Paul Reveals Tracklisting For NEW Album

www.paulmccartney.com

SEP132013

Paul Reveals Tracklisting For NEW Album

October 14th (15th in the US) will see the release of Paul’s first album of brand NEW solo material in six years. Today the tracklisting has been revealed:

1. Save Us (produced by Paul Epworth)
2. Alligator (produced by Mark Ronson)
3. On My Way to Work (produced by Giles Martin)
4. Queenie Eye (produced by Paul Epworth)
5. Early Days (produced by Ethan Johns)
6. New (produced by Mark Ronson)
7. Appreciate (produced by Giles Martin)
8. Everybody Out There (produced by Giles Martin)
9. Hosanna (produced by Ethan Johns)
10. I Can Bet (produced by Giles Martin)
11. Looking At Her (produced by Giles Martin)
12. Road (produced by Giles Martin)

Executive Producers: Paul McCartney and Giles Martin
Mixed by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent

Total Running Time: 46:11

Talking about the album, Paul said: “It's funny, when I play people the album they’re surprised it’s me. A lot of the tracks are quite varied and not necessarily in a style you'd recognise as mine. I didn't want it to all sound the same. I really enjoyed making this album. It's always great to get a chance to get into the studio with a bunch of new songs and I was lucky to work with some very cool producers. We had a lot of fun.”

Paul worked on the album with producers Paul Epworth, Mark Ronson, Ethan Johns and Giles Martin.

Commenting on the process, Paul said: “The original idea was to go to a couple of producers whose work I loved, to see who I got on with best - but it turned out I got on with all of them! We made something really different with each producer, so I couldn’t choose and ended up working with all four. We just had a good time in different ways.”

The album was recorded at Henson Recording Studios, Los Angeles; Avatar Studios, New York; Abbey Road Studios, London; Air Studios, London; Wolf Tone Studios, London and Hog Hill Mill, East Sussex.

Fans can pre-order NEW from:

Amazon - Click HERE!
iTunes - Click HERE!

Photographs by Mary McCartney.

Woodbridge: Rare copy of The Beatles’ album Please, Please Me donated to British Red Cross charity shop

www.eadt.co.uk
Woodbridge: Rare copy of The Beatles’ album Please, Please Me donated to British Red Cross charity shop
Craig Robinson
Friday, September 13, 2013

When charity shop worker Merriam Keeble took delivery of a donation of 200 LPs she was in for a pleasant surprise.


The Red Cross charity shop in Woodbridge has had some rare Beatlkes albums handed in as well as some other old vinyl. Merriam Keeble with 'Please Please Me'.

For, hidden away among the records featuring the likes of The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann and Diana Ross, was a rare pressing of The Beatles’ album, Please, Please Me.
Ms Keeble, who works at the British Red Cross shop in Thoroughfare, Woodbridge, is hoping the LP could fetch in the region of £250.
Also included in the collection is a rare The Five Faces of Manfred Mann album, while others by The Rolling Stones could be sold for between £60-80.
Ms Keeble said she was hoping the whole collection could raise at least £1,000.
“A gentleman turned up and asked if we would be interested in his records,” she said. “We said ‘yes, we would’ and he brought in four boxes of mixed LPs. They included everything from sets of operas and single releases through to some Beatles, Rolling Stones, Neil Young and The Who.”
“The Please, Please Me album is particularly exciting. We have the third edition of this pressing - there were only four originally.
“I’ve done quite a bit of research. It’s DMC1202. You can tell that it’s the third pressing because on the front cover an ‘a’ of ‘Angus McBean’ is under the ‘s’ of ‘songs’. In later pressings its under the ‘g’. There is also the right crediting to Northern Songs on the actual LP. That was different to early pressings. There’s very subtle differences.”
Ms Keeble, who has been working at the Woodbridge shop for 13 years, said they were incredibly grateful for the latest donation.
“It really is brilliant,” she said. “We can’t thank the gentleman enough. You don’t get that sort of gift very often. LPs such as this usually end up with collectors but now they can go to someone who wants to start their own collection.”
Ms Keeble was also happy to give out some unusual advice to help people in their search for a pristine LP.
“Sniff the records,” she said. “I was told once by an expert that people put boot polish on their LPs to get rid of the wear and tear. However it makes the recording unplayable. Part of the enjoyment of having them is to listen to them, so you must always give them a sniff.”


The Red Cross charity shop in Woodbridge has had some rare Beatlkes albums handed in as well as some other old vinyl. Merriam Keeble with 'Please Please Me'.

Our First Four – A Very Collectable First Apple Release

beatlesblogger.com
Our First Four – A Very Collectable First Apple Release
by beatlesblogger
September 8, 2013 

One of the reasons I got into this Beatles collecting caper, apart from a love of the music, was that I became fascinated by the band setting up their very own record label - Apple Records.
The Beatles were amongst the first, if not the first, band to do so and (apart from themselves) they signed up an eclectic range of artists to the label.
Their very first releases were marked by the issuing of a limited edition press kit of the first four 45rpm vinyl singles to come out on Apple - which they called "Our First Four".
In the UK there seems to have been two versions of this.
One was in a stronger, hard plastic outer case. Examples of this version were very limited, and these were hand-delivered to dignitaries like Stanley Gortikov, President of Capitol Records in 1968; to Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace; to her sister Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace; to the Queen Mother at St James’s Palace; and to the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson at Number 10 Downing Street, London. The plastic box set looked like this:



The other, lower cost version was posted to radio disc jockeys, music journalists and critics. It was in a cheaper, thin black cardboard box.
Both versions contained four singles: The Beatles “Hey Jude/Revolution” (R 5722); Mary Hopkin “Those Were the Days” (APPLE 2); Jackie Lomax “Sour Milk Sea” (APPLE 3); and The Black Dyke Mills Band “Thingumybob” (APPLE 4).
Each single was accompanied by a press release printed on the outside of a coloured folder containing an artist photo and a plastic sleeve to hold the record.
The reason for this post is that a copy of the cardboard "Our First Four" has just sold on Ebay for an impressive AU$6,317 (that's US$5,797, or £3,706 UK Pounds).
The price it fetched is testament to it's rarity. And as it is not often seen (and because the listing had such a good selection of photos of the item - showing in detail how the box worked and what was inside), I couldn't resist reproducing a selection of them here:



























The Beatles official site has reproduced a nice press advertisement for "Our First Four".

In the United States the press kit mailed to DJ's and music journos was perhaps a little less colourful and extravagant, but its contents were definitely as interesting (and collectable). Respected Beatle writer and discographer Bruce Spizer has a great article on the background to this one:





If you had a lazy six grand lying around would you purchase one of these?

Insightful biography of George Harrison, the ‘recovering’ Beatle

www.thenational.ae
Insightful biography of George Harrison, the ‘recovering’ Beatle
James McNair
The National
Sep 13, 2013

Like Under the Ivy, his much-acclaimed study of Kate Bush, the title of the latest music biography by the Edinburgh-based writer Graeme Thomson promises revelation. While fresh gen on any Beatle is difficult to unearth and would be hard to quantify without scaling the Everest of pertinent books already published, one can certainly affirm that George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door is an insightful, rigorous and beautifully written atomisation of the youngest Beatle’s life.
Timed to coincide with what would have been the year of Harrison’s 70th birthday, the book is affectionate, but never hagiographic. Thomson airs myriad acute quotes from scores of fresh interviewees, and as he maps Harrison’s path from Liverpool to Allahabad, India, where the guitarist’s ashes were strewn after he succumbed to lung cancer in 2001 at the age of 58. The author demonstrates that his subject was the most conflicted and enigmatic of the Fab Four; a man torn between a great spiritual yearning and more earthly pleasures.



Thomson’s book also employs a neat little trope: the “Be Here Now” sections that briefly footnote each chapter beam us down into a specific, always-revealing moment in Harrison’s life. The entry for September 1987, for example, finds “recovering Beatle” George dressing down the wife of a photographer who has playfully – and naively – asked one of the most press-fatigued and personal space-zealous musicians on the planet, “Don’t you want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone?” Harrison’s lengthy, acerbic reply gives both barrels to an innocent bystander. “Can I possibly tell you how little that means to me?” it begins.
Happily, there are numerous counterbalancing examples of Harrison’s warmer side, and Thomson cites 1971’s The Concert For Bangladesh, Harrison’s greatest single act of philanthropy, as a structurally flawed but ultimately successful undertaking that paved the way for Live Aid and led some to see Harrison as “a new breed of emotionally evolved rock star for a new era”. Elsewhere, a little snapshot of ukulele devotee George making pal Bob Dylan sit through six consecutive plays of George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows also warms the cockles.



From the outset, Thomson is careful not to get bogged down in the kind of slavish recitation of “born here”, “went to school there” facts that burden so many rock biographies. Instead, he is quick to put flesh on bones, detailing Harrison’s severe mood swings and “child-like sense of mischief”, and dispensing small, resonant details.
We learn that the teenage George covered his spots with panstick; that he believed he had been an Indian in a previous life; and that his harmonically advanced guitar-playing – as evidenced by that ringing Fadd9 chord that opens A Hard Day’s Night – might have owed something to Len Houghton, the family friend and Django Reinhardt fan who once gave George guitar lessons.
The madness of Beatlemania is sketched with a light but vivid touch. That the route of a motorcade through Adelaide in 1964 drew about 300,000 fans and there was a death threat to Harrison before the group played Japan’s Nippon Budokan Hall in August 1966 says it all. It’s little wonder that Harrison – a born worrier who had feared for his own mother’s life after the tragically early deaths of Paul’s mother Mary and John’s mother Julia – became increasingly paranoid. And with good reason, of course.
Seasoned Harrison fans will appreciate how Behind the Locked Door cares so deeply about its subject. Thomson is good at teasing out things that set Harrison apart from his bandmates. For instance, while John wrote Strawberry Fields Forever about a Salvation Army children’s home he’d loved as a child, and Paul immortalised Liverpool’s Penny Lane, George, Thomson writes, “stubbornly resists deification of his home city”.



The author also notes that, while Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics were often given to third-person flights of fancy, Harrison’s Beatles songs include a number of curmudgeonly critiques of band life written in the first person. Don’t Bother Me, the first Harrison original the band recorded, could hardly be more direct, and later came Taxman and Only aNorthern Song, the latter later described by Harrison as his “personal denunciation of The Beatles’ music publishing business”.
If the fluffy, cartoonish image of The Beatles was usually given short-shrift by Harrison, Thomson is able to show that the group’s scrabbled-over business affairs and Lennon and McCartney’s patronising attitude towards George’s songwriting — only around the time he wrote Something does he begin to command respect — were a factor. Not that Harrison was averse to playing the Beatles card when it suited him. Towards the end of the book, Steve Ferrone, sometime Harrison drummer in the early 1990s, recalls he and George riding in a limousine to a Prince show at Wembley Arena sans tickets. “George rolls down the window and says, ‘It’s OK, it’s me!’” recalls Ferrone. Needless to say, the gates parted.
Elsewhere in the book, we’re reminded that Indian spirituality and music changed everything for Harrison. His interest in transcendental meditation, his new-found dedication to the sitar and his valued friendship with the instrument’s leading virtuoso Ravi Shankar – all of these things deepened when he and his then-wife Pattie Boyd travelled to India in September 1966, just two weeks after The Beatles played Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California, their last ever show. In February 1968, when Harrison returns to Rishikesh, India, to study transcendental meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, his fellow Beatles are with him. “Finally, his interests were not just being taken seriously,” says Thomson, “they were driving the narrative of the band.”



Bookended by his undisputed masterwork, 1970’s All Things Must Pass, and his good-humoured, late 1980s output with Anglo-American supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, Harrison’s solo years are otherwise light on remarkable music.
He’s off the radar mostly by choice, but certain philanthropic gestures still make headlines. When Harrison’s company HandMade Films bankrolls Monty Python’s The Life of Brian to the tune of about US$4 million (Dh14.6m) simply because it’s a film George “would like to see”, the Python’s Terry Jones calls it “the world’s most expensive cinema ticket”.
As a musician, George is adrift for much of the 70s and 80s, however, and Thomson avers that the pious spirituality of some of his music proved a difficult pill to swallow against the lighthearted backdrop of glam and the irreverent glamour of punk. “He [Harrison] often appeared to be a man who had seen a glimpse of heaven and was pulling the ladder up behind him,” notes the author, memorably.



The knife attack that Harrison suffered after a psychotic fan broke into his home at Friar Park, Henley-on-Thames, on December 31, 1999, makes for a tremendously moving climax to the book. When fellow Traveling Wilbury Tom Petty learns of the attack, the dryly humorous telegram he sends bigs-up Harrison’s second wife Olivia, who had somehow summoned the courage to attack her husband’s assailant with a poker: “Aren’t you glad you married a Mexican girl?” it reads.
Two years later, when Dr Gilbert Lederman, a director of radiation oncology, all but forces a pitifully weak Harrison to autograph a guitar for his son just weeks before the Beatle’s death, the imposition seems almost as gross as the attack at Friar Park.
Olivia Harrison notes that her husband had long-since “maxed the planet out, looking for solitude”. It’s a neat summary of Harrison’s inability to escape his past.

James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.


George Harrison: Behind The Locked Door (Hardback)
By (author) Graeme Thomson
$25.25
Publisher: OMNIBUS PRESS
Published: 17 September 2013
Format: Hardback 372 pages

Alston illegal copied Beatles album seller jailed

www.bbc.co.uk
Alston illegal copied Beatles album seller jailed
A Cumbrian man who sold bootleg albums of Beatles music has been jailed.
13 September 2013

Paul Parkin was charged after police and trading standards officers raided his home in West View, Alston, following a tip-off by the British Recorded Music Industry Limited.
Bootleg vinyl LPs and illegal copies of music CDs were recovered.
At an earlier hearing the 57-year-old pleaded guilty to 23 offences. The judge at Carlisle Crown Court sentenced him to four months in jail.
Ten of the charges Parkin admitted were specimen counts of attempting to distribute vinyl records, with the other 13 being counts of possession of goods with intent to cause loss to another.

'Internet trading'
The records were all by The Beatles and included albums such as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Rubber Soul, White Unplugged Album, At The Hollywood Bowl and Please, Please Me.
Angela Jones, trading standards service manager for Cumbria County Council, said: "Internet trading has made it easier for individuals to distribute counterfeit goods.
"The unauthorised use of registered trademarks damages legitimate traders who trade lawfully.
"Anyone found to be selling or distributing counterfeit goods can face prosecution, confiscation of illegally earned assets or even - as Parkin has found out to his cost - imprisonment."

Another Set of Beatles’ BBC Recordings Is On the Way

artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
Another Set of Beatles’ BBC Recordings Is On the Way
By ALLAN KOZINN
September 12, 2013

When Capitol Records released “The Beatles Live at the BBC” to great fanfare in 1994, Beatles collectors lamented that the two-disc set barely scratched the surface of the vast trove of recordings the band made for the BBC between March 1962 and June 1965. Many of those radio recordings were already on a 10-disc bootleg set, after all, and in the 19 years since then, bootleggers have come up with another three discs’ worth of material.

But Capitol and Apple, the Beatles’ own label, are determined to catch up. “On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2,” another two discs, will be released Nov. 11. It will include 63 tracks, including 40 songs and 23 spoken segments, with interviews, introductions and studio banter. A remastered version of the 1994 set will be released at the same time.

The new set redresses some of the complaints about the original. It had seemed odd, for example, that the Beatles’ radio performances of some of their biggest hits, including “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” were left off the first set. All three are included here, as are “This Boy,” “Words of Love” and “And I Love Her,” which the earlier set also skipped.

The new set also includes several songs new to the Beatles official discography, including a rocked-up version of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” Paul McCartney’s energetic rendering of Little Richard’s “Lucille,” and John Lennon’s biting account of Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You.”  Included, too, is the Beatles version of “Happy Birthday,” recorded to celebrate anniversary of Saturday Club, one of the shows they performed on.

Three of the tracks have been released previously, including a cover of a Carl Perkins track, “Lend Me Your Comb,” which appeared on the first volume of “The Beatles Anthology.” There is no crossover between the 1994 set and the new album, but several songs from the earlier collection – including I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Got A Woman,” “Sure To Fall” and “Hippy Hippy Shake” – are heard here in different performances.

All told, the Beatles performed 88 songs on the BBC, most in multiple performances. Among them were 36 songs they never recorded at Abbey Road. Equally significant, though, is the way the BBC recordings were made. Essentially, they were live performances, sometimes with minimal vocal overdubbing. They represent the group’s concert style, which had an edge that their polished studio productions sometimes lacked – but although a few of the BBC recordings were made before live audiences, most were not, and are therefore free of the hysterical shrieking typically heard on even the most professionally recorded Beatles concert tapes.

Among the interviews are individual talks with each Beatle recorded for the Beeb’s Pop Profile program in November 1965 and May 1966. The sets will have notes by Kevin Howlett, a former BBC producer whose 1996 book, “The Beatles at the BBC – The Radio Years 1962-70” is being republished in a substantially expanded and reconfigured edition as “The Beatles – The BBC Archives 1962-1970,” by Harper Design, in November.

Paul McCartney 'New' : Impromptu Acoustic Performance

Publicado el 11/09/2013
By PAULMCCARTNEY
Pre-order 'New' 
From iTunes: http://smarturl.it/PMnewiTunes
From Amazon: http://smarturl.it/PMc_New_Album_Amzn

Last month, whilst getting ready to go on stage at Regina, Paul was caught on camera performing an impromptu version of 'New'. This quickly turned into an acoustic performance when Paul was joined by the rest of his band for a run-through the song.

Let us know what you think of the performance in the comments below.