- published: 29 Apr 2006
- views: 118902
- author: MrsEssence
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- 1967–1970
- 4-by The Beatles
- A Day in the Life
- Abbey Road
- Abbey Road (street)
- Abbey Road Studios
- Accountancy Shanty
- Act Naturally
- Adolf Hitler
- Ain't She Sweet
- Air India
- Alan W. Pollack
- Alfred Lennon
- Alistair Taylor
- All My Loving (EP)
- All You Need Is Cash
- All You Need Is Love
- Allan Williams
- Allen Klein
- And I Love Her
- Andy White (drummer)
- Anthology 1
- Anthology 2
- Anthology 3
- Apple Corps
- Apple Records
- Apple scruffs
- Ask Me Why
- Astrid Kirchherr
- ATV Music
- Baby's in Black
- Back in the U.S.S.R.
- Beach Boys
- Beatle boots
- Beatlemania
- Beatlemania Hamburg
- Beatles '65
- Beatles Anthology
- Beatles Day
- Beatles for Sale
- Beatles VI
- Beatles-Platz
- Bert Kaempfert
- Bill Harry
- Bill Murray
- Billy Preston
- Blues
- Bob Dylan
- Bognor Regis
- Bolton
- Bongos, Bass & Bob
- Bongwater (band)
- Bonzo Dog Band
- Book The Beatles
- Brian Epstein
- Brian Hodgson
- Brian Jones
- British Invasion
- Bruce Spizer
- Bruno Koschmider
- Brylcreem
- Can't Buy Me Love
- Candlestick Park
- Capitol Records
- Category The Beatles
- Chas Newby
- Che Guevara
- Cheese & Onions
- Come Together
- Comedy rock
- Communist Cooking
- Concrete Jungle Boy
- Cynthia Lennon
- Daniel Johnston
- Das Damen
- Dave Dexter, Jr.
- David Battley
- Day Tripper
- Deaf
- Death of John Lennon
- Deface the Music
- Derek Taylor
- Dick James
- Dogbowl
- Donovan
- Egyptian Theatre
- Eight Days a Week
- Eleanor Rigby
- Eric Clapton
- Eric Idle
- Everly Brothers
- Fifth Beatle
- For You Blue
- Four by The Beatles
- Francie Schwartz
- Frank Sinatra
- Free as a Bird
- From Me to You
- Front Loader
- Fräulein
- Galaxie 500
- Gary Weis
- Geoff Emerick
- George Dunning
- George Harrison
- George Martin
- George Toogood Smith
- Germans
- Get Back
- Giles Martin
- Glyn Johns
- Grammy
- Gramophone record
- Graphic novel
- Guerrilla
- Gummo Marx
- Gus Dudgeon
- Hamburg
- Handmade Films
- Harrisongs
- Harry Nilsson
- Hello, Goodbye
- Help! (album)
- Help! (film)
- Help! (song)
- Hey Jude
- Hey Jude (album)
- Highway 61 Revisited
- Hollywood
- Horst Fascher
- How I Won the War
- Hunter Davies
- I Am the Walrus
- I Feel Fine
- I Give Myself To You
- I Must Be In Love
- I'll Cry Instead
- I'll Get You
- I'm Down
- If I Fell
- If You Love Me, Baby
- In His Own Write
- Indica Gallery
- Ivan Vaughan
- J.J. Jones
- Jabberwocky (film)
- Jane Asher
- Jeff Lynne
- Jellyfish Kiss
- Jim Keltner
- Jimmie Nicol
- Joey Arias
- John Cleese
- John Lennon
- Johnny Gentle
- Johnny Hutchinson
- Julia Lennon
- Jürgen Vollmer
- Kaiserkeller
- Ken Brown (musician)
- Ken Mansfield
- Ken Scott
- Ken Thornton
- Ken Townsend
- Keyboardist
- Kinfauns (Surrey)
- King Missile
- Klaus Voormann
- L'Amour Perdu
- Lady Madonna
- Larry Parnes
- Lawrence Welk
- Lead guitar
- Lee Eastman
- Lennon–McCartney
- Let It Be
- Let It Be (album)
- Let It Be (film)
- Let It Be (song)
- Let It Be... Naked
- Lida Husik
- Linda McCartney
- Lingasong Records
- Liverpool
- Long Tall Sally (EP)
- Lorne Michaels
- Love Me Do
- Magic Alex
- Magical Mystery Tour
- Mal Evans
- Malcolm Foster
- Marc Ribot
- Mark Griffiths
- Mark Lewisohn
- Marx Brothers
- Matchbox (song)
- Maureen Starkey
- Meet The Beatles!
- Member of Parliament
- Michael Palin
- Mick Jagger
- Mickey Simmonds
- Mimi Smith
- Mockumentary
- Mona Best
- Monty Python
- MPL Communications
- Murray the K
- Music genre
- My Bonnie
- Nazi
- Neil Aspinall
- Neil Innes
- New Orleans
- New York City
- New York Mets
- Nicky Hopkins
- Northern Songs
- Nowhere Man (EP)
- Nowhere Man (song)
- Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
- Old Brown Shoe
- Ollie Halsall
- Once We Had A Donkey
- Paleface (musician)
- Paperback Writer
- Parlophone
- Parody music
- Past Masters
- Pastiche
- Pattie Boyd
- Paul is dead
- Paul McCartney
- Penny Lane
- Pete Best
- Peter and Gordon
- Peter Crabbe
- Peter Shotton
- Peter Stampfel
- Phil McDonald
- Phil Spector
- Plastic Ono Band
- Please Please Me
- Pop rock
- Por Siempre Beatles
- Portal The Beatles
- Prefab
- Pretenders (band)
- Protest Song
- Pub
- Punk rock
- Ravi Shankar
- Ray Connolly
- Record label
- Reel Music
- Reeperbahn
- Revolution (song)
- Revolver (album)
- Rhino Records
- Richard Lester
- Ricky Fataar
- Ringo Starr
- Rob Reiner
- Rockpile
- Rod Stewart
- Roger Rettig
- Ronnie Scott
- Rory Storm
- Rubber Soul
- Rutland
- Saturday Night Live
- Savile Row
- Say Sorry Again
- Scotch of St James
- Seltaeb
- Sessions (album)
- Shangri-La
- She Loves You
- She's a Woman
- Shea Stadium
- Shimmy Disc
- Shonen Knife
- Sid Bernstein
- Sketch comedy
- Soho
- Something
- Spinal Tap (band)
- Startling Music
- Stoop Solo
- Strawberry Field
- Stuart Sutcliffe
- Superman
- Superman True Brit
- Swan Records
- Syd Straw
- Tea house
- Teapot
- Template The Rutles
- Terry Gilliam
- Thank You Girl
- The Bag O'Nails
- The Beatles
- The Beatles (album)
- The Beatles (No. 1)
- The Beatles Box
- The Beatles Box Set
- The Beatles in 1966
- The Beatles in film
- The Beatles in India
- The Beatles in Italy
- The Beatles in Mono
- The Beatles reunions
- The Beatles timeline
- The Beatles' Ballads
- The Beatles' First
- The Beatles' Hits
- The Beatles' Story
- The Cavern Club
- The Compleat Beatles
- The Dirty Mac
- The Early Beatles
- The Ed Sullivan Show
- The Number Ones
- The Pussywillows
- The Quarrymen
- The Rolling Stones
- The Rutles
- The Rutles (album)
- The Star-Club
- The Times
- The Tinklers
- The Top Ten Club
- There's a Place
- Things We Said Today
- This Boy
- This Is Spinal Tap
- Ticket to Ride
- Time Bandits
- Tittenhurst Park
- Tollie Records
- Tony Barrow
- Tony Sheridan
- Tuli Kupferberg
- Twist and Shout
- Twist and Shout (EP)
- UK Singles Chart
- Uncle Wiggly
- University of Oxford
- Unrest (band)
- Up Against It
- Utopia (band)
- Vee-Jay Records
- Very Together
- Virgin Records
- Warner Bros. Records
- We Can Work It Out
- What Goes On (song)
- Wigmore Street
- With The Beatles
- Yes It Is
- Yesterday
- Yesterday (EP)
- Yesterday and Today
- Yoko Ono
- You Can't Do That
- Zeppo
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Abbey Road Studios
Abbey Road Studios is a recording studio located at 3 Abbey Road, St John's Wood, City of Westminster, London, England. It was established in November 1931 by the Gramophone Company, a predecessor of British music company EMI, its present owner. It is most notable as being the venue in the 1960s for innovative recording techniques adopted by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Hollies, Badfinger, and others.
Towards the end of 2009, the studio came under threat of sale to property developers, however the British Government protected the site, granting it English Heritage Grade II listed status in 2010, thereby preventing the building from subjection to major alterations.
Originally a nine-bedroom Georgian townhouse built in the 1830s on the footpath leading to Kilburn Abbey, the building was later converted to apartments where the most flamboyant resident was Maundy Gregory. The premises were acquired by the Gramophone Company in 1931 and converted into studios. Pathé filmed the opening of the studios, when Sir Edward Elgar conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in recording sessions of his music. The neighbouring house is also owned by the studio and used to house musicians. During the mid-1900s the studio was extensively used by leading British conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, whose house was just around the corner from the studio building.
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Beatles-Platz
The Beatles-Platz (German: Beatles Square/Plaza) is a plaza in the St. Pauli quarter in Hamburg, Germany, at the crossroads of Reeperbahn and Große Freiheit. It is circular, with a diameter of 29 metres (95 ft) and paved black to make it look like a vinyl record. Surrounding the place are five statues, representing The Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe, George Harrison, and a hybrid of drummers Pete Best and Ringo Starr each of whom played with The Beatles at times during their Hamburg engagements.
This plaza was built to commemorate Hamburg's importance in The Beatles' history. The draft design was by architects Dohse & Stich during a common tendering. Building the project cost about €500,000 and was split among donations, sponsors and the city of Hamburg.
The project's initiator was Hamburg radio station Oldie 95. On the station's instigation the community of interest IG Beat City was founded, which considers The Beatles-Platz as a prelude for more projects targeting The Beatles' memorisation in Hamburg's cityscape.[citation needed]
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Bognor Regis
Coordinates: 50°46′57″N 0°40′35″W / 50.78237°N 0.67639°W / 50.78237; -0.67639
Bognor Regis is a seaside resort town and civil parish in the Arun district of West Sussex, on the south coast of England. It is 55.5 miles (89 km) south-south-west of London, 24 miles (39 km) west of Brighton, and 6 miles (10 km) south-east of the city of Chichester. Other nearby towns include Littlehampton east-north-east and Selsey to the south-west. The nearby villages of Felpham, briefly home to the poet William Blake, and Aldwick are now suburbs of Bognor Regis, along with those of North and South Bersted.
Bognor is one of the oldest recorded Anglo-Saxon place names in Sussex. In a document of 680 AD it is referred to as Bucgan ora meaning Bucge's (a female Anglo-Saxon name) shore, or landing place.
Bognor Regis was originally named just "Bognor", being a fishing (and one time, smuggling) village until the 18th century, when it was converted into a resort by Sir Richard Hotham.
Bognor was a part of the ancient parish of South Bersted in the county of Sussex, attaining parish status separate from South Bersted in 1828. Until 1894 it formed part of the Hundred of Aldwick, an ancient division of Chichester Rape. From 1894 to 1974 it was part of Bognor Urban District (Bognor Regis Urban District from 1929), and since 1974 it has been a part of Arun District.
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Death of John Lennon
Coordinates: 40°46′35″N 73°58′34″W / 40.776436°N 73.976006°W / 40.776436; -73.976006
John Lennon was an English musician who gained worldwide fame as one of the founders of The Beatles, for his subsequent solo career, and for his political activism and pacifism. He was shot by Mark David Chapman at the entrance of the building where he lived, The Dakota, in New York City, on Monday, 8 December 1980; Lennon had just returned from Record Plant Studio with his wife, Yoko Ono.
Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where it was stated that nobody could have lived for more than a few minutes after sustaining such injuries. Shortly after local news stations reported Lennon's death, crowds gathered at Roosevelt Hospital and in front of The Dakota. He was cremated on 10 December 1980, at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York; the ashes were given to Ono, who chose not to hold a funeral for him. The first report of his death to a national audience was announced by Howard Cosell, on ABC's Monday Night Football.
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Hamburg
Hamburg (
/ˈhæmbɜrɡ/; German pronunciation: [ˈhambʊɐ̯k], local pronunciation [ˈhambʊɪç]; Low German/Low Saxon: Hamborg [ˈhaˑmbɔːx]), officially Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, is the second-largest city in Germany, the thirteenth largest German state, and the sixth-largest city in the European Union. The city is home to over 1.8 million people, while the Hamburg Metropolitan Region (including parts of the neighbouring Federal States of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein) has more than 4.3 million inhabitants. Situated on the river Elbe, the port of Hamburg is the second largest port in Europe (after the Port of Rotterdam) and 11th-largest worldwide.
Hamburg's official name, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (German: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg), reflects Hamburg's history as a member of the medieval Hanseatic League, as a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, and that Hamburg is a city-state and one of the sixteen States of Germany.
Hamburg is a major transport hub in Northern Germany and is one of the most affluent cities in Europe. It has become a media and industrial centre, with plants and facilities belonging to Airbus, Blohm + Voss and Aurubis. The radio and television broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk and publishers such as Gruner + Jahr and Spiegel-Verlag are pillars of the important media industry in Hamburg. In total, there are more than 120,000 enterprises.
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Hollywood
Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema. Today, much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding areas such as the Westside neighborhood, and the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys, but significant auxiliary industries, such as editing, effects, props, post-production, and lighting companies remain in Hollywood, as does the backlot of Paramount Pictures.
On February 16, 2005, California Assembly Members Jackie Goldberg and Paul Koretz introduced a bill to require California to keep specific records on Hollywood as if it were independent, although it is not the typical practice of the City of Los Angeles to establish specific boundaries for districts or neighborhoods. For this to be done, the boundaries were defined. The bill was unanimously supported by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles City Council. Assembly Bill 588 was approved by the Governor of California on August 28, 2006, and now the district of Hollywood has official borders. The border can be loosely described as the area east of West Hollywood, south of Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, Cahuenga Boulevard, and Barham Boulevard, and the cities of Burbank and Glendale, north of Melrose Avenue and west of the Golden State Freeway and Hyperion Avenue. This includes all of Griffith Park and Los Feliz[citation needed] – two areas that were hitherto considered separate from Hollywood by most Angelenos. The population of the district, including Los Feliz, as of the 2000 census was 123,436 and the median household income was $33,409 in 1999.
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Indica Gallery
Coordinates: 51°30′27″N 0°08′16″W / 51.507364°N 0.137737°W / 51.507364; -0.137737
Indica Gallery was a counterculture art gallery in Mason's Yard (off Duke Street), St. James's, London, England during the late 1960s, in the basement of the Indica Bookshop co-owned by John Dunbar, Peter Asher and Barry Miles. It was supported by Paul McCartney and hosted a show of Yoko Ono's work in November 1966 at which Ono first met John Lennon.
The International Times newspaper was started in the basement of the Indica bookshop.
Miles had been running the bookshop and alternative happenings venue Better Books but with new, more traditional, owners arriving, had been planning to open his own bookstore/venue. Through Paolo Leonni, Miles met John Dunbar who was planning on opening a gallery, and with John's friend Peter Asher as silent partner, they combined their ideas into a company called Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited (MAD) to start the Indica Books and Gallery in September 1965, as an outlet for art and literature. They found empty premises at 6 Masons Yard, which was in the same courtyard as the Scotch of St James club, where John Dunbar was leaving with his girlfriend Marianne Faithful, when he discovered the place.
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Kaiserkeller
Kaiserkeller is a night club in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg, Germany, near the Reeperbahn. It was opened by Bruno Koschmider on October 14, 1959. The Beatles had a contract with Kaiserkeller to play there in 1960.
A Caribbean steel band that had played at Allan Williams Jacaranda club in Liverpool took an offer to play in Hamburg. After receiving letters enthusing about Hamburg's club scene, Williams made contact with Koschmider, offering to act as a booking agent, to which Koschmider agreed. Koschmider had previously booked Derry and the Seniors after seeing them perform in London, and as they were successful in Hamburg, he asked Williams to look for additional groups.Rory Storm and The Hurricanes were Williams' first choice, but as they were committed to a season at Butlins holiday camp, they turned his offer down (as did Gerry & The Pacemakers) so Williams sent The Beatles to Hamburg instead. They were required to play six or seven hours a night, seven nights a week. The Beatles first played at Koschmider's Indra club, sleeping in small, "dirty" rooms in the Bambi Kino, and then moved (after the closure of the Indra) to the larger Kaiserkeller.
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Kinfauns (Surrey)
Kinfauns was a bungalow-style house, located at 16 Claremont Drive, Esher, Surrey, England, KT10 9LU, on the Claremont Estate. From 1964 to 1970 it was home of George Harrison, lead guitarist of The Beatles, and was where many of the demo recordings for the White Album were made. The house has since been demolished, and a new one built in its place.
Harrison bought Kinfauns for £20,000 on 17 July 1964, on the advice of Dr. Walter Strach, the Beatles' accountant. Going house-shopping, he said later, "It was the first one I saw, and I thought, that'll do." He was joined there months later by wife-to-be Pattie Boyd. Harrison and Boyd were married on 21 January 1966, and lived in the house until 1970, when Harrison purchased Friar Park.
During 1967, Harrison and Boyd painted the outside of the house in psychedelic patterns; a mural around the fireplace was created by design collective The Fool, who also painted several Beatles musical instruments and Harrison's Mini.
Aside from Paul McCartney's house at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St. John's Wood, Kinfauns was probably the home the Beatles gathered at most, as it was only a short drive from the homes of John Lennon (Kenwood) and Ringo Starr (Sunny Heights). It was where Harrison, Lennon and their wives retreated during their first LSD experience in 1965, and in May 1968 it was where many of the demo recordings for the White Album were made, on Harrison's Ampex four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. (These demos have been released on various bootleg albums; seven of them also appear on The Beatles Anthology, Vol. 3.)
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Liverpool
Liverpool ( /ˈlɪvəpuːl/) is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Liverpool was 445,200 and was part of a larger urban area of 816,216.
Historically a part of Lancashire, the urbanisation and expansion of Liverpool were both largely brought about by the city's status as a major port. By the 18th century, trade from the West Indies, Ireland and mainland Europe coupled with close links with the Atlantic Slave Trade furthered the economic expansion of Liverpool. By the early 19th century, 40% of the world's trade passed through Liverpool's docks, contributing to Liverpool's rise as a major city.
Inhabitants of Liverpool are referred to as Liverpudlians but are also colloquially known as "Scousers", in reference to the local dish known as "scouse", a form of stew. The word "Scouse" has also become synonymous with the Liverpool accent and dialect. Liverpool's status as a port city has contributed to its diverse population, which, historically, were drawn from a wide range of peoples, cultures, and religions, particularly those from Ireland. The city is also home to the oldest Black African community in the country and the oldest Chinese community in Europe.
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New Orleans
New Orleans ( /nuː ˈɔrliənz/ or /ˈnuː ɔrˈliːnz/, locally /nuː ˈɔrlənz/ or /ˈnɔrlənz/; French: La Nouvelle-Orléans [la nuvɛlɔʁleɑ̃] (
listen)) is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The population of the city proper was 343,829 as of the 2010 U.S. Census. The New Orleans metropolitan area (New Orleans–Metairie–Kenner Metropolitan Statistical Area) had a population of 1,167,764 in 2010 and was the 46th largest in the United States. The New Orleans–Metairie–Bogalusa Combined Statistical Area, a larger trading area, had a 2010 population of 1,214,932.
The city is named after Philippe d'Orléans, Duke of Orléans, Regent of France, and is well known for its distinct French Creole architecture, as well as its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage. New Orleans is also famous for its cuisine, music (particularly as the birthplace of jazz), and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The city is often referred to as the "most unique" in America.
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Penny Lane
Coordinates: 53°23′13″N 2°55′10″W / 53.38694°N 2.91944°W / 53.38694; -2.91944
"Penny Lane" is a song by The Beatles, written primarily by Paul McCartney. It was credited to Lennon–McCartney.
Recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, "Penny Lane" was released in February 1967 as one side of a double A-sided single, along with "Strawberry Fields Forever". Both songs were later included on the Magical Mystery Tour LP (1967). The single was the result of the record company wanting a new release after several months of no new Beatles releases.
In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked "Penny Lane" at #456 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
The song's title is derived from the name of a street near Lennon's house, in the band's hometown, Liverpool. McCartney and Lennon would meet at Penny Lane junction in the Mossley Hill area to catch a bus into the centre of the city. The area that surrounds its junction with Smithdown Road is also commonly called Penny Lane. At the time, in the 1960s, this was a significant bus terminus for several routes, and buses with "Penny Lane" displayed were common throughout Liverpool.
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Reeperbahn
The Reeperbahn is a street in Hamburg's St. Pauli district, one of the two centres of Hamburg's nightlife and also the city's red-light district. In German it is also sometimes described as die sündige Meile (the sinful mile).
The name Reeperbahn means ropewalk, which is a place where ropes are made (Low German Reep = rope, the standard German word is Seil; Bahn= track). The street was a ropewalk in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The street is lined with restaurants, night clubs, discotheques and bars. There are also strip clubs, sex shops, brothels, a sex museum and similar businesses. The Operettenhaus, a musical theatre, is also located at the Reeperbahn. It played Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats for many years, after that Mamma Mia!, an ABBA-musical, and now "Ich war noch niemals in New York", ("I have never been in New York") featuring hit songs by Austrian singer/songwriter Udo Jürgens. There are other theatres at the Reeperbahn (St. Pauli Theater, Imperial Theater, Schmidts Tivoli) and also several Cabarets/Varietés.
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Rutland
Coordinates: 52°39′20.00″N 0°39′30.00″W / 52.65556°N 0.65833°W / 52.65556; -0.65833
Rutland ( /ˈrʌtlənd/) is a landlocked county in central England, bounded on the west and north by Leicestershire, northeast by Lincolnshire and southeast by Peterborough (a unitary authority ceremonially in Cambridgeshire) and Northamptonshire.
Its greatest length north to south is only 18 miles (29.0 km), greatest breadth east to west, 17 miles (27.4 km). It is the smallest (in terms of population) normal unitary authority in mainland England (only the City of London is smaller in terms of area), and is 348th of the 354 districts in terms of population. It is the smallest historic English county, leading to the adoption of the Latin motto Multum In Parvo or "much in little" by the county council in 1950. Among modern ceremonial counties the Isle of Wight, City of London and City of Bristol are all smaller. The former County of London, in existence 1889 to 1965, also had a smaller area.
The only towns in Rutland are Oakham, the county town, and Uppingham. At the centre of the county is the large artificial reservoir, Rutland Water, with a similar surface area to Windermere. It is an important nature reserve serving as an overwintering site for wildfowl and a breeding site for ospreys. The town of Stamford is just over the border in a protruding part of Lincolnshire.
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Savile Row
Savile Row (pronounced /ˌsævɪl ˈroʊ/) is a shopping street in Mayfair, central London, famous for its traditional men's bespoke tailoring. The term "bespoke" is understood to have originated in Savile Row when cloth for a suit was said to "be spoken for" by individual customers. The short street is termed the "golden mile of tailoring", where customers have included Winston Churchill, Lord Nelson, Napoleon III and Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Savile Row runs parallel to Regent Street between Conduit Street at the northern end and Vigo Street at the southern. Linking roads include Burlington Place, Clifford Street and Burlington Gardens.
Savile Row was built between 1731 and 1735 as part of the development of the Burlington Estate, and is named after Lady Dorothy Savile, wife of the 3rd Earl of Burlington. It originally ran from Burlington Gardens (then Vigo Lane) to Boyle Street, with houses only on the east side, but in 1937–8 it extended to Conduit Street, and in the 19th century houses were built on the west side. The original architectural plan is believed to have been drawn up by Colen Campbell, though Henry Flitcroft appears to have been the main architect of the street, under the supervision of Daniel Garrett, while Nos 1 and 22–23 Savile Row were designed by William Kent, who lived next door in No 2.Dr Livingstone was laid out in state in No 1, when it was the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, before being buried in Westminster Abbey.
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Soho
Coordinates: 51°30′47″N 0°07′52″W / 51.513°N 0.131°W / 51.513; -0.131
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable transformation. It now is predominantly a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices, with only a small remnant of sex industry venues.
The area of Soho was grazing farmland until 1536, when it was taken by Henry VIII as a royal park for the Palace of Whitehall. The name "Soho" first appears in the 17th century. Most authorities believe that the name derives from a former hunting cry. The Duke of Monmouth used "soho" as a rallying call for his men at the Battle of Sedgemoor, half a century after the name was first used for this area of London.
In the 1660s the Crown granted Soho Fields to Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans. He leased 19 of its 22 acres (89,000 m2) to Joseph Girle, who gained permission to build and promptly passed his lease and licence to bricklayer Richard Frith in 1677. Frith began the development. In 1698 William III granted the Crown freehold of most of this area to William, Earl of Portland. Meanwhile the southern part of what became the parish of St. Anne, Soho, was sold by the Crown in parcels in the 16th and 17th centuries, with part going to Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester.
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Strawberry Field
Coordinates: 53°22′49″N 2°53′2″W / 53.38028°N 2.88389°W / 53.38028; -2.88389
Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army children's home in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, England.
The earliest reference to 'Strawberry Field' dates from 1870. In 1912 it was transferred to a wealthy merchant whose widow sold the estate to the Salvation Army in 1934. It opened on 7 July 1936. The original house was later demolished and replaced with a smaller purpose-built home for children which opened in the early 1970s. This home provided three family units, each accommodating 12 children. It closed in early January 2005 and is now a church and prayer centre. The famous gates marking its entrance were removed and replaced with replicas in May 2011.
The name of the home became world famous in 1967 with the release of The Beatles single "Strawberry Fields Forever" written by John Lennon. Lennon grew up near the home - one of his childhood treats was the garden party that took place each summer on the grounds of Strawberry Field. Lennon's Aunt Mimi recalled: 'As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army Band starting, John would jump up and down shouting "Mimi, come on. We're going to be late."' He and his childhood friends Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan often played in the wooded area behind the building, which Lennon nicknamed in the plural "Strawberry Fields."
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The Bag O'Nails
The Bag O'Nails was a live music venue and meeting place for musicians in the 1960s, situated at 8 Kingly Street, Soho, London. Bands and other musicians such as Georgie Fame and Gass appeared there, often jamming with artists such as Jimi Hendrix. The venue hosted an early gig by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
After Beatles recording sessions in London their roadie Mal Evans, personal assistant Neil Aspinall and Paul McCartney would often look for a place where they could eat and The Bag O'Nails was one of their favourite venues. McCartney met his future wife Linda Eastman there on 15 May 1967. In his memoirs Evans wrote:" January 19 and 20: "I ended up drunk in The Bag O'Nails with Paul [McCartney] and Neil [Aspinall]".
Coordinates: 51°30′44.5″N 0°8′20″W / 51.512361°N 0.13889°W / 51.512361; -0.13889
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The Beatles in India
The Beatles visited Rishikesh in India in 1968 to attend an advanced Transcendental Meditation (TM) training session at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Amidst widespread media attention, their stay at the ashram was one of the band's most productive periods. Their adoption of the Maharishi as their guru is credited by some as changing attitudes in the West about Indian spirituality, and encouraging the study of Transcendental Meditation. The Beatles first met the Maharishi in London in August 1967 and then attended a seminar in Bangor, Wales. Although planned to be a 10-day session, their stay was cut short by the death of their manager, Brian Epstein. Wanting to learn more, they kept in contact with the Maharishi and planned to attend his ashram in October, but their trip was rescheduled due to other commitments.
The Maharishi's compound was across from Rishikesh, located in the holy "Valley of the Saints" in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the home to many ashrams. The Beatles arrived there in February 1968, along with wives, girlfriends, assistants and numerous reporters, joining about 60 other TM students, including musicians Donovan, Mike Love of The Beach Boys, and flautist Paul Horn. While there, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison wrote many songs (Ringo Starr wrote one), of which eighteen were later recorded for The Beatles (White Album), two for Abbey Road, and others for solo works.
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The Cavern Club
The Cavern Club is a rock and roll club in Liverpool, England. Opened on Wednesday 16 January 1957, the club had their first performance by The Beatles on 9 February 1961, and where Brian Epstein first saw The Beatles performing on 9 November 1961.
Alan Sytner opened the club having been inspired by the Jazz district in Paris, where there were a number of clubs in cellars. Sytner returned to Liverpool and wanted to open a club similar to Le Caveau in Paris. He eventually found a perfect cellar for his club — which had been used as an air raid shelter during the war — and opened it on 16 January 1957. The first act to open the club was the Merseysippi Jazz Band.
What started as a jazz club eventually became a hangout for skiffle groups. Whilst playing golf with Sytner's father, Dr. Joseph Sytner, Nigel Walley — who had left school at 15 to become an apprentice golf professional at the Lee Park Golf Club — asked Dr. Sytner if his son could book The Quarrymen at The Cavern, which was one of three jazz clubs he managed. Dr. Sytner suggested that the band should play at the golf club first, so as to assess their talent, which they did. Sytner phoned Walley a week later and offered the band an interlude spot playing skiffle between the performances of two jazz bands at The Cavern, on Wednesday, 7 August 1957.
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The Star-Club
The Star-Club was a music club in Hamburg, Germany that opened Friday 13 April 1962 and was initially operated by Manfred Weissleder and Horst Fascher. In the 1960s, many of the giants of rock music played at the club. The club closed on 31 December 1969 and the building it occupied was destroyed by a fire in 1987. The address in Hamburg area St. Pauli was: Große Freiheit 39; Große Freiheit is a side street of the Reeperbahn.
The club achieved worldwide renown through the performances of the Beatles, who played there 13 April 1962 - 31 May 1962 and started another round of performances 1 November 1962. Their last performance there was 31 December 1962; that performance was recorded on a home tape machine, and a remixed version was released in 1977 as Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962.
The Beatles' first Hamburg Club performance was at the Indra Club (also in Große Freiheit) at 18 August 1960.
English musicians (alphabetical): The Beatles, Chicken Shack (featuring Christine McVie (Perfect)), Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, Cream, Lee Curtis, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, Earth (pre-Black Sabbath), The Graduates, The Jimi Hendrix Experience (US/UK, march 1967), The Jaybirds (featuring Alvin Lee of Ten Years After), Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas (band), The Liverbirds, The Overlanders, The Pretty Things, The Remo Four, The Searchers; Richard Thompson, Soft Machine...
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University of Oxford
Coordinates: 51°45′40″N 1°15′12″W / 51.7611°N 1.2534°W / 51.7611; -1.2534
The University of Oxford (informally Oxford University or Oxford) is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096. The University grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. In post-nominals, the University of Oxford was historically abbreviated as Oxon. (from the Latin Oxoniensis), although Oxf is now used in official university publications.
After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled north-east to Cambridge, where they established what became the University of Cambridge. The two ancient English universities have many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge. In addition to their cultural and practical associations, as a historic part of British society, they have a long history of rivalry with each other.
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Wigmore Street
Wigmore Street is a street in the City of Westminster, in the West End of London, England. The street runs for about 600 yards parallel and to the north of Oxford Street between Portman Square to the west and Cavendish Square to the east.
The well-known Wigmore Hall concert hall is located on north side of Wigmore Street, just to the east of the junction with Welbeck Street. Harley Street and Wimpole Street, famous for their private medical practices, are nearby and have junctions with Wigmore Street. Number 95 Wigmore Street was the location of the original offices of the Beatles' Apple Corps in 1968 prior to their move to Savile Row.
The nearest tube stations are on Oxford Street to the south: Marble Arch at the west end; Bond Street in the centre and Oxford Circus at the east end.
The corner of Wimpole and Wigmore Street features in the famous legal case about causing a "nuisance" between neighbours - Sturges v. Bridgman (1879).
Coordinates: 51°30′57″N 0°09′04″W / 51.51583°N 0.15111°W / 51.51583; -0.15111
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Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.
A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.
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Alan W. Pollack
Alan W. Pollack is a musicologist. He is best known for having musically analysed every Beatles song released. He started the task in 1989 and finished in 2000, with 187 original songs and 25 cover songs. The analyses have come to be known as the "Notes on..." Series, as each is entitled "Notes on Love Me Do", "Notes on Help!" and so on. The notes were released weekly, usually on Wednesdays, on the rec.music.beatles usenet group.
Pollack holds a B.A. in Music from Brooklyn College and both an M.A. and PhD from University of Pennsylvania in Music Theory and Composition. He was an instructor of music theory and composition at Yale University from 1975 - 1977. Since 1979 he has pursued a career in software engineering.
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Alfred Lennon
Alfred "Alf" Lennon (14 December 1912 – 1 April 1976) was the father of English musician John Lennon. He spent many years in an orphanage—with his sister, Edith—after his father died. He was known as being very witty and musical throughout his life—he sang and played the banjo—but not as being very dependable. Although always known as Alf by his family, he later released a record as Freddie Lennon, and was quoted in newspapers under that name.
He married Julia Stanley in 1938. John was their only child together, but as Alf was often away at sea during World War II, he did not see much of his child during his infancy. During this period, Julia became pregnant with another man's child. He offered to look after his wife, their child and the expected baby, but Julia rejected the idea. He had very little contact with his son until Beatlemania, when they met again, but later had only intermittent contact with each other. He died in Brighton, where he had gone to live after marrying 19-year-old Pauline Jones.
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Alistair Taylor
James Alistair Taylor (21 June 1935 in Runcorn – 9 June 2004 in Chesterfield) was the English personal assistant of Brian Epstein who accompanied him to the Cavern Club when he first saw The Beatles play on 9 November 1961. Taylor later became General Manager of Apple Corps for a short period.
Born in Runcorn, Taylor did his National Service in the Royal Air Force and worked in a series of jobs as a mover, timber importer and docker in the Liverpool Docks, before being successfully interviewed by Brian Epstein for a salesman job at North End Music Stores (NEMS). Brian liked him so much that he decided to offer him a job as his personal assistant in the shop.
Taylor said he invented the name of Raymond Jones to order Tony Sheridan’s album, which featured backing music by the Beatles, because he thought NEMS was losing sales by not stocking the disc:
Taylor's claim is in some doubt, as NEMS and Epstein communicated with a real Raymond Jones to acknowledge their debt once the Beatles became famous.
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Allan Williams
Allan Richard Williams (born 17 March 1930 in Bootle, Liverpool) is a former businessman and promoter of Welsh descent. He was the original booking agent and first manager of The Beatles. He personally took the young band to Hamburg, Germany, where they gained the vital show business experience that led to their emergence on the world stage.
In 1957 Williams leased a former watch-repair shop at 21 Slater Street, Liverpool, which he converted into a coffee bar. He named the venue the Jacaranda, after an exotic species of ornamental flowering tree, jacaranda mimosifolia. The Jac (as it became known) opened in September 1958. The Beatles were frequent customers, with John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe attending Liverpool Art College nearby, and Paul McCartney at Liverpool Institute adjacent to the college. Asking for the chance to play the club, Williams instead put them to work redecorating, with Lennon and Sutcliffe painting a mural for the Ladies room. Finally, the Beatles began playing at the Jac on occasion. Between May and August 1960, Williams secured a number of bookings for the group at other places. (Scott Wheeler: Charlie Lennon: Uncle To A Beatle. Boulder, Colorado: Outskirts Press, 2005.) One was backing a local stripper; when she discovered the Beatles were not familiar with the "Gypsy Fire Dance", they instead backed her with a rendition of the Harry Lime theme tune.
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Allen Klein
Allen Klein (December 18, 1931 – July 4, 2009) was an American businessman, talent agent and record label executive. His clients included The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Allen Klein was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish immigrants from Budapest, Hungary. His father was a butcher by trade, and his mother died before his first birthday. As a teenager, he worked in several jobs while attending evening classes. He excelled at mental arithmetic, and graduated from Upsala College, East Orange, New Jersey, in 1956.
He undertook bookkeeping for several people in showbusiness, and audited record companies. In 1957 he began his own business, a partnership with his wife Betty. Record industry insiders began to fear his blunt-speaking tenacity, and well-placed people began to recommend him. Klein regarded himself as a shrewd and tenacious businessman, exampled by him having a modified Bible quote on his desk, reading: "Though I walk in the shadow of the valley of evil, I have no fear, as I am the biggest bastard in the valley."
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Andy White (drummer)
Andrew "Andy" White (born 1930) is a Scottish drummer, best known for replacing Ringo Starr on drums on The Beatles' first single, "Love Me Do". White featured on the American 7" single release of the song, which also appeared on the band's debut British album, Please Please Me. He also played drums on the "Love Me Do" single B-side, "P.S. I Love You".
White has played with many other prominent musicians and groups, including Chuck Berry, Billy Fury, Herman's Hermits and Tom Jones. Allmusic called White "one of the busier drummers in England from the late '50s through the mid-'70s".
Andy White was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1930, the son of a baker. At the age of 12, he started playing drums in a pipe band, and became a professional session musician at the age of 17. In the 1950s and early 1960s, White played drums with a number of swing and traditional jazz groups and musicians. In 1958 he formed a big band jazz outfit and took it to the American Northeast where he backed "rockers" like Chuck Berry, The Platters and Bill Haley & His Comets. White said, "We used some big band arrangements and put a back beat to it to fit in with the rock 'n' roll thing. I got the chance to hear rock 'n' roll in the flesh. That was where I got a good idea about what it was supposed to happen, drumwise." In 1960 in London White recorded with Billy Fury on Fury's first album, The Sound of Fury, which is generally regarded as Britain's first rock and roll album.
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Astrid Kirchherr
Astrid Kirchherr (born 20 May 1938), is a German photographer and artist and is well known for her association with The Beatles (along with her friends Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer), and her photographs of The Beatles during their Hamburg days: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best.
Kirchherr met artist Sutcliffe in the Kaiserkeller bar in Hamburg in 1960, where he was playing bass with The Beatles, and was later engaged to him, before his death in 1962. Although Kirchherr has taken very few photographs since 1967, her early work has been exhibited in Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Vienna, and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. She has published three limited-edition books of photographs.
Astrid Kirchherr was born in 1938 in Hamburg, Germany, and is the daughter of a former executive of the German branch of the Ford Motor Company. During World War II she was evacuated to the safety of the Baltic Sea where she remembered seeing dead bodies on the shore (after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland had been bombed and sunk), and the destruction in Hamburg when she returned.
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Bert Kaempfert
Bert Kaempfert (born Berthold Kämpfert; 16 October 1923 – 21 June 1980) was a German orchestra leader and songwriter. He made easy listening and jazz-oriented records, and wrote the music for a number of well-known songs, such as Strangers in the Night and Spanish Eyes.
He was born in Hamburg, Germany - where he received his lifelong nickname, Fips - and studied at the School of Music there. A multi-instrumentalist, he was hired by Hans Busch to play with his orchestra before serving as a bandsman in the German Navy during World War II. He later formed his own big band, toured with them, then worked as an arranger and producer, making hit records with Freddy Quinn and Ivo Robić. In 1961, he hired The Beatles to back Tony Sheridan for an album called My Bonnie. The album and its singles, released by Polydor, were the Beatles' first commercially released recordings.
Kaempfert's own first hit with his orchestra had been in 1960, with Wonderland by Night. Many of his tunes became better known as hits for other artists:
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Bill Harry
Bill Harry (born in Liverpool, England) is the creator of Mersey Beat, an important newspaper of the early 1960s, which focused on the Liverpool music scene. Harry had started various magazines and newspapers before attending the Liverpool College of Art, with fellow students John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, who both later performed with The Beatles.
Harry met his wife-to-be, Virginia, at the Jacaranda club (managed by Allan Williams, the first manager of The Beatles) and she later agreed to help him start a music newspaper. After borrowing £50, Harry released the first issue of Mersey Beat on 6 July 1961, with the first 5,000 copies selling out within a short time. Harry arranged for the future Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, to see them perform a lunchtime concert at The Cavern Club on 9 November 1961. Epstein subsequently asked Harry create a national music paper, the Music Echo, but after problems with Epstein about editorial control, he decided to become a P.R.; working for many solo artistes and groups.
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Bill Murray
William James "Bill" Murray (born September 21, 1950) is an American actor, comedian and golfer. He first gained national exposure on Saturday Night Live in which he earned an Emmy Award and later went on to star in a number of critically and commercially successful comedic films, including Caddyshack (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), and Groundhog Day (1993). Murray gained additional critical acclaim later in his career, starring in Lost in Translation (2003), that earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, and a series of films directed by Wes Anderson, including Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012).
Murray was born and raised in Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, the son of Lucille (née Collins), a mail room clerk, and Edward Joseph Murray II, a lumber salesman. Murray's father died in 1967 from complications of diabetes when Bill was 17 years old. Murray, along with his eight siblings, was raised in an Irish American family. Three of his siblings are actors: John Murray, Joel Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray. A sister, Nancy, is an Adrian Dominican nun in Michigan, who has traveled the United States in a one-woman programme, portraying St. Catherine of Siena.
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Billy Preston
William Everett "Billy" Preston (September 2, 1946 – June 6, 2006) was a musician whose work included R&B, rock, soul, funk and gospel. Preston became famous, first as a session musician with such artists as Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and The Beatles, and was later successful as a solo artist with such hit pop singles as "Space Race", "Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing from Nothing", and a string of albums.
Alongside Tony Sheridan, Billy Preston was the only other musician to be credited on a Beatles recording after he was credited on the group's number-one hit, "Get Back", with the record title listed as The Beatles with Billy Preston. Steven Stills asked Preston if he could use Preston's phrase "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" in a song and created the legendary eponymous hit.
William Everett Preston was born on September 2, 1946 in Houston, Texas. At the age of three, the family moved to Los Angeles where Preston began playing piano while sitting on his mother Robbie's lap. Noted as a child prodigy, by the age of ten, Preston was playing organ onstage backing several gospel singers such as Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and Andrae Crouch. At twelve, he appeared in the W.C. Handy biopic starring Nat King Cole entitled, St. Louis Blues, playing W.C. Handy at a younger age. A year prior, Preston appeared on Cole's national TV show singing the Fats Domino hit, "Blueberry Hill".
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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (
/ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.
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Brian Epstein
Brian Samuel Epstein ( /ˈɛpstaɪn/; 19 September 1934 – 27 August 1967), was an English music entrepreneur; best known for being the manager of The Beatles, until his death. He also managed many other musical artists, such as Gerry & the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, Cilla Black, The Remo Four, and The Cyrkle. His management company was named NEMS Enterprises after his family's music stores, also called NEMS (North End Music Stores).
Epstein paid for The Beatles to record a demonstration tape in Decca's London studios, which resulted in Decca declining to sign the group to a contract. After approaching nearly all all the major recording companies and recording producers in London and being rejected, Epstein managed to secure an EMI recording contract under threat of withdrawing the sale of EMI's records at his NEMS music stores. NEMS was one of the biggest musical retail outlets in the North of England. Record producer George Martin offered a contract on behalf of EMI's small Parlophone label, only when informed of the economic threat to EMI by Epstein.
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Brian Hodgson
Brian Hodgson (born 1938) is a British television composer and sound technician. Born in Liverpool in 1938, Hodgson joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1962 where he became the original sound effects creator for the science fiction programme Doctor Who. His main claims to fame are the sound of the TARDIS (which he created by running the back door key to his mother's house along a bass string of a gutted piano, then electronically treating the recording) and the famous voices of the Daleks, which he created by distorting the actors' voices and feeding them through a device called a ring modulator. He continued to produce effects for the programme until 1972 when he left the Workshop, leaving Dick Mills to produce effects for the remainder of the show's run.
Earlier, in 1966, with fellow workshop musician Delia Derbyshire and EMS founder Peter Zinovieff, he helped set up Unit Delta Plus, an organisation which they intended to use to create and promote electronic music. Based in a studio in Zinovieff's townhouse in Putney, they exhibited their music at a few experimental and electronic music festivals, including The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at which The Beatles' "Carnival of Light" had its only public playing. After a troubled performance at the Royal College of Art, in 1967, the unit disbanded.
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Brian Jones
Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones (28 February 1942 – 3 July 1969), was an English musician and a founder member of the Rolling Stones.
Jones' main instruments were the guitar and the harmonica, but he played a wide variety of other musical instruments and was a talented multi-instrumentalist. His innovative use of traditional or folk instruments, such as the sitar and marimba, was integral to the changing sound of the band.
Originally the leader of the group, Jones' fellow bandmembers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards soon overshadowed him; especially after they became a successful songwriting team. He developed a serious drug abuse problem over the years and his role in the band steadily diminished. He was asked to leave the Rolling Stones in June 1969 and guitarist Mick Taylor took his place in the group. Jones died less than a month later by drowning in the swimming pool at his home on Cotchford Farm in East Sussex.
Original Stones bassist Bill Wyman stated about Jones: "...he formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs ... Very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it - highly intelligent - and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away."
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Bruce Spizer
David "Bruce" Spizer (born July 2, 1955) is a tax attorney in New Orleans, Louisiana, who is also recognized as an expert on The Beatles. He has published eight books, and is frequently quoted as an authority on the history of the band and its recordings.
Spizer was born and raised in New Orleans. He attended Isidore Newman School and then received B.A., M.B.A., and J.D. degrees from Tulane University, where he was a member of honorary societies Phi Beta Kappa and the Order of the Coif. While pursuing his legal career, he also managed The Cold, a popular New Wave band in New Orleans.
In 1997, Spizer earned a large legal fee from the settlement of a class action lawsuit, and decided to use some of the money to replace his childhood collection of Beatles LPs (which had been damaged by cockroaches) with a new set of first edition albums. Drawn into the world of Beatles collectors, he ended up writing and self-publishing The Beatles Records on Vee-Jay, about the relationship between EMI, the Beatles' U.K. record label, and Vee-Jay Records, the U.S. label that released the band's first records in the U.S. As of 2011, Spizer has written and published eight books about The Beatles. A New York Times reviewer described his books as containing "a wealth of detail about the Beatles' American recordings and their first visit to the United States, touching on everything from contracts and lawsuits to promotional materials, all richly illustrated." A New York Daily News article called his The Beatles' Story on Capitol Records "a Beatle collector's fantasy by a fanatic Beatles collector and historian."
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Bruno Koschmider
Bruno Koschmider (born 1926, Danzig (Gdańsk) - died 2000, Hamburg, Germany) was a German entrepreneur in Hamburg, Germany best known for employing The Beatles in the early 1960s. He controlled various businesses, such as the Bambi Kino, which was a porn cinema, The Indra club and The Kaiserkeller.
Allan Williams booked The Beatles (in May 1960) into Koschmider's Indra club.
The Beatles first played at the Indra club - sleeping in small, dirty rooms in the Bambi Kino - and then moved (after the closure of the Indra) to the larger Kaiserkeller In October 1960, they left Koschmider's club and worked at the "Top Ten Club", which was run by Peter Eckhorn. When Paul McCartney and Pete Best went back to the Bambi Kino to get their belongings they found it in almost total darkness. As a snub to Koschmider, they found a condom, attached it to a nail on the concrete wall of their room, and set fire to it. There was no real damage, but Koschmider reported them for attempted arson. McCartney and Best spent three hours in a local jail and were deported, as was George Harrison, for working under the legal age limit.
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Chas Newby
Charles 'Chas' Newby (born 18 June 1941, in Blackpool, Lancashire, England), was temporarily the bassist for The Beatles in December 1960, following the departure of Stuart Sutcliffe. When The Beatles returned from Germany for the first time, they were short of a bass guitarist. Pete Best suggested Chas Newby. Chas had been with The Blackjacks (Pete Best's group), and was now attending university, but was on vacation and so agreed to play with The Beatles. He appeared with them for four engagements in December 1960 (December 17th, Casbah Club, Liverpool; December 24th, Grosvenor Ballroom, Liscard; December 27th, Litherland Town Hall; December 31st, Casbah Club). John Lennon asked him to go to Germany, for the Beatles' second trip, but he chose to return to university.
Chas later became a teacher of Mathematics at Droitwich Spa High School in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, England.
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Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa]; June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia within popular culture.
As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was radically transformed by the endemic poverty and alienation he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region's ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.
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Cynthia Lennon
Cynthia Lillian Lennon (née Powell, born 10 September 1939) is the former wife of musician John Lennon, and mother of Julian Lennon. She grew up in the middle-class section of Hoylake, on the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. At the age of twelve, she was accepted into the Junior Art School, and was later enrolled in the Liverpool College of Art. Lennon also attended the college; a meeting with Powell in a calligraphy class led to their relationship.
When Lennon was performing in Hamburg with The Beatles, she rented Lennon's bedroom from his aunt and legal guardian, Mimi Smith. After she became pregnant, the Lennons were married on 23 August 1962, at the Mount Pleasant Register office in Liverpool. Starting in 1964, the Lennon family lived at Kenwood in Weybridge, where she kept house and participated with her husband in a London-based social life. In 1968, Lennon left her for Yoko Ono; the couple's divorce was legally granted on 8 November 1968.
She married Italian hotelier Roberto Bassanini in 1970, divorcing him in 1973. In 1976, she married John Twist, an engineer from Lancashire, but divorced him in 1983. After her divorce from Twist, she changed her name back to Lennon by deed poll and met Jim Christie, her partner for 17 years. She published a book of memoirs, A Twist of Lennon, in 1978, and later married Noel Charles, a night club owner, in 2002. In September 2005, she published a more intimate biography, John. Over the years she staged several auctions of memorabilia associated with her life with Lennon. In 2006, she and her son attended the Las Vegas premiere of the Cirque du Soleil production of Love, which was her first public appearance with Ono. She currently lives in Majorca, Spain.
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Daniel Johnston
Daniel Dale Johnston (born January 22, 1961) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and artist. Johnston was the subject of the 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. He currently lives in Waller, Texas.
Johnston has been diagnosed with manic depression and schizophrenia which has been a recurring problem throughout his life.
Johnston was born in Sacramento, California, and grew up in the northern panhandle of West Virginia between Ohio and Pennsylvania near Chester and New Cumberland, West Virginia. He began recording music in the late 1970s on a $59 Sanyo monaural Boombox, singing and playing piano and chord organ. Following graduation from Oak Glen High School, Johnston spent a few weeks at Abilene Christian University in West Texas, but soon dropped out. Later he attended the East Liverpool branch of Kent State University.
Johnston's musical work gained some notoriety when he moved to Austin, Texas. Johnston began to attract the attention of the local press and gain a following augmented in numbers by his habit of handing out tapes to people he met. Live performances were well-attended and hotly anticipated.
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Dave Dexter, Jr.
Dave E. Dexter, Jr. (1915 – 1990) was an American music journalist, record company executive, and producer known primarily for his long association with Capitol Records. He worked with many important figures in jazz and traditional popular music, including Count Basie, Peggy Lee, Duke Ellington, and Frank Sinatra. He is also known for his role in packaging and sometimes altering the recordings of The Beatles for the American market.
Dexter was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His career in music began in journalism, as he wrote about music for the Kansas City Journal-Post and then for Down Beat magazine in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this time, he produced an album entitled Kansas City Jazz which documented his hometown's jazz scene, showcasing such talents as Count Basie, Lester Young, and Big Joe Turner.
In 1943, Dexter joined Capitol Records, established the previous year, initially writing press releases and doing other publicity work, but eventually rising to the position of A&R representative. Over the next three decades, he signed some of the biggest names in music to the label, including Frank Sinatra, Stan Kenton, Peggy Lee,Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman and Kay Starr. He produced the first Dixieland recordings to reach the music charts, and was responsible for the landmark 1944 collection The History of Jazz. He also compiled a series of world music albums, Capitol of the World, and served as editor of the company's own publication, Capitol News. His productions included the Duke Ellington classic "Satin Doll".
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Derek Taylor
Derek Taylor (7 May 1932 – 8 September 1997) was an English journalist, writer and publicist, best known for his work as press officer for The Beatles. He had started his career as a local journalist in Liverpool working for the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, then becoming a North England-based writer for national British newspapers that included the News Chronicle, the Sunday Dispatch and the Sunday Express. He also served as a regular columnist and theatre critic for the Daily Express.
Taylor was a national journalist when he was assigned to write a review of a Beatles concert. He had been expected by his editors to write a piece critical of what at that time was considered by the national press as an inconsequential teen fad. However, he was enchanted by the group and instead sang their praises. Shortly afterwards, he was invited to meet The Beatles and soon became a trusted journalist in their circle.
As The Beatles gained national attention in Britain, Taylor's editors conceived of running a column ostensibly written by a Beatle to boost circulation, to be ghostwritten by Taylor. George Harrison was the Beatle eventually decided upon. Although Taylor was initially only given the right to approve or disapprove of the content, Harrison's dissection of the first draft turned the column into an ongoing collaboration between the two, with Harrison providing the stories and Taylor providing the polish.
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Dogbowl
Dogbowl (born Stephen Tunney) is an American artist and musician. He was a founding member of the avant-garde band King Missile (Dog Fly Religion) and has recorded many albums as a solo act.
He is also the author of two novels, One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy, published in 2010 by MacAdam/Cage and Flan, published in 1992 by Four Walls Eight Windows. One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy takes place on a terraformed Moon two thousand years in the future and chronicles the misadventures of sixteen year old Hieronymus Rexaphin, a boy who can see the fourth primary color, and the trouble he gets into after showing his unusual eyes to a teenage tourist girl from Earth. Flan is a long, fairly violent post-apocalyptic work containing some elements of surrealism.
Stephen Tunney graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in 1982. He received an MFA from the City College of New York in 1991. He currently lives in New York City and Paris, France with his wife and two children
Stephen Tunney's novel One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy, published by MacAdam/Cage in 2010 is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers Series" for the Holiday Season 2010-2011. One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy will be translated into French and published France in Fall 2011 by the French publisher Éditions Albin Michel. One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy is Stephen Tunney's second novel. He published Flan (1992, Four Walls Eight Windows) and on 2008 was re-published by Running Press. Flan was widely reviewed and appraised by magazines and newspapers such as New York Press, Boston Phoenix Literary Section, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Option, and the San Francisco Chronicle among others.
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Donovan
Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch, 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist. Initially labelled as an imitator of Bob Dylan, Donovan quickly developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music (notably calypso). He has variously lived in Scotland, London, California and Ireland, and currently lives with his family in County Cork in Ireland.
Emerging from the British folk scene, Donovan shot to fame in the United Kingdom in early 1965 with a series of live performances on the pop TV series, Ready Steady Go!. Initially signing with the British label Pye Records in 1965, he recorded a handful of singles and two albums in the folk music vein, but after signing a new contract with the US label Epic Records his popularity rapidly spread to the US and other countries. After extricating himself from his original management contract, he began a long and successful collaboration with Mickie Most, one of the leading British independent record producers of the era, scoring a string of hits in the UK, the US, Australia and other countries. His successful records in the 1960s included the UK hits "Catch the Wind" and "Colours" in 1965, while "Sunshine Superman" topped the US Billboard Hot 100 chart the following year, and reached #2 in Britain. Donovan was the first artist to be signed to CBS/Epic Records by then-new Administrative Vice President Clive Davis, who later became head of the CBS Record empire.
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Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, (born 30 March 1945) is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and influential guitarists of all time. Clapton ranked second in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and fourth in Gibson's Top 50 Guitarists of All Time.
In the mid 1960s, Clapton departed from the Yardbirds to play blues with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. In his one-year stay with Mayall, Clapton gained the nickname "Slowhand". Immediately after leaving Mayall, Clapton formed Cream, a power trio with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce in which Clapton played sustained blues improvisations and "arty, blues-based psychedelic pop." For most of the 1970s, Clapton's output bore the influence of the mellow style of J.J. Cale and the reggae of Bob Marley. His version of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" helped reggae reach a mass market. Two of his most popular recordings were "Layla", recorded by Derek and the Dominos, another band he formed and Robert Johnson's "Crossroads", recorded by Cream. A recipient of seventeen Grammy Awards, in 2004 Clapton was awarded a CBE for services to music. In 1998, Clapton, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance abusers.
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Eric Idle
Eric Idle (born 29 March 1943) is an English comedian, actor, author, singer, writer, and comedic composer. He was a member of the British surreal comedy group Monty Python, a member of the The Rutles on Saturday Night Live, and the author of the Broadway musical Spamalot.
Idle was born in South Shields, County Durham (now Tyne and Wear) in Harton Village, the son of Nora Barron (née Sanderson), a health visitor, and Ernest Idle. His father served in the Royal Air Force and survived World War II, only to be killed in a hitch-hiking accident when Idle was only two years old. His mother had difficulty coping with a full-time job and raising a child, so when Idle was seven, she enrolled him into the Royal Wolverhampton School as a boarder. At this time the school was a charitable foundation dedicated to the education and maintenance of children who had lost one or both parents. Idle is quoted as saying: "It was a physically abusive, bullying, harsh environment for a kid to grow up in. I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority. Perfect training for Python."
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Everly Brothers
The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil; born Isaac Donald "Don" Everly on February 1, 1937 and Phillip "Phil" Everly on January 19, 1939, are country-influenced rock and roll performers, known for steel-string guitar playing and close harmony singing. The group was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
Don and Phil Everly are both guitarists and use vocal harmony mostly based on parallel thirds. With this, each line can often stand on its own as a melody line. This is in contrast to classic harmony lines which, while working well alongside the melody, are not as melodic by themselves.
For most of their recordings, Don sings the lower harmony part, while Phil takes the higher. One exception is on "Devoted To You". Although Don is still low and Phil is high, they switch lead and harmony back and forth. Don almost always sings any lines that are sung solo (for example, the verses of "Bye Bye Love".) Among the exceptions to this rule is the Everlys' 1965 single "It's All Over", where Phil sings the song's solo lines.
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Fifth Beatle
The Fifth Beatle is an informal title that various commentators in the press and entertainment industry have applied to persons who were at one point a member of The Beatles, or who had a strong association with the "Fab Four" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) during the group's existence. The "Fifth Beatle" claims started appearing in the press immediately upon the band's sensational rise to global fame in 1963–1964 as the most famous quartet in pop culture.
At The Beatles' 1988 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, George Harrison at one point stated that there were only two "fifth Beatles": Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall (referring to the Beatles' public relations manager and road manager-turned-business-executive, respectively). In a 1997 BBC interview, Paul McCartney stated: "If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was [Beatles' manager] Brian Epstein."
The term is not used to indicate the chronology of band members joining the group. Pete Best joined Lennon, McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe and Harrison on the eve of their Hamburg sojourn, the five using the monikers, "The Silver Beetles" and "The Silver Beatles" (they would experiment with "The Beat Brothers" and ultimately "The Beatles" while in Hamburg with Best).
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Francie Schwartz
Francie Schwartz, born 1944, is an American scriptwriter and the former girlfriend, during the late 1960s, of Paul McCartney, who referred to her as "Franny". At the time, McCartney was engaged to the actress Jane Asher who broke off the engagement when she found them in bed together, although Schwartz claims otherwise. One of the fans who used to hang around McCartney's Cavendish Avenue house says that "...Paul brought this American girl home...[and a little while later]...another car turned into Cavendish Avenue – it was Jane. She'd come back...earlier than she was supposed to. Jane went into the house. A bit later on she came storming out again and drove away." Later on, Jane's mother arrived to retrieve Jane's things.
In 1968, intrigued by the Beatles' formation of the Apple Corps which she had read about in the American magazine "Rolling Stone", at the age of 23 she went to London to see if one of her scripts was of interest to what she regarded as the "non-establishment". She met the Beatles at a critical point in their development – when they were making the "White Album".
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Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra, /sɨˈnɑːtrə/, (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and film actor.
Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the "bobby soxers", he released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra in 1946. His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1953 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity.
He signed with Capitol Records in 1953 and released several critically lauded albums (such as In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice 'n' Easy). Sinatra left Capitol to found his own record label, Reprise Records in 1961 (finding success with albums such as Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, Sinatra at the Sands and Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim), toured internationally, was a founding member of the Rat Pack and fraternized with celebrities and statesmen, including John F. Kennedy. Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, recorded the retrospective September of My Years, starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, and scored hits with "Strangers in the Night" and "My Way".
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Geoff Emerick
Geoffrey Emerick (born 1946 in London) is an English recording studio audio engineer, who is best known for his work with The Beatles' albums Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Abbey Road. He is widely regarded as one of the best engineers in all of recording history.
Emerick first started working as an assistant engineer at EMI at the age of 15. To familiarize with his work, he was placed under the supervision of another assistant engineer, Richard Langham. On his second day of work at EMI, Richard Langham was assigned to be the assistant engineer of Norman Smith who will be doing the first recording session of the Beatles in the evening. As a new recruit, Emerick was not entitled to get over-time pay, but was lucky enough to witness the first-ever EMI recording session by the finalised line-up of The Beatles in 1962, during which the group recorded for the first time with new drummer Ringo Starr on what would eventually become their first hit single "Love Me Do". As assistant engineer, Emerick worked on numerous early recordings by the Beatles, and also helped record other artists for the label, including Judy Garland. He assisted at the EMI artist test of The Hollies.
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George Dunning
George Garnett Dunning (November 17, 1920 – February 15, 1979) was a Canadian film maker and animator. He is best known for animating and directing the 1968 Beatles' film Yellow Submarine.
He was born in Toronto and studied in Canada at the Ontario College of Art, and soon found freelance work as an illustrator. Dunning joined the NFB of Canada in 1943, where he worked with Norman McLaren and contributed to several episodes of the Chants populaires series. From 1944 to 1947 Dunning created many original short films and developed his skills animating articulated, painted, metal cut-outs.
In 1948, he spent a year working for UNESCO in Paris under the mentorship of Czech-born animator Berthold Bartosch. Then in 1949, he and fellow NFB grad Jim McKay created one of Toronto’s first animation studios, Graphic Associates, where he produced commercials and gave Michael Snow his first job in film. In 1956 he moved to England to manage UPA’s new London office. After the office went under, he hired many of the UPA staff to work for him and his newly established production company, TVC. By 1961, TVC was producing about one hundred commercials a year. During this time Dunning also managed to make many personal short films noted for their surrealistic atmosphere and Kafkaesque themes.
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George Harrison
George Harrison,MBE (25 February 1943 – 29 November 2001) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian culture and mysticism, and introduced it to the other Beatles, as well as their Western audience. Following the band's break-up he was a successful solo artist, and later a founding member of the Traveling Wilburys. Harrison was also a session musician and a film and record producer. He is listed at number 11 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
Although most of The Beatles' songs were written by Lennon and McCartney, Beatle albums generally included one or two of Harrison's own songs, from With The Beatles onwards. His later compositions with The Beatles include "Here Comes the Sun", "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". By the time of the band's break-up, Harrison had accumulated a backlog of material, which he then released as the triple album All Things Must Pass in 1970, from which two hit singles originated: a double A-side single, "My Sweet Lord" backed with "Isn't It a Pity", and "What Is Life". In addition to his solo work, Harrison co-wrote two hits for former Beatle Ringo Starr, as well as songs for the Traveling Wilburys—the supergroup he formed in 1988 with Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison.
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George Martin
Sir George Henry Martin CBE (born 3 January 1926) is an English record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, audio engineer and musician. He is sometimes referred to as "the Fifth Beatle"—a title that he has described as "nonsense"—in reference to his extensive involvement on each of The Beatles' original albums. He is considered one of the greatest record producers of all time, with 30 number one hit singles in the UK and 23 number one hits in the USA.
Influenced by a range of musical styles, encompassing Cole Porter and Johnny Dankworth, he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1947 to 1950, studying piano and oboe. Following his graduation, he worked for the BBC's classical music department, then joined EMI in 1950. Martin produced comedy and novelty records in the early 1950s, working with the likes of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.
In a career spanning over six decades, Martin has worked in music, film, television and live performance. He has also held a number of senior executive roles at media companies and contributes to a wide range of charitable causes, including his work for the Prince's Trust and the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
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George Toogood Smith
George Toogood Smith (1903 – 5 June 1955) was the maternal uncle, through marriage, of John Lennon. Smith operated his family's two dairy farms and a retail outlet with his brother, Frank Smith, in the village of Woolton, Liverpool. The farms had been in the Smith family for four generations, but after the start of World War II, they were taken over by the British Government for war work.
Smith started courting Mimi Stanley in the spring of 1932, but was thwarted by her indifference and her father's interference. After delivering milk to the hospital where she worked he gave her an ultimatum that she must marry him, "or nothing at all!" On 15 September 1939, she finally married him. They bought a semi-detached house called Mendips, named after the range of hills, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Liverpool.
Lennon lived with Smith and his wife for the majority of his childhood, and Smith taught the young Lennon to read, read him nursery rhymes at night, and later taught Lennon how to solve crossword puzzles. He also taught him to draw and paint and bought him his first mouth organ. Smith collapsed and died on a Sunday at his home of a liver haemorrhage, aged 52, and was buried in St Peter’s Church graveyard, Woolton.
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Germans
The Germans (Deutsche) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Legally, Germans are citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 66–75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, France, Russia, Chile, Poland, Australia and Romania who most likely are not native speakers of German. Thus, the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 66 and 160 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).
Today, peoples from countries with a German-speaking majority or significant German-speaking population groups other than Germany, such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, have developed their own national identity and usually do not refer to themselves as "Germans" in a modern context.
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Giles Martin
Giles Martin (born 9 October 1969) is an English record producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He is the son of Sir George Martin, famed producer of almost all of The Beatles' records.
Giles Martin grew up without much awareness of The Beatles, and was discouraged by his father from pursuing a career in music lest the inevitable comparisons should be made. Giles ignored the advice, first playing in the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful band Velvet Jones, then writing jingles in college, then working in various musical capacities in the UK. In 1995, he was appointed co-music director for the television and radio music countdown show, The Great Music Experience. He worked on the Party at the Palace concert to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee, for which he also produced the subsequent album and DVD.
Martin's first notable producer role came with the high-selling UK band Kula Shaker. After that, his production and mixing credits came to include Jeff Beck, Elvis Costello, INXS, and Kate Bush. In 2004 Martin produced Hayley Westenra's multi-platinum album Pure, the UK’s fastest-selling classical album of all time.
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Glyn Johns
Glyn Johns (born 15 February 1942, Epsom, Surrey, England) is a British musician, recording engineer and record producer.
He has worked with such artists as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Easybeats, The Band, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Clash, The Steve Miller Band, Small Faces, Spooky Tooth, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Blue Öyster Cult, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Midnight Oil, New Model Army, Belly, Joe Satriani, Ronnie Lane, Rod Stewart with Faces, Joan Armatrading, Buckacre, Gallagher and Lyle, Georgie Fame, Family, Helen Watson, Fairport Convention, Humble Pie and many others.
In the 1960s, while associated with the rock band The Presidents, Johns began working as a recording studio engineer at IBC Studios, Portland Place, London and was able to take the band in during weekends and try his skills at production and recording. The Presidents was his first true production work and some of the original tracks are available to hear and record at the Sound Bite Page on The President's web site www.the-presidents.org.uk. In 1969, Johns was called upon to rescue the troublesome Get Back sessions for The Beatles. Johns compiled several versions of the album, which were all rejected by the band, before the project was eventually turned over to producer Phil Spector. Spector's version became the released album, which was retitled Let It Be.
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Gus Dudgeon
Angus Boyd Dudgeon (30 September 1942 – 21 July 2002), most commonly known as Gus Dudgeon, was an English record producer, most notable for production of many of Elton John's recordings.
Gus Dudgeon was born in Surrey, England. He began work at Decca's Olympic Studios in Baker Street, London as a tea boy, and eventually was promoted to the position of sound engineer. In this capacity, he worked with The Artwoods, Bruce Channel, Davy Graham and Shirley Collins. Early pop successes included The Zombies' "She's Not There" (1964) and John Mayall's Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (1966). He helped in the auditions for Tom Jones and The Rolling Stones. Finally he became a co-producer on Ten Years After's debut album in 1967. Around this time he also produced the Bonzo Dog Band albums The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse and Tadpoles. Dudgeon produced two highly successful albums for Elkie Brooks: Pearls and Pearls II. He is also known for producing David Bowie's hit single, Space Oddity (1969).
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Harry Nilsson
Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994) was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. On all but his earliest recordings he is credited as Nilsson. He is known for the hit singles "Everybody's Talkin'" (1969), "Without You" (1971), and "Coconut" (1972). Nilsson's career is also notable for the fact that he was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists of his era to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours.
He was awarded Grammys for two of his recordings; best male contemporary vocal in 1969 for "Everybody's Talkin'", the theme song to the Academy Award-winning movie Midnight Cowboy, and best male pop vocal in 1972 for "Without You."
Nilsson was born in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. His paternal grandparents were Swedish circus performers and dancers, especially known for their "aerial ballet" (which is the title of one of Nilsson's albums). His father, Harry Edward Nilsson, Jr., abandoned the family when young Harry was three. An autobiographical reference to this is found in the opening to Nilsson's song "1941":
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Horst Fascher
Horst Fascher (born 5 February 1936, Hamburg) is a previous German nightclub bouncer, and a friend of The Beatles during their days playing in Hamburg, Germany.
A onetime professional boxer whose career was cut short (he had unintentionally killed a sailor in a street fight), Fascher found work in clubs along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. When the Beatles (including original drummer Pete Best and bassist Stuart Sutcliffe) made their first trip to Germany in August 1960, Fascher befriended the young group, who played at the Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller.
As they rose through the ranks of bands playing the Reeperbahn (making five trips in all over the next two-and-a-half years), Fascher usually managed to be working at the same clubs, and for the same boss, as the Beatles. They visited him at home, and he in turn kept troublemakers away from the band. The only favour Fascher asked was to be able to sing with them occasionally onstage, which was granted; Eddie Cochran's music was a common choice.
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Hunter Davies
This article is about the Scottish writer. For the American writer see Hunter S. Thompson
Edward Hunter Davies (born 7 January 1936) is a prolific British author, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of many books, including the only authorised biography of The Beatles.
Davies was born in Johnstone to Scottish parents. For 4 years his family lived in Dumfries until Davies was aged 11. Davies has frequently quoted his boyhood hero as being football centre-forward, Billy Houliston, of Davies' then local team, Queen of the South.
His family moved to Carlisle when Davies was 11 and he attended the Creighton School in the city. Davies lived in Carlisle until he moved to study at university. During this time his father, who was a former RAF pay clerk, developed multiple sclerosis and had to retire on medical grounds from a civil service career. Davies joined the sixth form at Carlisle Grammar School and was awarded a place at University College, Durham to read for an Honours Degree in History, but after his first year he switched to a general arts course. He gained his first writing experience as a student, contributing to the university newspaper, Palatinate. However after completing his degree course he stayed on at Durham for another year to gain a teaching diploma.
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Ivan Vaughan
Ivan Vaughan (18 June 1942 - 16 August 1993) was a boyhood friend of John Lennon, and later schoolmate of Paul McCartney at the Liverpool Institute, both commencing school there in Sept. 1953. He was born on the same day as Paul McCartney in Liverpool. He played bass part-time in Lennon's first band, The Quarrymen, and was responsible for introducing Lennon to Paul McCartney at a community event (the Woolton village fête) on July 6, 1957, where The Quarrymen were performing. McCartney impressed Lennon, who invited McCartney to join the band, which he did a day later. This led to the formation of Lennon and McCartney's songwriting partnership, and later of The Beatles.
Vaughan studied classics at University College, London, married in 1966 and settled down to family life with a son and daughter, and became a teacher.
Lennon and McCartney never forgot the friend who brought them together. For a time they put Vaughan on the payroll of their Apple company, in charge of a plan that never took off to set up a school with a Sixties, hippie-style education ethos. Vaughan's wife Jan, a languages teacher, was hired to sit down with Lennon and McCartney and help with the French lyrics to the 1965 song "Michelle".
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Jane Asher
Jane Asher (born 5 April 1946) is an English actress, author and entrepreneur.
Asher was the middle of three children born to Richard Alan John and Margaret Asher, née Eliot, in Willesden, North West London. Her father was a broadcaster and a consultant at the Central Middlesex Hospital and the author of notable medical articles. Asher's mother was a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.[citation needed] Asher attended Queen's College in Harley Street, London and is the elder sister of Clare Asher, a radio actress and school inspector. Asher's elder brother is record producer Peter Asher,
, who was "Peter" of Peter and Gordon.
Asher was a child actress and appeared in the 1952 film Mandy and the 1955 science fiction film The Quatermass Xperiment. She also had a title role in a version of Alice in Wonderland (1958) and Through the Looking-Glass for Argo Records. In 1961 she co-starred in The Greengage Summer which was released in the United States as Loss of Innocence. She also appeared in the 1962 film and Disney TV programme, The Prince and the Pauper. British TV appearances included three episodes (1956–1958) of the British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood and as a panelist on the BBC's Juke Box Jury.
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Jeff Lynne
Jeffrey "Jeff" Lynne (born 30 December 1947) is an English songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer who gained fame as the leader and sole constant member of Electric Light Orchestra. He was later a co-founder and member of The Traveling Wilburys together with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. Lynne has produced recordings for artists such as The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Roy Orbison, Dave Edmunds, Del Shannon and Tom Petty. He has co-written songs with Petty and also with George Harrison, whose 1987 album Cloud Nine was co-produced by Lynne and Harrison. Among the many compositions to his credit are such well-known hits as "Livin' Thing", "Evil Woman", "Turn to Stone", "Do Ya", "Xanadu", "Strange Magic", "Sweet Talkin' Woman", "Telephone Line", "Shine a Little Love", "Mr. Blue Sky", "Hold On Tight", "All Over the World", and "Don't Bring Me Down".
In 2008, The Washington Times named Lynne the fourth greatest record producer in music history.
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Jimmie Nicol
James George "Jimmie"/"Jimmy" Nicol (born 3 August 1939, 93 Silverthorne Road, Battersea, London), is a British drummer, best known for temporarily replacing Ringo Starr in The Beatles for a series of concerts during the height of Beatlemania in 1964, elevating him from relative obscurity to worldwide fame and then back again in the space of a fortnight. Nicol had hoped that his association with The Beatles would greatly boost his career, but instead found that the spotlight moved away from him once Starr returned to the group. His subsequent lack of commercial success led him into bankruptcy in 1965. After then working with a number of different bands, which included a successful phase with The Spotnicks, he left the music business in 1967 to pursue a variety of entrepreneurial ventures. Later in his life he became a recluse preferring not to discuss his connection to The Beatles and refusing to seek financial gain from it. He has a son, Howard, who is a BAFTA award-winning sound engineer.
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John Cleese
John Marwood Cleese (/ˈkliːz/; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, writer and film producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s he became a member of Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films: And Now for Something Completely Different, The Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life.
In the mid 1970s, Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, co-wrote and starred in the British sitcom Fawlty Towers. Later, he co-starred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and former Python colleague Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. He also starred in Clockwise, and has appeared in many other films, including two James Bond films as R/Q, two Harry Potter films and three Shrek films.
With Yes Minister writer Antony Jay he co-founded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films.
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John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founder members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to raising his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.
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Johnny Hutchinson
Johnny 'Hutch' Hutchinson (born 18 July 1940 in Malta), also known as Johnny Hutch, was a Liverpudlian rock and roll drummer of the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the same time that The Beatles rose through the ranks of British rock bands. Hutch's group, The Big Three, were rivals of the Beatles, and his opinions of them were not the highest; one early remark he made was that the Beatles "weren't worth a carrot."
Feelings aside, Hutch sat in with them during a 1960 audition, keeping a beat until their then-drummer Tommy Moore could arrive. Mersey Beat magazine editor, Bill Harry, claimed that the vacant drummer position in The Beatles when Pete Best was dismissed was initially offered by Epstein to Johnny, who Epstein later managed. Knowing The Beatles had secured a record contract, Hutchinson turned down the job, saying, "Brian asked me to join the Beatles and I said, I wouldn’t join the Beatles for a gold clock. There’s only one group as far as I’m concerned and that’s the Big Three. The Beatles can’t make a better sound than that, and Pete Best is a very good friend of mine. I couldn’t do the dirty on him". Johnnny did play for The Beatles when Pete Best naturally never turned up on the evening of his dismissal, and two subsequent bookings, until second choice Ringo Starr could join The Beatles from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
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Julia Lennon
Julia Lennon (née Stanley; 12 March 1914 – 15 July 1958) was the mother of English musician John Lennon, who was born during her marriage to Alfred Lennon. After complaints to Liverpool's Social Services by her eldest sister, Mimi Smith (née Stanley), she handed over the care of her son to her sister. She later had one daughter after an affair with a Welsh soldier, but the baby was given up for adoption after pressure from her family. She then had two daughters, Julia and Jackie, with John 'Bobby' Dykins. She never divorced her husband, preferring to live as the common-law wife of Dykins for the rest of her life.
She was known as being high-spirited and impulsive, musical, and having a strong sense of humour. She taught her son how to play the banjo and ukulele, and bought his first acoustic guitar, even though her eldest sister strongly disapproved. She kept in almost daily contact with Lennon, and when he was in his teens he often stayed overnight at her and Dykins' house. On 15 July 1958, she was struck down and killed by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, close to her sister's house at 251 Menlove Avenue. Lennon was traumatised by her death and wrote several songs about her, including "Julia" and "Mother." Biographer Ian MacDonald wrote that she was, "to a great extent... her son's muse."
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Jürgen Vollmer
Jürgen Vollmer, with Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voorman (the "Exis"), befriended The Beatles during the band's time in Hamburg in the early 1960s. Vollmer was the son of a professional army officer who died during World War II. Young Vollmer was attending Hamburg's Institute of Fashion at the time he met The Beatles, who at the time included drummer Pete Best and bassist Stu Sutcliffe. Vollmer quickly became one of the group's photographers, and was responsible for the "Beatles haircut" and some of their most iconic images in their leather-clad days prior to Brian Epstein. John Lennon was particularly impressed with Vollmer's photos, and used one of his favourites on the cover of his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll. During the time Vollmer lived in the USA, he worked as a set photographer in several Hollywood film productions.
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Kaiserkeller
Kaiserkeller is a night club in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg, Germany, near the Reeperbahn. It was opened by Bruno Koschmider on October 14, 1959. The Beatles had a contract with Kaiserkeller to play there in 1960.
A Caribbean steel band that had played at Allan Williams Jacaranda club in Liverpool took an offer to play in Hamburg. After receiving letters enthusing about Hamburg's club scene, Williams made contact with Koschmider, offering to act as a booking agent, to which Koschmider agreed. Koschmider had previously booked Derry and the Seniors after seeing them perform in London, and as they were successful in Hamburg, he asked Williams to look for additional groups.Rory Storm and The Hurricanes were Williams' first choice, but as they were committed to a season at Butlins holiday camp, they turned his offer down (as did Gerry & The Pacemakers) so Williams sent The Beatles to Hamburg instead. They were required to play six or seven hours a night, seven nights a week. The Beatles first played at Koschmider's Indra club, sleeping in small, "dirty" rooms in the Bambi Kino, and then moved (after the closure of the Indra) to the larger Kaiserkeller.
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Ken Mansfield
Ken Mansfield is a Grammy Award-winning record producer, former U.S. Manager of Apple Records, a high-ranking executive for several record labels, songwriter and the author of three books.
Since the 1960s, Mansfield has been associated with an array of notable performers including The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Waylon Jennings, James Taylor, Roy Orbison, Don Ho, the Imperials, Tompall Glaser, Harry Nilsson, Glen Campbell, Buck Owens, Lou Rawls, Andy Williams, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Eric Burdon, Badfinger, Ray Stevens, Jackie Lomax, The Four Freshmen, Judy Garland, Dolly Parton, David Cassidy, Nick Gilder, Claudine Longet and Jessi Colter. In the 1970s, he helped popularize the Outlaw movement in country music by producing Waylon Jennings' top-selling album, Are You Ready for the Country as well as the crossover hit "I’m Not Lisa" by Jessi Colter. In 2000, the former record executive-turned-producer embarked on a literary career with The Beatles, The Bible and Bodega Bay. His follow-up, The White Book - The Beatles, the Bands, the Biz: An Insider's Look at an Era, was released in 2007. Mansfield's third book, Between Wyomings, published by Thomas Nelson, was released on June 9, 2009.
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Ken Scott
Ken Scott (born 20 April 1947 in London) is an English record producer and recording engineer.
Scott started at the age of 16 working in the tape library at Abbey Road Studios. He became a recording engineer working with such acts as The Beatles, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Procol Harum.
Scott moved to Trident Studios where he worked with such artists as Elton John, Harry Nilsson, Mahavishnu Orchestra, America and with George Harrison on the 6x platinum selling album All Things Must Pass.
Scott went on to co-produce David Bowie's albums Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Aladdin Sane (1973) and Pin Ups (1973) before producing Supertramp, The Tubes, Dixie Dregs, Devo, Missing Persons, Kansas, Happy The Man and Level 42.
More recently Scott has recorded a number of legendary drummers for a VST instrument called EpiK Drums – A Ken Scott Collection.
Scott received a Clio award for "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke", and two Grammy nominations.
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Ken Townsend
Ken Townsend MBE is a renowned English sound engineer who played an important role at Abbey Road Studios. He worked on several Beatles albums, such as Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1966 he invented automatic double tracking (ADT). He spent his whole working career at Abbey Road, and retired as the Chairman of the Studio Group after 42 years of service.
During the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows, Lennon complained that he had always hated doing a second take to double the sound of his vocals, so Townsend, the studio technical manager, created the world's first ADT system by taking the signal from the playback and recording heads and delaying them slightly, thereby creating two sound images and not just one. By altering the speed and frequencies he could also create other different types of effects, which The Beatles used throughout the recording of Revolver.
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Larry Parnes
Laurence Maurice "Larry" Parnes (1930 - 4 August 1989) was an English pop manager and impresario. He has been described as "the first major British rock manager... Parnes' stable encompassed most of the most successful pre-Beatles British rock singers."
Parnes was born in Willesden, London. After leaving school he began work in a clothing store, and by the age of 18 ran a women's clothing shop in Romford, Essex. He then bought a share in a bar in Romilly Street, Soho. He agreed to invest in a touring play, The House of Shame, which became both successful and notorious in 1954 after its publicist, John Kennedy, persuaded two actresses to stand outside the theatre dressed as prostitutes. In 1956, with Kennedy, he started to manage young rock and roll singer Tommy Hicks, who anglicised the name of his Swedish grandfather to become known as Tommy Steele. Steele achieved popular success, some of his songs being co-written by Parnes' friend Lionel Bart, and Parnes succeeded in presenting Steele as an "all-round entertainer".
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Lawrence Welk
Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was an American musician, accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1982. His style came to be known to his large number of radio, television, and live-performance fans (and critics) as "champagne music".
In 1996, Welk was ranked #43 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.
Welk was born in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota. He was sixth of the eight children of Ludwig and Christiana (Schwahn) Welk, ethnic Germans who emigrated to America in 1892 from Selz, Kutschurgan District, in the German-speaking area north of Odessa (now Odessa, Ukraine, but then in southwestern Russia).
The family lived on a homestead that today is a tourist attraction. They spent the cold North Dakota winter of their first year under an upturned wagon covered in sod.[citation needed]
Welk decided on a career in music and persuaded his father to buy a mail-order accordion for $400 (equivalent to $4,641 as of 2012). He promised his father that he would work on the farm until he was 21, in repayment for the accordion. Any money he made elsewhere during that time, doing farmwork or performing, would go to his family.
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Lee Eastman
Lee Eastman, born Leopold Vail Epstein, (12 January 1910 - 30 July 1991) was a New York show business attorney, and art collector the son of Louis (b. Russia ~1887, imm. 1906) and Stella (Freyer) Epstein. His sisters were Emmaline and Rose. He married Louise Lindner, heiress to the Lindner Department Store fortune; they had four children, including John Eastman and Linda McCartney, the late wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney. Eastman became McCartney's business manager shortly before the breakup of The Beatles while his son John represented McCartney during his 1970 lawsuit to legally dissolve the Beatles. He is the maternal grandfather of potter Heather McCartney, photographer Mary McCartney, fashion designer Stella McCartney, and musician/sculptor James Louis McCartney. Eastman was also the friend and longtime lawyer for and collector of the works of the Abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning.
When the Beatles' company Apple Corps was in business trouble early in 1969, Eastman and Allen Klein were both considered to take the reins of the company, and of the band's careers. John Lennon favoured Klein. Lennon said he was impressed that Klein knew Lennon's lyrics, and understood them, and that Klein was very intelligent.George Harrison and Ringo Starr chose Klein, though Lennon said in 1970 that he maneuvered Klein into Apple. McCartney wanted Eastman, but was out-voted 3-1. For a short period, Klein managed Apple and the personal careers of Lennon, Harrison, and Starr while Eastman was the corporate counsel and managed McCartney. The Klein/Eastman combination did not work, and after a contentious meeting, Eastman was out. Subsequent disagreements over decisions made by Klein and the other Beatles prompted McCartney—represented by Eastman—to sue them to dissolve the partnership, and he eventually succeeded.
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Lorne Michaels
Lorne Michaels, CM (born November 17, 1944) is a Canadian-Americantelevision producer, writer, and comedian best known for creating and producing Saturday Night Live and producing the various film and TV projects that spun off from it.
Michaels was born Lorne David Lipowitz in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of Florence (née Becker) and Henry Abraham Lipowitz, a furrier. He was the eldest of the Lipowitz children. He has a sister, Barbara Lipowitz, who currently resides in Toronto, and a brother, Mark Lipowitz, who died from a brain tumor. Michaels attended the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto and graduated from University College, University of Toronto, where he majored in English, in 1966. Michaels began his career as a writer and broadcaster for CBC Radio. He moved to Los Angeles from Toronto in 1968 to work as a writer for Laugh-In and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. He starred with Hart Pomerantz in The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, a Canadian comedy series which ran briefly in the early 1970s. During the late 1960s, Michaels married Rosie Shuster, who later worked with him on Saturday Night Live as a writer. She was the daughter of Frank Shuster, one half of the famous comedy team, Wayne and Shuster. Michaels and Shuster were divorced in 1980.
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Magic Alex
Yanni (later John) Alexis Mardas (Greek: Αλέξης Μάρδας; born May 5, 1942, Athens, Greece), better known as Magic Alex, the name given him by The Beatles when he knew the group between 1965 and 1969, is a self-styled electronics wizard and one-time head of The Beatles' Apple Electronics.
Mardas arrived in England in 1965, exhibiting his Kinetic Light Sculptures at the Indica Gallery. Mardas impressed John Lennon with the Nothing Box; a small plastic box with randomly blinking lights, and said that he could build a 72-track tape machine, so was given the job of designing the new Apple Studio in Savile Row. He was involved in the hasty departure of Lennon and George Harrison from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India, and Lennon's divorce of his first wife, Cynthia Lennon.
In the 1970s, the anti-terrorism industry offered bullet-proof vehicles, bugging devices and security hardware, and Mardas set up various companies offering these products to royalty and VIPs. King Hussein of Jordan bought a fleet of cars that Mardas had customised, but the cars proved to be more life-threatening than ordinary cars, as bullets easily pierced the supposed armour-plating, and the glass splintered. In 1987, Mardas was a managing director of Alcom Ltd, which specialised in electronic communications and security. He now lives in Greece.
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Mal Evans
Malcolm Frederick 'Mal' Evans (27 May 1935 – 5 January 1976) was best known as the road manager, assistant, and a friend of The Beatles.
In the early 1960s, Evans was employed as a telephone engineer, and also worked part-time as a bouncer at the Cavern Club, where The Beatles performed. Manager Brian Epstein later hired Evans as their assistant road manager, in tandem with Neil Aspinall. Evans was tall and heavily-built, and Peter Brown (one of Epstein's staff) later wrote of Evans as "a kindly, but menacing-looking young man". Evans contributed to many Beatle recordings, and appeared in some of the films they made. Although The Beatles stopped touring in 1966, Evans carried on assisting the band until their 1970 break-up. From 1969 forward, Evans had also found work as a record producer (most notably with Badfinger's top 10 hit "No Matter What"), and as an occasional songwriter.
Evans was killed by police on 5 January 1976 at his home in Los Angeles. Officers were called when his girlfriend phoned the police and told them that Evans was confused and had a gun. The police believed that the air rifle Evans was holding was a rifle and shot him dead.
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Marc Ribot
Marc Ribot ( /ˈriːboʊ/; born May 21, 1954) is an American guitarist and composer.
His own work has touched on many styles, including no wave, free jazz, and Cuban music. Ribot is also known for collaborating with other musicians, most notably Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and composer John Zorn.
Ribot was born in Newark, New Jersey. He has worked extensively as a session guitarist. He has performed and recorded with Tom Waits, John Zorn, David Sylvian, Jack McDuff, Wilson Pickett, The Lounge Lizards, Arto Lindsay, T-Bone Burnett, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Cibo Matto, Elysian Fields, Sam Phillips, Elvis Costello, David Poe, Allen Ginsberg, Foetus, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Susana Baca, The Black Keys, Stan Ridgway, Vinicio Capossela, Alain Bashung, Lyenn, Hector Zazou, McCoy Tyner, Elton John, Madeline Peyroux, Marianne Faithfull, Leonid Fedorov, Tonio K, Andres Calamaro, Anarchist Republic of Bzzz and others.
Ribot's earliest session work was featured on Tom Waits' Rain Dogs (1985) and helped define Waits' new musical direction. Ribot worked with Waits on many of his following albums including Franks Wild Years (1987), Mule Variations (1999), Real Gone (2004) and Bad as Me (2011). He has appeared on Elvis Costello's Spike, Mighty Like a Rose (1991), and Kojak Variety (1995). Ribot has appeared on numerous recordings by John Zorn, including many of Zorn's Filmworks recordings, solo performances on Zorn's Masada Guitars (also featuring Bill Frisell and Tim Sparks), and is a member of Zorn's Bar Kokhba Sextet and Electric Masada . Ribot's first two albums featured The Rootless Cosmopolitans, followed by an album of works by Frantz Casseus for solo guitar. Further releases found him working in a variety of band and solo contexts including two albums with his self-described "dance band", Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans), featuring compositions by Arsenio Rodríguez.
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Mark Griffiths
Mark Griffiths is a British musician famous for touring with Neil Innes in his touring ensemble of the fictional Beatles parody The Rutles where he performs Rutles songs and other songs from his career such as his songs from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. He also plays with Cliff Richard's backing band and with The Shadows.
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Mark Lewisohn
Mark Lewisohn (born 16 June 1958) is an English author and historian, regarded as the world's leading authority on the English rock band The Beatles.
Over the course of his career, Mark Lewisohn has worked for EMI, MPL Communications and Apple, and has written many reference books about The Beatles. He has been referred to as the world's leading authority on the subject, renowned for his meticulous research and integrity. He is credited with discovering such facts as the precise date when John Lennon first met Paul McCartney.
In 1986, Lewisohn's book The Beatles Live! was published. This featured a complete history of all the Beatles' live performances, in a format which Lewisohn would follow for his subsequent books. After being invited by EMI to listen to all of The Beatles' original session tapes, Lewisohn wrote The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years, which was published in 1987. The book was in the form of a diary, detailing every recording session The Beatles had at Abbey Road Studios chronologically. It included details such as who played on each track and how many takes were recorded in each session. The book featured an introductory interview by Paul McCartney.
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Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950. Five of the Marx Brothers’ thirteen feature films were selected by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedy films, with two of them (Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera) in the top twelve.
The core of the act was the three elder brothers, Chico, Harpo and Groucho; each developed a highly distinctive stage persona. The two younger brothers, Gummo and Zeppo, did not develop their stage characters to the same extent, and eventually left the act to pursue other careers. Gummo was not in any of the movies; Zeppo appeared in the first five.
Born in New York City, the Marx Brothers were the sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany and France. Their mother, Minnie Schönberg, was from Dornum in East Frisia; and their father, Simon Marx (whose name was changed to Samuel Marx, and who was nicknamed "Frenchy") was a native of Alsace and worked as a tailor. The family lived in the then-poor Yorkville section of New York City's Upper East Side, between the Irish, German and Italian quarters.
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Maureen Starkey
Maureen "Mo" Starkey Tigrett, née Mary Cox, (4 August 1946 – 30 December 1994) was the first wife of The Beatles' drummer, Ringo Starr. She met Starr at The Cavern Club, where The Beatles were playing, when she was a trainee hairdresser in Liverpool. Starr proposed marriage at the Ad-Lib Club in London, on 20 January 1965. They were married at the Caxton Hall Register Office, London, in 1965, but were divorced in 1975.
First living at 34 Montagu Square, Marylebone, the Starrs bought Sunny Heights, in St George's Hill, Weybridge. In 1973, they bought Tittenhurst Park from John Lennon. They had three children together: Zak, Jason, and a daughter, Lee. As a favour to Starr, Frank Sinatra recorded a special version of "The Lady Is a Tramp", for her 22nd birthday in 1968.
She started living with Isaac Tigrett in 1976—one of the founders of the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues—and married him in 1989. They had one daughter, Augusta. Maureen died at home of leukaemia on 30 December 1994, after receiving treatment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Her four children, mother, husband and ex-husband Starr were at her bedside when she died.
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Michael Palin
Michael Edward Palin, CBE, PRGS (born 5 May 1943) is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries. Palin wrote most of his comedic material with Terry Jones. Before Monty Python, they had worked on other shows such as the Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Palin appeared in some of the most famous Python sketches, including "Argument Clinic," "Dead Parrot," "The Lumberjack Song," "The Spanish Inquisition," and "The Fish-Slapping Dance."
Palin continued to work with Jones after Python, co-writing Ripping Yarns. He has also appeared in several films directed by fellow Python Terry Gilliam and made notable appearances in other films such as A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. In a 2005 poll to find The Comedians' Comedian, he was voted the 30th favourite by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.
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Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger, (born 26 July 1943) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor, best known as the lead vocalist and a founder member of The Rolling Stones.
Jagger's career has spanned over fifty years. Allmusic has described Jagger as "one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll". His distinctive voice and performance, along with Keith Richards' guitar style, have been the trademark of The Rolling Stones throughout the career of the band. In 1989, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with The Rolling Stones.
Jagger gained much press notoriety for admitted drug use and romantic involvements, and was often portrayed as a counterculture figure. In the late 1960s Jagger began acting in films (starting with Performance and Ned Kelly), to mixed reception. In 1985, Jagger released his first solo album, She's the Boss, and was knighted in 2003. In early 2009, he joined the eclectic supergroup SuperHeavy.
Jagger was born into a middle class family at Livingstone Hospital, in Dartford, Kent, England. His father, Basil Fanshawe ("Joe") Jagger (13 April 1913 – 11 November 2006), and his grandfather David Ernest Jagger were both teachers. His mother, Eva Ensley Mary (née Scutts; 6 April 1913 – 18 May 2000), born in New South Wales, Australia, was a hairdresser and an active member of the Conservative Party. Jagger is the elder of two sons (his brother Chris Jagger was born on 19 December 1947) and was raised to follow in his father's career path.
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Mickey Simmonds
Mickey Simmonds (born 31 January 1959, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England) is an English session keyboardist, arranger and composer. He is best known for his work with progressive rock acts, Mike Oldfield, Renaissance, Camel and Fish. He has also worked with Joan Armatrading, Paul Young, The Rutles, Art Garfunkel, Kiki Dee, John Coghlan's Diesel Band, Elkie Brooks, Judie Tzuke, Imagination, Bucks Fizz, Jennifer Rush, The Mods, 4 Bills & a Ben, and, most recently The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Simmonds has a long standing relationship with Neil Innes, hence The Rutles (including all the arrangements on Archaeology 1996) and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, whose studio album Pour l'Amour des Chiens was co-produced by Simmonds & Innes.
Simmonds has released two solo albums, The Shape of Rain (1996) and The Seven Colours of Emptiness (2009). As influences, he cites progressive rock acts such as early Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Pink Floyd.[citation needed]
Simmonds played on three albums; The Complete Mike Oldfield (1985), Islands (1987), and Heaven's Open (1991), as well as on tour 1983 -1993.
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Mimi Smith
Mary Elizabeth "Mimi" Smith (née Stanley) (24 April 1903 – 6 December 1991) was the maternal aunt and parental guardian of the English musician John Lennon. Mimi was born in Liverpool, England and was the oldest of five daughters. She became a resident trainee nurse at the Woolton Convalescent Hospital, and later worked as a private secretary. On 15 September 1939, she married George Smith, who ran his family's dairy farm and a shop in Woolton; a suburb of Liverpool.
After Mimi's younger sister, Julia Lennon, separated from her husband, she and her son (Lennon) moved in with a new partner, but Mimi contacted Liverpool's Social Services and complained about little John sleeping in the same bed as the two adults. Julia was eventually persuaded to hand the care of Lennon over to the Smiths. Lennon lived with them for most of his childhood, and remained close to her, even though she was highly dismissive of his musical ambitions, his girlfriends, and wives.
She often told the teenage Lennon that "The guitar's all right John, but you'll never make a living out of it". Despite later losing touch with other family members, Lennon kept in close contact and telephoned Mimi every week until his death in 1980. Lennon bought her a bungalow in Poole, Dorset, where she lived until her death in 1991. The Smiths' house in Liverpool was later donated to the The National Trust.
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Mona Best
Mona "Mo" Best (3 January 1924 – 9 September 1988) was born in India and is best known as the mother of Pete Best (b. 24 November 1941), who was an early member of The Beatles. Mona also had two other sons, Rory (born 1945) and Vincent "Roag" Best (born 1962). It was later confirmed that Roag's father was The Beatles' associate Neil Aspinall, although he was not registered as the father on Roag's birth certificate.
After moving to Liverpool from India, the Best family claim that Mona pawned all of her jewellery in 1954, and used the money to place a 33–1 bet on a horse named "Never Say Die", and used her winnings to buy a house in 1957. Mona later opened The Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the house as a venue for Rock 'n' Roll music. It was planned as a members-only club for her sons and their friends. The club was often referred to as The Casbah Club, or The Casbah.
The Quarrymen—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ken Brown—frequently played at The Casbah instead of the The Cavern Club, which had a jazz-only policy at that time. The Casbah Club cellar—with its original decoration—still exists. In 2006, the property was accorded a Grade II Heritage listing. Mona died in 1988, after a heart attack following a long illness.
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Monty Python
Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) was a British surreal comedy group who created Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and impact, spawning touring stage shows, films, numerous albums, several books and a stage musical as well as launching the members to individual stardom. The group's influence on comedy has been compared to The Beatles' influence on music.
The television series, broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974, was conceived, written and performed by members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Loosely structured as a sketch show, but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach (aided by Gilliam's animation), it pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content. A self-contained comedy team responsible for both writing and performing their work, the Pythons' creative control allowed them to experiment with form and content, discarding rules of television comedy. Their influence on British comedy has been apparent for years, while in North America it has coloured the work of cult performers from the early editions of Saturday Night Live through to more recent absurdist trends in television comedy. "Pythonesque" has entered the English lexicon as a result.
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Murray the K
Murray Kaufman (February 14, 1922 – February 21, 1982), professionally known as Murray the K, was an influential rock and roll impresario and disc jockey of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. During the early days of Beatlemania, he frequently referred to himself as the fifth Beatle.
Murray Kaufman came from a show business family: his mother, Jean, played piano in vaudeville and wrote music and his aunt was a character actress on the stage and in film. He was a child actor - an extra - in several 1930s Hollywood films. He attended a military boarding school, and later was inducted into the United States Army where he arranged entertainment for the troops. Following the war, he put together shows in the Catskills' "Borscht Belt", also doing warm-ups for the headline performers.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worked in public relations and as a song plugger, helping to promote tunes like Bob Merrill's "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window." From there, he worked as a radio producer and co-host at WMCA (and briefly thereafter at WMGM), working with personalities such as Laraine Day on the late night interview program "Day At Night" and with Eva Gabor. At the same time, he was doing promotion for several baseball players, including Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, and his radio beginnings may be attributable to his connection with the New York Giants, whose manager, Leo Durocher, was the husband of Laraine Day. His work on those shows earned him his own late-night show that often featured his wife as co-host, as was popular at the time. For a while in the 1950s he was president of the National Conference of Disk Jockeys.
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Neil Aspinall
Neil Stanley Aspinall (13 October 1941 – 24 March 2008) was a British music industry executive. A school friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, he went on to head The Beatles' company Apple Corps.
The Beatles employed Aspinall as their road manager and personal assistant, which included driving his old Commer van to and from shows, both day and night. After Mal Evans started work for The Beatles, Aspinall was promoted to become their personal assistant, later becoming chief executive of their company, Apple Corps.
On behalf of Apple, Aspinall was involved in notable court cases against Allen Klein, EMI, and Apple Computer. He supervised the marketing of music, videos, and merchandising, as well being a director of Standby Films, which was run from his home in Twickenham, London. On 10 April 2007, Aspinall retired from Apple Corps. He died of lung cancer in New York City in 2008.
Aspinall was born in Prestatyn, North Wales, after his mother had been evacuated from the family home in Liverpool because of the air-raids on Liverpool during the Second World War, while Aspinall's father was away at sea with the Royal Navy. Aspinall and his mother returned to Liverpool later in 1942 after the bombing had subsided. Aspinall later attended West Derby School, where he passed his 11-plus exams. When he was twelve years old, Aspinall gained a place at the Liverpool Institute in Mount Street, and was in the same class as Paul McCartney for English and Art lessons.
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Nicky Hopkins
Nicholas Christian "Nicky" Hopkins (24 February 1944 – 6 September 1994) was an English pianist and organist.
Hopkins recorded and performed on many notable British and American pop and rock music releases from the 1960s through the 1990s including many notable Rolling Stones releases.
Hopkins was born in Perivale, Middlesex, England. His musical talent emerged early and he began playing piano at age three. He was initially tutored by a local piano teacher and in his teens he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. He suffered from Crohn's disease from his youth. Poor health and ongoing surgery made it difficult for him to tour. This resulted in his working primarily as a studio player for most of his career.
Hopkins' studies were interrupted in 1960 when he left school at 16 to became the pianist with Screaming Lord Sutch's Savages until, two years later, he and fellow Savages Bernie Watson, Rick Brown (Fenson) and Carlo Little, joined the renowned blues harmonica player Cyril Davies, who had just left Blues Incorporated, and became the Cyril Davies R&B All Stars. Hopkins played piano on their first single, Davies' much-admired theme tune "Country Line Special". However he was forced to leave the All Stars in May 1963 for a series of operations that almost cost him his life and was bed-ridden for nineteen months in his late 'teens. During his convalescence Davies died of leukaemia and The All Stars disbanded.
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Ollie Halsall
Peter John 'Ollie' Halsall (14 March 1949 - 29 May 1992) was a left-handed guitarist and is best known for his role in The Rutles, the bands Patto, Timebox and Boxer, and for his contribution to the music of Kevin Ayers. He is also notable as one of the few players of the vibraphone in rock music. He was known as Ollie because of his distinctive way of pronouncing his surname with a dropped 'h'. The Ollie Halsall Archive was established in 1985, with the aim of documenting and promoting the work of a unique musician.
Ollie may not have been the best guitarist in the world, but he was certainly among the top two. John Halsey, 1997[citation needed]
Halsall (ex Pete and the Pawnees, The Gunslingers, The Music Students, all 1964, The Rhythm and Blues Incorporated, 1965), came to London in October 1966 to play vibraphone with the pop rock outfit Timebox (which included bassist Clive Griffiths and keyboardist 'Professor' Chris Holmes. Halsall took up guitar, they enlisted Mike Patto on vocals and drummer 'Admiral' John Halsey.
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Pattie Boyd
Patricia Anne "Pattie" Boyd (born 17 March 1944) is an English model, photographer and author. She began her fashion career in 1962, and worked in London, New York, and Paris, modelling in London, New York, and Paris (for Mary Quant and others), and was photographed by David Bailey, and Terence Donovan. She appeared on the cover of Vogue and wrote for 16 Magazine.
She is the former wife of musicians George Harrison and Eric Clapton, and claims that she was the inspiration for songs written by both musicians: Harrison's "Something", "I Need You", "For You Blue" and "Isn't It a Pity", and Clapton's "Layla", "Wonderful Tonight" and "Bell Bottom Blues".
An exhibition of photographs taken by Boyd during her relationships with Harrison and Clapton opened at the San Francisco, California San Francisco Art Exchange on February 14, 2005, titled Through the Eye of a Muse. They have been exhibited worldwide, including shows in San Francisco, Dublin, Sydney, Toronto, Moscow, London, and throughout the USA. Boyd's autobiography, Wonderful Today: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, was published in England on 23 August 2007 (in the U.S. as Wonderful Tonight).
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Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of the Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), he has been described by Guinness World Records as "The Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time", with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles. With John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, he gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and with Lennon formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. After leaving the Beatles, he began a solo career and later formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine.
According to the BBC, his Beatles song "Yesterday" has been covered by over 2,200 artists—more than any other song. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre", became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK, and he is "the most successful songwriter" in UK chart history, according to Guinness. As a songwriter or co-writer, he is included on thirty-one number one titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2012 he has sold over 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the United States.
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Pete Best
Pete Best (born 24 November 1941) is a British musician, principally known as the original drummer in The Beatles. He was born in the city of Madras, which was then part of British India. After his mother moved to Liverpool in 1945, Best's mother, Mona Best (1924–1988), opened The Casbah Coffee Club, in the cellar of the Bests' large house in Liverpool, which became very popular, having a membership of over 1,000. The Beatles (at the time known as The Quarrymen) played some of their earliest concerts at the club. Best played there with his first band, The Black Jacks, and later with The Beatles.
Best was invited to join The Beatles on 12 August 1960, on the eve of the group's first Hamburg season of club dates. He was eventually replaced by Ringo Starr on 16 August 1962, when The Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, dismissed Best under the direction of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, following The Beatles' first recording session at Abbey Road Studios. After working in a number of commercially unsuccessful groups he gave up the music industry to work as a civil servant for twenty years, before starting The Pete Best Band. He has been married for over 45 years to Kathy Best; they have two daughters and four grandchildren. Best is sometimes referred to as the "Fifth Beatle".
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Peter Shotton
Peter Shotton (born 4 August 1941), commonly referred to as Pete Shotton, is an English businessman and former musician, best known for his long friendship with John Lennon of The Beatles. He was a close childhood friend of Lennon's, and attended Dovedale Infants School and Quarry Bank Grammar School at the same time as the future Beatle. The two boys were frequently in trouble with their teachers and with their headmaster, and they came to be known at Quarry Bank as "Shennon and Lotton" or "Lotton and Shennon."
In 1957, Shotton was Lennon's bandmate in The Quarrymen, playing percussion (specifically, a washboard), until Paul McCartney joined. He was "fired" from the band when, after confiding that he really did not enjoy playing, Lennon smashed the washboard over his head at a party. However, he remained a friend and confidant – as he became friends with all of the Beatles as the group formed.
After the Beatles became famous, Lennon and George Harrison bought a supermarket on Hayling Island, and gave it to Shotton to run. Later, he served as manager of the Apple Boutique, then as the first managing director of Apple Corps.
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Phil McDonald
Philip McDonald is an English recording studio audio engineer, best known as the engineer for EMI and later for Apple during The Beatles studio years alongside with Neil Aspinall, Geoff Emerick, Mal Evans, and others. In Apple, McDonald joined as senior balance engineer. He was just 25. He was responsible at EMI for engineering work on albums by John Lennon, The Shadows, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Roy Harper and George Harrison.
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Phil Spector
Phillip Harvey "Phil" Spector (born Harvey Phillip Spector on December 26, 1939) is an American record producer and songwriter.
The originator of the "Wall of Sound" production technique, Spector was a pioneer of the 1960s girl-group sound and produced over 25 Top 40 hits in 1960–1965. Some of his famous girl groups are The Ronettes and The Crystals. After this initial success, Spector later worked with artists including Ike and Tina Turner, John Lennon, George Harrison, and the Ramones with similar acclaim. He produced The Beatles' Academy Award winning album Let It Be, and the Grammy Award–winning Concert for Bangladesh by former Beatle George Harrison. In 1989, Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer. The 1965 song "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", produced and co-written by Spector for The Righteous Brothers, is listed by BMI as the song with the most U.S. airplay in the 20th century.
In 2009 Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2003 shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in his Alhambra, California home. He is serving a prison sentence of 19 years to life.
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Pretenders (band)
The Pretenders are an English–American rock band formed in Hereford, England in March 1978. The original band comprised initiator and main songwriter Chrissie Hynde (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), James Honeyman-Scott (lead guitar, backing vocals, keyboards), Pete Farndon (bass guitar, backing vocals), and Martin Chambers (drums, backing vocals, percussion). The band has experienced drug-related deaths of the members, and numerous subsequent personnel changes have taken place over the years, with Hynde as the sole continual member.
Hynde, originally from Akron, Ohio attended Kent State University at the time of the Kent State shootings in 1970. She moved to London in 1973, working at the weekly music paper NME and at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothes store. She was involved with early versions of The Clash and The Damned and played in short-lived bands such as Masters of the Backside and The Moors Murderers. The Pretenders formed in 1978 after Dave Hill at Anchor Records heard some demos of Hynde's music. He arranged a rehearsal studio in Denmark Street, where a 3-piece band consisting of Hynde, Mal Hart on bass (he had played with Hynde and Steve Strange in The Moors Murderers), and Phil Taylor of Motörhead on drums played a selection of Hynde's original songs. Dave Hill was impressed and arranged a day at Studio 51 to record another demo. Although it was rough, he felt he had seen and heard enough "star potential" to suggest that Hynde form a more permanent band to record for his new label, Real Records. Hynde then formed a band composed of Pete Farndon (who was later associated romantically with Hynde) on bass, James Honeyman-Scott on guitar, and Gerry Mcilduff on drums. This band, then without a name, recorded five tracks at Regents Park Studio in July 1978, including "Stop Your Sobbing." Shortly thereafter, Gerry Mcilduff was replaced on drums by Martin Chambers, and Hynde named the band "Pretenders" after The Platters song "The Great Pretender."
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Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to with the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.
In 1956, he began to tour Europe and America playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continues to perform in the 2000s, often with his daughter Anoushka.
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Ray Connolly
Ray Connolly is an English novelist, screenwriter and journalist.
He is perhaps best known for writing the screenplays for the films That'll Be the Day and the sequel Stardust, for which he won a Writers Guild of Great Britain best screenplay award, and for his many interviews with the Beatles. He was due to interview John Lennon on the day the ex-Beatle was murdered, an event he wrote about in the BBC radio play Unimaginable. In addition to the biography John Lennon 1940-1980, he wrote the introduction to The Beatles Complete songbook.
Ray Connolly was born and brought up in Lancashire and educated at the London School of Economics where he read social anthropology. After entering journalism at the Liverpool Daily Post, he then moved to the London Evening Standard where he interviewed, among others, many Sixties and Seventies rock stars. Many of his interviews with the Beatles are collected in his eBook The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, while other interviews are collected in Stardust Memories - Talking About My Generation, which is also now available as an eBook
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Richard Lester
Richard Lester (born 19 January 1932) is an American film director based in Britain. Lester is notable for his work with The Beatles in the 1960s and his work on the Superman film series in the 1980s.
Lester was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A child prodigy, he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. He started in television in 1950, working as a stage hand, floor manager, assistant director, and then to director in less than a year, because no one else was around that knew how to do the work. In 1953, Lester moved to London and began work as a director in independent television, working for the legendary low cost television producers The Danziger Brothers on episodes of Mark Saber, a half-hour detective series.
A variety show he produced caught the eye of Peter Sellers, who enlisted Lester's help in translating The Goon Show to television as The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d. It was a hit, as were two follow-up shows, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred. Lester recalls that A Show Called Fred was "broadcast live and that's why I went into film directing where you can do a second take!"
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Ringo Starr
Richard Starkey, MBE (born 7 July 1940), better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the Beatles. When the band formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He joined the Beatles in August 1962, taking the place of Pete Best. In addition to his drumming, Starr is featured on lead vocals on a number of successful Beatles songs (in particular, "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Yellow Submarine", and the Beatles version of "Act Naturally"). He is credited as a co-writer of the songs "What Goes On" and "Flying", and as the writer of "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden".
As drummer for the Beatles, Starr was musically creative, and his contribution to the band's music has received high praise from notable drummers in more recent times. Starr described himself as "your basic offbeat drummer with funny fills". Drummer Steve Smith said that Starr's popularity "brought forth a new paradigm" where "we started to see the drummer as an equal participant in the compositional aspect" and that Starr "composed unique, stylistic drum parts for The Beatles songs". In 2011, Starr was picked as the fifth-best drummer of all-time by Rolling Stone readers.
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Rob Reiner
Robert "Rob" Reiner (born March 6, 1947) is an American actor, director, producer, writer, and political activist.
As an actor, Reiner first came to national prominence as Michael "Meathead" Stivic, son-in-law of Archie and Edith Bunker (played by Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton), on All in the Family. That role earned him two Emmy Awards during the 1970s. As a director, Reiner was recognized by the Directors Guild of America (DGA) with nominations for Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally..., and A Few Good Men. He also directed Misery. He studied at the UCLA Film School.
Reiner was born to a Jewish family in The Bronx, New York, and is the son of Estelle Reiner (née Lebost), an actress, and Carl Reiner, a comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. As a child, Reiner lived in New Rochelle, New York, where his family lived at 48 Bonnie Meadow Road. This is similar to 148 Bonnie Meadow Road, the fictional address of the Petries on The Dick Van Dyke Show, the 1960s CBS sitcom created by his father. Also, his latest film Flipped takes place at the corner of Bonnie Meadow Lane and Renfrew Street.
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Rod Stewart
Roderick David "Rod" Stewart, CBE (born 10 January 1945) is a British singer-songwriter, born and raised in North London, England, and currently residing in Epping. He is of Scottish and English ancestry.
With his distinctive raspy singing voice, Stewart came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with The Jeff Beck Group and then Faces. He launched his solo career in 1969 with his debut album An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down (US: The Rod Stewart Album). His work with The Jeff Beck Group and Faces influenced heavy metal genres.
With his career in its fifth decade, Stewart has sold over 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best selling artists of all time. In the UK, he has had six consecutive number one albums, and his tally of 62 hit singles include 31 that reached the top 10, six of which gained the number one position. He has had 16 top ten singles in the U.S, with four of these reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked him the 17th most successful artist on the "The Billboard Hot 100 Top All-Time Artists". He was voted at #33 in Q Magazine's list of the top 100 Greatest Singers of all time, and #59 on Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Singers of all time. As a solo artist, Stewart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and was inducted a second time, as a member of Faces, in April 2012.
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Ronnie Scott
Ronnie Scott (28 January 1927 – 23 December 1996) was an English jazz tenor saxophonist and jazz club owner.
Ronnie Scott (originally Ronald Schatt) was born in Aldgate, east London, into a family of Russian Jewish descent on his father's side, and Portuguese antecedents on his mother's. Scott began playing in small jazz clubs at the age of sixteen. (His claim to fame being, he was taught to play by "Vera Lynn's father-in-law!") He toured with Johnny Claes, the trumpeter, from 1944 to 1945 and with Ted Heath in 1946, as well as working with Ambrose, Cab Kaye, and Tito Burns. He was involved in the short-lived musicians' co-operative Club Eleven band and club (1948–1950), with Johnny Dankworth and others, and was a member of the generation of British musicians who worked on the Cunard liner Queen Mary (intermittently 1946–c. 1950) in order to visit New York and hear the new music directly. Scott was among the earliest British musicians to be influenced in his playing style by Charlie Parker and other bebop musicians.
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Rory Storm
Rory Storm (21 September 1939 – 28 September 1972) was an English singer and musician. Born Alan Caldwell in Liverpool, Storm was the singer and leader of Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, a Liverpudlian band who were contemporaries of The Beatles in the late 1950s, and early 1960s. Ringo Starr was the drummer for The Hurricanes before joining The Beatles in August 1962.
The Hurricanes were one of the most popular acts on the Liverpool and Hamburg club scenes during their existence, although their attempt at a recording career was not successful. They released only two singles, the second one being a version of the West Side Story song "America", which was produced by The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein.
When Storm's father died, he returned from Amsterdam to Liverpool to be with his mother at Stormsville, at 54 Broadgreen Road, Broadgreen, Liverpool. On 27 September 1972, Storm developed a chest infection and could not sleep properly, so he took sleeping pills. The next day Storm and his mother were both found dead. A post mortem determined that Storm had not taken enough pills to kill himself, but it was suspected that his mother had, after finding her son's body.
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Shonen Knife
Shonen Knife, written in Japanese as 少年ナイフ, which transliterates as Shōnen Naifu, literally "Boy Knife," is an all-female Japanese pop-punk band formed in Osaka, Japan, in 1981. Heavily influenced by 1960s girl groups, pop bands, The Beach Boys, and early punk rock acts, such as the Ramones, the trio crafts stripped-down songs expressing infectious melodies and simplistic, exuberant lyrics sung both in Japanese and English.
Despite their pop-oriented nature, the trio maintains a distinctly underground garage rock sound rooted in edgy instrumentation and D.I.Y. aesthetics, which over the course of their long career has earned them a solid, worldwide cult following and made avid fans out of seminal '90s alternative rock acts such as Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Redd Kross. The band has been credited with making "the international pop underground more international" by "opening it up to bands from Japan". They have also performed as a Ramones tribute band under the name The Osaka Ramones.
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Stuart Sutcliffe
Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe (23 June 1940 – 10 April 1962) was a Scottish artist and musician, best known as the original bass player of The Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue a career as an artist, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with coming up with the name "The Beatles", as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, The Crickets. As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometimes referred to as the "Fifth Beatle".
When The Beatles played in Hamburg, he met photographer Astrid Kirchherr, to whom he was later engaged. He later enrolled in the Hamburg College of Art after leaving The Beatles, and studied under future pop art artist, Eduardo Paolozzi. He earned praise for his paintings, which mostly explored a style related to abstract expressionism. In 1962, Sutcliffe collapsed in the middle of an art class in Hamburg after complaining of head pains. German doctors performed various checks on him, but were unable to determine exactly what was causing the headaches. On 10 April 1962, he was taken to hospital, but died in the ambulance on the way.
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Syd Straw
Syd Straw is an American rock singer and songwriter. The daughter of actor Jack Straw (The Pajama Game), she began her career singing backup for Pat Benatar, then took her distinct voice to the indie/alternative scene and joined the Golden Palominos (also including Michael Stipe, Matthew Sweet, and Anton Fier). She released her first album, Surprise, in 1989; it featured contributions by Stipe, Fier, Richard Thompson, Jody Harris, Peter Blegvad, and a number of other well-known musicians. A second album, War and Peace, appeared in 1996. Recorded with a relatively obscure Midwest rock group called the Skeletons, it chronicled a brief and unhappy romance. In 2008, she released a new album, entitled Pink Velour, on her own label, Earnester Records. According to an earlier interview, the title track “is about my family moving back and forth between the east and the west, and my being kidnapped by my mother on Valentine's Day in 1969, and about not seeing my dad for almost seven years.”
A frequent backup singer and contributor to duets with other musicians, Straw has also maintained an intermittent acting career, appearing on the television shows The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Tales of the City. Syd Straw can be heard singing harmony and backing vocals on the Rickie Lee Jones albums Traffic From Paradise and The Evening of My Best Day. She is also featured on Leo Kottke's Peculiaroso, which Jones produced. Straw appears on "What Am I Worth" from the Dave Alvin album King of California. For a number of years she has given an annual "Heartwreck" live performance on Valentine's Day.
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Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam ( /ˈɡɪliəm/; born 22 November 1940) is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). The only "Python" not born in Britain, he took British citizenship in 1968.
Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Beatrice (née Vance) and James Hall Gilliam, who was a traveling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Soon after, they moved to the nearby Medicine Lake.
The family moved to Panorama City, California, in 1952. Gilliam attended Birmingham High School where he was class president and senior prom King, was voted "Most Likely to Succeed", and achieved straight A's. During high school, he began to avidly read Mad magazine, which was then edited by Harvey Kurtzman; this later influenced his work.
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The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register (it became The Times on 1 January 1788). The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News International, itself wholly owned by the News Corporation group headed by Rupert Murdoch. The Times and The Sunday Times do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1967.
The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, including The Times of India (1838), The Straits Times (1845), The New York Times (1851), The Irish Times (1859), the Los Angeles Times (1881), The Seattle Times (1891), The Daily Times (Malawi) (1900), The Canberra Times (1926), and The Times (Malta) (1935). For distinguishing purposes it is therefore sometimes referred to, particularly in North America, as the "London Times" or "The Times of London".
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Tony Sheridan
Tony Sheridan (born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity on 21 May 1940 in Norwich, Norfolk), is an English rock and roll singer-songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as an early collaborator of The Beatles, (though the record was labelled as being with "The Beat Brothers"), one of two non-Beatles (the other being Billy Preston) to receive label performance credit on a record with the group, and the only non-Beatle to appear as lead singer on a Beatles recording which charted as a single.
In his early life, Sheridan was influenced by his parents' interest in classical music, and by age seven, he had learned to play the violin. He eventually came to play guitar, and in 1956, formed his first band. He showed enough talent that he soon found himself playing in London's "Two I's" club for some six months straight, but at the same time he also found himself reduced to sleeping in doorways. In 1958, at 18, he began appearing on the BBC's Oh Boy, playing electric guitar on such early Rock classics as "Blue Suede Shoes", "Glad All Over", "Mighty Mighty Man" and "Oh Boy!". Sheridan was soon viewed as a very promising guitarist and as such was employed backing a number of singers, reportedly including Gene Vincent and Conway Twitty while they were in England. Early in 1960, Sheridan performed in a package tour of the United Kingdom which also included Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. On April 17, Vincent and Cochran rebuffed his request to ride along with them to the next venue, but he thereby escaped the road accident which would leave Cochran dead and Vincent badly injured. He also played guitar for Cherry Wainer on her recording of "Happy Organ".
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Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono (オノ・ヨーコ（小野 洋子）, Ono Yōko?, born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese artist, author, and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront in her music which prefigured New Wave music and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs.
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933 to mother Isoko Ono, the great-granddaughter of Zenjiro Yasuda of the Yasuda banking family, and to father Yeisuke Ono, a banker and one-time classical pianist who was a descendant of an Emperor of Japan. The name "Yoko" means "ocean child". Two weeks before she was born, her father was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after and Yoko met her father when she was two. Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. In 1937, her father was transferred back to Japan and Ono was enrolled at Tokyo's Gakushuin (also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.
wn.com/Yoko_Ono
RELEASE
ALBUMS
- Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band
- Rendezvous
- Questionnaire
- We've Arrived! (And to Prove It We're Here)
- Lonely-Phobia
- Unfinished Words
- Hey Mister
- Easy Listening
- Now She's Left You
- The Knicker Elastic King
- I Love You
- Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik
- Joe Public
- Shangri-La
- Don't Know Why
- Back in '64
- Lullaby
- Baby S'Il Vous Plait
- My Little Ukelele
- Under My Skin
- Rut-A-Lot
- L'amour Perdue
- Gibberish
- Front Loader
- Say Sorry Again
- I Must Be in Love
- 24 Hours in Tunbridge Wells
- The Fabulous Bingo Bros.
- Concrete Jungle Boy
- The Children of Rock and Roll
- Stoop Solo
- Song o' the Insurance Men
- Testing
- I Give Myself to You
- Communist Cooking
- Johnny Cash
- Protest Song
- Accountancy Shanty
- Football
- Boring
- L'amour Perdue Cha Cha Cha
- The Hard to Get
- The Song o' the Continuity Announcers
- I Must Be in Love (clear mix)
- Protest Song (mosaicless mix)
- Goose-Step Mama
- Number One
- Baby Let Me Be
- Hold My Hand
- Blue Suede Schubert
- I Must Be in Love
- With a Girl Like You
- Between Us
- Living in Hope
- Ouch!
- It's Looking Good
- Doubleback Alley
- Good Times Roll
- Nevertheless
- Love Life
- Piggy in the Middle
- Another Day
- Cheese and Onions
- Get Up and Go
- Let's Be Natural
- We've Arrived
- Now She's Left You
- Number One
- Love Life
- Goose Step Mama (rehearsal)
- It's Looking Good (rehearsal)
- I Must Be In Love (rehearsal)
- Baby Let Me Be
- Good Times Roll
- Let's Be Natural
- Get Up and Go
- Blue Suede Schubert (rehersal)
- Between Us
- Piggy in the Middle
- Living in Hope
- Double Back Alley
- Plenty of Time
- Between Us (tv)
- It's Looking Good (tv)
- Get Up and Go (tv)
- I Must Be in Love - RWTV
- I Wanna Be With You
- Back Breaker
- Front Loader
- Say Sorry Again
- I Must Be in Love
- Concrete Jungle Boy
- Children of Rock 'n' Roll
- Baby Sil Vous Pleit
- It's Looking Good
- Hold My Hand
- Number One
- Love Life
- I Must Be in Love
- Lullaby
- My Little Ukelele
- Knicker Elastic King
- Ready Mades
- Testing
- When I'm With You
- Live at Mrs. Fletcher's
- The Old Gay Whistle Test
- Bride Stripped Bare
- Double Back Alley
- Plenty of Time
- Boring
- Worst Is Yet to Comee
- Womble Bashers of Walthomstowe
- Slaves of Freedom
- We've Arrived!
- Now She's Left You
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The Rutles Intro
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:53
- Updated: 28 Oct 2012
Post Monty Python, Eric Idle had a tv show about the Rutles, aka the Prefab Four: Dirk, Nasty, Stig and Barry, who were quite a lot like the Beatles, only sillier. Here, Eric Idle introduces the phenomenon and shows some of their highlights.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Intro
The Rutles All You Need Is Cash: Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:49
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
a 1978 television film that traces the career of a fictitious British rock group called The Rutles and is parody of The Beatles carrier. Staring: * Eric Idle as Dirk McQuickly (Paul) / Narrator * John Halsey as Barry Wom (Ringo) * Ricky Fataar as Stig O'Hara (George) * Neil Innes as Ron Nasty (John) * Michael Palin as Eric Manchester, Rutle Corp. Press Agent / Lawyer * George Harrison as The Interviewer * Bianca Jagger as Martini McQuickly * John Belushi as Ron Decline, the most feared promoter in the world * Dan Aykroyd as Brian Thigh, ex-record producer who turned down the Rutles * Gilda Radner as Mrs. Emily Pules * Bill Murray as Bill Murray the K. * Gwen Taylor as Mrs. Iris Mountbatten / Chastity * Ron Wood as Hell's Angel * Terence Bayler as Leggy Mountbatten * Henry Woolf as Arthur Sultan, the Surrey Mystic * Ollie Halsall as Leppo, the "fifth Rutle"
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_All_You_Need_Is_Cash_Part_1
The Rutles: Shangrila
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:53
- Updated: 18 Nov 2012
The Rutles gather an all-star chorus together to record their reunion single.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Shangrila
THE RUTLES - Number One (1962)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:51
- Updated: 10 Nov 2012
10/5/1962 (Parlourphone single)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Number_One_1962
THE RUTLES - With A Girl Like You (1964)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:58
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
"A Hard Day's Rut" 7/10/1964, footage from Rutlemania document.
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_With_A_Girl_Like_You_1964
The Rutles 2 - Cant Buy Me Lunch - A Beatles parody
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:43
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
More Than twenty years after the release of the original Beatles parody, The Rutles 1 mockumentary " All You Need Is Cash ", famous artists, actors and musicians speak out on how the Rutles influenced them. (more)
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_2_Cant_Buy_Me_Lunch_A_Beatles_parody
THE RUTLES - Cheese And Onions (1969)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:38
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
"Yellow Submarine Sandwich" (Soundtrack 1/17/1969)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Cheese_And_Onions_1969
THE RUTLES - It's Looking Good (1965)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:13
- Updated: 18 Nov 2012
Che Stadium 1965 ("Rutle Soul" 12/3/1965)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_It's_Looking_Good_1965
The Rutles: Ouch!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:53
- Updated: 18 Nov 2012
"Ouch!" By The Rutles From "The Rutles (Album)" A parody of "Help!" By The Beatles
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Ouch!
The Rutles - Hold My Hand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:31
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Hold_My_Hand
THE RUTLES - Goose-Step Mama (1962)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:41
- Updated: 07 Nov 2012
Extremely rare footage from The Cavern, Liverpool 1962
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Goose-Step_Mama_1962
The Rutles - John and Yoko
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:06
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
The John and Yoko parody or is it just Nasty (Neil Innes) and Chastity (Gwen Taylor) :-) -- Scene from the 1978 movie "The Rutles: All you need is cash", with guest appearances from George Harrison, Mick Jagger and Paul Simon.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_John_and_Yoko
THE RUTLES - Ouch! (1965)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:47
- Updated: 20 Nov 2012
7/23/1965 (Parlourphone single)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Ouch!_1965
THE RUTLES - Hold My Hand (1963)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:29
- Updated: 07 Nov 2012
"Meet The Rutles" 11/22/1963
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Hold_My_Hand_1963
The Rutles - Get Up And Go
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:21
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
Live on the rooftop of Rutle Corps, January 30, 1969. Featured in the film "Let It Rot."
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Get_Up_And_Go
The Rutles - I Must Be In Love
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:02
- Updated: 13 Nov 2012
The Rutles - I Must Be In Love
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_I_Must_Be_In_Love
THE RUTLES - Piggy In The Middle (1967)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:59
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
11/24/1967 (Parlourphone single)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Piggy_In_The_Middle_1967
The Rutles-Get Up and Go
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:19
- Updated: 19 Nov 2012
From "The Rutles: All You Need is Cash." song by Neil Innes.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles-Get_Up_and_Go
THE RUTLES - Let's Be Natural (1969)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:44
- Updated: 19 Nov 2012
"Shabby Road" 9/26/1969
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Let's_Be_Natural_1969
THE RUTLES - Get Up And Go (1969)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:44
- Updated: 21 Oct 2012
Single 4/17/1969
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Get_Up_And_Go_1969
The Rutles: Shangri-La
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:47
- Updated: 19 Nov 2012
"Shangri-La" By The Rutles From "The Rutles Archaeology" A parody of "A Day in the Life", "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "Hey Jude"; additional mini-pastiches of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" "Lovely Rita" "For No One", "I Am the Walrus", "Magical Mystery Tour", "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need is Love" "The End" By The Beatles "Whatever" By Oasis "How Sweet To Be A Idiot" "Joe-Public" By Neal Innes/ The Rutles.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Shangri-La
Bonzo Dog Band (Rutles) - Give Booze a Chance
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:02
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
http://wn.com/Bonzo_Dog_Band_Rutles_Give_Booze_a_Chance
The Rutles: Another Day
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:14
- Updated: 04 Nov 2012
"Another Day" By The Rutles From "The Rutles (Album)" A parody of "Martha My Dear" By The Beatles
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Another_Day
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The Rutles: Together Again!
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:38
- Updated: 06 Nov 2012
"This is a shameless publicity stunt" ... The Rutles (minus Ollie Halsall and Eric Idle) returned in 1997 to record their best album, Archaeology. In this film shot and edited by Taly and Russ Johnson, Neil Innes, Rikki Fataar and John Halsey play "Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band" and "Shangri-La," live on a rooftop in New York City. The video also features original art of Rutles merchandising and other good things.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Together_Again!
Rutlemania "Ouch" Live From New York City
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:23
- Updated: 02 Nov 2012
This is the little Ditty from the second outing by the Pre fab Four
http://wn.com/Rutlemania_Ouch_Live_From_New_York_City
The Rutles - "Yesterday's Leftovers" (Bootleg) [Full Album]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 41:01
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
The Rutles - "Yesterday's Leftovers" (Bootleg) [Full Album] 01. 00:00 "I Must Be In Love [1]" 02. 02:39 "The Children of Rock and Roll" 03. 03:26 "I Must Be In Love [2]" 04. 05:46 "Cheese and Onions" 05. 07:12 "Shangri-La" 06. 10:35 "Hold My Hand" 07. 13:06 "Brian Thigh Interview" 08. 14:31 "You Need Feet" (Bernard Bresslaw) 09. 15:40 "Dirk's Love Song" (De, De, De, De, De , De) 10. 16:29 "Lullaby" 11. 16:58 "Baby S'il Vous Plait" ("Baby Let Me Be" - French Version) 12. 18:52 "My Little Ukelele" 13. 20:53 "Under My Skin" 14. 24:23 "Rut-a-Lot" 15. 30:18 "I Must Be In Love [3]" 16. 32:36 "Not Letting It Be" Track Info: Tracks 1, 2, 3: "The Rutland Weekend Songbook" 1976. "I Must Be in Love"[1] includes intro and fans. "I Must Be in Love"[2] clear mix minus screaming fans. Tracks 4, 5: Saturday Night Live 1977. Track 6: "Hold My Hand" with "tuning-up intro" from 1978 "The Rutles" vinyl record. The "tuning-up intro" was cut from the Rhino CD re-issue. Track 7: Brian Thigh Interview, originally heard on the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special 1978. It was edited for DVD release. Track 8: From "A Thousand Feet Of Film", originally heard on the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special 1978. Not a Rutles song - 1959's "You Need Feet" was originally recorded and released in England by Bernard Bresslaw. Track 9: Originally heard on the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special 1978. Tracks 10, 11, 12 : "Archaeology" 1996 Japan bonus tracks. "Lullaby" is a brief musical gag from Innes. "Baby S'il ...
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Yesterday's_Leftovers_Bootleg_Full_Album_
The Rutles - Hold My Hand
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:31
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Hold_My_Hand
THE RUTLES - Love Life (1967)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:58
- Updated: 29 Oct 2012
7/7/1967 (Parlourphone single)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Love_Life_1967
The Rutles - Love Life
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:17
- Updated: 22 Oct 2012
I do not own the rights to this song. Lyrics Love Life Love Life Love Life Love Life Make up your mind (Love Life) In your own time (Love Life) To live is to live (Love Life) To love is sublime (Love Life) Where there's a will, there's a way Love is the meaning of life Life...
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Love_Life
THE RUTLES - It's Looking Good (1965)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:13
- Updated: 18 Nov 2012
Che Stadium 1965 ("Rutle Soul" 12/3/1965)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_It's_Looking_Good_1965
THE RUTLES - RUTLEMANIA LIVE! singing HOLD MY HAND
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:00
- Updated: 05 Sep 2012
COMING SOON: Idle, Innes and etc. interview excerpts... A touch of musical history was made when the ultimate Beatles satirists, the original RUTLES - Eric Idle, Neil Innes, Rickey Fataar and John Halsey, or Dirk, Ron, Stig and Barry - appeared together in public for the first time ever at LA's American Cinematheque to celebrate the Rutles 30th anniversary. RUTLEMANIA, Eric Idle's new RUTLES stage show, was represented by its stars: beatles tribute band The Fab Four, now transformed into RUTLEMANIA. Here's their absolutely live version of the RUTLES song "Hold My Hand," replete with previously taped teenage screams.
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_RUTLEMANIA_LIVE!_singing_HOLD_MY_HAND
The Rutles - Get Up And Go
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:21
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
Live on the rooftop of Rutle Corps, January 30, 1969. Featured in the film "Let It Rot."
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Get_Up_And_Go
The Rutles: Love Life
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:54
- Updated: 25 Oct 2012
"Love Life" By The Rutles From "The Rutles (Album)" A parody of "All You Need Is Love" By The Beatles
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Love_Life
The Rutles: Shangri-La
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:47
- Updated: 19 Nov 2012
"Shangri-La" By The Rutles From "The Rutles Archaeology" A parody of "A Day in the Life", "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "Hey Jude"; additional mini-pastiches of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" "Lovely Rita" "For No One", "I Am the Walrus", "Magical Mystery Tour", "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need is Love" "The End" By The Beatles "Whatever" By Oasis "How Sweet To Be A Idiot" "Joe-Public" By Neal Innes/ The Rutles.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Shangri-La
The Rutles: Shangrila
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:53
- Updated: 18 Nov 2012
The Rutles gather an all-star chorus together to record their reunion single.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Shangrila
The Rutles - Living In Hope
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:37
- Updated: 04 Nov 2012
Live on Barry's wedding night, February 11, 1965.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Living_In_Hope
Trailers from The Rutles (VHS, Roadshow Home Video, 1984)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:22
- Updated: 11 Aug 2012
TRAILERS: Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii Mr Mom Time is on our side Easy Money Get Crazy The Golden Seal Gorky Park
http://wn.com/Trailers_from_The_Rutles_VHS,_Roadshow_Home_Video,_1984
The Rutles - "Archaeology" [Full Album]
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 49:41
- Updated: 17 Nov 2012
01. 00:00 "Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band" 02. 02:19 "Rendezvous" 03. 04:25 "Questionnaire" 04. 07:11 "We've Arrived (And to Prove It Were Here)" 05. 09:20 "Lonely-Phobia" 06. 11:56 "Unfinished Words" 07. 14:04 "Hey Mister!" 08. 17:22 "Easy Listening" 09. 19:31 "Now She's Left You" 10. 21:36 "The Knicker Elastic King" 11. 24:14 "I Love You" 12. 26:32 "Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik" 13. 30:58 "Joe Public" 14. 34:58 "Shangri-La" 15. 42:42 "Don't Know Why" 16. 46:25 "Back In '64" The Rutles Archaeology is an album by the comedy band The Rutles. Like their previous release, the album contains pastiches of Beatles' songs. Three of the four musicians who had created the soundtrack for the 1978 film — Neil Innes, John Halsey, and Ricky Fataar — reunited in 1996 and recorded a second album, Archaeology, an affectionate send-up of The Beatles Anthology albums (while its original cover design rather parodied that of The Beatles' Past Masters singles compilation, though). The fourth 'real' Rutle, Ollie Halsall, died in Spain in 1992. Eric Idle was invited to participate, but declined. Like the Anthology project that it lampooned, it featured tracks ostensibly from all periods of the Rutles' career, sequenced to reflect the fictional band's chronology. Several of the songs were actually older Innes songs that were dusted off and given the "Rutles" treatment. The reunion was blessed by George Harrison, who encouraged The Pre-Fab Four to proceed. (When ...
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Archaeology_Full_Album_
THE RUTLES "Back in '64"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:08
- Updated: 01 Sep 2012
March, 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the Rutles film "All You Need Is Cash". The Rutles members were: Ron Nasty (styled after John Lennon) played by Neil Innes; Dirk McQuickly (styled after Paul McCartney) played by Eric Idle; Stig O'Hara (styled after George Harrison) played by Ricky Fataar; Barry Wom (born Barrington Womble) (styled after Ringo Starr) played by John Halsey (the character's truncated surname was an affectionate play on how Ringo had changed his real surname of 'Starkey' to 'Starr'); (Hamburg only) 'Leppo, The Fifth Rutle' (styled after Stu Sutcliffe) seen only in a still photograph in the film - the photo showed Ollie Halsall, the fourth musician who played and sang on the soundtrack. George Harrison (a long time friend of Idle's) was involved in the project from almost the beginning. Producer Gary Weis remembers: "We were sitting around in Eric's kitchen one day, planning a sequence that really ripped into the mythology and George looked up and said, 'We were The Beatles, you know!' Then he shook his head and said 'Aw, never mind'. I think he was the only one of The Beatles who really could see the irony of it all." Says George Harrison: "...the Rutles sort of liberated me from The Beatles in a way. It was the only thing I saw of those Beatles television shows they made. It was actually the best, funniest and most scathing. But at the same time, it was done with the most love." This vid is an edited alternate ending for the film THE ...
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Back_in_'64
THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH Trailer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:48
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
Available on DVD through www.umbrellaent.com.au Buy it here: www.umbrellaent.com.au The Rutles, a hilarious spoof of The Beatles and the brainchild of Monty Python's Eric Idle, made their first appearance in a short film on Saturday Night Live. Audience response was so overwhelming that SNL producer Lorne Michaels decided to go ahead with a full production, All You Need Is Cash, which originally aired on NBC-TV in the spring of 1978 - six years before the more famous "mockumentary" Spinal Tap. The extravaganza starred Idle and Neil Innes (the latter of whom wrote all of the music) and featured special guests Mick Jagger, Ron Wood, Paul Simon, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and even ex-Beatle George Harrison. Follow four mop-topped young Brits whose right choice of trousers (tight) gets them a lifetime recording contract despite their lack of musical ability. Overcoming that, they go on to produce monumental albums like Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band, along with appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and a concert at Che Stadium, cementing their world domination of pop music. But, as with their Fab Four namesake, artistic differences and various other problems threaten to derail Rutlemania. Don't miss The Rutles' wonderfully warped songs "Hold My Hand," "Love Life," "Ouch!," "Piggy In The Middle," "Cheese And Onions," "Get Up And Go," and many other familiar-sounding tunes.
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_ALL_YOU_NEED_IS_CASH_Trailer
THE RUTLES - Number One (1962)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:51
- Updated: 10 Nov 2012
10/5/1962 (Parlourphone single)
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_Number_One_1962
THE RUTLES - With A Girl Like You (1964)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:58
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
"A Hard Day's Rut" 7/10/1964, footage from Rutlemania document.
http://wn.com/THE_RUTLES_With_A_Girl_Like_You_1964
Rutles Reunion Interview EXCERPT 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:00
- Updated: 05 Sep 2012
Interview with the Rutles (Eric Idle, Neil Innes, John Halsey and Ricky Fataar) conducted by Martin Lewis at the American Cinematheque in LA 3/17/08. The only time the Rutles have ever made a public appearance together.
http://wn.com/Rutles_Reunion_Interview_EXCERPT_1
The Rutles 2 - Cant Buy Me Lunch - A Beatles parody
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:43
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
More Than twenty years after the release of the original Beatles parody, The Rutles 1 mockumentary " All You Need Is Cash ", famous artists, actors and musicians speak out on how the Rutles influenced them. (more)
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_2_Cant_Buy_Me_Lunch_A_Beatles_parody
The Rutles "Cheese & Onions"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:39
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
1978 brought "The Pre-Fab Four" The Rutles 'All You Need Is Cash' television special. Many celebrity cameo appearances were made by George Harrison, Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, Gilda Radner, Ron Wood and others.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_Cheese_Onions
The Rutles - It's Looking Good
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:07
- Updated: 16 Oct 2012
Live at Che Stadium, August 15, 1965.
http://wn.com/The_Rutles_It's_Looking_Good
8:38
The Rutles: Together Again!
"This is a shameless publicity stunt" ... The Rutles (minus Ollie Halsall and Eric Idle) r...
published: 21 Aug 2010
author: KeepUnderCover
The Rutles: Together Again!
"This is a shameless publicity stunt" ... The Rutles (minus Ollie Halsall and Eric Idle) returned in 1997 to record their best album, Archaeology. In this film shot and edited by Taly and Russ Johnson, Neil Innes, Rikki Fataar and John Halsey play "Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band" and "Shangri-La," live on a rooftop in New York City. The video also features original art of Rutles merchandising and other good things.
- published: 21 Aug 2010
- views: 12700
- author: KeepUnderCover
2:23
Rutlemania "Ouch" Live From New York City
This is the little Ditty from the second outing by the Pre fab Four...
published: 31 Mar 2008
author: Rutles4ever
Rutlemania "Ouch" Live From New York City
This is the little Ditty from the second outing by the Pre fab Four
- published: 31 Mar 2008
- views: 11898
- author: Rutles4ever
41:01
The Rutles - "Yesterday's Leftovers" (Bootleg) [Full Album]
The Rutles - "Yesterday's Leftovers" (Bootleg) [Full Album] 01. 00:00 "I Must Be In Love [...
published: 07 Aug 2012
author: MisterMusicMan382
The Rutles - "Yesterday's Leftovers" (Bootleg) [Full Album]
The Rutles - "Yesterday's Leftovers" (Bootleg) [Full Album] 01. 00:00 "I Must Be In Love [1]" 02. 02:39 "The Children of Rock and Roll" 03. 03:26 "I Must Be In Love [2]" 04. 05:46 "Cheese and Onions" 05. 07:12 "Shangri-La" 06. 10:35 "Hold My Hand" 07. 13:06 "Brian Thigh Interview" 08. 14:31 "You Need Feet" (Bernard Bresslaw) 09. 15:40 "Dirk's Love Song" (De, De, De, De, De , De) 10. 16:29 "Lullaby" 11. 16:58 "Baby S'il Vous Plait" ("Baby Let Me Be" - French Version) 12. 18:52 "My Little Ukelele" 13. 20:53 "Under My Skin" 14. 24:23 "Rut-a-Lot" 15. 30:18 "I Must Be In Love [3]" 16. 32:36 "Not Letting It Be" Track Info: Tracks 1, 2, 3: "The Rutland Weekend Songbook" 1976. "I Must Be in Love"[1] includes intro and fans. "I Must Be in Love"[2] clear mix minus screaming fans. Tracks 4, 5: Saturday Night Live 1977. Track 6: "Hold My Hand" with "tuning-up intro" from 1978 "The Rutles" vinyl record. The "tuning-up intro" was cut from the Rhino CD re-issue. Track 7: Brian Thigh Interview, originally heard on the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special 1978. It was edited for DVD release. Track 8: From "A Thousand Feet Of Film", originally heard on the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special 1978. Not a Rutles song - 1959's "You Need Feet" was originally recorded and released in England by Bernard Bresslaw. Track 9: Originally heard on the "All You Need Is Cash" TV special 1978. Tracks 10, 11, 12 : "Archaeology" 1996 Japan bonus tracks. "Lullaby" is a brief musical gag from Innes. "Baby S'il ...
- published: 07 Aug 2012
- views: 2113
- author: MisterMusicMan382
2:31
The Rutles - Hold My Hand
Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964....
published: 05 May 2011
author: cheeseandonionsohno
The Rutles - Hold My Hand
Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964.
- published: 05 May 2011
- views: 68124
- author: cheeseandonionsohno
4:17
The Rutles - Love Life
I do not own the rights to this song. Lyrics Love Life Love Life Love Life Love Life Make ...
published: 31 Aug 2009
author: Ian Barrett
The Rutles - Love Life
I do not own the rights to this song. Lyrics Love Life Love Life Love Life Love Life Make up your mind (Love Life) In your own time (Love Life) To live is to live (Love Life) To love is sublime (Love Life) Where there's a will, there's a way Love is the meaning of life Life...
- published: 31 Aug 2009
- views: 13084
- author: Ian Barrett
3:00
THE RUTLES - RUTLEMANIA LIVE! singing HOLD MY HAND
COMING SOON: Idle, Innes and etc. interview excerpts... A touch of musical history was mad...
published: 18 Mar 2008
author: idontwantyourpity
THE RUTLES - RUTLEMANIA LIVE! singing HOLD MY HAND
COMING SOON: Idle, Innes and etc. interview excerpts... A touch of musical history was made when the ultimate Beatles satirists, the original RUTLES - Eric Idle, Neil Innes, Rickey Fataar and John Halsey, or Dirk, Ron, Stig and Barry - appeared together in public for the first time ever at LA's American Cinematheque to celebrate the Rutles 30th anniversary. RUTLEMANIA, Eric Idle's new RUTLES stage show, was represented by its stars: beatles tribute band The Fab Four, now transformed into RUTLEMANIA. Here's their absolutely live version of the RUTLES song "Hold My Hand," replete with previously taped teenage screams.
- published: 18 Mar 2008
- views: 9675
- author: idontwantyourpity
3:21
The Rutles - Get Up And Go
Live on the rooftop of Rutle Corps, January 30, 1969. Featured in the film "Let It Rot."...
published: 05 May 2011
author: cheeseandonionsohno
The Rutles - Get Up And Go
Live on the rooftop of Rutle Corps, January 30, 1969. Featured in the film "Let It Rot."
- published: 05 May 2011
- views: 68534
- author: cheeseandonionsohno
2:54
The Rutles: Love Life
"Love Life" By The Rutles From "The Rutles (Album)" A parody of "All You Need Is Love" By ...
published: 13 Apr 2010
author: SgtRuttersClubBand
The Rutles: Love Life
"Love Life" By The Rutles From "The Rutles (Album)" A parody of "All You Need Is Love" By The Beatles
- published: 13 Apr 2010
- views: 10394
- author: SgtRuttersClubBand
7:47
The Rutles: Shangri-La
"Shangri-La" By The Rutles From "The Rutles Archaeology" A parody of "A Day in the Life", ...
published: 10 Apr 2010
author: SgtRuttersClubBand
The Rutles: Shangri-La
"Shangri-La" By The Rutles From "The Rutles Archaeology" A parody of "A Day in the Life", "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "Hey Jude"; additional mini-pastiches of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" "Lovely Rita" "For No One", "I Am the Walrus", "Magical Mystery Tour", "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need is Love" "The End" By The Beatles "Whatever" By Oasis "How Sweet To Be A Idiot" "Joe-Public" By Neal Innes/ The Rutles.
- published: 10 Apr 2010
- views: 28406
- author: SgtRuttersClubBand
4:53
The Rutles: Shangrila
The Rutles gather an all-star chorus together to record their reunion single....
published: 26 May 2006
author: videowombat
The Rutles: Shangrila
The Rutles gather an all-star chorus together to record their reunion single.
- published: 26 May 2006
- views: 76473
- author: videowombat
2:37
The Rutles - Living In Hope
Live on Barry's wedding night, February 11, 1965....
published: 05 May 2011
author: cheeseandonionsohno
The Rutles - Living In Hope
Live on Barry's wedding night, February 11, 1965.
- published: 05 May 2011
- views: 10143
- author: cheeseandonionsohno
9:22
Trailers from The Rutles (VHS, Roadshow Home Video, 1984)
TRAILERS: Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii Mr Mom Time is on our side Easy Money Get Crazy The G...
published: 27 Dec 2010
author: FLEMISHDOG
Trailers from The Rutles (VHS, Roadshow Home Video, 1984)
TRAILERS: Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii Mr Mom Time is on our side Easy Money Get Crazy The Golden Seal Gorky Park
- published: 27 Dec 2010
- views: 1481
- author: FLEMISHDOG
Vimeo results:
73:01
The Rutles "All You Need Is Cash"
La banda 'The Rutles' surgió a finales de los años 70 de la mente del 'Monty Python', Eric...
published: 06 Oct 2012
author: eLzO
The Rutles "All You Need Is Cash"
La banda 'The Rutles' surgió a finales de los años 70 de la mente del 'Monty Python', Eric Idle. Un grupo cuya primera aparición en el programa Saturday Night Live causó un gran revuelo. Tanto que su historia se llevo al cine en forma de documental ("All You Need Is Cash") con actores famosos como John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd y las apariciones estelares de Mick Jagger y George Harrison.
Con una discografía de solo tres discos los componentes de los Rutles (Eric Idle, Neil Innes, Ricky Fataar, John Halsey, Ollie Halsall y David Battle) se convirtieron así en leyenda. Algunos dijeron que eran una burda copia de los Beatles, comentario que los Rutles siempre negaron: "Son ellos los que nos copian". Y es que cualquier parecido con la realidad es pura coincidencia.
Una película olvidada por el gran grupo público y que yo he querido recuperar para que podáis disfrutadla
0:00
The Rutles - All You Need Is Cash
La historia del grupo pop más grande de todos los tiempos 'The Rutles' .
La banda 'The Ru...
published: 04 Oct 2012
author: eLzO
The Rutles - All You Need Is Cash
La historia del grupo pop más grande de todos los tiempos 'The Rutles' .
La banda 'The Rutles' surgió a finales de los años 70 de la mente del 'Monty Python', Eric Idle. Un grupo cuya primera aparición en el programa Saturday Night Live causó un gran revuelo. Tanto que su historia se llevo al cine en forma de documental (All You Need Is Cash) con actores famosos como John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd y las apariciones estelares de Mick Jagger y George Harrison.
Con una discografía de solo tres discos los componentes de los Rutles (Eric Idle, Neil Innes, Ricky Fataar, John Halsey, Ollie Halsall y David Battle) se convirtieron así en leyenda. Algunos dijeron que eran una burda copia de los Beatles, comentario que los Rutles siempre negaron: "Son ellos los que nos copian". Y es que cualquier parecido con la realidad es pura coincidencia.
Una película olvidada por el gran grupo publico y que yo he querido recuperar para que podáis disfrutadla.
4:09
Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Band and The Rutles
Singer, songwriter, musician and comedian Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Band and The Rutles ...
published: 01 Mar 2011
author: Chattoon!
Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Band and The Rutles
Singer, songwriter, musician and comedian Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Band and The Rutles talks to Chattoon! about his life and work. Interviewed by Jeremy Jacobs, cartooned by Simon Cartoono Ellinas with camerawork by Paul Martin, sound by Anthony Bueno and directed by Guy Carter.
3:22
Let's Be Natural (Rutles Tribute)
My videomaking attempt using Pinnacle Studio for the first time and especially the split-s...
published: 05 Oct 2011
author: Tim Hoek
Let's Be Natural (Rutles Tribute)
My videomaking attempt using Pinnacle Studio for the first time and especially the split-screen possibility.
So, everything you see and hear is me!
(yes, I'm playing and singing every part)
From the middle part to the end of the clip it's a making-of where you'll see the seperate videos and the different stages of combining all bits.
The great song Let's Be Natural is written by Neil Innes for The Rutles movie! (a Beatles parody, check IMDB.com)
Youtube results:
49:41
The Rutles - "Archaeology" [Full Album]
01. 00:00 "Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band" 02. 02:19 "Rendezvous" ...
published: 06 Aug 2012
author: MisterMusicMan382
The Rutles - "Archaeology" [Full Album]
01. 00:00 "Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon a Good Time Band" 02. 02:19 "Rendezvous" 03. 04:25 "Questionnaire" 04. 07:11 "We've Arrived (And to Prove It Were Here)" 05. 09:20 "Lonely-Phobia" 06. 11:56 "Unfinished Words" 07. 14:04 "Hey Mister!" 08. 17:22 "Easy Listening" 09. 19:31 "Now She's Left You" 10. 21:36 "The Knicker Elastic King" 11. 24:14 "I Love You" 12. 26:32 "Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik" 13. 30:58 "Joe Public" 14. 34:58 "Shangri-La" 15. 42:42 "Don't Know Why" 16. 46:25 "Back In '64" The Rutles Archaeology is an album by the comedy band The Rutles. Like their previous release, the album contains pastiches of Beatles' songs. Three of the four musicians who had created the soundtrack for the 1978 film — Neil Innes, John Halsey, and Ricky Fataar — reunited in 1996 and recorded a second album, Archaeology, an affectionate send-up of The Beatles Anthology albums (while its original cover design rather parodied that of The Beatles' Past Masters singles compilation, though). The fourth 'real' Rutle, Ollie Halsall, died in Spain in 1992. Eric Idle was invited to participate, but declined. Like the Anthology project that it lampooned, it featured tracks ostensibly from all periods of the Rutles' career, sequenced to reflect the fictional band's chronology. Several of the songs were actually older Innes songs that were dusted off and given the "Rutles" treatment. The reunion was blessed by George Harrison, who encouraged The Pre-Fab Four to proceed. (When ...
- published: 06 Aug 2012
- views: 2579
- author: MisterMusicMan382
4:08
THE RUTLES "Back in '64"
March, 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the Rutles film "All You Need Is...
published: 10 Mar 2008
author: zuebee
THE RUTLES "Back in '64"
March, 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the Rutles film "All You Need Is Cash". The Rutles members were: Ron Nasty (styled after John Lennon) played by Neil Innes; Dirk McQuickly (styled after Paul McCartney) played by Eric Idle; Stig O'Hara (styled after George Harrison) played by Ricky Fataar; Barry Wom (born Barrington Womble) (styled after Ringo Starr) played by John Halsey (the character's truncated surname was an affectionate play on how Ringo had changed his real surname of 'Starkey' to 'Starr'); (Hamburg only) 'Leppo, The Fifth Rutle' (styled after Stu Sutcliffe) seen only in a still photograph in the film - the photo showed Ollie Halsall, the fourth musician who played and sang on the soundtrack. George Harrison (a long time friend of Idle's) was involved in the project from almost the beginning. Producer Gary Weis remembers: "We were sitting around in Eric's kitchen one day, planning a sequence that really ripped into the mythology and George looked up and said, 'We were The Beatles, you know!' Then he shook his head and said 'Aw, never mind'. I think he was the only one of The Beatles who really could see the irony of it all." Says George Harrison: "...the Rutles sort of liberated me from The Beatles in a way. It was the only thing I saw of those Beatles television shows they made. It was actually the best, funniest and most scathing. But at the same time, it was done with the most love." This vid is an edited alternate ending for the film THE ...
- published: 10 Mar 2008
- views: 101415
- author: zuebee
3:48
THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH Trailer
Available on DVD through www.umbrellaent.com.au Buy it here: www.umbrellaent.com.au The Ru...
published: 28 Mar 2012
author: UmbrellaEntAU
THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH Trailer
Available on DVD through www.umbrellaent.com.au Buy it here: www.umbrellaent.com.au The Rutles, a hilarious spoof of The Beatles and the brainchild of Monty Python's Eric Idle, made their first appearance in a short film on Saturday Night Live. Audience response was so overwhelming that SNL producer Lorne Michaels decided to go ahead with a full production, All You Need Is Cash, which originally aired on NBC-TV in the spring of 1978 - six years before the more famous "mockumentary" Spinal Tap. The extravaganza starred Idle and Neil Innes (the latter of whom wrote all of the music) and featured special guests Mick Jagger, Ron Wood, Paul Simon, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and even ex-Beatle George Harrison. Follow four mop-topped young Brits whose right choice of trousers (tight) gets them a lifetime recording contract despite their lack of musical ability. Overcoming that, they go on to produce monumental albums like Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band, along with appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and a concert at Che Stadium, cementing their world domination of pop music. But, as with their Fab Four namesake, artistic differences and various other problems threaten to derail Rutlemania. Don't miss The Rutles' wonderfully warped songs "Hold My Hand," "Love Life," "Ouch!," "Piggy In The Middle," "Cheese And Onions," "Get Up And Go," and many other familiar-sounding tunes.
- published: 28 Mar 2012
- views: 1295
- author: UmbrellaEntAU
| The Rutles | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Origin | London, England |
| Genres | Parody, comedy rock, pop rock |
| Years active | 1975–1978, 1996–1997, 2002 |
| Labels | Warner Bros., Rhino, Virgin |
| Associated acts | The Beatles, Monty Python, Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band |
| Website | Rutles.org |
| Past members | |
| Eric Idle Neil Innes Ricky Fataar John Halsey Ollie Halsall David Battley |
|
The Rutles (also known as the Prefab Four[1]) are a band that are known for their visual and aural pastiches and parodies of The Beatles. Originally created by Eric Idle and Neil Innes as a fictional band to be featured as part of various 1970s television programming, the group (remaining a parody of The Beatles) recorded, toured, and released two UK chart hits in reality.
Initially created for a short sketch in Idle's UK television comedy series Rutland Weekend Television, the Rutles gained international fame after being the focus of the 1978 mockumentary television film, All You Need Is Cash (often referred to as just The Rutles). Having been encouraged by the reaction to the sketch, featuring Beatles' music pastiches by Neil Innes, the film was written by Idle, who co-directed it with Gary Weis. It featured 20 songs written by Innes, which he performed with three musicians as "The Rutles". A successful soundtrack album in 1978 was, much later, followed in 1996 by Archaeology, which spoofed the Beatles' Anthology series which had recently been released. The Rutles pre-date the American parody Spinal Tap by about a year.
A second film, The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch — modelled on the 2000 TV special The Beatles Revolution — was made in 2002 and released in the US on DVD in 2003, but it did not prove as popular as the original film.
Contents |
The band[link]
Rutland Weekend Television version (1975-76)[link]
The Rutles members in the original 1975 skit on Rutland Weekend Television, which subsequently aired on Saturday Night Live, were:
- "Nasty" — Neil Innes;
- "Stig" — David Battley;
- "Dirk" — Eric Idle;
- "Barry" — John Halsey.
In the original skit "Stig" is the Paul McCartney character and was portrayed by Battley, with Idle portraying the George Harrison character as "Dirk". The John Lennon character is named "Nasty". The Ringo Starr character was originally named Barry, although in the series spin-off book "The Rutland Weekend Songbook", this character is mistakenly identified as "Kevin" -- the only appearance of this name in the entire Rutles canon. In the original sketch, the characters are given only the singular names Stig, Dirk, Barry and Nasty.
However, as would happen frequently during the Rutles existence, some of the actors lip-synching the Rutles music on-screen were not musicians, and did not participate in the recording process. Rutles music for Rutland Weekend Television and the spin-off album The Rutland Weekend Songbook was recorded by Neils Innes' own band Fatso, which consisted of:
- Neil Innes - piano, vocal
- John Halsey - drums
- Roger Rettig - guitar
- Billy Bremner (later of Rockpile fame) - guitar
- Brian Hodgson - bass
[edit] All You Need Is Cash version (1978)
In adapting the characters for a full-length TV feature, several changes were made. Idle continued to play "Dirk", but Dirk was now modelled after Paul McCartney, not George Harrison. Battley was replaced as Stig by Ricky Fataar, and Stig became the George Harrison-inspired character. Additionally, the characters now all had first and last names.
The Rutles members in All You Need Is Cash were:
- Ron Nasty (styled after John Lennon) — played by Neil Innes
- Dirk McQuickly (styled after Paul McCartney) — played by Eric Idle
- Stig O'Hara (styled after George Harrison) — played by Ricky Fataar
- Barry Wom, né Barrington Womble (styled after Ringo Starr) — played by John Halsey. The character's truncated name was a play on how Ringo had changed his name from 'Richard Starkey' to 'Ringo Starr'.
Also, in tracing the fictional history of the band, one other member was mentioned:
- Leppo, The Fifth Rutle (styled after Stuart Sutcliffe) — seen only in a still photograph. The photo showed Ollie Halsall, who played and sang on the soundtrack. This name parodies that of the fifth Marx Brothers' member, Gummo Marx as well as Zeppo's.
Once again, the band that recorded the actual music was slightly different to the band that appeared on camera, as Idle did not take part in the recording process. On the soundtrack release of the music from All You Need Is Cash, The Rutles were officially:
- Neil Innes: guitar, keyboards, vocals. Innes sang the John Lennon-inspired songs.
- Ollie Halsall: guitar, keyboards, vocals. Halsall sang the Paul McCartney-inspired songs.
- Ricky Fataar: guitar, bass, sitar, tabla, vocals. Fataar sang the George Harrison-inspired songs.
- John Halsey: percussion, vocals. Halsey sang the Ringo Starr- inspired songs.
- Andy Brown: bass
While the Rutles are often thought of as a four-piece band, the credits of the original LP release of their first album make it quite clear they were a five-piece band. Brown, however, did not appear in any role in All You Need Is Cash, and was not part of any Rutles reunion.
[edit] Archaeology version (1996)
After an 18-year hiatus, The Rutles (Innes, Halsey and Fataar) reconvened to record the 1996 album Archaeology (parody of the Beatles Anthology). Halsall had died in 1992, but appears on several tracks that were outtakes from the original 1978 album, and is credited as a band member (similar to the Beatles' "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love").
On record the band was augmented by keyboardist Mickey Simmonds, who would go on to play with the band live. Also appearing on the record was bassist Malcolm Foster (ex-Pretenders), as The Rutles had no bass player. Guitarists Dougie Boyle and Bernie Holland were also featured.
Subsequent touring versions (1997–present)[link]
Innes and Halsey toured as The Rutles in the UK, augmented by other musicians. The touring group performs songs from the Rutles repertoire and from Innes's own solo career.
The touring version:
- Neil Innes — piano, guitar and vocals;
- John Halsey — drums;
- Mark Griffiths — bass guitar and vocals;
- Mickey Simmonds — keyboards and vocals;
- Ken Thornton — lead guitar;(nicknamed "Rutling" by Neil Innes)
- J.J. Jones — percussion.
Fataar played with this touring version of The Rutles on certain dates.
History[link]
[edit] Rutland Weekend Television (1975-76)
The Rutles began in 1975 as a sketch on Idle's BBC television series Rutland Weekend Television. The sketch presented Neil Innes (ex-Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band) fronting The Rutles singing "I Must Be In Love", a pastiche of a 1964 Lennon-McCartney tune. The band name was a continuation of the regional premise of the TV show.
The show was presented as a programme by a fictional TV network in Rutland, the smallest county in England. One running joke was that it was run on a shoestring. If the show parodied a topic, it would use names derivative of "Rutland". When Idle and Innes created a parody of the Beatles, Idle suggested "Rutles".
Innes was the musician/composer for the series and created songs with ideas on how they could be presented.
Innes came up with parodying A Hard Day's Night. He had written "I Must Be In Love" which he realised sounded very "Beatley" and thought of the Rutles skit. He passed the idea to Idle, who had a separate idea about a boring TV documentary maker. They merged the ideas into one extended film shot for the TV show.
The Rutles had connections with The Beatles, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Monty Python. The Beatles were fans of the Bonzos: they featured them in the 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour and Paul McCartney (working with Gus Dudgeon under the alias Apollo C. Vermouth) had produced their 1968 hit single "I'm the Urban Spaceman". The Bonzos and members of the Python team worked together in the late 1960s on the TV comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set. George Harrison was a Python fan as well as being involved in The Rutles film (see below), his company Handmade Films later took over production of Python film Life Of Brian after the original backers pulled out, fearing its subject was too controversial, as well as financing the two first solo films of ex-Python Terry Gilliam, Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.
In merchandising for the TV series, references were made to a Rutles album (Finchley Road) and a single ("Ticket To Rut"). In 1976, BBC Records produced The Rutland Weekend Songbook, an album containing 23 tracks including the Rutles songs "I Must Be In Love" and "The Children Of Rock And Roll" (later reworked as "Good Times Roll").
[edit] Saturday Night Live (1976)
Two years later, on 2 October 1976 , when Idle appeared on the American NBC show Saturday Night (later Saturday Night Live), he took videotape extracts from Rutland Weekend Television — including the Rutles clip. That led to a suggestion by SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels to extend the skit into a one-hour mock documentary. This proposal led to the 1978 mockumentary All You Need Is Cash, directed by SNL film director Gary Weis (responsible for the programme's short films), though Idle was credited as co-director.
[edit] Saturday Night Live (1977)
On 23 April 1977, Idle made another appearance on Saturday Night Live, bringing along Neil Innes as a musical guest. A running theme for this episode is the "Save Great Britain Telethon," and at one point there is an appearance by "The Rutle who lives in New York, Nasty". Innes appeared as Nasty with a lone white piano, singing a short version of "Cheese & Onions". Later in the episode, as Neil Innes, he performed a pre-Rutles version of "Shangri-La".[2]
"All You Need Is Cash" (1978)[link]
Main article: All You Need Is Cash
 |
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2010) |
All You Need Is Cash documented the rise and fall of The Rutles, paralleling much of the history of The Beatles.
Innes wrote and produced the music. He relied on his memory of Beatles music, without listening, to create soundalike songs. Innes assembled a band (himself, Halsey, Ollie Halsall, Andy Brown, and Ricky Fataar) and the group played in a London pub to gel. During Rutles performances and studio recordings, Innes took lead on the songs that resembled Lennon's; Halsall sang on most McCartney-esque tunes; Fataar sang the Harrison songs; and Halsey sang a Ringo Starr-type song. Idle mimed to Halsall's singing and Brown's bass playing in the completed film. Halsall appeared in the film as "Leppo", the fifth Rutle who in the earliest years "mainly stood in the back". Brown did not appear in the film.
File:Rutles7.jpg
George Harrison makes a cameo, interviewing the band's press spokesman 'Eric Manchester' — based on Beatles press agent Derek Taylor, played by Michael Palin.
All You Need Is Cash was one of the first of its kind, inspiration for the Rob Reiner comedy film This Is Spinal Tap in 1984.
All You Need Is Cash is a series of skits and gags that illustrate the Rutles story, following the chronology of The Beatles. The glue of the film is the soundtrack by Innes, who created 19 more songs for the film, each a pastiche of a Beatles song or genre. Fourteen songs were on a soundtrack album. The CD version added the six songs omitted from the original vinyl album. The album was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Comedy Recording of the year. The orchestrations and arrangements were by film composer John Altman.
All You Need Is Cash was not a success on American television and finished bottom of all programmes that week. The programme fared better on BBC television.
A 66-minute version edited for TV was released on video and DVD but it has been superseded by the restored 72-minute version.
The Beatles' reaction[link]
|
|
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2008) |
George Harrison was involved in the project from the beginning. Producer Gary Weis said "We were sitting around in Eric's kitchen one day, planning a sequence that really ripped into the mythology and George looked up and said, 'We were the Beatles, you know!' Then he shook his head and said 'Aw, never mind.' I think he was the only one of the Beatles who really could see the irony of it all.
Harrison later said "...the Rutles sort of liberated me from the Beatles in a way. It was the only thing I saw of those Beatles television shows they made. It was actually the best, funniest and most scathing. But at the same time, it was done with the most love." Harrison showed Innes and Idle the Beatles unreleased official documentary The Long and Winding Road, made by Neil Aspinall. (Aspinall's documentary would be resurrected as The Beatles Anthology.)
- Ringo Starr liked the happier scenes in the film, but felt the scenes that mimicked sadder times hit too close.
- John Lennon loved the film so much that he refused to return the videotape and soundtrack he was given for approval. He told Innes, however, that ‘Get Up and Go’ was too close to The Beatles' "Get Back" and to be careful not to be sued by Paul McCartney. The song was subsequently omitted from the 1978 vinyl LP soundtrack. In an interview with 'BeatlesandBeyond' Radio Show presenter Pete Dicks, Innes remembered that Lennon said...' you're going to have trouble with THAT one! - How right he was, the dear man...'
- McCartney, who had just released his own album, London Town, always answered, “No comment.” According to Innes: “He had a dinner at some awards thing at the same table as Eric one night and Eric said it was a little frosty.” Idle claimed McCartney changed his mind because his wife Linda thought it was funny.
All the group and Apple consented to use of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert footage, along with other “real” footage cut in with Rutle footage.
Idle claims on the All You Need Is Cash DVD commentary track that Harrison and Starr at one point discussed starting a band with Innes and Idle, based on the Beatles' and Rutles' shared and imaginary histories. This never came to pass.
Later history[link]
Idle and Fataar issued one single as 'Dirk and Stig' in 1979 (Idle's only appearance on a Rutles-related disc), but throughout the 1980s The Rutles did not exist.
Innes, with session musicians, performed as "Ron Nasty and The New Rutles" at a convention honouring the 25th anniversary of Monty Python in 1994. This led to a Rutles reunion album in 1996, featuring Innes, Fataar and Halsey. Halsall died in 1992, but the reunion album, entitled Archaeology (a play on the Beatles' Anthology series), featured several tracks recorded in 1978 that included his contributions.
In 2002, Idle made The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch, but it remained unreleased for a year. The film features an even bigger number of celebrity interviewees discussing the band's influence. This was met with mixed reactions from fans, especially since it used material culled from the original. The DVD has yet to be released in the UK.
McQuickly and Nasty had cameos in the 2004 graphic novel, Superman: True Brit, co-written by John Cleese. In the graphic novel, the Rutles are saved by Superman after their car nearly plummets from the top of a car park.
In 2007, a reissue of Archaeology included a new Rutles track called "Rut-a-lot", which was simply a live medley of songs from the first Rutles album.
On 17 March 2008, all four Rutles reunited for the first time at a 30th anniversary screening of All You Need Is Cash at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. The event included a question and answer session and performance by members of the tribute show "Rutlemania" which ran for a week at the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood before doing a week in NYC at The Blender Grammery Theater. The "Rutlemania" live show was conceived and written by Eric Idle which starred The Beatles tribute group "The Fab Four" as "The Pre-fab Four" Rutles.
In February 2009 on his website "InnesBookOfRecords.Com", Neil Innes released what he refers to as "Ron Nasty's Final Song", titled "Imitation Song" - a parody of "Imagine". This was also Innes' first and only entry in the Masters of Song-Fu competition run by Quick Stop Entertainment.
Fictional history[link]
Ron Nasty first met Dirk McQuickly in January 1959, at the now-historical address of 43 Egg Lane, Liverpool. Having joined up with Stig O'Hara (a guitarist of no fixed hairstyle), they started playing as a trio. After 18 months, they discovered drummer Barrington Womble (whom they persuaded to change his name to Barry Wom to save time, and his hairstyle to save Brylcreem) hiding in their van, and the classic line-up of the Rutles was completed.
In 1960, at the suggestion of then-manager Arthur Scouse, the group went to Hamburg where, with fifth member Leppo, who mainly stood at the back, they played all the clubs on the Reeperbahn, particularly The Rat Keller. It was there that Leppo crawled inside a trunk with a small German fräulein and was never heard from again. Luckily, he had no talent for playing anyway.
In October 1961, fate intervened in the shape and other attributes of one-legged retail chemist from Bolton, Leggy Mountbatten (a parody of Brian Epstein), who, after falling into "The Cavern" one night, decided he hated the boys' music, but liked the cut of their jib (and especially the cut of their trousers). He became their manager, cleaned up their image, and touted them around the major record companies. Eventually, they signed to Parlourphone, and their debut album, which was recorded in 20 minutes (their second took even longer), became an enormous success. By December 1963, they were the biggest thing ever to hit the music business, with 19 out of the top 20 singles in the UK.
In 1964, Rutlemania went worldwide, and then some. The group swiftly conquered the US thanks to the promotion of Bill Murray the K, while Nasty's book of comic prose, Out Of Me Head, dominated the best-seller lists. In July of that year, the group's first film, A Hard Day's Rut, was released. This was followed in 1965 by Ouch! By this time, Rutlemania had reached such a fever pitch that crowd control was a serious problem. In August 1965, the Prefab Four played a sell-out concert at New York's Ché Stadium (a pun on Argentinean-born guerrilla leader Ché Guevara and the New York Mets's Shea Stadium but pronounced the same as as "Shea"), arriving a day early in order to get away before the audience arrived.
File:Rutles8.jpg
When Nasty met Chastity: The Rutles's not-so-subtle sendup of John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono in 1966 at Indica Gallery in London.
In 1966, controversy hit the Rutles when Nasty was quoted as saying that the group were 'bigger than God'. Nasty, however, insisted that he had been misquoted by a slightly deaf journalist, and had actually said they were bigger than Rod, referring to Rod Stewart, then a relative unknown. The band bounced back with their 1967 masterpiece Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band, though this too was misted over in controversy when the group claimed they wrote it under the influence of tea, to which they had been introduced by Bob Dylan. When Nasty was arrested for possession of tea, there was a national outcry and a full-page advertisement in The Times calling for it to be legalised. All five members of The Rolling Stones had been arrested already, and an MP had been caught nude with a teapot. Shortly afterwards, Nasty visited an art exhibit at The Pretentious Gallery in Soho, and it was here that he met a German-born Nazi artist named Chastity whose father had invented World War II. After spending a whole night together, Nasty and Chastity announced their engagement the next day at a press conference, during which they sat in a shower to promote world peace.
More bad news followed for the group. While staying with the mystic Arthur Sultan at his retreat in Bognor Regis, the band heard that Mountbatten had tragically emigrated to Australia, where he had accepted a teaching post. Some critics argue that the band lost their direction at this point. Tragical History Tour, their self-indulgent TV movie about four Oxford history professors on a tour around Rutland tea-shops, was regarded as a failure.
In April 1968, the group launched their new record company, Rutle Corps. Despite signing up some promising talent (notably Arthur Hodgson and the Kneecaps and the 'French Beach Boys,' Les Garçons de la Plage), poor financial management (mainly on the part of Stig O'Hara's financial planner, Ron Decline) finally led to the label's ultimate failure. Around this time, a 'Stig is Dead' rumour, prompted by both many obscure clues within the band's songs and album covers (including a track which, when played backwards, reportedly said 'Stig has been dead for ages, honestly') and the fact that Stig had not spoken publicly in five years began to circulate, prompting Barry to stay in bed for a year. Whether this was intended as a tax dodge or as an attempt to start his own 'Barry is Also Dead' rumour never became clear.
It was in this atmosphere that the group's final release, Let It Rot, was recorded. Soon afterwards, the band fell apart amid much legal wrangling; McQuickly sued Nasty and O'Hara, Wom sued McQuickly, Nasty sued O'Hara and Wom and - in all the confusion - O'Hara ended up accidentally suing himself. Wom had some success with his solo LP, When You Find The Girl Of Your Dreams In The Arms Of Some Scotsmen From Hull, but like the other members, soon drifted into obscurity, punctuated only by the making of a 1978 retrospective documentary, All You Need Is Cash. McQuickly formed the punk rock group Punk Floyd with his French wife, Martini (he sang; she did not); Nasty turned his back on the world; Wom became two hairdressers, as per a joke once made to the press; and O'Hara found work for Air India as an air hostess.
It is rumoured that The Rutles acquired all their music from others. Many people said that they stole it from New Orleans blues legend Blind Lemon Pye, but he said that the Rutles' music came from his next-door neighbour Ruttling Orange Peel. Ruttling claimed that he did write the music, but his wife claims that he is always lying. She said that he also claimed to have started the Everly Brothers, Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Welk. There is a small-time group named The Beatles who patterned their career after the legendary Rutles.
Rutles albums (fictional)[link]
- Please Rut Me (1963)
- With The Rutles (1963)
- A Hard Day's Rut (1964)
- Rutles for Sale (1964)
- Ouch! (1965)
- Rutle Soul (1965)
- Semiautomatic (1966)
- Sgt. Rutter's Only Darts Club Band (1967)
- Tragical History Tour (1967)
- The Triangular Album (1968) [3]
- Yellow Submarine Sandwich (1969)
- Shabby Road (1969)
- Let It Rot (1970)
(Note: These titles may not all be official.)
Rutles discography (real)[link]
The Rutland Weekend Songbook (1976)[link]
"The Rutland Weekend Songbook" / Eric Idle & Neil Innes
BBC Records (UK) / Passport Records (US)
Saturday: (Side 1 )
- "L'Amour Perdu"
- Gibberish
- Wash With Mother ( "Front Loader" )
- "Say Sorry Again"
- The Rutles in "Rutles For Sale". ("I Must Be In Love")
- 24 Hours In Tunbridge Wells ( "Tunbridge Wells Medley" )
- The Fabulous Bingo Brothers ( "Once We Had A Donkey" )
- In Concrete ( "Concrete Jungle Boy")
- "The Children of Rock-N-Roll"
- Startime ("Stoop Solo" )
- "Song O'The Insurance Salesmen"
- Closedown
Sunday: (Side 2)
- "Testing"
- "I Give Myself To You"
- "Communist Cooking"
- Johnny Cash Live At Mrs.Fletchers ( "Stuck In Mrs.Fletchers" )
- The Old Gay Whistle Test ("Protest Song")
- "Accountancy Shanty"
- "Football"
- "Boring"
- Goodafternoon ("L'Amour Perdu Cha-Cha-Cha")
- Disco ("Hard To Get")
- Closedown ("The Song O'The Continuity Announcers")
Rutles Notes:
- Side 1, Track 5: The first released Rutles recording. (This version has slightly different lyrics from the 1978 version.)
- Liner notes mis-credit "Kevin" as a Rutle instead of "Barry." (This marks the only appearance of "Kevin" in the Rutles canon!)
- The original "Rutles" Musicians are: Roger Rettig and Billy Bremner on guitars, Brian Hodgson on bass, Neil Innes on piano, and John Halsey on drums. (This group was also known as "Fatso.")
- Side 1, Track 9: This song is credited as "Ron Lennon," and it is the nucleus of what will later become The Rutles song "Good Times Roll".
- Album reissued on C.D. in the 1990s with two bonus tracks: "Protest Song" (Uncensored) & "I Must Be In Love" (Minus screaming fans.)
The Rutles (1978)[link]
Main article: The Rutles (album)
A soundtrack album entitled The Rutles containing 14 tongue-in-cheek pastiches of Beatles songs was also released.
The cover art of the album suggested the existence of a number of other Rutles albums including Tragical History Tour and Let It Rot.
The album contains some obvious send-ups of Beatles numbers such as "Ouch!" ("Help!"), "Love Life" ("All You Need is Love"), "Piggy in the Middle" ("I Am the Walrus"), "Doubleback Alley" ("Penny Lane") and "Get Up And Go" (CD reissue only — "Get Back"). However, its real tribute is in its subtly layered blending of elements from many classic Lennon-McCartney tunes.
The Rutles 7" Singles (1978)[link]
"I Must Be In Love" + "Cheese And Onions " / "A Girl Like You"
WEA Records / UK only release / 1978 / K17125
Side 1: "I Must Be In Love"
Side 2: "Cheese And Onions" / "A Girl Like You"
- Released with picture sleeve.
- Sleeve misprints "With A Girl Like You" on both sides ( Dropping "With" ), Label is correct.
- All three songs same as album versions.
"Let's Be Natural" b/w "Piggy In the Middle"
WEA Records / UK only release / 1978 / K17180
Side 1: "Let's Be Natural"
Side 2: "Piggy In the Middle"
- Issued in a standard paper sleeve.
- Both songs same as album versions.
"I Must Be In Love" b/w "Doubleback Alley"
WEA Records / Japan / 1978 / P-200-W
Warner Bros. Records / US / 1978 / WBS 8560
Side 1: "I Must Be In Love"
Side 2: "Doubleback Alley"
- Japanese release issued in picture sleeve featuring rare colour photo from "I Must Be In Love" video.
- Both songs same as album versions
[edit] The Rutles 12" EP (1978)
Promotional Warner Bros. faux-Beatles Rutles five-song 331⁄3 RPM 12-inch (PRO-E-723) complete with recreated Lads-in-Nehru-suits portrait in the same fashion and pose as the real Beatles' portrait released on the sleeve of the Capitol 45 rpm release "I Want to Hold Your Hand" b/w "I Saw Her Standing There" (Capitol 5112). The unnamed Rutle Corps Records label (peeled banana in the centre) boasted five tracks and was pressed in translucent yellow vinyl:
Side 1
- "I Must Be In Love" - 2:04 ("A Hard Day's Night"/ "Can't Buy Me Love")
- "Doubleback Alley" - 2:54 ("Penny Lane")
- "With A Girl Like You" - 1:50 ("If I Fell")
Side 2
- "Another Day" - 2:09 ("Martha My Dear")
- "Let's Be Natural" - 3:23 ("Dear Prudence")
[edit] The Rutles Archaeology (1996)
Main article: The Rutles Archaeology
Three of the four musicians who had created the soundtrack for the 1978 film — Innes, Halsey and Fataar — reunited in 1996 and recorded a second album, Archaeology, a send-up of The Beatles Anthology albums. The fourth 'real' Rutle, Ollie Halsall, died in Spain in 1992. Eric Idle was invited to participate, but he declined. Accordingly, photos of the three 'surviving' Rutles parodied those of the then three surviving Beatles in the Anthology series.
Like the Anthology project that it lampooned, it featured tracks ostensibly from all periods of the Rutles career, sequenced to reflect the fictional band's chronology. (Several of the songs were actually old Innes standards that were dusted off and given the 'Rutles' treatment.) The reunion was blessed by George Harrison, who encouraged The Pre-Fab Four to proceed. (When approached, he told Innes, 'Sure. It's all part of the "soup"...' Innes related that encounter in interviews he gave in 1996.)
[edit] "Eric Idle Sings Monty Python" (2000)
"Eric Idle Sings Monty Python" (Live) / Eric Idle
Restless Records / C.D. only release / 01877-73730-2
- Track 16 is the only track with Rutles content, Idle sings "I Must Be In Love" (First recording of Idle vocalising a Rutles song.)
- Eric is introduced as "Sir Dirk McQuickly" with a "History of The Rutles" introduction by Peter Crabbe
- In the C.D. booklet , the lyric page for this song is torn out.
- This C.D. is the sole release featuring the notorious " Lennon / McCartney / Innes " song credit!
[edit] Rutles Highway Revisited (A tribute to The Rutles)
A 20-track album of Rutles covers released by Shimmy Disc on December 8, 1993.
- "Cheese & Onions" - Galaxie 500
- "Hold My Hand" - The Pussywillows
- "Number One" - Bongos, Bass & Bob
- "Good Times Roll" - Lida Husik
- "Another Day" - Dogbowl
- "Piggy In The Middle" - Das Damen
- "I Must Be In Love" - Syd Straw and Marc Ribot
- "Nevertheless" - Joey Arias
- "Let's Be Natural" - When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water
- "Between Us" - Unrest
- "Ouch!" - Peter Stampfel and The Bottlecaps
- "Blue Suede Schubert" - The Tinklers
- "Living In Hope" - Tuli Kupferberg
- "Baby Let Me Be" - Daniel Johnston
- "It's Looking Good" - Uncle Wiggly
- "Goose Step Mama" - Shonen Knife
- "Get Up And Go" - Jellyfish Kiss
- "Doubleback Alley" - King Missile
- "With A Girl Like You" - Paleface
- "Love Life" - Bongwater
- The album title is a parody of Bob Dylan's album, "Highway 61 Revisited".
- The album cover image is a parody of The Rolling Stones album "Their Satanic Majesties Request"
Bootlegs[link]
Bootlegs include Hard Days Rut, Rehearsal, Sweet Rutle Tracks, Rutles To Let, Sgt. Rutters Only Darts Club Band, and Rutland's Rare Rutles Revisited. Much of the material on these releases comes from 1978 rehearsal tapes, or from the Rutland Weekend Television soundtrack LP.
- Also of note: "Cheese & Onions" - the version heard on Saturday Night Live - made its way onto several Beatles bootleg albums, as an unreleased John Lennon demo. See: "Indian Rope Trick. The Echoes of a Dream" (side 2, track 5), for one.[4]
- "Get Up & Go" also appeared on a bootleg as an "Unreleased Beatles Track" on the album , "Tanks For the Mammaries".
Lawsuits[link]
Following the release of the 1978 The Rutles album, ATV Music, the then-owner of the publishing rights to the Beatles catalog, sued Innes for copyright infringement. Though Innes hired a musicologist to defend the originality of his songs,[5] he settled with ATV out of court for 50% of the royalties and shared songwriting credit on the 14 songs included on the album.[6] As of early 2006, these six songs from the first Rutles CD (which were not on the original LP release) are credited solely to Neil Innes: "Baby Let Me Be", "Between Us", "Blue Suede Schubert", "Get Up And Go", "Goose Step Mama", and "It's Looking Good".[7] The other 14 songs from the CD (that is, all of the songs from the original LP release) have all had John Lennon and Paul McCartney added to the songwriting credits along with Neil Innes. However, the booklet accompanying a 2007 reissue of the album on Rhino/Warner Brothers credits all 20 songs solely to Innes.
See also[link]
- All You Need Is Cash
- The Rutles Soundtrack
- The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch
- The Rutles Archaeology
- Deface the Music, a similar Beatles parody by the group Utopia
Notes[link]
- ^ Eric Idle (1978). All You Need Is Cash (Film).
- ^ SNL Transcripts listing
- ^ The Rutles 2:Can't Buy me Lunch . There is a very long scene where a group of people discuss the Album.
- ^ Bootleg album (vinyl LP): Indian Rope Trick. The Echoes of a Dream. Slipped Disc Records SX-TT 979. Printed in Copenhagen, Denmark.
- ^ Catlin Moran (1996-10-25). The spoof Beatles are back in business. Times (London).
- ^ Paul du Noyer (1996-12-01). The Post-Prefab Three. Q Magazine. http://www.neilinnes.org/articles/RutQ96.htm.
- ^ BMI web site
References[link]
- Badman, Keith (2002). The Beatles: The Dream is Over. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-9199-5.
- Badman, Keith (2001). The Beatles Diary Volume 2: After the Break Up 1970–2001. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-8307-0.
External links[link]
- Tragical History Tour - the official Rutles web page
- Rutlemania - the real-life history of the Rutles
- Doo Dah Diaries - Project to compile the complete history of the Bonzos including Neil Innes and The Rutles
- Article by music theorist John R. Covach: The Rutles and The Use of Specific Models in Musical Satire. Indiana Theory Review, 1991.
- The Rutles section of Neil Innes' website
- skyjude - movie legends
- The Rutles-The Full True Story An anonymous article detailing the real-life battles between Idle and Innes over control and credit for The Rutles
- Czech page about The Rutles
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
