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Beatles News Archives

2001 Page 4

Paul on Ian Dury Tribute

Ian Dury died of cancer last year. Now Paul and a host of pop music stars are putting together a tribute album, with part of the proceeds for the album to be donated to Cancer BACUP, for whom Dury was a spokesman and campaigner.

Paul and friends have reportedly re-recorded tracks for Brand New Boots And Panties - a reworking of Ian Dury's seminal 1977 LP.

The album is released on East Central One Records on April 9th and the full track listing is as follows:

'Wake Up & Make Love With Me' - Sinead O'Connor & The Blockheads
'Sweet Gene Vincent' - Robbie Williams & The Blockheads
'I'm Partial To Your Abracadabra' - Paul McCartney & The Blockheads
'My Old Man' - Madness 'Billericay Dickie' - Billy Bragg & The Blokes
'Clevor Trever' - Wreckless Eric & The Blockheads
'If I Was With A Woman'- Cerys Matthews (Catatonia) & The Blockheads
'Blockheads' - Grant Nicholas (Feeder) & The Blockheads
'Plaistow Patricia' - Shane McGowan & The Blockheads
'Blackmail Man' - Keith Allen & The Blockheads

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The International Beatles Week and The Mathew Street Music Festival hosted in Liverpool

* INTERNATIONAL BEATLE WEEK ACTIVITY
* 300 BANDS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD PLAYING
* SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCES
* LARGEST GATHERING OF BEATLES TRIBUTE BANDS
* 6 OUTDOOR STAGES IN LIVERPOOL CITY CENTRE
* THE CAVERN CLUB
* STREET ENTERTAINMENT AND STREET ACTIVITY
* ACTIVITY FROM CITY CENTRE BARS AND RESTAURANTS
* THE LARGEST MULTI MUSIC WEBCAST IN HISTORY
* CELEBRITY INTERVIEWS
* ALL OF THE ABOVE "LIVE"

People can see it all "live" on the internet, and this is in direct association with the Festival organisers in an effort to make the Festival rank as the largest and best Festival in the world as a tribute to the greatest band the world has aver known "THE BEATLES".

We have created a "hotlink" to our website this can be uploaded onto your website home page. If you send us a "hotlink" of your website URL we will
reciprocate.

Please join us in our beautiful city and be part of our special annual event, the people of Liverpool are ready to welcome you to our city and share in
part of our heritage, support us and log on to....www.livelink2000.com

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Paul McCartney declares his love -- for vegetables

All you need are vegetables, Paul says as he prepares to show his well-being by undertaking a new concert tour. Paul, who is ready to hit the road again for the first time in eight years, says being vegetarian for the past quarter of a century has kept him going strong.

The singer-songwriter became vegetarian more than 25 years ago along with his late wife Linda. "The benefit of a vegetarian diet is that it gives you more energy,'' Paul said in a statement released in London at the start of Britain's National Vegetarian Week.

"That's certainly the case with me, seeing as I'm now looking at going out on tour again at an age when most people are thinking of retiring.''

Paul revealed last month that he was planning a concert tour for around the time his new studio album comes out in September. He is currently recording in the United States. "Recently I recorded 18 songs for this new album in just two weeks,'' he said.

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John Lennon's Manuscript, Doodles Up for Sale

Two pages of doodles and notes made in preparation for a play by Beatles songwriter John Lennon were put up for sale at a London autograph dealer.

Fraser's Autographs said the thirty-sixlines, written on the front and back of a sheet of cardboard, were priced at $35,300. The front of the piece includes the original working draft of John's subversive version of Queen Elizabeth II annual speech, which was banned from the play "In His Own Write,'' based on the musician's critically acclaimed books.

Instead of the monarch's preferred form of address, John's version begins: "My housebound and eyeball take great pressure in denouncing this loyal ship.''

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Harrison Settles Suit With Neighbors

A path that cuts through George Harrison’s Maui estate to the Pacific Ocean is closed to the public under a settlement reached with the former Beatles neighbors, his attorney said.

George and his east Maui neighbors have agreed to a settlement that allows the singer privacy while prohibiting anyone from using the path, which provides access to the ocean. Details of the settlement are confidential, said Harrison's attorney, Paul Alston.

Hawaii law prohibits private ownership of the state's beaches. Other shoreline and public access provisions and easements commonly affect private landowners.

Harrison's neighbors in Nahiku, who include Ralph Waite of the "The Waltons'' TV series, had claimed the right to cross George's property under an easement granted by the previous landowner. The dispute began in the early 1990s after George objected to his neighbors using the path. The neighbors claimed they had a right to use it and filed lawsuits.

Last year, the Hawaii Supreme Court reversed a 1993 decision by Circuit Judge John McConnell that people may use a path across George's property. The state high court sent the case to trial. George appealed, saying his privacy was being violated.

The trail on George's property provides access to Kapukaulua Point, a rocky bluff overlooking the ocean. The path then continues to the shoreline. George had allowed residents to use the trail until he discovered some had allowed nonresidents access so they could see his home.

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Beatles producer sells 'Yesterday' for Montserrat

Beatles producer George Martin has put up for auction a piece of the band's "Yesterday'' to help a Caribbean island where the Fab Four once made music.

Martin is selling on the Internet 500 lithographs of the original score of "Yesterday,'' one The Beatles' best-known songs, aiming to raise $1 million for the British colony of Montserrat. "This is not a charity that is helping depressed people,'' Martin said. "They are determined to make it work. And we are going to help them.''

Once a mecca for music superstars, Montserrat had its economy and infrastructure shattered by a volcanic eruption sixyears ago.

Martin first visited the eastern Caribbean Island 30 years ago while looking for a quiet place to set up a studio. "It was wonderful to work there,'' George said. "I took Paul, Linda and the kids, and Stevie Wonder came. Nobody took any notice of Paul,'' he said laughing, adding that Stevie Wonder caused a sensation among the islanders.

Paul signed the first lithograph: "Congratulations you're No. 1.'' They will all be auctioned online through Yahoo!'s UK and American Web sites. Martin will use the money to build an entertainment and community center on the northern part of the island.

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Paul Who? He's a Real Nowhere Man

He's not even 64 yet - but Paul is already unknown to some young Americans, a new survey shows. When a group of 16-to-24-year-olds were asked about the former Beatle, 9 percent hadn't heard of him. Maybe he'd be amazed.

The finding surprised Larry Rosin, president of Edison Media Research, which did the national phone poll of 748 people aged 16 to 40 for Records & Radio magazine.

"He's such an icon. But it's a symbol of how time has marched on," Rosin said, noting that 100 percent of those in the 35-to-40 bracket had heard of Sir Paul.

The wide-ranging survey - which included asking participants about their familiarity with 35 different artists - also "looked at trends in music purchases, what influences purchasing behavior and what artists are compelling them," Rosin said.

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John's Childhood Home to Be Sold

The house where John Lennon spent his childhood is going up for sale on the Internet. Ernest Burkey, who lived in the house for 30 years, died last month at age 88.

"I would prefer to see it bought by somebody, who had a feeling for The Beatles,'' his son, Rod Burkey, told Sky News. He did not say when or where the Internet ad would be posted.

John lived at 251 Menlove Avenue in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton from the age of five - when his parents separated and he went to live with his Aunt Mimi - until he was 23. He taught himself to play guitar in the four-bedroom 1930s house, and reportedly wrote "She Loves You'' in the front room.

Real estate agents quoted by Liverpool newspapers valued the house at about $207,000 but said it could fetch much more because of its history. Last year, the house was awarded a plaque from the English Heritage agency identifying its former resident. It attracts a steady stream of visitors.

Mike Storey, leader of the Liverpool local government council, said the city would be prepared to contribute to the cost of buying the house if partners could be found.

The National Trust, a heritage organization, owns Paul McCartney's childhood home but has said it has no plans to buy the Lennon house.

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Paul leads new anti-landmine drive

Paul McCartney and his girlfriend, Heather Mills, launched a new campaign to rid the world of landmines.

"Landmines take or wreck three lives an hour, every hour, every day of every year. We have to come together now to try to stop that,'' Paul said on launching Adopt-A-Minefield UK, a new charity raising funds for mine clearance and landmine survivors.

An estimated 60 million landmines may still be hidden in the ground in 70 countries. Each year an estimated 26,000 people are killed or injured by landmines. As many as a third of the victims are children.

Britain's late Princess Diana made the abolition of landmines one of the causes she backed before being killed in a Paris car crash in 1997.

Heather said more work must still be done. "There have been many excellent and high-profile campaigns against this hidden killer, but the need for a continued, concerted drive to rid the world of landmines is as great now as it ever was,'' she said. In April, Heather and Paul took their campaign to Washington where they said they found Secretary of State Colin Powell supportive despite U.S. reservations about a worldwide ban.

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Famous fans vote ‘Day In The Life’ Fab Four's best

‘A Day In The Life’, a Lennon-McCartney opus featuring a 40-piece orchestra, is the greatest Beatles song of all time, according to the Fab Four's fellow pop stars and leaders of the music industry.

A survey published, compiled a greatest Beatles song chart after polling celebrity fans, including Paul Weller, Radiohead, REM, Travis, Goldie and Noddy Holder.

John Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, which he sometimes described as his best song, narrowly beat his ‘I Am The Walrus’ for the No. 2 spot. All three songs were released in 1967.

"The Beatles supplied the soundtrack for being young in the Sixties and in ways that no other band has done, they have touched the lives of successive generations since", said Allan Jones, editor of music magazine Uncut which carried out the poll.

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McCartney calls Lennon's killer "jerk of all jerks"

Paul condemned John Lennon's killer as "the jerk of all jerks" as he burst into verse to honor the fellow Beatle with whom he created so much magic.

Laying his heart on his sleeve in his new role as a poet, Paul was fulsome in praise of John, gunned down outside his New York apartment by Mark Chapman in 1980.

Performing his poems at Britain's leading literary festival in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, Paul fondly recalled his first meeting with John: "He smelt of beer".

He then hauntingly adopted Chapman's voice for the poem: "I'm the guy with the pistol who kills your best friend. You can't really blame me because I'm round the bend".

Paul's first volume of poetry – "Blackbird Singing" -- has sold more than 55,000 copies in Britain and the United States. Now it is being translated into Japanese, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

He won a standing ovation from 1,300 ‘Poetic Beatlemania’ fans as he read his verses -- and even tried a cheeky dose of audience participation in a swelteringly hot marquee.

The audience loved him -- and he was delighted that Bill Clinton, one of his heroes, had quipped on his Hay-on-Wye appearance, which he was just acting as "the warm-up act to Paul McCartney". The former president was slow hand-clapped for being 45 minutes late in starting the night's lecture on conflict resolution. Paul stepped out on time and told the crowd "At least I wasn't late".

The poetry book also contains the lyrics from some of the most memorable Beatle songs and Paul, ever sensitive to criticism, sought to disprove one critic who had challenged readers to "try and say the song lyrics without laughing".

So Paul obliged by reading the words of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Maxwell's Silver Hammer’ without bursting into song.

Then he coached the eager crowd into a burst of audience participation for his grand finale. It is not often that you can sit in a tent in the Welsh mountains and watch a group of middle-aged middle-class book fans chanting at the top of their voices: "No one will be watching us. Why don't we do it in the road?"

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Wings the Album, the Documentary...And Now the Book

Paul McCartney reliving all his yesterdays, revealed that he is producing a book about his group Wings and illustrating it with photos by his late wife Linda.

Wings, the group he formed after the acrimonious breakup of The Beatles, has already been the subject of a television documentary and a 'Greatest Hits' album.

Now it's time for the book -- and for the first time he will be publishing the backstage rock photos taken by Linda. Before meeting Paul, Linda Eastman was a leading photographer of rock icons like Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrixand the Doors.

Marriage to Paul changed all that when she became a mother and joined Wings as the keyboard player. Before her death from breast cancer in 1998, she said: ''Playing in a band totally stopped me as a working photographer, my career just stopped.

"Photography was more important to me than music -- but my husband and my family were more important to me than photography and I was prepared to give up photography for them,'' she added.

But that still didn't stop her taking informal pictures which are now to see the light of day in a new ‘Wingspan’ book for which Paul McCartney will be supplying the text.

"Linda had en eye for honesty", he said. "She saw the truth and that shines through all of the images that she produced. Her pictures are all very natural, nothing was posed".

A collection of Linda's rock photos – ‘Sixties: Portrait Of An Era’ became an international bestseller in 1992, selling 200,000 copies.

The Wingspan 'Greatest Hits' album entered the BillBoard album chart in the United States at number two, making it the fastest-selling album of McCartney's post-Beatles career. The Wingspan television documentary, showing home movie footage from the McCartney’s, attracted a U.S. television audience of 15 million.

Paul McCartney has a new studio album coming out in September and he has said he would like to hit the road, for the first time in eight years with a string of impromptu concerts around the world.

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Stella McCartney Would Dump Fashion for Family-Interview

Designer Stella McCartney wants to have children and would be prepared to give up fashion if necessary to start a family, according to an interview.

Just a month ago Stella announced she was leaving French fashion house Chloe to launch her own clothes label with the Italian luxury goods group Gucci.

In an interview in Britain's Sunday Times, Stella said that she wanted to follow the lead of her mother Linda McCartney in being a "dinner-on-the-table mum". "I've inherited her love of cooking, and I very much want to be married and have children one day, I'd rather not do fashion if it meant that I couldn't have a family".

Stella, whose catwalk designs rank among the world's best, added: "But I don't think women today need to make that choice. Look at Donna Karen. She’s designer, a businesswoman and a mother".

Stella said that she was "flattered" that Gucci had wanted her to work for them, but said deciding her future had been nerve-racking. "I was even having panic attacks", she said.

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Paul's Birthday Celebration

On Saturday 16th June we will be have an early celebration for Paul's birthday with a here-there-everywhere coach tour of Macca's Merseyside, party lunch at Calderstones Park PLUS for the first time ever....Beatle fans can celebrate with a night of Beatle nostalgia at New Clubmoor Hall - the place where Paul made his debut as a Quarryman back in October 1957, and the first venue to ever PAY Paul for his services - yes, the first of Macca's Millions was earned here.

Best of all - members of The Quarrymen have re-united to re-create that day all those years ago!! For details, go to www.live@pool.com, or e-mail me on live@pooltours.com

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Paul McCartney Mulls World Tour

Why don't you do it on the road, Paul? - "That would be good. I do fancy that actually," Paul said in a statement regarding plans to launch his first world tour in eight years this fall.

Paul, whose Wingspan debuted at number two on the charts this week is putting the final touches on a new studio album for release in September, at which time he says he's likely to launch some kind of world tour.

"I think it is very likely that I might tour around then. I like to go out on the road with a new album and I'm very excited by this one," Paul says. "I've been recording it in the States and we recorded 18 tracks in just two weeks. Recording new songs makes you enthusiastic and want to get out and play them."

The tour, described by Reuters as possibly a series of "impromptu shows," would be Paul's first since 1993's Off the Ground tour. Although in the interim, Paul has overseen performances of his classical works and done one-night stands, like his infamous pre-millennium Cavern Club gig in 1999 that was Webcast live. (Most fans couldn't hear a thing due to Net congestion.)

With Paul making the publicity rounds lately pushing his Wingspan documentary, soundtrack and a poetry book, Blackbird Singing, you might think he'd be willing to reform Wings. But Macca has nixed the idea, deciding to tour with the mostly unknown sidemen who play on his album.

"You can't reform Wings for the same reason that you can't reform The Beatles, because a very important member of each band wouldn't be there," he tells Reuters. "With The Beatles, it is John and with Wings it is Linda."

Meanwhile, McCartney, 58, recently took a potshot at Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, telling Radio Times magazine that Ono refused to change the song credits for "Yesterday."

The best-selling ballad, while officially credited to Lennon-McCartney, was a Paul tune, featuring him playing an acoustic guitar backed by a string quartet.

"At one point Yoko earned more from 'Yesterday' than I did," Paul told the magazine. "It doesn't compute, especially when it's the only song that none of The Beatles had anything to do with. I asked as a favor if I could have my name before John's on the Anthology credits for 'Yesterday,' and Yoko refused."

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Paul Visits George in Italy

Paul McCartney has paid an emotional visit to George Harrison, who is recovering from a lung cancer operation, reports the Sunday People newspaper.

Paul visited George in his hotel suite in Milan where George is recovering after the op in America.

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Limited Edition of Autographed 'Yesterday' Scores to Raise Funds for Montserrat

This received from Bob Hieronimus.
Sir George Martin did not receive his knighthood simply for serving in the legitimate capacity of "the Fifth Beatle" or for producing all the Beatles hits. Almost as legendary are Sir George's generous spirit and philanthropic nature. After the volcanic explosions of 1995 completely destroyed Martin's home on Montserrat, along with over half of the rest of the island, he has been working ceaselessly to bring comfort and aid to the surviving community.

In 1997 the world rallied to his cause of assisting the volcano-devastated island of Montserrat where Sir George's AIR studios once recorded such luminaries as Paul McCartney, Sting, Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton by producing a "rock royalty" concert at the Royal Albert Hall featuring all these and many more. Hieronimus & Co. assisted with donations and by organizing a simultaneous memorabilia sale and fundraiser at our local Baltimore Hard Rock Cafe.

When we heard another fundraiser was being planned we asked Sir George for the details, and he supplied the following news which will excite all Beatlefans. Sir George Martin wrote the introduction to my book about the making of the film, The Beatles Yellow Submarine, which will be published by Krause Publications early next year. For more information on the Yellow Submarine book, please visit http:// www.21stCenturyRadio.com/yellowsubmarine.html

Dear Bob & Zoh,
"Thank you for your fax. You are kind to think of our fund raising efforts for Montserrat; I am sure you have done enough as it is. To raise the remainder needed to complete the Cultural Center which will be the focal point of the new town, I have cooked up a special scheme which I would like you to know about. I have organised an internet auction which takes place on June 14th 2001, in which Yahoo have collaborated and I persuaded Paul McCartney to work with me on the project.

"Quite simply, I have arranged to have a limited edition of 490 perfect reproductions made of the original score that I wrote for string quartet for "Yesterday" framed by the fine British designer Viscount David Linley (he is Princess Margaret's son, but don't hold that against him!) The result is a stunning objet d'art. Paul and I have signed them all again recently as authentication, and the number one score is to be auctioned first, beginning 14th June, which you probably know will be the 36th anniversary of the recording.

Bids are assessed for a two week period, at the end of which the highest bid receives this special piece of memorabilia. A few days later we have the same process, but this time the remaining 489 copies are put up for sale and after another two weeks the top 489 bids win the last of the series. That's it folks! No more. It is a one-off. I hope and expect that we will raise a million dollars, and I have set up a special foundation for it.

"It happily runs along with the issue on July 3rd of retrospective collection of CDs of my productions over the past fifty years. Rather a bizarre lot as it includes a vast variety of works - over 150 titles ranging from classical folk, jazz and pop recordings, comedy, spoken word and even children's stuff. It is lovely for me, but I am not sure who will buy the six-pack set. Nevertheless, EMI are setting up a special web site for it and expect it to sell.

"God Bless! George"

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