play"I Want to Hold Your Hand", and McCartney joins in on the fun, pretending to conduct the band.






There's even an interview in existence, from the hotel at Lidingö, where they resided, and they are listening to the EP, with McCartney commenting: "I really like this one, they really got the beat. It’s really great!"

Earlier theories around the inspiration for the album cover of "Sgt. Pepper" have brought forth this photo of  Jim Mac's band, the jazz band of McCartney's father, Jim.


Jim Mac's Band

So if you're a die hard record collector, here's an EP to hunt for! Roger Wallis, Mercblecket's conductor and arranger at the time, had made five or six arrangements of the most famous Beatles songs, four of which ended up on the EP: "I Want To Hold Your Hand", "This Boy", "All My Loving" and "I Saw Her Standing There" - with new lyrics. After having met The Beatles and given them their EP, Mercblecket made "A Hard Day's Night" their signature melody for years to come.

"Mercblecket Beats The Beatles" [EP] 1964 Philips 433 445 PE





Listen to Mercblecket's rendition of All My Loving.

Sacramento declares Meatless Mondays to honor Paul McCartney

www.sacbee.com
Sacramento declares Meatless Mondays to honor Paul McCartney
BY ANITA CHABRIA
SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

Sacramento Kings announce Paul McCartney to be the first show at Golden 1 Center. Hector Amezcua The Sacramento Bee

Forget Taco Tuesdays. Sacramento is all about Meatless Mondays.

The city passed a resolution Tuesday night declaring all Mondays from here on to be meat-free in Sacramento in honor of Paul McCartney, a noted vegetarian who will play the opening night concert at Golden 1 Center.

“It’s been Farm to Fork Week … and one of the things we realized would be fun to do and exciting for the whole city was this resolution,” said Crystal Strait, chief of staff to the mayor. “It’s super cool that this city isn’t just giving (McCartney) a swag bag, we’re doing something to celebrate something that is important to him.”


Guitars are lined up in front of Golden 1 Center as the Sacramento Kings announce Paul

The resolution encourages residents to take a break from animal-based eating for one day a week. There will be no penalties for failure to comply.

Local restaurants – 22 of them – will jump on the ex-Beatle’s bandwagon with special McCartney-themed menus for the month of October. At Evan’s Kitchen in East Sacramento, the Sir Paul-fest includes dishes like “Maybe I’m Amazed Rice Crispy French Toast” and “The Lovely Linda,” ratatouille-stuffed squash blossoms over alfredo and marinara with tempura basil.

The Meatless Monday effort coincides with the sixth annual Sacramento Vegan Chef Challenge, according to organizer Bethany Davis, who is helping coordinate the McCartney menus. She’s working with other restaurants including Broderick, Lou’s Sushi, Old Ironsides and The Porch to craft their own plant-based provisions.


Paul McCartney will inaugurate Golden 1 Center with concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday. Gary Wiepert AP

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/city-arena/article104453981.html#storylink=cpy

Strait said McCartney was aware and supportive of the upcoming ordinance. McCartney is an outspoken advocate for vegetarianism and founder of the Meat-Free Monday campaign in the United Kingdom.

Students from McClatchy High School and the Edible Schoolyard Project at Sacramento Charter High School were scheduled to speak at Tuesday night’s Sacramento City Council meeting in support of the measure.

Meatless-eating efforts first started during World War I when the U.S. government needed citizens to conserve resources and asked them to skip meat one day a week. The international Meatless Monday campaign started in 2003 as an effort to improve people’s health and the environment.

In recent years, it has spread across the globe.

“Meat production and then dairy production alongside it are huge as far as deforestation and water use,” Davis said. “People are designed more for a plant-based diet … It’s better for health. It’s better for the environment. It’s a social justice issue as well.”

McCartney is not actually playing on a Monday. He is playing on Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 4 and 5. While his guitar may weep during the concerts, his stomach won’t have to. Food vendors in Golden 1 Center will also add meatless chow to their menus for his shows.

Inside Golden 1 Center's high-tech wonders
Sacramento's new arena reflects Chairman Vivek Ranadive's background as a high-technology executive.
Dale Kasler The Sacramento Bee
Anita Chabria: 916-321-1049, @chabriaa

Paul McCartney interviews Harry Styles for magazine

www.liverpoolecho.co.uk
Paul McCartney interviews Harry Styles for magazine
BY SOPHIE MCCOID
27 SEP 2016

Does this mean the One Direction star is making a musical comeback?


Paul McCartney and Harry Styles

Sir Paul McCartney has interviewed Harry Styles for UK magazine AnOther.

The One Direction star caused a social media furore today when he posted photos of the three magazine covers he's posed for on Instagram.

It was also revealed today that the issue features an in-depth interview with Harry undertaken by Macca and comedian Chelsea Handler, in their Autumn/Winter edition.

AnOther has described the feature as a "special document curated by Harry." - which you know explains nothing.

The three covers all feature a differently styled Harry on the front.

In one Harry is dressed in a red military jacket, with long flowing locks.

||| 29.9.16 |||

Una foto publicada por @harrystyles el 26 de Sep de 2016 a la(s) 7:59 PDT

The second one shows the 22-year-old in black and white with a floppy 60s haircut and a fairisle jumper.

||| 29.9.16 |||

Una foto publicada por @harrystyles el 26 de Sep de 2016 a la(s) 7:59 PDT

While the final shot showcases a classically handsome Harry starring longingly.

||| 29.9.16 |||

Una foto publicada por @harrystyles el 26 de Sep de 2016 a la(s) 7:58 PDT

The covers have caused a huge stir among Directioners, who believe it might signal the start of Harry's solo career.

Harry's issue of AnOther is out on Thursday, September 29, so hopefully all will be revealed then.

Film review: Eight Days A Week and Shea

wogew.blogspot.com
Film review: Eight Days A Week and Shea
Posted by Roger Stormo
Monday, September 26, 2016 


EIGHT DAYS A WEEK – THE TOURING YEARS

Here's a map of the Beatles tours as assembled by the pre-production crew of the film. Why not animate it and use it? It would have told more of a story than what this film managed to do.


Beatles tours.

"The Beatles Live Project" looked promising. They were going to assemble amateur footage shot by the audience at Beatles concerts and use that to tell the story of The Beatles touring years 1962 to 1966. The definitive story. The first drafts of the film went something like this: Four complete live songs by the Beatles, then a bit of storytelling, another four live songs, and another bit of storytelling – and so on for a cut of the film which lasted two hours and twenty minutes.

But then they brought in Hollywood director Ron Howard and everything changed. What did we get? We got sort of an "extra disc" to the Anthology DVD series. Short clips and celebrity talking heads. Okay, perhaps this is a more entertaining film for a broader audience, at the cost of alienating us Beatles fans. Plus, you're no longer telling the story about the touring years. What the story in the film is, is this: The Beatles are touring North America, and the mania forces them to end touring and concentrate on their record career instead. The concerts the Beatles gave in other countries is just added as a sprinkle of spice to the story. We also get an insight into what the Beatles did in the recording studio, and we leave them in January 1969, when they once again and for the last time gave a live concert.

The scope of the film changed, and with that we are left with a half hearted summing up of sorts of the Beatles as a live touring band. If you are going to really tell the story of the Beatles tours, you need to tell them about the time that Jimmy Nicol on the brink of a world tour had to replace a hospitalised Ringo Starr for the first part of that tour. If you leave Jimmy out, you are not really telling the story of The Beatles on tour. You can spot him briefly in the film on a canal boat in Amsterdam, but his presence is never explained. And a lot of other people are missing, too. There's not even a brief mention of Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe. Hamburg is barely touched upon. The years 1962 and 1963 are all but non-existant in this film. Yes, we do get wonderful colour film from Manchester, courtesy of the Pathé film "The Beatles Come To Town" and outtake footage from that film, but the soundtrack of the two songs there, "Twist and Shout" and "She Loves You" is from Hollywood Bowl 1964! But what about the December 1963 Liverpool Empire songs? What about the Royal Variety show? Most importantly, what about their dry run tour of Sweden? Now that was their first ever tour of a foreign country, their first taste of Beatlemania outside the U.K. and the girls of Sweden – who had already formed a Swedish Beatles Fan Club. We get about two seconds from the television programme they participated in while in Sweden, "Drop In". And don't forget, the Beatles arrived back in London from their tour of Sweden at the exact same moment that Ed Sullivan was leaving London for USA, and he took notice of the commotion at the airport where hundreds of fans were waiting for The Beatles to arrive! How about that hard winter tour of the UK in 1963 in their van, Mal Evans behind the wheel? See their "Words Of Love" promo for a glimse of that. Mal, their one man road crew should have been profiled, and he wasn't. Instead, an American roadie who helped out Mal and Neil at the 1966 tour is interviewed.

A lot of footage originally filmed in black and white had been colourised for this film: the Washington DC concert film, the press conference at the airport in New York, Lennon's apology at the press conference in Chicago, "Help!" from the Blackpool 1965 concert and "Can't Buy Me Love" from the NME Poll Winners Concert. The colorised footage was a hit and miss sort of thing which mainly missed, with orange skin tones, orange tongues and black and white between the hair and the ears. I would rather have them spend this money on getting more rare footage!

And when it came to the concerts, audio producer Giles Martin used the same tactic that he employed for his soundtrack to the "A Hard Day's Night"-film, he recorded and overdubbed the sound of individually screaming girls of today to the images. This was done every time the film zoomed in on a smaller group of girls, and also onto the Shea Stadium film, which we saw after the main feature.

Some fakery which should have been edited out: The fake Shea Stadium poster, and a black and white shot of the current front door sign of Abbey Road Studios. It wasn't even named Abbey Road Studios at the time, and later in the film we see the real sixties EMI Studios door sign, so why keep in that latter day one?


Fake Shea Stadium poster.

Paul and Ringo are rehashing stories that they misremember, like McCartney still maintaining that they held out playing in the USA until they got a hit single. Come on, the Ed Sullivan Show was booked way before they ever knew that they were going to get a hit record over there.

I first saw this film last Tuesday at a press showing, and again two days later on Thursday 22 September along with an audience. In fact it was a full house here in Oslo at the biggest theatre in the cinema complex. And it seemed the audience loved it. I knew I was in good company when the Apple logo appearing on the screen in the beginning of the film got a round of applause! People were genuinely entertained and laughter and applause followed a lot of the scenes. As for the Shea film, this had first generationers singing along, as if they were attending a karaoke film or - indeed, a concert. Most of the audience thoroughly enjoyed themselves (the handful of people who left before Shea were probably the disappointed ones) and the film was favourably reviewed on Facebook by the people I knew in the audience - most of them members of Norwegian Wood, the Beatles fan club of Norway.

And I was entertained too, I'm not ashamed of admitting that. But still, I think Ron Howard went and ruined the film – it would have been better without him. Because what did he bring to the table? Well, for one thing – he removed most of the concert footage and brought in the talking heads. And then he emphasized the North American tours at the cost of all the other concerts the Beatles gave in the rest of the world. That's no documentary, that's revisionism! The one person who had anything interesting to come up with, was Larry Kane – because he was actually there with them. The rest of the talking heads just took up space which could have been used to show The Beatles. They had spent money on interviewing even more celebrities for the film, but these were later cut out, and I do believe on the insistence of Ringo - who saw a version with all the talking heads and didn't approve.

One thing Howard accomplished, was to bring new light to the fact that The Beatles refused to play to segregated audiences. This is a well known fact for us Beatle buffs, but it hasn't been very publicly known, or rather, it has been forgotten about. It's a fact which certainly has historical significance and plays a part in the liberation of the black communities of USA. And this aspect of the film was used to promote the film before it was even released. Great, well done!

I had really high hopes for this film, but the result is at best a forgery. The best way to see this film is to start with no expectations or knowledge whatsoever. Because then it is actually quite entertaining. It is better the second time you view it than the first, because then you're prepared for its limitations. We didn't need the Beatles in the studio or filming "A Hard Days Night" and "Help!". And as much as we love to see footage from the Apple rooftop concert in 1969 (and here we did get previously unseen footage from "I've Got A Feeling"), it falls outside the scope of the theme of the film. And it's not because there's any lack of material from live performances between 1963 and 1966 which could have been shown instead. On the contrary, The Beatles as a performing band during their touring years is vastly undercommunicated here – because of all the concert footage that exists but isn't used! We miss Holland, we miss Germany 1966, we miss Australia! There's way too little from Japan and the Philippines story is grossly underplayed. Manila was as much a nail in the coffin for The Beatles' touring career as the Ku Klux Klan and Beatle record bonfires. Thank goodness for that 2014 documentary, "When The Beatles Drove Us Wild" and other, unofficial documentaries who tell us more of the true story. Lacking as they may be in the music departement, they give us more footage of The Beatles on tour, as well as insightful interviews with people in the Beatles' entourage.




Eight Days A Week is an entertaining film for a broad audience and once we had abandoned the idea that this was a film about The Beatles on tour, it was enjoyable. And of course, they brought us snippets of things we hadn't seen before, "Roll Over Beethoven" filmed in colour in Stockholm 1964 especially comes to mind. But this means that the definitive film about The Beatles on Tour can still be made. And it should be a TV series with 8 hour long episodes. One about 1960-1963, three episodes covering 1964, two about 1965 and two about 1966. They have gathered enough material for this, material which didn't make it to the final cut of Eight Days A Week. And a home video edition with bonus material in the form of complete or near complete concerts. That would have been satisfactory for Beatle fans, and possibly overkill for the man on the street. Historically though, that's the kind of approach The Beatles are worthy of – and not this fragment.

When the film premiered in Liverpool, it was prefaced by two short films: An introduction by Paul, Ringo and Ron Howard especially addressing the Liverpool audience (and Howard openly admitting that he had never been to Liverpool but really wanted to visit some time), and an 11 minutes long film where people from Liverpool were interviewed. Only there did you hear from people like Allan Williams, Joe Flannery, Beryl Marsden, Freda Kelly, and siblings Beryl Williams and Barry Chang who went along to Hamburg with the Beatles. And in Japan, more footage from The Beatles' visit to Tokyo was shown. The latter two films will be included as bonus features on the home cinema release, deluxe edition.


The audience audibly present

SHEA STADIUM

It was very nice to see and hear The Beatles at Shea Stadium on the big screen and with good sound – although the volume was a little low during the screenings I attended. With a monumental stadium like Shea, you really want to have really loud audio to convey the atmosphere of being there. The audio was not only remixed but also substituted by Giles Martin and was a mishmash of this and that. "Twist And Shout" is mostly the studio version with added audience noise, "Act Naturally" is from the concert, but with the guitar solos added from the studio version, "Baby's In Black" is again a mix of the concert and the studio version, "Help!" is the 1966-version they recorded at CTS especially for the Shea film soundtrack, and "She's A Woman" is from the Hollywood Bowl! The sound is very narrow stereo or even mono, with a stereo effect on the audience. The picture quality is probably as good as it gets, it was filmed in 35mm but I do believe that the film was sometimes zoomed in to focus on the lead singers and that meant a drop in quality during those scenes only. Again, this was already present in the original version and there seems to be no outtake footage available, so it is what it is. Seemed to me the film wasn't very much edited at all, from the 1966 TV version, which means that outtakes of George with his Gretsch guitar from the missing "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby" appears in "A Hard Day's Night" in between him playing the Rickenbacker. Fan edits of the Shea Stadium film has rectified this, but it's kept in here. It was really nice to hear Ringo sing "Act Naturally" live (with his hi-hat work leaking into the vocals), he did a good enough job of it so it was never really needed to have the original film featuring the record as a soundtrack back in 1966.

I do hope that Apple elects to release The Beatles At Shea Stadium in full at some point in the future, and with an option to hear the real concert soundtrack instead of this mashup Martin version, for those of us who prefer historical accuracy.

There's a very good two hours long podcast discussing Howard's film and the Shea film, which includes important interviews with insiders working with the production crew, Chuck Gunderson and Erik Taros. It's hosted by Robert Rodriguez and Richard Buskin.  You can find it here.

All you need is love… and screaming: what the Beatles really meant

www.theguardian.com
All you need is love… and screaming: what the Beatles really meant
Eva Wiseman
Sunday 25 September 2016

The new documentary about the Beatles brings to life some very old memories


Fab four: (from left) Paul, George, John and Ringo in Liverpool in 1962. Photograph: Copyright Apple Corps

When George Martin’s son recently remixed the Beatles’ live recordings, he removed the screams. Hearing snatches of the new songs makes me feel uncomfortable, as if… as if the music has been caught just coming out of the shower, too naked, too raw. And also it seems to miss the point. If you want the pure music there are the studio albums – if you want the live experience, you need the fans.




My mum’s friend phoned her after watching The Beatles: Eight Days a Week. The oddest thing, she said: she’d seen Val. At the ABC Cinema in Ardwick in 1963, my mum and Val were the only ones not screaming. It was two days before John F Kennedy was assassinated and one of the coldest winters on record, but that always seems to be the case, especially in Manchester, and especially looking back.

My mum was 12, and too young to fancy even Paul, and she remembers looking over at Val’s older sister, a beatnik, usually poised and cool as anything, and seeing her getting up on to her seat and dancing, her hands reaching towards the stage where “She Loves You” was being drowned out by the sound of girls. In 1966 the Beatles stopped touring because of just this.

“Those who flock round the Beatles,” wrote Paul Johnson in the New Statesman the following February, “who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures”.





It seems laughable now, to dismiss that power, that roar. Those screams weren’t just screams of passion, they were screams of protest. Every girl in that crowd in Ardwick, apart from my mum and her friend Val, was releasing something big and frightening, and it scared the policemen, standing with their hands on their hips, an expression of sour terror on their faces.

So my mum and Val looked at each other, then joined in. The way she tells it, their first scream was just to be part of it, screaming to feel what all the other girls were feeling, that mad chaos. The second scream was different.

How did it feel, I texted my mum. “To release all that pent up suburban repression?” she replied. Yeah, how did it feel? The little dots on my phone were flashing, she was writing. Then she wasn’t. Then she was. Dot dot dot. Eventually, “Fabulous,” she said.



Though the girls became a unit, a crowd, when the camera sweeps away from the stage you can make eye contact with each one. You can see each fan moved for a slightly different reason, each scream a slightly different tone. For all the words written and films made about the Beatles, for all the Radio 4 documentaries, for all the politics (on which the film is fascinating), the fans are for me by far the most interesting and awe-inspiring aspect of the myth. They moved as a mass, but peeled off from the crowd their little lives are revealed to be bigger than the stories suggest.

After being introduced to the worlds outside their record players, Val and my mum snuck off to clubs, where Val won a prize for lip-synching to Sandie Shaw. The trick was, she took her shoes off before she got on stage. A couple of years after the concert in Ardwick, the two of them spent a summer pretending to be French. They’d learned how to fancy boys by then, and hung around Manchester flirting in Jacques Prévert quotes and writing poetry.

“Islands all are islands,” my mum texts me, remembering Val’s poem 50 years later. “Separate and unique, trying to communicate, not knowing what we seek.” It was awkward speaking in a French accent, she says, when one of the boys told her the Six Day War had begun.

When Val started dying earlier this year, my mum made her a mixtape. It had the Beatles, of course, and she got the train up to Glossop to sit with her and listen and talk. They talked about that concert, their fear and that noise. The music was a way of accessing other things. They were out in the world in a room swollen with feelings, and her sister was up on the chair and their heroes were on the stage, and they made the decision to become part of something bigger, the decision to join in.

Fifty years later by her bed, the songs reminded them of all the small moments of their shared history. She died in March, and reappeared yesterday in Eight Days a Week, a happy ghost, screaming.

Reissues Reach Record As Elvis, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd Join 2016 Bandwagon

www.forbes.com
Reissues Reach Record As Elvis, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd Join 2016 Bandwagon
Mark Beech
SEP 24, 2016


Paul McCartney (R) and Ringo Starr (L) pose at a screening of ‘The Beatles Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years’ in London on September 15, 2016. (BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images)

The music reissue bandwagon is going into overdrive and is set to reach a record high in 2016. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are storming back into the charts this week. They are will be followed by Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode and Oasis. The phenomenon isn’t just British. The late Elvis Presley, Miles Davis and Lou Reed are all joining in.

For years, record companies have been countering slowing sales of physical products, especially among younger consumers, by expensive box sets aimed at older buyers. The trend is growing, with record numbers this year coming from labels: Legacy (Sony ), Rhino (Warner), Hip-O (Universal) and more. New and announced titles, including anniversary editions and vinyl reissues, are currently running at more than 450 for mainstream artists so far in 2016, an increase from the approximately 320 at the same time a year ago.

Back in April, the IFPI business group said that digital revenues (at 45% of the recording industry global income) had overtaken physical sales (about 39%). Still, analysts said that while total year-on-year revenue was rising, mainly spurred by streaming, physical losses were being contained by increases in vinyl and re-releases.

Among the first out of the gates in advance of the holiday season, and widely anticipated: the Beatles with Live At The Hollywood Bowl (Apple) – music 50 years old and yet already at No. 7 in the U.S., and likely to climb, and at No. 3 in the U.K. The companion movie. Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years, it was confirmed this week, will be available November 18 on Blu-Ray and DVD, along with special 2-disc collector’s editions.





It’s also worth watching Led Zeppelin, whose The Complete BBC Sessions is the highest new entry in the U.K. Official Chart this week at No. 3. The title adds long-lost material to improved remasters of the rest on the original BBC Sessions.



The biggest box sets, always large-budget items with hours of content, last year were topped by the Grateful Dead’s 30 Trips Around The Sun, a 73-hour blockbuster costing $699.98.

This time, Pink Floyd has a 27-disc box set for exactly the same price, $699.98. The Early Years on Legacy is out on November 11 with more than 12 hours of audio and 15 hours of video, including 20 unreleased songs such as 1967’s “Vegetable Man” and “In the Beechwoods.”




There are a number of comprehensive Elvis Presley collections, with some fans dutifully buying each as new material comes to light or simply to get the new packaging. The RCA Albums Collection, a 60-disc set, came out to mark to 60th anniversary of the star’s first album for RCA Records and is priced about $349.98.


The cover of “Elvis Presley – The RCA Albums Collection” RCA

The Lou Reed posthumous release is equally prosaically titled: The RCA and Arista Album Collection. This 17-disc compilation is also less revelatory but pulls together the singer-songwriter’s albums, with a few of them out of print for years. It is a neat way of getting everything in one place, at least until more remasters or rarities show up.



Anyone who wants to summarize the career of Reed’s friend David Bowie could do worse than investing in his boxes. Five Years (1969-1973) was yesterday joined by Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), which includes The Gouster, a previously unreleased collection that was an early version of Young Americans, and the rare Live Nassau Coliseum ’76. Both Bowie collections have material from the superlative Rykodisc reissues which are now getting hard to get.



Most major artists are now on the bandwagon with nearly all classic albums now getting a deluxe extra disc at least. The larger reissues scoring highly this year include Cluster 1971-1981, the various-artist compilation Close To The Noise Floor and Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now.


The Rolling Stones, packshot of the CD version of “In Mono”. ABKCO Records.

Take your pick: they will be joined by Crowded House (a big reissue program), Depeche Mode (video singles) and Oasis (the misunderstood third album Be Here Now). The Miles Davis Bootleg Series will take in his 1966-1968 years, the Rolling Stones put out the In Mono Box, while Sting, Graham Parker, Joe Cocker and Kris Kristofferson also get boxed. Even 1980s U.K. stars get a look-in: a 19-disc set by Dead or Alive and a super deluxe Kings Of The Wild Frontier by Adam & The Ants retailing at $149.98. The latter is a special super deluxe golden boxset with a DVD of promo videos, live performances, the first DVD release of Adam & The Ants Live In Tokyo 1981 in its entirety, a mini-documentary of the first U.S. tour in 1981, a replica Ant Catalogue and posters.



The big box sets of the past often contain conspicuously useless items: Pink Floyd marbles and scarves for example. The cynics may quote Morrissey’s lyric “Paint a Vulgar Picture” in which he sang: “Re-issue! Re-package!.. Double-pack with a photograph, Extra track and a tacky badge.”

Cynics might also scoff at Bono bug shades saving the world. (As included in the Uber Deluxe edition of Achtung Baby). But if such memorabilia helps save the record industry, well, that’s something.




I'm the author of books including All You Need is Rock, collecting my rock criticism for Bloomberg. I'm now editor of Dante magazine and write for ArtInfo and Forbes. Follow me @Mark_Beech

Paul McCartney Speaks on His Kanye West Collaborations In New Clip

www.highsnobiety.com
Paul McCartney Speaks on His Kanye West Collaborations In New Clip
By Chris Danforth
24 sept 2016




Clippings from a fairly recent Paul McCartney interview have surfaced on /r/HipHopHeads.

In the video, Paul discusses his collaborations with Kanye West, calling him (in a good way) a “monster” and “a crazy guy that comes up with great stuff.” Speaking on the creative process behind “All Day” and “Four Five Seconds,” McCartney reveals how he found inspiration in a Picasso painting, and the fact that Oprah Winfrey and others warned Sir Paul about “All Day,” which famously premiered at the 2015 Brit Awards. The five-minute video sheds some fascinating light into the collaboration between West and McCartney, as well as Rihanna’s involvement.

Check it out above.

Olivia Harrison and Dhani Harrison accept the inaugural Global Citizen George Harrison Award

Musician Dhani Harrison speaks onstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.
(Sept. 21, 2016 - Source: Theo Wargo/Getty Images North America)


www.billboard.com
'Global Citizen: The World On Stage' Fuses Big Ideas with Performances from Kesha, Tom Morello, Paul Simon & More
by Lyndsey Havens
9/23/2016


Jon Batiste, Warren Haynes, Tom Morello, and Regina Spektor perform during the first "Global Citizen: The World on Stage" concert at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Sept. 22, 2016 in New York City.
Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

Tom Morello, Warren Haynes, Regina Spektor and many more took to the "world stage" prior to the Global Citizen Festival this weekend.

On Saturday (Sept. 24), Global Citizen Festival -- which had its inception in 2012 -- will take over Central Park for a celebration through music of impactful work and positive progress featuring sets from Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Demi Lovato, Major Lazer, Metallica, Usher, Coldplay's Chris Martin, Ellie Goulding, Eddie Vedder, Yandel and Yusuf/Cat Stevens. Thursday evening (Sept. 22), the organization held its first ever ceremony called "Global Citizen: The World On Stage," an event that illustrated the inseparable intersection between music and a movement for change.


Dhani Harrison, Leland Melvin, Ron Garan, Jon Batiste, and Regina Spektor pose backstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.
(Sept. 21, 2016 - Source: Cindy Ord/Getty Images North America)

While the majority of the evening was dedicated to several prominent speakers, all of whom addressed various causes in dire need of help and support -- such as the refugee crisis, education, poverty, hunger, gender equality and so much more -- there were also a variety of affecting performances, and most notably of all, the presentation of the inaugural George Harrison Global Citizen award, which Paul Simon presented to Olivia and Dhani Harrison (George's widow and son, respectively).


Musician Dhani Harrison speaks onstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.
(Sept. 21, 2016 - Source: Theo Wargo/Getty Images North America)

As a whole, the event not only celebrated the mission and hard work of Global Citizens but more so added meat to the meaning of the festival -- as the organization's founder and CEO, Hugh Evans, said best, the night offered a look "behind the scenes of what empowers the movement."


Paul Simon speaks onstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.
(Sept. 21, 2016 - Source: Theo Wargo/Getty Images North America)

The theme of empowerment trickled into each performance of the evening, as every song (primarily covers) was specially selected for its meaning and big-picture context. The most poignant song selection came from opening act Kesha, who dedicated her performance to "anyone fighting for their rights," before diving into Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released."


Paul Simon speaks onstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.
(Sept. 21, 2016 - Source: Theo Wargo/Getty Images North America)

A handful of other performances from the likes of Warren Haynes (who performed U2's "One") and Tom Morello alongside the Kenyan Boys Choir (who performed Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land"), were sprinkled throughout the first portion of the evening, providing momentary music relief from the heavier presentations such as a spoken word performance, Q&As, and video presentations.


Co-Founder and CEO of Global Citizen and Global Poverty Project Hugh Evans speaks onstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.
(Sept. 21, 2016 - Source: Theo Wargo/Getty Images North America)

Eventually, the evening's pinnacle was reached as Simon took the stage. He spoke of the global influence and impact George Harrison had on the world, using The Concert For Bangladesh -- a benefit concert Harrison organized with Ravi Shankar that took place at Madison Square Garden in 1971 -- as evidence of how "music can build movement." After Olivia and Dhani -- who spoke briefly of his father -- accepted the award, Simon proceeded to play "Here Comes the Sun," followed by Haynes performing "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) and Morello's heavy cover of Bruce Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad," -- "a song by the only Boss worth listening to" -- complete with a grueling guitar solo.

The celebratory event ended with an utterly explosive collaborative performance from Haynes, Morello, Jon Batiste, and Regina Spektor as they all delivered a mind-blowing rendition of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." As intense instrumentals played on in the background, Spektor sang "I look at the world and I notice it's turning," a sentiment that encapsulates the mission of Global Citizens and served as a proper conclusion to an evening that aimed to celebrate such a a shift.






getfirstlook.com
2016 GLOBAL CITIZEN: THE WORLD ON STAGE

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 22: Olivia Harrison and son Dhani Harrison seen on stage after accepting the inaugural George Harrison Global Citizen Award from Paul Simon during 2016 Global Citizen: The World on Stage at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on September 22, 2016 in New York City.


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 22: Olivia Harrison and Dhani Harrison accept the inaugural Global Citizen George Harrison Award from Paul Simon at the 2016 'Global Citizen: The World on Stage' concert at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on September 22, 2016 in New York City.



Photo: Taylor Hill / FilmMagic


Photo: Taylor Hill / FilmMagic


Photo: Taylor Hill / FilmMagic


Photo: Taylor Hill / FilmMagic


Photo: Taylor Hill / FilmMagic


Photo: Laura Cavanaugh / Getty Images Entertainment


Photo: Laura Cavanaugh / Getty Images Entertainment


Photo: Laura Cavanaugh / Getty Images Entertainment


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Gary Gershoff / WireImage


Photo: Theo Wargo / Getty Images Entertainment


Photo: Theo Wargo / Getty Images Entertainment


NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 22: Dhani Harrison, Leland Melvin, Ron Garan, Jon Batiste, and Regina Spektor pose backstage during Global Citizen: The World On Stage at NYU Skirball Center on September 22, 2016 in New York City.


Photo: Cindy Ord / Getty Images Entertainment


Photo: Cindy Ord / Getty Images Entertainment