It’s been announced that Jack Douglas, the record producer who was behind the desk for John Lennon’s final studio album, 1980’s Double Fantasy, has died aged 80.

According to a statement on his Facebook page, Douglas passed away on Monday (May 11) from complications from lymphoma. “He passed away peacefully on Monday night,” his family has written. “As many of you who follow him know, he produced great music, and lived a colourful life. We know that he touched many of your lives. He will be missed.”

Other than Lennon, the group that Douglas was most associated with was Aerosmith. He produced their run of classic 1970s albums – Get Your Wings, Toys In The Attic, Rocks and Draw The Line – before returning to helm their 1998 live album A Little South Of Sanity, as well as 2004’s Honkin’ On Hobo and their most recent album Music From Another Dimension, released in 2012.

Douglas was born in the Bronx, just months after the end of the war, in 1945. He travelled to the UK in the mid '60s, where he spent some time as a folk musician, before returning to the States and training as a sound engineer. In the early 1970s, he joined the staff at New York’s Record Plant, where he worked on records by Alice Cooper, The Who, Blue Öyster Cult, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and Cheap Trick.

The latter were another band Douglas enjoyed a long relationship with – he produced their 1977 self titled debut and was still working with them as late as 2006’s Rockford.

For Double Fantasy, Douglas brought in a number of ace session players, including Bowie alumni Andy Newmark and Earl Slick, Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Lewin and guitarist Hugh McCracken. Stunned by Lennon’s murder just weeks after the album was released, the same band worked on Yoko Ono’s 1981 album Seasons Of Glass.

Douglas went on to work with names such as Supertramp, Clutch and on Slash’s 1996 solo project Slash’s Snakepit.

Producer Warren Huart, who was mentored by Douglas, has paid to tribute to him, saying: "Jack carried decades of success with humility and grace. He never acted like a legend, even though he absolutely was one. He treated people with respect. He listened. He cared. He gave so much of himself to the artists, musicians, friends, and family around him."

"There are producers who make hit records. Then there are producers who leave a lasting mark on people’s hearts and lives. Jack did both."

The film director Steven Soderbergh has been talking about his latest project, for which he’s teamed up with Meta. It’s an AI-enhanced documentary about the last recorded interview given by John Lennon, to RKO Radio in December 1980.

Yes, we know. Yet another John Lennon doc. AI. Meta.

Soderbergh has defended the idea in an interview with Deadline magazine. “I think people, when they heard about this project and that I was using AI tech, jumped to the absolute worst conclusion, which is, ‘He’s going to try and bring John Lennon back to life.’ And all I can say is, have we met?

"Do I look like somebody that would do that? So it’s a little hard to talk about also because I feel once you’ve seen the movie, you go, ‘Oh, of course.’”

The filmmaker explains that AI is essentially used in the project like CGI. “There’s a way of using AI in which your intention is to fool somebody or manipulate them, to create an image that you want them to think is real. And then there’s a use, which is what we’re doing in the documentary, where it’s obvious that it is AI and that it is being used essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology.”

One of the AI sequences is a scene where babies are dressed up in ‘Sixties’ outfits - “It’s a way of comically illustrating something that John is talking about. You can’t shoot that. And even if you did somehow - you came up with some justification for shooting a bunch of one-year-old babies dressed in tie-dye outfits, crying their eyes out - even if you did it, if people knew it was real, it wouldn’t be funny.”

Soderbergh says that when it comes to AI he’s “pro-choice” but also suspects that Lennon himself would have been open to working with it. “I asked Sean (Lennon), “What do you think your dad’s take on this tech would’ve been?” And he said, “Oh, he would’ve wanted to engage.”

“He loved all new technology. All The Beatles did. He would want to play with it just to see what it could do. He goes, ‘That was the way he was.’ How he would’ve felt about it ultimately, we’ll never know, but he said he would’ve wanted to play with it.”

The doc is titled John Lennon: The Last Interview. There’s no release date as yet because Soderbergh is still looking for a distributor.

One morning in early 1971, John Lennon sat down at a Steinway upright piano in the bedroom of his Grade-II listed Georgian house at Tittenhurst Park, a 72-acre estate near Ascot in Berkshire, and wrote a song regarded by many as the ultimate peace anthem, an ode to idealism and a meditation on collective hope.

The song was Imagine and, for many, it is viewed as the defining composition of Lennon’s post-Beatles career and one of the greatest songs of the 20th century.

Critics have debated its merits. While some view it as a deeply poignant song others have found it overly sentimental. But for Lennon that was the whole point.

Imagine is “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic,” he once said, “but because it is sugarcoated, it is accepted.”

It’s 55 years since Lennon wrote and released the song. But its simple plea for a world without war, borders or divisions resonates just as powerfully now as it ever has done.

By 1971, Lennon was moving away from the more left-field, visceral material of the Plastic Ono Band and returning to calmer, more conventional music as he began working on the album that would become Imagine.

The inspiration for its title track came from a number of poems in Yoko Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit, one of which was called Cloud Piece. This included the line: “Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in.”

In an interview with Andy Peebles of BBC Radio 1, recorded in New York on 6 December 1980, Lennon explained that Imagine “should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song”.

“A lot of it – the lyric and the concept – came from Yoko,” he said. “But in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit, her book. There's a whole pile of pieces about ‘Imagine this’ and ‘Imagine that’.”

In 2018, Lennon’s comments resulted in Ono being formally recognised by the National Music Publishers Association in New York as the co-writer of Imagine.

In another interview in December 1980, with writer David Sheff, Lennon said that the song was also inspired by a book about “the concept of positive prayer” that he and Ono had been given by American comedian, actor, writer and political activist Dick Gregory.

Lennon was allegedly later contacted by a religious organisation with a request to use the song.

He recalled: “The World Church called me once and asked, ‘Can we use the lyrics to Imagine and just change it to “Imagine one religion?”’ That showed [me] they didn't understand it at all. It would defeat the whole purpose of the song, the whole idea.”

On 27 May 1971, Lennon began recording the song at Ascot Sound Studios, a facility that he and Ono had created in the basement of the original house on the estate. Sound engineer Eddie Veale helped build the studio and called it “the first professional home studio in the UK”.

Phil Spector and Yoko Ono produced Imagine and the album that bears its name.

Lennon assembled a crack band for the recording. On drums was future Yes drummer Alan White, while revered session player Nicky Hopkins played additional piano.

On bass was Klaus Voormann, a long-time friend of The Beatles from their Hamburg days and a linchpin in their backstory, who also designed the Revolver album cover.

“Tittenhurst Park was a sort of paradise, beautiful gardens,” recalled Voormann in the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon. “The house itself wasn’t that big but a very, very nice house. I loved it. The studio was really small and the atmosphere was very loose.”

The sessions for Imagine took place on 27 May lasted until early evening. According to writer David Fricke in his 2012 book The Making Of Imagine, they recorded three takes and chose the second one for release.

The Imagine: John Lennon documentary offers a compelling glimpse into the recording of the song.

“What’s this one, a ballad?” Nicky Hopkins asks Lennon as they sit behind the mixing desk in the cramped basement studio.

“Yeah, come on I’ll teach you,” says Lennon.

He then proceeds to play the song on the piano, as Hopkins, Ono, Voormann and White look on.

Towards the end of the song, Lennon veers into pastiche, taking his vocal way down low, but the song’s emotional power is still evident.

“It’s a nice song, for sure” says Hopkins.

“Yeah, that’s the one I like best,” replies Lennon.

Yoko Ono then suggests adding another piano track an octave higher. “It’s such a delicate song,” she says.

Voorman suggests using the white grand piano.

The next footage is of Lennon, at the white piano in the large white living room at Tittenhurst Park, with headphones on and fully mic’d up, while Yoko sits behind him on the carpet, smoking a cigarette and listening intently. This is the footage for the iconic promotional film for the song.

During the mixing process, Lennon can be seen standing at the desk telling Phil Spector that “it should be just a piano song” as he and Spector determine where exactly the piano should sit in the mix. “The bass sounds too trebly,” says Lennon at one point.

Watching Lennon’s performance in this documentary, one thing becomes abundantly clear. The key to Imagine’s greatness is its simplicity.

Much of the song’s emotional power also stems from Lennon’s exquisitely calm and understated performances, vocally and instrumentally.

It’s a beautifully crafted song. There is such an impeccable feel to his playing on the Steinway upright, beginning with the iconic C-Cmaj7-F chord progression, and an innate humility and directness to his vocal performance.

One of the song’s major hooks of course is the emotive descending melody on the bridge: “Imagine all the people/Living for today”, followed by a blissful “a-ha” falsetto from Lennon, all underpinned by a F-Am/E-Dm7-F/C-G-C/G-G7 chord progression.

One of Lennon’s great talents was conveying a feeling and idea simply and directly, and that is precisely what he does with Imagine.

Cynics may argue that the song is naive, utopian and idealistic, but it also shows insight and empathy. In simple humanitarian terms it is difficult to argue against Lennon’s belief that global unity is the key to the world’s problems, while division through wars, nationalism, capitalism and religion can bring only poverty and pain.

“Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man.”

As Yoko Ono said of the song, the lyrics to Imagine are “just what John believed: that we are all one country, one world, one people”.

It’s a view reflected in a review by Rolling Stone magazine, which described the lyrics to Imagine as “22 lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in purpose, to repair and change itself.”

The arrangement and mix of Imagine were kept lean and direct. Nicky Hopkins contributed a higher piano part but his electric piano part was not deemed necessary in the final mix.

On 4 July 1971, a subtle layer of string overdubs were added, at The Record Plant in New York, and the song was finished.

Imagine was released as a single on 11 October 1971 and became the bestselling single of Lennon’s solo career.

“Imagine is the best song I’ve ever written,” Lennon told writer David Sheff in 1980. “It’s almost like a prayer.”

The song reached No 3 in the Billboard Hot 100 and No 1 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, but was not released as a single in the UK.

Following Lennon’s violent murder in 1980, the song went to No 1 in the UK, Ireland and Luxembourg.

The song’s lyrics upset some religious groups, particularly the line, “Imagine there’s no heaven”.

In an interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner in 1970, Lennon said he considered the song to be as strong a composition as any he had written within The Beatles.

In the five and a half decades since its release, the song’s beauty and its power as a beacon of hope has given it a colossal and enduring lifespan.

In 2006, former US president Jimmy Carter told Debbie Elliott of NPR: “In many countries around the world – my wife and I have visited about 125 countries – you hear John Lennon’s song Imagine used almost equally with national anthems.”

More than 200 artists have covered the song, including Madonna, Stevie Wonder, Joan Baez, David Bowie, Elton John and Diana Ross.

In Ray Coleman’s 1992 book Lennon: The Definitive Biography, George Martin singled out the song from Lennon’s solo work. “My favourite song of all was Imagine,” he said.

Across the decades, the song has been appropriated in moments of great triumph and tragedy.

The morning after the November 2015 Paris attacks, German pianist Davide Martello brought a piano out into the street in front of the Bataclan, where 89 people had been shot dead the night before, and performed an instrumental version of Imagine to honour the victims of the attack.

Not surprisingly, the song has charted highly on numerous polls over the years. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the song number three on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.

The magazine described Imagine as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise that has carried us through extreme grief, from the shock of Lennon’s own death in 1980 to the unspeakable horror of September 11.

“It is now impossible to imagine a world without Imagine, and we need it more than he ever dreamed.”

Harry Wayne Casey had an incredible run as a hit songwriter, producer and performer in the ’70s.

As the ‘KC’ and the lead singer in pioneering disco group KC And The Sunshine Band, Casey formed a creative partnership with bassist Richard Finch as co-writers and co-producers of a string of big-selling singles including four US No 1s in Get Down Tonight, That’s The Way (I Like It), (Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty and I’m Your Boogie Man.

But arguably the greatest song Casey ever wrote with Finch was a hit for another singer – George McCrae.

That song, Rock Your Baby, was a chart-topping success in 1974.

It was also a hit with one of the most famous musicians that ever lived.

In a new interview for the Rock & Roll High School with Pete Ganbarg podcast, Casey looks back on his career and reveals how he wrote Rock Your Baby and his other classic songs.

Formed in Florida in 1973 and originally named KC & The Sunshine Junkanoo Band, Casey’s group also included guitarist Jerome Smith and drummer Robert Johnson.

Debut album Do It Good was released in 1974 on independent record label TK Records. Four singles were lifted from the album – Blow Your Whistle, Queen Of Clubs, Sound Your Funky Horn and I’m A Pushover. None were hits in the US, although Queen Of Clubs made the top 10 in the UK.

In fact, Casey’s first big success came with Rock Your Baby.

The singer George McCrae had guested on Do It Good, performing backing vocals alongside his wife Gwen, who also had a successful solo career. Her vocals were sampled in various dance tracks and the bassline from her 1979 song All This Love That I'm Giving partly inspired Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s No 1 duet Rain On Me.

As Casey explains in the Rock & Roll High School podcast, the idea for Rock Your Baby came to him when he was working in a Florida studio and discovered a Lowrey organ that had been used by Indiana-born musician Timmy Thomas on his influential 1972 track Why Can’t We Live Together, one of the first hit songs to utilise a rhythm machine.

Casey recalls that the Lowrey organ had seven or eight different pre-programmed rhythms, including mambo, cha cha cha and samba rock.

“I just hit one of those buttons,” he says, “and then in my normal way of writing, these chords come out. I remember playing it back and thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing.’ It just had such a great feeling.”

With Richard Finch on bass and Jerome Smith adding funky rhythm guitar, the backing track was completed in 45 minutes as a demo.

For the lead vocal on the track, Casey initially thought of using Jimmy ‘Bo’ Horne, who went on to have a few minor hits in the disco era, including Dance Across The Floor, a 1978 single written and produced by Casey.

As fate would have it, Horne was not available for Rock Your Baby, but George McCrae happened to be hanging around at the studio at the right time.

Casey says of McCrae: “He started singing the melody that I gave him and I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is the voice for this song!’”

Released in May 1974, Rock Your Baby held the No 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in July of that year. It also had a three-week run at the top of the UK chart.

The song would eventually sell more than 11 million copies worldwide.

1975 was the year when KC And The Sunshine Band had their breakthrough with their second album, self-titled, and its chart-topping singles Get Down Tonight and That’s The Way (I Like It).

At this point the disco era was in full swing, and Harry Casey was a hit-making machine. A song he wrote for soul singer Betty Wright, Where Is the Love?, won a Grammy in 1975.

An instrumental version of Rock Your Baby was included on KC And The Sunshine Band's third album The Sound of Sunshine, also released in 1975.

Rock Your Baby was hailed as a classic by John Lennon, who famously stated: “I’d give my eyetooth to have written that.”

Lennon said that his 1974 single Whatever Gets You Thru The Night was in part influenced by Rock Your Baby.

In the Rock & Roll High School podcast, Casey admits: “I was never a huge Beatles fan.”

But he adds with evident pride: “I learned recently that John Lennon said that Rock Your Baby is the one song he wished he would have written. And that it did influence his song Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.”

And that’s not all.

“Rock Your Baby influenced ABBA to write their song Dancing Queen,” Casey says. “I can hear the progression right in the song. Absolutely.”

It’s the sound of spring condensed into four minutes. Paul McCartney’s Coming Up has a zesty, eager bounce in its step, entirely fitting for an iconic artist stepping into a new decade.

Nearly half a century on it’s one of the most enduring singles of his post-Beatles career. Played to the right crowd on the right occasion, it can still fill floors in 2026.

But though in retrospect it – and the McCartney II album – has been viewed as a fresh start for Macca, that’s not exactly how it was intended at the time. Coming Up was recorded in mid 1979, just after the release of Wings’ Back To The Egg album. The group were still very much a going concern at the time – they had tour dates pencilled in for the autumn.

Indeed, as late as October 1980, McCartney was still insisting, in an interview with Club Sandwich, that the band had a future: “It doesn’t mean Wings are going to split up,” he said of the McCartney II album. “It just means that for the time being, we’re doing solo things rather than a group project.”

Back in the summer of 1979, McCartney had a gap in his schedule and he used it in the way he knew best: working on new music. Working from home in Sussex, he used a hired Studer 16-track, plugging one microphone directly into the back of the machine. Later on, he moved up to his Scottish farmhouse – where he’d written the bulk of the first McCartney album a decade previously – and finished what were initially just exploratory recordings.

It was in Scotland where inspiration hit for Coming Up. “I went into the studio each day and just started with a drum track,” McCartney told Club Sandwich. “It is very much like sitting down with a few lumps of clay and putting down one after another until it makes itself into a face or something. In this case, it just made itself into the song.”

“Then I built it up bit by bit without any idea of how the song was going to turn out. After laying down the drum track, I added guitars and bass, building up the backing track. I did a little version with just me as the nutty professor, doing everything and getting into my own world like a laboratory. The absent-minded professor is what I go like when I’m doing those; you get so into yourself it’s weird, crazy. But I liked it.”

“Then I thought, ‘Well, OK, what am I going to do for the voice?’ I was working with a vari-speed machine with which you can speed up your voice, or take it down a little bit. That’s how the voice sound came about.

"It’s been speeded up slightly and put through an echo machine I was playing around with. I got into all sorts of tricks, and I can’t remember how I did half of them, because I was just throwing them all in and anything that sounded good, I kept. And anything I didn’t like, I just wiped.”

Coming Up, he summarised, was “very much like sitting down with a few lumps of clay and putting down one after another until it makes itself into a face or something. In this case, it just made itself into the song.”

Though other tracks on the album, like Temporary Secretary, were clearly experiments, Coming Up had clear commercial appeal. So it was not surprising that when Wings started touring that autumn, it became part of their set - “we wanted to do something the audience hadn’t heard before.” McCartney reasoned.

Wings would have probably played it on the Japanese tour scheduled for January 1980, but those gigs never happened.

McCartney was caught attempting to smuggle 250 grams of marijuana in through Narita Airport and spent nine days in jail for his trouble. Whether the ex-Beatle was trying to subconsciously trying to sabotage the tour, or he arrogantly thought his stardom would insulate him remains unclear to this day. But the tour was cancelled, Wings never played live again and on his return to the UK McCartney appears to have had a rethink about the material he’d recorded the previous summer.

He decided to go ahead and release it, initially as a double album, before it was (quite rightly) whittled down to a single. Coming Up was an obvious choice as the lead single. A live version of the same track, recorded with Wings at the Glasgow Apollo in the December was placed on the B side.

Curiously, for the US market, the sides were flipped. Columbia Records reasoned that American record buyers would rather hear Paul’s “real” voice.

Whatever, the single was a success on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK it raced up to Number Two, but got stuck behind Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Geno. In the US it reached Number One, his seventh chart topper since the Beatles’ demise.

It was helped along its way greatly by its video, which by the standards of 1980 was cutting-edge. You may recall it featured an impossibly boyish-looking Macca (he was 37 at the time) fronting a ten-piece big band. But on closer inspection all the musicians are… Paul McCartney disguised as other pop stars.

“The drummer character in the video I based loosely on John Bonham, who’s a friend of mine” McCartney confirmed in a 2024 Youtube interview. “One of the guitar players I based on Hank Marvin. One of the guys in a group called the Sparks (Ron Mael) was the pianist. I based characters on some people I knew, some people I’d seen. And I made up the rest up.”

Elsewhere, there’s a Frank Zappa, an Andy Mackay of Roxy Music and a Beatlemania version of himself (complete with Hofner bass) who shakes his head cutely during the ‘wooo’ bits at the end of each chorus. Linda is in there too, both as herself and in drag (king) mode.

And to cap it all, according to ‘Bonham’s’ drum head, the band are called The Plastic Macs – not just making the obvious point that – literally - all the instruments are played by the song’s author, but surely a little nod to his old partner’s one-off supergroup. For twelve years previously, at the Rolling Stones’ Rock N’ Roll Circus, John Lennon fronted a group called The Dirty Mac that contained Eric Clapton, Keith Richards (on bass!) and Mitch Mitchell.

But then Lennon was never far from his thoughts. Though the two men had not spent time together since 1976, they were in contact and still on cordial terms. Prior to the Japanese tour, McCartney had rung the Dakota and offered his friend “some dynamite weed” (presumably the stash that Japanese customs seized) and when he had been held in jail, Lennon had sent him a supportive message.

Billboard Number Ones were all well and good, but they were not as valuable to McCartney as a word of praise from the one man in the world he (musically) looked up to. So one can imagine how he felt when word got back that his erstwhile partner had not only heard Coming Up but liked it.

The apocryphal story is that Lennon exclaimed ‘F**k a Pig! It’s Paul!” when he chanced across the vari-speeded version of Coming Up on the radio some time that summer. Whether those were his exact words matters not. He was certainly impressed, apparently saying that he couldn’t get the track out of his head: “It’s driving me crackers!”

“I thought that Coming Up was great,” he elaborated later in 1980 in a video interview. “And I like the freak version that he made in his barn better than that live Glasgow one. If I’d have been with him, I’d have said, ‘That’s the one to do.’”

The two men had a long shared history of friendly competition. During the second half of their Beatles career they had effectively acted as each other’s editors, improving and inspiring each other to new heights of creativity.

Even as solo artists, this dialogue through music had continued. During the early 1970s, there had been sniping – McCartney’s Too Many People provoked Lennon’s scathing How Do You Sleep? which begat his ex-partner’s hurt response, Dear Friend. Come 1973/74 there seemed to be a rapprochement and Let Me Roll It from Band On The Run can be seen as a song inspired by Lennon’s recent work or even written to elicit approval from his friend.

With Coming Up, he finally had that approval once more. What’s more, Coming Up might have played a part in Lennon’s own return to music later that year. In that video interview, Lennon said: “If I’m impressed by a record on the (radio), I immediately want to write (a song). Warren Beatty said it about movies. ‘A great movie is one that makes you want to make a movie.'”

And word got back to McCartney that Coming Up was the song that had inspired him. “I heard a story from a guy who recorded with John in New York, and he said that John would sometimes get lazy,” McCartney later said. “But then he’d hear a song of mine where he thought, ‘Oh, s**t, Paul’s putting it in, Paul’s working!’ Apparently Coming Up was the one song that got John recording again. I think John just thought, ‘Uh oh, I had better get working, too.’”

The result, as we know, was Double Fantasy. And whilst Coming Up will always be redolent of fresh starts, optimism and positivity in general, there’s a poignancy there too – for it’s one of the last lines in the Lennon – McCartney conversation, the musical friendship that changed the world.

The further the initial impact of the Beatles recedes into history, the higher the prices for Fabs-related memorabilia rise. In the past week we’ve seen a piano that was once used by John Lennon fetched a record-breaking £2.5 million ($3.2 million).

That’s the most for any piece of Beatles-related memorabilia. But then it was the Broadwood upright piano that Lennon used to compose a number of songs for Sgt Pepper, including Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Being For The Benefit Of Mister Kite! and his section of A Day In The Life.

The piano was sold at Christie’s in New York as part of the Jim Irsay Collection, a group of items that belonged to the billionaire, who owned the American football franchise Indianapolis Colts until he died last year.

Irsay also owned a Ludwig drum kit that Ringo Starr had used both in the studio and live between May 1963 and 1964 – it was the kit he played when the Beatles appeared on the history-making Ed Sullivan show in February ‘64. That went for $2.4 million in the Christie’s auction and a drum head from Ringo’s next Ludwig kit sold for even more: $2.9 million.

However, the highest price at the auction went to an instrument with no connection to the Beatles (not directly, anyway). This was David Gilmour’s Black Strat which went for a whopping £11 million, thus becoming the most expensive guitar ever sold at an auction. Meanwhile, a Fender Mustang that Kurt Cobain used in the iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit video fetched more than £5.2 million.

In a statement, Julien Pradels, the president of Christie's Americas, said: "Lot after lot, we felt like we were making history."

"The Irsay sale did justice to the brilliance of the collector, and the monumental pieces he brought together - iconic objects that tell the story of our culture and our times."

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

It is regarded by many as the best song that John Lennon ever wrote for The Beatles – and that was a view held by Lennon himself.

Lennon once described Strawberry Fields Forever as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote”, adding that, along with Help!, “they were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it”.

Strawberry Fields Forever is quite simply a masterpiece, a poignant, heartfelt song that bridges the innocence of Lennon’s post-War childhood with the kaleidoscopic, heady sensation of ’60s psychedelia.

It is also a landmark moment in the rich back catalogue of The Beatles.

Like everything within the exhaustively chronicled career of The Beatles, there's no shortage of opinions on when exactly John Lennon first came up with the germ of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Forums were abuzz in late 2024, when a clip in the Beatles ’64 documentary showed Lennon in a New York hotel room at the height of Beatlemania playing what certainly sounds like the opening, descending melody of Strawberry Fields Forever on a Melodica. Some observers were not convinced.

What is fairly certain is that Lennon wrote the whole song between 26 September and 6 November 1966 in Spain, during filming for the Richard Lester-directed film How I Won The War, a black comedy in which Lennon plays hapless Private Gripweed.

In David Sheff’s 1980 book, The Last Major Interview With John Lennon And Yoko Ono, Lennon recalled the writing of Strawberry Fields Forever: “We were in Almeria,” he said, “and it took me six weeks to write the song.

“I was writing it all the time I was making the film. And as anybody knows about film work, there’s a lot of hanging around.

“I have an original tape of it somewhere, of how it sounded before it became the psychedelic sounding song it became on record.”

Like the Paul McCartney-penned Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever was Lennon’s nostalgia-fuelled look back to his childhood years in Liverpool.

Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army children’s home in the leafy Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon had lived since the age of five with his Aunt Mimi at ‘Mendips’, 251 Menlove Avenue.

One of Lennon's childhood treats was the garden party held each summer, near the home, where a Salvation Army brass band played.

"There was something about the place that always fascinated John,” said Mimi in Hunter Davies’ book, The Beatles. “He could see it from his window. 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.’”

When Lennon wrote the song, it was also informed by his experiences with LSD.

In the The Beatles Anthology, Lennon described the song as “psychoanalysis set to music”.

“The second line goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree’,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “Well, what I was trying to say in that line is, ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius’… What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is, ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.’”

Lennon continued to work on the song at his house Kenwood, in Weybridge, Surrey, recording demos when he returned from filming in Spain. He also included parts played on a mellotron, an instrument he bought in August 1965.

On 24 November 1966, all four Beatles arrived at Studio 2 of EMI Recording Studios [now called Abbey Road Studios] to begin work on the song. This was the first activity by the band since they completed their final tour of the US on 29 August 1966.

For Lennon, who had felt vulnerable and unable to connect with any of the cast during the filming of How I Won The War, reuniting with the band was a revelation.

"I was never so glad to see the others,” he was quoted as saying in Jonathan Gould’s 2007 book, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America. “Seeing them made me feel normal again."

Strawberry Fields Forever would become one of the most technically complex recordings The Beatles ever attempted.

The song was recorded over eight dates in the final weeks of 1966: 24, 28 and 19 November and 8, 9, 15, 21 and 22 December.

The band, producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick would spend an unprecedented 55 hours of studio time completing the song.

Take One on 24 November began with Lennon playing the band the song on his acoustic before he changed to his Epiphone Casino for the recording.

McCartney played the mellotron and wrote the melody for that instrument on the introduction.

This take opened with a verse instead of the chorus, beginning with the line, “Living is easy with eyes closed”.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to this version, with George Harrison’s overdubbed slide guitar on the choruses really elevating Lennon’s vocal.

On 28 November, the band reconvened to try a different arrangement, featuring McCartney’s mellotron intro followed by the chorus.

The band re-recorded the song again on 29 November, using the same arrangement. Harrison added arpeggio chord patterns and Lennon’s vocal was recorded with the tape running fast so when it played back at the normal speed his voice was lower, with a slurred effect.

As ever, McCartney delivers an impeccably judged bass line beneath the crystalline jangle of the guitars.

George Harrison’s cascading swarmandal [Indian harp], which intros the second and third verses, injects an Eastern flavour to the sound.

As with Dylan, Lennon’s lyrics spill effortlessly over stanzas, the lyrics seemingly driving the form and direction of the song’s structure.

Lennon added a second vocal over the chorus, and final overdubs included piano and additional bass.

The subsequent mixdown became Track 7 - and the first minute of this version would be used for the final released version of the song.

At this point, Lennon wanted to try something different with the song and turned to George Martin for help.

In Joseph Brennan’s 1996 book, Strawberry Fields Forever: Putting Together The Pieces, Martin said of Lennon: "He'd wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous. He asked me if I could write him a new line-up with the strings. So I wrote a new score.”

This new score utilised four trumpets and three cellos.

The sessions for Martin’s brass and cello arrangement took place on 15 December.

The musicians included cellist Joy Hall, the first woman to appear on a Beatles song.

Martin’s string and brass parts enhanced the Indian flavour of the song.

As Ian McDonald noted in his 1994 book, Revolution In The Head, Martin’s scoring of the cellos would "[weave] exotically" around McCartney's "sitar-like" guitar figures before the coda.

As the sessions rolled on, overdubbing and editing continued at a pace.

At the end of December 1966 Lennon reviewed acetates of the previous version, Take 7, and the new remake, Take 26.

According to Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recordings Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962-1970, Lennon told Martin that he liked both the “original, lighter” take 7 and “the intense, scored version” of take 26.

Then, in a decision that only someone with boundless creative vision yet no engineering knowledge would make, Lennon asked Martin to simply stick the two versions together.

“There are two things against it,” Martin replied, as reported in Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “They are in different keys and different tempos. Apart from that, fine.”

“Well,” Lennon reportedly said, “You can fix it.”

And so it was that on 22 December, 1966, George Martin and Geoff Emerick sat in the control room of Studio 2 at EMI Abbey Road Studios and pondered how to splice the two versions together.

Armed with only a pair of editing scissors, a couple of tape machines and a varispeed control, Emerick and Martin embarked on some trial-and-error experimentation.

By speeding up the playback of the first takes and slowing down the playback of the second, Emerick eventually managed to get them to match in both pitch and tempo.

Take 7, which opened the song, was left in its original key of B flat major, while Take 26, recorded in C major and at a faster tempo, was slowed by 11.5 per cent, which brought the tempos and keys of both versions into line.

They had fulfilled Lennon’s seemingly impossible request, “with the grace of God, and a bit of luck,” said Martin.

The edit can be heard on the finished, released version at precisely 60 seconds in, immediately prior to the words “going to” in the second chorus.

The joining of the two versions marked the completion of Strawberry Fields Forever, nearly a month after recording began.

On 13 February 1967, Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A-side with Penny Lane.

In line with the band’s usual practice of not including tracks released as singles on albums, Strawberry Fields Forever was omitted from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a decision which George Martin later acknowledged was a “dreadful mistake”.

Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was the first Beatles single since Please Please Me in 1963 not to reach No. 1.

The song reached No. 2 in the UK, kept from the top slot by Englebert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me.

Music writer Peter Doggett noted that the failure of Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane to reach the top slot was “arguably the most disgraceful statistic in chart history”.

Doggett described Strawberry Fields Forever as "the greatest pop record ever made" adding that it is “a record that never dates, because it lives outside time”.

The stunning inventiveness of Strawberry Fields Forever left both fans and critics bewildered and breathless.

It was the sound of The Beatles taking a huge creative stride forward.

In the States, the song marked the point at which writers sought for the first time to elevate pop to a higher cultural plain. A 1967 feature in Time magazine led the way:

“[The] Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of.

“They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music.”

At 10:30pm on 8 December 1980, John Lennon and Yoko Ono left the Record Plant studio, a 10th floor facility at 321 West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

The studio was renowned for having an unfinished room with high ceilings, which many bands used for rehearsals. But it was best known as the studio where Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concluded the recording and mixing of the 1975 album Born To Run.

Ono, Lennon and producer Jack Douglas had spent the previous four days recording and mixing Walking On Thin Ice, a song written and recorded by Ono.

As Lennon listened to the mix, he became evermore ecstatic about its potential.

“From now on,” he told Ono excitedly, “we’re just going to do this, this is the direction”, as writer Ken Sharp noted in his 2010 book Starting Over: The Making Of John Lennon And Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy.

Lennon was clutching the tape of the final mix from this session as he and Ono stepped into a limo on the street outside the Record Plant. They had planned to go and eat at the Stage Deli, a well-known delicatessen just two blocks from Carnegie Hall, but decided instead to head home.

As they arrived at the Dakota Building around 10.45pm, Ono stepped out first and headed towards the entrance.

As Lennon emerged from the limo and walked towards the Dakota, 25-year-old Mark David Chapman stepped forward and fired five shots at close range from a .38 revolver.

Four of the shots hit Lennon in the back and shoulders. Police arrived at the scene within minutes and Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, but he was pronounced dead 30 minutes later.

In the hours and days that followed news of Lennon’s death triggered an overwhelming outpouring of grief.

The lyrics to Walking On Thin Ice would prove tragically prophetic, with their focus on the unpredictability of life and death – of “throwing the dice in the air” – and reach the conclusion: “When our hearts return to ashes, it will be just a story”.

Walking On Thin Ice was also the song that featured the last recording John Lennon ever made – a sizzling, visceral guitar solo that was unlike anything he had ever done.

In November 1980, the pair had released the Double Fantasy album, which was steadily ascending the US Top 10 when Lennon was killed.

But as Paul Zollo of American Songwriter noted in April 2020: “Nothing matched the pure electric fury” of Walking On Thin Ice.

The song is widely considered to be Yoko Ono’s finest composition, hailed for its haunting lyrics and propulsive post-punk sound.

45 years on from its conception, it stands as Yoko and John’s final, deeply poignant collaboration, a song that continues to excite and inspire.

The idea for Walking On Thin Ice came to Yoko Ono during one of the Lennons’ car trips between their Dakota Building apartment and their estate in Cold Spring Harbour on Long Island. They lived in a waterfront property in the community of Laurel Hollow and it was here that John Lennon learned to sail.

In an interview with American Songwriter magazine in 2020, Ono explained how Walking On Thin Ice sprang from her imagination almost fully formed.

“It’s a song that came to me music, notes and lyrics together,” she said. “I was thinking of Lake Michigan. I went to Chicago and Lake Michigan is so big that you don’t know the end of it when you look at it…

“I was just thinking of this woman [who] is walking Lake Michigan when it is totally frozen, and is walking and walking but not knowing that it’s that huge. I’m like one of those people. ‘Oh, it’s ice but I can walk on it.’ I walk like that in life.”

Clocking in at an epic six minutes, Walking On Thin Ice is a jagged left-field disco-infused track, with a real sense of urgency and edge. It sounds lean and post-punk yet defiantly rooted in the new ’80s decade.

The song was first recorded in August 1980 as part of the sessions for Double Fantasy at the Hit Factory at 353 West 48th Street.

Tony Levin’s raw, galloping bass anchors the track. Earl Slick delivers some inspiring ambient guitar flourishes, while Hugh McCracken contributes angular stabs of rhythm guitar.

After one of the takes John Lennon allegedly suggested that McCracken only play on the backbeats. “That’s great, really funky,” Ono said.

While the basis of the track was recorded from August 1980, it wasn’t until early December when Lennon, Ono and Jack Douglas resumed work on the song.

“We only had a germ of that record, so we made a loop of I think eight bars,” Douglas told Ben Yakas for a piece in Gothamist in July 2016. “It’s just loop-based. And a loop then was just a tape machine, I had it on a two-track spinning back to a multitrack, cutting bars together.”

Once the tape loop was in place, Douglas and Lennon were able to start overdubbing voices and instruments onto the song.

That first evening back in the studio, on 4 December 1980, Yoko Ono remade her lead vocal from the previous sessions months earlier. Everything about her vocal performance is impeccably well judged, from the soft half-spoken phrases to the warm textures and whispered vibrato.

There is a cool detachment to her vocal performance here, but it’s also strangely intimate.

On 4 December 1980, John Lennon laid down his guitar solo on the track, which kicks in at 1:18. It’s a searing, dynamic performance, a succession of twisted, guttural half-discordant squalls.

His solo is daring and cathartic, and it’s easy to see why Lennon was so enthralled by the song and his contribution.

It was rumoured that Lennon played the solo on a new red Stratocaster but producer Jack Douglas soon blew that theory out of the water.

“It was the Capri,” Douglas told writer Kenneth Womack in an interview published on Salon.com in January 2021. Douglas was referencing Lennon’s iconic 1958 Rickenbacker 325, the same instrument he bought in Hamburg in 1960 and played consistently until 1964 when he received a new model during The Beatles’ US tour.

“For the solo, John simply wailed on the guitar,” wrote Womack, “executing a series of power chords as Douglas, sitting nearby, reached over and worked the instrument’s Bigsby tailpiece. As with a whammy bar, the Bigsby tremolo arm allowed the producer to manipulate the vibrato sound and heighten the eerie ambience they had been creating for Walking On Thin Ice.”

From there, the song shifts to the bridge: “I may cry some day/But the tears will dry whichever way/And when our hearts return to ashes/It’ll be just a story”.

At 2:30, Ono lurches into a monotone vocal syllable “ai, ai, ai…”, which is the Japanese word for love, pronounced ‘ah-ee’. Ono repeats the word over and over for more than a minute. This is gradually immersed within other instrumentation such as the drums and percussion of Arthur Jenkins Jnr.

A section with a series of emotive gasps and grunts follows, before one of the most effective parts of the song – the spoken word vocal on the second bridge. “I knew a girl who tried to walk across the lake/Course it was winter when all this was ice/That’s a hell of a thing to do, you know/They say the lake is as big as the ocean/I wonder if she knew about it?”

“I was still sitting in the chair by the mic, waiting for them to change the tape,” Ono told Paul Zollo of American Songwriter magazine. “That’s when it just came. So I just wrote it down quickly. I said, ‘I got it!’ And I told them I was just going to do something after the singing, and I just did it.”

In many ways, this was the creative turning point of the song.

“Yoko was great,” Jack Douglas told writer Ben Yakas in a piece for Gothamist in July 2016. “John knew that Yoko was onto something with that one, especially with that spoken-word.”

By then Lennon was obsessed with Walking On Thin Ice – and with the whole new direction it signalled.

“It was as if we were both haunted by the song,” Yoko wrote in the liner notes for the single. “I remember I woke up in the morning and found John watching the sunrise and still listening to the song. He said I had to put it out right away as a single.”

Tragically, Lennon never lived to see Walking On Thin Ice released as a single. The song was released on 6 February, 1981 and reached No.35 in the UK Singles Chart and No.58 in the US Billboard 100.

“When Walking On Thin Ice came out, I played it non-stop,” recalled Nile Rogers, as reported on the JohnLennon.com website. “Whenever anyone would get in my car, I would blast the song and say, ‘This shit is incredible!’ When I think of Yoko I think of Thin Ice. It’s a great piece of work, and to this day it remains one of my favourite songs.”

Back in August 1980, in the early stages of the song’s recording, when Earl Slick had just laid down his inspiring guitar parts, Lennon excitedly asked Ono to come into the control room to hear the emerging song.

“I think you just cut your first number one, Yoko,” he reportedly said, echoing an almost identical phrase George Martin relayed to The Beatles after they recorded Please Please Me 18 years earlier.

And so it proved to be, although not in the mainstream pop chart. In 2003, following the emergence of several club mixes of the song, Walking On Thin Ice was released as a maxi-single with remixes by artists such as Pet Shop Boys, Danny Tenagli and Felix Da Housecat.

It spent weeks on the US Dance Club Songs chart before reaching No.1, eclipsing Madonna and Justin Timberlake.

In the liner notes of the original release on 4 February 1981, Yoko Ono wrote about the song’s release against the background of her tragic loss.

“Getting this together after what happened was hard,” she wrote. “But I knew John would not rest his mind if I hadn’t. I hope you like it, John. I did my best.”

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album was released 45 years ago this month and its producer, Jack Douglas, has been letting slip some secrets about the sessions.

Douglas, who’s now 80, appeared on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast this week and

"And in fact, when we were doing Double Fantasy and word got out that maybe we were smoking pot after the session was over, and then Yoko would get, like, pissed off at us," Douglas said. "And she'd call us, she'd call us down into her office in Studio One. And John and I would be standing there like two school children."

He continued: "She yelled at us for, you know, 'What were you doing? You were blah blah blah blah blah.' And then she looked at me, and she said, 'You know, I can always get Phil (Spector) to do these sessions."

It was an idle threat, as Lennon, Douglas said, “hated” Spector. The last time the erratic producer had worked with Lennon was during the chaotic sessions for the Rock N’ Roll album six years previously when Spector, as was his wont, had started waving guns around in the studio.

"I hated him (Spector). And John and I looked at each other. And before I could do it, John went, 'Oh. Yeah,'" he said.

Lennon’s pet name for Ono was ‘mother’, it should be pointed out.

Anyway, Douglas delivered Double Fantasy successfully and there was enough material from the sessions to provide the bulk of Milk And Honey, a posthumous John and Yoko album which was released in January 1984.

After Lennon’s murder, Douglas continued to produce and worked with Aerosmith on their two most recent albums, Honkin’ On Bobo and Music From Another Dimension!, as well as the New York Dolls’ 2006 reunion album Someday It Will Please Us To Remember Even This.

How strange it must have been to view ‘70s pop culture through the eyes of a Beatle.

Having done so much to steer rock ’n’ roll’s evolution through the cultural riptides of the ‘60s, it surely would have been bewildering to then gaze upon this new era of creative effervescence at a time when lawsuits and persistent appeals for the Beatles to reform were anchoring them in the past.

Nothing the Fab Four had done before would suggest that they were artists overly enthralled by nostalgia. The reunion talk and the multimillion dollar offers from the super-rich as itself a form of zombie Beatlemania. Those appeals would come to nothing. John, Paul, George and Ringo were going it alone, and music, as is its wont, carried on regardless.

The Rolling Stones rolled on. The big beasts of rock were assembled. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath had arrived. David Bowie had made himself known. And then there was Elton John, who with his 1970 hit, Your Song, had officially introduced himself as a generational talent.

John Lennon was listening. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1975, Lennon described his fellow Beatles and the boys in the Stones as the “Old Guard.” Bowie and John were the “newies” – and Your Song was just what British rock was waiting for.

“[I] remember thinking, ‘Great, that’s the first new thing that’s happened since we happened.’ It was a step forward,” said Lennon. “There was something about his vocals that was an improvement on all of the English vocals until then.’”

Elton was just getting started. He and his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, were developing a real taste for it. Elton worked fast, chasing his eponymous 1970 album with Tumbleweed Connection, recording a third studio album that year with the Friends soundtrack (1971). All three went gold.

Technically, he recorded four albums in 1970, with his first live album, 17-11-70, taped during his much-bootlegged WABC-FM radio performance.

Elton was of no mind to slow down. In 1971, by the time he entered London’s Trident Studios to track Madman Across The Water, he had hit his straps, backed by a formidable rhythm section of Dee Murray on bass guitar and Nigel Olsson on drums.

Caleb Quaye returned to play electric guitar, tracking acoustic guitars on Holiday Inn, but it was the arrival of a coltish Scottish folk guitarist who could play anything with a string on it, Davey Johnstone, that would change the direction of the Elton John Band, inaugurating a collaboration that continues to this day, with Johnstone not only Elton’s guitar player but musical director, too.

He had been recommended to Elton by producer Gus Dudgeon, who had worked with Johnstone with Magna Carta, and after the success of Mad Man… he officially joined the band for 1972’s Honky Château.

“Elton and I became very close musically when I worked on Mad Man Across The Water as a session guy, because I was playing all acoustic on the title track of that album, and then mandolin and sitar on Holiday Inn,” says Johnstone, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “And something happened. There was a thing that happened between us. It was like, ‘This is working really good. This guy is easy to work with.’ And that’s what it was for both of us, so that continued and just became what it was.”

Elton likes to introduce Johnstone as the guitarist who had never picked up an electric guitar before Honky Château and yet somehow turned his band into a rock ’n’ roll outfit. That’s an exaggeration, but Johnstone admits there is some truth to it.

“Put it this way, it’s what he says. It’s how he introduces me on stage!” laughs Johnstone. “And it’s kind of true. My buddy Billy Connolly, my dear friend Billy Connolly – we talk once every couple of weeks – always remembers the vibe at that point. We were talking about it one day and he said, ‘If Elton asked you if you’d played electric guitar, you were such a brash young guy, you would probably say, ‘Of course!’ Just to get the job.’

“But it was very true that I barely played electric guitar. I played a couple of fun sound effects on some Magna Carta albums, and I did have an electric guitar laying around, but it wasn’t what I played at the time. So, yeah, it’s partly true.”

Just think, Johnstone was only introduced to Elton in 1971, and by the summer of 1974 he had played on Madman Across The Water, Honky Château, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and Caribou. What a run.

But by 1974, the Elton John Band needed to take a deep breath before going again. They took a cruise aboard the SS France, crossing the Atlantic on its final voyage, working on what would become Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy, and also proving that rock stars in the mid ‘70s could be responsible when they needed to.

“It was a great trip over because we were also chaperoning Julian Lennon,” says Johnstone. “Because Cynthia [Lennon, née Powell, Julian’s mother, Lennon’s ex-wife] was on the trip with us, and we were kind of making sure that he didn’t get up to too much mischief, because he was only about 11 years old at that time. He was on his way to New York to have the summer with his dad.

“We were happy to do that. Then when we got to New York Harbor, John was there, so it was awesome. It was quite an interesting trip – very iconic, if you think about it. It was the last trip of the SS France. It was their last voyage. To do that, and then to meet John for the first time – for me anyway, I hadn’t met him before that – it was an amazing trip.”

The plan was for the band to kill some time in New York, Olsson would hotfoot it to Nederland, Colorado, join Dudgeon and his production team at Caribou Ranch, work on the drum sounds, then the rest of the band would all head west.

Captain Fantastic… was to be a concept record, Taupin’s lyrics diarising and dramatising the early days of he and Elton’s songwriting partnership. Confessional, celebratory, raw, Captain Fantastic… was a considerable musical undertaking.

As Johnstone recalls, every song was “intense”. The cruise gave Elton a chance to get his thoughts in order. His New York stopover gave him the opportunity to warm-up for Captain Fantastic…, and he found the time to drop in on Lennon when he was tracking Walls And Bridges at the Record Plant. Much to Lennon’s delight, he ended up appearing on the album.

“Elton popped in on the session for Walls And Bridges and sort of zapped in and played the piano and ended up singing Whatever Gets You Thru The Night with me,” Lennon said, speaking to Rolling Stone in 1975. “Which was a great shot in the arm. I’d done three quarters of it, ‘Now what do we do?’ Should we put a camel on it or a xylophone? That sort of thing. And he came in and said, ‘Hey, ah’ll play some piano!’”

Once Lennon finished Walls And Bridges, he had some time to decompress, and chose to get out of the big city and seek some fresh mountain air. Colorado would do just nicely.

Visiting the Elton John Band at Caribou would also take his mind off the ongoing legal wrangles over his immigration status, and besides, Lennon wanted to see how an Elton John album came together.

“We didn’t really plan for anything. We knew there was there was a possibility that John Lennon would come up for a week,” says Johnstone. “Because he was really keen. He was really interested in watching the way our band was working, because if you think about it, we had become the next thing after the Beatles.

“I mean, obviously there was [Led] Zeppelin, a big Zeppelin moment, which still goes on to today, but John called us, during another album that we were recording, and said he thought that we were the best stuff that he had heard since the Beatles. And for us to hear that from John Lennon was like, ‘What?’ It was a wonderful compliment.”

Lennon’s arrival in Nederland caused quite a stir. Here was this small, sleepy town, 47 miles northwest of Denver, the gateway to the great outdoors, the skyline fringed by the Rockies, the Barker Meadow Reservoir close by, and here was a Beatle, John Lennon in the flesh.

“John went into Nederland to this little food store to buy a toothbrush and toothpaste. And they were like, ‘What??’ He was signing autographs for people in there and was just so great with everybody,” said John Carsello, Caribou’s studio manager, speaking to the official Elton John website. “It was really nuts.”

Lennon arriving in Colorado without a toothbrush betrays the fact that there was no great masterplan. It was not so unusual that musicians would drop in on each other, or that they might be passing through; Neil Sedaka was in the studio for the Captain Fantastic… sessions and witnessed the band pull off one of its great set-pieces, the recording of We All Fall in Love Sometimes and Curtains all in one go. They nailed it in two takes.

It wasn’t like Lennon was on the studio call sheet. He brought no gear. As far as anyone was concerned, he was there as a friend. As Johnstone recalls, there was no expectation that Lennon would reciprocate and track something with the band.

The album was being recorded in the order that Taupin wrote the songs. But there was ample time on the schedule for side missions, and the sessions for Captain Fantastic… would ultimately yield two songs that made it to number one without making it on the album.

Chaperoning Julian Lennon, Elton’s cameo on Walls And Bridges, Lennon in the studio; maybe it was kismet that one of these number one singles would be a Beatles cover.

“John wanted to come out and hang out with us. We didn’t plan on recording anything,” says Johnstone. “But during the odd session when Elton and I, Dee and Nigel were together, one of the things that I would do is I would start playing the riff from Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. It was just one of those things, and it was like, ‘Oh, we must record that one day!’ Well, when John came up, it was a no-brainer.”

Johnstone got the ball rolling, playing the riff as he often did. He gave one of his Les Pauls to Lennon, and told him he had to play on it. Lennon demurred, insisting Johnstone was the guitar player. Johnstone remembers Lennon saying over and over, “‘Can you tune it for me? I’m not the guitar player, you are”. This was really happening.

Olsson described it as a “pinch me” moment. Everyone was on-point. This was a chance to record a Beatles song with a Beatle.

“I started playing that in the studio, it was like, ‘Let’s do that!’ And we cut Lucy In The Sky and a couple of other things – one song of John’s that we used as a B-side [One Day (At A Time)]. It was just a wonderful time,” says Johnstone.

It’s also another example of how the Elton John Band would maximise their time in the studio. The 9 August, 1974, was a typically productive day by anyone’s standards, with the band recording Bitter Fingers, the second track on Captain Fantastic…, and Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – the latter augmented with a reggae section that was improvised in the studio by Lennon, who would be credited under his alias, Dr Winston O’Boogie.

This was no throw-and-go recording, an afterthought once Bitter Fingers was ticked off the list. The Elton John version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is Gus Dudgeon production masterclass, a panorama of instrumentation, with percussionist Ray Cooper laying down bells, gong, congas, bell tree and tambourine.

Elton, who would track his lead vocals a few days later, played piano, mellotron and harpsichord. Johnstone and Lennon dovetailed on guitar.

“Then also, we recorded Philadelphia Freedom during those sessions as well, so there was a massive output,” says Johnstone. “If you think about it, this is what we were doing all through those early parts of the ‘70s, till this album, which was ’74. We were always one album ahead.”

Philadelphia Freedom was another huge success from such a small footprint in the band’s calendar. It was written onsite at Caribou on the 13th August, recorded on the 17th, all in a day, with Johnstone just plugging a Fender Telecaster into the board and going for it. Elton tracking his vocals a few days later.

Elton John and John Lennon were not finished. The success of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds reprised the Beatles at their most psychedelic, a welcome flashback for those still jonesing for a Fab Four reunion.

After the Walls And Bridges sessions, there was talk of a wager, that if Whatever Gets You Thru The Night went to number one, Lennon was to perform it live with Elton and his band. Much to Lennon’s surprise, it did.

“I said sure, not thinking in a million years it was gonna get to number One, Al Coury or no Al Coury, the promotion man at Capitol,” he told Rolling Stone. “And there I was. Onstage.”

It was historic. It wasn’t officially Lennon’s last ever live performance but Elton John’s Thanksgiving show at Madison Square Garden on 28 November 1974 would be the last time he would step up and play in such a setting, in concert before a sold-out crowd.

He sat in with the Elton John Band for one Whatever Gets You Thru The Night and Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and, for good measure, threw in another Beatles cover, I Saw Her Standing There. The set was recorded. Lennon’s contribution was not included in the original release of Elton John’s 1976 live album, Here And There, but it made the mid ‘90s reissues.

For Lennon, it was perhaps the end of an era. For Elton John, 1974 this was just the start of a new chapter, Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy was in the can, Caribou was in stores worldwide, and a greatest hits record was coming soon, just in time for Christmas.

It was all systems go. All aboard the Starship for a 16,000-mile 10-week tour playing 45 shows in 31 cities across North America. They were the biggest thing since the Beatles, and the audience was waiting…

• Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy 50th Anniversary is out now via UMR.

Looking back on the life and legacy of John Lennon – who was gunned down 45 years ago on 8 December 1980 – it’s easy to forget that the initial reaction to his final album Double Fantasy was largely negative.

Some of Lennon’s most ardent admirers, such as British DJ John Peel, denounced the album’s sentimentality and questioned its relevance.

At the time, Lennon had only recently reemerged into the spotlight after five years of relative domesticity, raising his infant son Sean with Yoko Ono in their Dakota building apartment on New York’s Upper West Side.

For Lennon, 1975 to 1980 was a period of reflection and self-discovery, a kind of domestic bliss, although as NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray noted in his review of Double Fantasy, “It sounds like a great life, but it makes for a lousy record.”

Within weeks of the album’s release, Lennon was gone and the songs on the Double Fantasy album were viewed in a whole new context.

The initial reviews still stood. But it was impossible to dissect the songs from the overwhelming sense of tragedy and loss.

45 years on, Double Fantasy has far more bite and edge than was first acknowledged, with Yoko Ono contributing some of its creative high points.

But there’s also an abiding directness and honesty to Lennon’s big, mellow radio-friendly hits from the album, such as Watching The Wheels, which opens side two.

On this song, Lennon addresses those who were confused by his ‘househusband’ years. The song gives an evocative glimpse into his state of mind at the time – a sense of reflection and calm after the turbulence and emotional trauma of his past.

Watching The Wheels began life as a demo, reportedly written by Lennon in late 1977 and given the working title of Emotional Wreck. He had the central piano riff and the opening lines but it then underwent numerous revisions.

By 1978, he had allegedly called it People, and while the chorus had yet to be written, the chord progression and the verses were in place.

One year later, he had changed the title to I’m Crazy and recorded on piano in his apartment.

By the beginning of 1980, it was retitled Watching The Wheels and demoed by Lennon with an electric guitar and a short-lived boogie rhythm.

Then in June 1980, he recorded a final demo, just before entering the studio to record Double Fantasy.

Lennon was asked about the meaning of the song in an interview with Rolling Stone on 5 December 1980, three days before his murder.

“The whole universe is a wheel, right? Wheels go round and round. They’re my own wheels, mainly. But, you know, watching myself is like watching everybody else. And I watch myself through my child, too.”

In the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon told writer David Sheff that the decision to go back into the studio was not an easy one for him.

“I hadn’t stopped from ’62 till ’73 – on demand, on schedule, continuously. And walking away was hard… I thought… shouldn’t I be, like, going to the office or something?’. Because I don’t exist if my name isn’t in the papers or if I don’t have a record out or in the charts, or whatever – if I’m not seen at the right clubs. It must be like the guys at 65 when somebody comes up and goes, ‘Your life is over. Time for golf’.”

In reality, Lennon never stopped writing and making music. He simply wasn’t going into the studio to record it.

All that changed in June 1980 after Lennon embarked on a sailing trip from Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda. During the trip, the 43-ft sloop Megan Jaye encountered a severe storm. One by one, the crew of five were struck down with fatigue and seasickness, except Lennon.

Tethered to the craft by a safety harness, Lennon took over the helm at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. “Focus on the horizon, not the compass,” the captain instructed him, before taking himself below.

For the next six hours, Lennon was smashed in the face by waves which knocked him completely off his feet at least twice.

“It’s an incredible experience, because it won’t go away,” Lennon is quoted as saying on the official John Lennon website. “You can’t change your mind. It’s like being on stage, once you’re on, there’s no getting off.

“Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky. I had the time of my life.

“I was screaming sea shanties and shouting at the Gods. I felt like a Viking. Jason and the Golden Fleece.”

The experience renewed Lennon’s confidence and highlighted the fragility of life. He began to write new songs and reworked earlier demos.

“I was so centred after the experience at sea that I was tuned into the cosmos,” he said, “and all these songs came.”

Yoko Ono contacted producer Jack Douglas and gave him Lennon’s demos. Douglas had worked as an engineer on the 1971 album Imagine and other subsequent releases by Lennon and Ono.

“My immediate impressions were that I was going to have a hard time making it better than the demos because there was such intimacy in the demos," Douglas told Chris Hunt of Uncut magazine in 2005.

Despite such reservations, sessions for the album that became Double Fantasy began on 7 August 1980 at the Hit Factory, in the heart of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. These sessions were kept top secret because Lennon reportedly wanted to be able to discretely abort the sessions if he felt they were not going well.

On 18 August 1980, Lennon and the session players arrived at the Hit Factory, to record Watching The Wheels.

Lennon had asked Jack Douglas to give the track a ‘circular’ sound. Douglas envisaged the sound of a hammer dulcimer and invited a street musician called Matthew Cunningham to the session after hearing him busking on a hammer dulcimer on a sidewalk on Columbus Avenue.

When Cunningham arrived at the studio, he was playing on a track that featured some of the finest session players in the industry, musicians such as Earl Slick and Hugh McCracken on guitars, Tony Levin on bass, Andy Newmark on drums, George Small on keyboards and multi-instrumentalist and singer Eric Troyer on a Prophet-5.

In Ken Sharp’s book Starting Over: The Making Of John Lennon And Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, George Small discussed his role on the recording of the song.

“That’s the most keyboard-oriented song on the record,” he said. “That’s me on piano and John played a Yamaha electric grand… On the ending part – where John sings, ‘I just had to let it go’ he really made a big point of making sure that I had played that romantic piano line on the tag exactly that way. He told me he was in a bar one night and was listening to a piano player and that riff just stuck in his head. So he had to have that riff on the end of it.”

Before recording the album, the band rehearsed for two weeks, although Earl Slick reportedly wasn’t invited to the rehearsals as Douglas wanted him to be the creatively spontaneous ‘wild card’ on the session. “You’re fast – you’ll catch up,” Douglas reportedly told Slick.

In an interview with Matt Hurwitz of Mix magazine, published in December 2024, Douglas recalls that Lennon’s singing “drove that band”. He noted that Lennon always sang live using a Neumann U67 microphone and would typically do three to four live takes with the band, leaving Douglas to then comp the takes if needed.

Douglas was hugely impressed by Lennon’s vocal technique. “He’d work off to the side of the 67 on certain words to get a different sound,” Douglas told Hurwitz in the Mix magazine interview. “He’d work the side a little bit, then come back out. He’d do rhythms. Best technique I ever saw.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Watching The Wheels session is busker Matt Cunningham’s experience of that day, as Douglas recalled in the 2024 interview with Matt Hurwitz of Mix magazine. Cunningham reportedly didn’t recognise Lennon or Yoko Ono when they arrived. “Is that the artist?” Cunningham reportedly asked. “Yes,” replied Douglas, “that’s the artist and his wife.”

Lennon was excited by the sound of the hammer dulcimer and came out into the main studio and started working with Cunningham, who reportedly still didn’t recognise him. Even when Ono then invited Cunningham to a sushi lunch with herself, Lennon and Douglas, Cunningham allegedly remained unaware that he was in the company of the former Beatle.

The following day, as Douglas told Matt Hurwitz in his Mix magazine interview, he received a phone call from Cunningham, who was paid a $100 fee for the session. “I just had a weird feeling,” began Cunningham, “did I just do a session with John Lennon?”

With Lennon determined to keep the sessions secret, Cunningham was asked to return to the studio where Lennon reportedly gave him two flight tickets and some travel money.

“He [Lennon] gave him two tickets to Puerto Rico,” Douglas told Hurwitz. “He said, ‘Do me a favour, go take a vacation.’”

Lennon recorded his vocals two days later, on 20 August 1980, and the song was mixed nine days after that.

As ever with Lennon, it’s the simplicity and honesty of the song that gives it such resonance.

Lyrically, it gets straight to the point, with Lennon delivering his reflective lines with rawness and intimacy.

His voice is double-tracked as it had been back in Abbey Road in the late ’60s: “People say I'm lazy/Dreaming my life away/Well they give me all kinds of advice/Designed to enlighten me/When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall/Don't you miss the big time boy, you're no longer on the ball?”

Watching The Wheels was released posthumously in March 1981. Inevitably, Lennon’s sudden death after finally finding some peace and solace in his life lends the song real poignancy.

As Jim Beviglia put it in a piece for American Songwriter magazine in January 2024. “Watching The Wheels will go down as one of the loveliest songs in John Lennon’s catalogue. His mind clear and the restlessness of previous years largely cooled, he wrote a playful, tender ode to the joys of dropping out of the rat race to be with family.

“It’s a bitter irony that fate would take that all away from him and lend Watching The Wheels an entirely unintended context.”

It would have been John Lennon’s 85^th birthday tomorrow and to mark the occasion, a recently discovered interview with the ex-Beatle is to air on Boom Radio.

The interviewer was the ex-Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne, who spoke to Lennon in his Dakota apartment in 1975, shortly before he took a five-year break from the music business.

And the interview contains some interesting revelations, not least that Lennon didn’t think much of his most recent album, 1974’s Walls and Bridges, and had to be persuaded to release it.

Lennon told Horne that he “couldn’t stand to listen” to the studio tapes at first, and thought to “just throw this away”. He then played them to friends “and they said: ‘Hey, it’s all right.’ So I said: ‘It’s all right. Oh it’s not bad at all. I quite like some of it myself. OK, let’s put it out.’”

Walls And Bridges is something of an underrated gem in Lennon’s discography, and is probably best known for the two singles it spawned – Number 9 Dream and the effervescent Elton John collab, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, a US Number One that inexplicably flopped in his home country.

It should be said, of course, that Lennon was never a great judge of his own work and old interviews regularly saw him disparaging huge swathes of his work with the Beatles.

During the interview, Lennon also talked about his battles to stay in the US with the Nixon administration. He told Horne that he knew that his phone was being tapped: “I know the difference between the phone being normal when I pick it up and when every time I pick it up, there’s a lot of noises.”

“(The administration was) coming for me one way or the other; I mean, they were harassing me. And I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in a car and they’d be following me in a car and not hiding.”

Lennon also said that he wasn’t the only rock star Nixon was suspicious of. “Mick (Jagger) had to vanish up his own manhole to get Keith (Richards) and the rest of them in to tour even. I mean, he did a lot of behind-the-scenes work just to get ‘em to be allowed in. So all of us have problems. It’s just that I wanted to stay here.”

You can hear more excerpts from the interview and Horne’s memories of the encounter tomorrow evening (October 9) on Boom Radio.

Paul McCartney has been talking about how exposure to avant-garde music enhanced the Beatles in the late '60s and coloured some of their greatest work.

Macca has been interviewed by Radio 3 presenter Elizabeth Alker for her upcoming book Everything We Do Is Music, which explores the links between pop and classical music. In a piece in the Guardian, Alker describes meeting the ex-Beatle in his office as he remembers how he educated himself about experimental music.

McCartney saw experimental composer Cornelius Cardew in concert, attended a lecture by Karlheinz Stockhausen about synthesised music and met Delia Derbyshire. By 1966 all this background work was flowing into the Beatles' music.

The first track to benefit from this new type of thinking was Tomorrow Never Knows, for which McCartney set up a couple of Brenell tape machines to create loops. “I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring and dissolving sounds all mixed together.

"There could have been a guitar solo in it – straightforward or wacky – but when you put the tape loops in, they take it to another place because when they play, you get all these kind of happy accidents. They’re unpredictable and that suited that track. We used those tricks to get the effect we wanted.”

The following year brought I Am The Walrus, which in many ways went even further out. “(John) Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” he says, “and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations.

"I brought that idea to I Am the Walrus. I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare – King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”

Interestingly, McCartney said he wanted to use this new technology “in a controlled way”, still working within the limits of a three-minute pop song.

When the less cautious Lennon got his hands on a pair of Brenell machines, the result was Revolution 9, the extraordinary cut-up piece that must have astonished (and terrified) the group’s audience when they heard it for the first time on the White Album in late 1968.

But by bringing these elements into pop music, both Beatles were gently pushing their audience – and thus popular culture – forward. “You think, ‘Oh well, our audience wants a pop song,’” McCartney says.

“And then you might read about William Burroughs using the cut-up technique and you think, ‘Well, he had an audience, and his audience liked what he did.’ And eventually we decided that our audiences would come along with us, rather than it being down to us to feed them a conventional diet.”

Anyway, Alker’s book Everything We Do Is Music sounds fascinating. It’s out via Faber & Faber on August 28.

There’s another hefty John Lennon box set on its way.

After last year’s Mind Games reissue, comes Power To The People, which looks at the 1971 - 1972 era. These were John and Yoko’s early years in New York, when the couple fell in with activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the time of the heavily-politicised Some Time In New York City album.

Power To The People includes a ‘reimagined’ and remixed version of that album, together with a treasure trove of unreleased tracks, demos, out-takes, home recordings and studio jams.

It also includes the two One To One concerts Lennon and Ono gave at Madison Square Garden, New York in August 1972, which were featured in last year’s One-to-One: John and Yoko documentary.

A pair of benefit gigs for the children at the Willowbrook institution on Staten Island, they would mark the last time Lennon would play a full concert.

At the time, Lennon enthused about the shows, telling the NME: “That Madison Square Garden gig was the best music I enjoyed playing since The Cavern or even Hamburg. It was just the same kind of feeling when The Beatles used to really get into it.”

Today, Yoko, writing in the preface to Power To The People, describes the One To One concerts as “our effort in Grassroots Politics. It embodied what John and I strongly believed in – Rock for Peace and Enlightenment.”

Co-ordinating the package is Sean Ono Lennon, who in a statement, said: “I was completely floored putting this collection together and getting to remix the concerts and hearing all the unreleased material from my parents’ archive for the first time. People may not realise how special it is for me to hear my dad talking or to see him.

"I grew up with a set number of images and audio clips that everyone’s familiar with. So to come across things that I’ve never seen or heard is really deep for me, because it’s almost like getting more time with my dad.”

“When I was eleven, my mum put out the Live In New York City album and film. So I grew up listening to it. It was a concert that had a legendary status in my mind, because it was my dad’s last concert.

"For the concerts, we spent a lot of time finding the best possible balance to keep the feeling of a live show while refining the overall sound as much as possible there was some meticulous and miraculous work with audio restoration. I won’t disclose all our techniques but there was some ‘movie magic’ required, and I think in the end, the shows sound better than ever.”

Power To The People comes in a variety of editions, ranging from a single CD of a hybrid of both the One To One concerts to a double CD of both shows, right up to the Super Deluxe edition, which features nine CDs, three Blu-Ray discs, a 204-page book, poster, postcards, stickers, and more.

They’re all out on October 10, the day after what would have been the ex-Beatle’s 85^th birthday. Now there’s a thought.

On the morning of Thursday 19 January 1967, the four members of The Beatles arrived at Studio One of EMI Studios Abbey Road to record the song that is now regarded by many as the greatest composition they ever created.

The song was A Day In A Life, a magisterial and mind-blowing achievement that was unlike anything that had gone before.

It was chosen as the closing track on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album – it had to be, nothing else could follow it – and when the final gargantuan E major piano chord crescendo is played simultaneously by Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr and roadie Mal Evans (along with producer George Martin on harmonium), it marks an emotive and iconic closure to one of the most momentous songs in recording history.

In many ways, the creation of A Day In The Life is two wholly separate yet intertwined stories: the writing of the song and the arduous technical challenges that had to be overcome to realise it.

It was the morning of 18 December, 1966 when John Lennon reportedly sat down at the piano at his home Kenwood, in Surrey, after reading two articles in The Daily Mail that would inspire the lyrics for A Day In The Life.

The first was about Tara Browne, a 21-year-old millionaire playboy and a friend of Paul McCartney’s, who had been killed in a car crash after driving his Lotus Elan through a red light in South Kensington and crashing into a stationary van.

As Lennon began to construct a chord sequence, the lines began to form. “He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the lights had changed/A crowd of people stood and stared…”

The next story that caught Lennon’s attention was a piece about potholes.

“I was writing the song with the Daily Mail propped up in front of me on the piano,” recalled Lennon in 1967, ”There was a paragraph about 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered.”

By mid-January, the melody and most of the lyrics were written, and Lennon went to McCartney’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood to present the song to him.

In his book The Lyrics, McCartney recalls that the song’s opening lines were actually a joint effort. It was also McCartney who contributed the song’s pivotal line, “I’d love to turn you on”.

“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on A Day In The Life,” Lennon told Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, in 1970.

Lennon continued: “The way we wrote a lot of the time: you'd write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.”

When Lennon first sang A Day In The Life to the band in the studio, they wanted to record the track immediately.

At that point, the song had the working title of ‘In The Life Of …’ and it featured Lennon on piano, McCartney on Hammond organ, George Harrison on acoustic guitar and Ringo Starr on congas.

They taped four takes of the rhythm track, at which point Lennon switched to acoustic guitar, while McCartney was on piano and Harrison was on maracas.

Despite swift progress, there was one obstacle – a 24-bar gap in the middle of the song that they didn’t know how to fill.

They decided to simply leave the 24 bars blank and then decide later what to put in that gap on the tape.

Mal Evans, the band’s longstanding tour manager and roadie, was allocated the task of counting off the bars during the recording and then setting an alarm clock off at the start of the 24th bar to let the band know it was almost time to resume playing.

The recording mics picked up this alarm and engineer Geoff Emerick was unable to eliminate it from the mix.

While Lennon had most of the song in place, he was unsure how to proceed. “For the first bit, [John] said to me, ‘I don’t know where to go from here,” recalled George Martin in the book All You Need Is Ears. “So, Paul said, ‘Well, I’ve got this other song I’ve been working on. What do you think of it?’. This ended up being the middle bit and so they joined the two bits together to make one song.”

In direct contrast to Lennon’s part, the middle eight section that McCartney came up with was bouncy and upbeat.

And in a remarkable stroke of luck, its lyrics related directly to the sound of Mal Evans’ alarm clock. “Woke up, got out of bed/Dragged the comb across my head”.

This section was designed to follow whatever they decided to put in the 24-bar gap.

Lennon suggested creating something that started out small and grew into something huge.

McCartney was drawn to this idea and suggested that they could achieve this with a full orchestra.

George Martin assured them that there was no way that EMI would pay for a full orchestra to record 24 bars of music. Then, in a suggestion so simple that it borders on near-genius, Ringo suggested they simply hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.

As it turned out, the orchestral segment was recorded multiple times, filling a separate four-track tape machine, and then four different recordings were overdubbed into one single massive crescendo.

The orchestral part was recorded on 10 February 1967 in the vast Studio One at EMI Studios, with Martin and McCartney conducting a 40-piece orchestra.

The total cost of hiring the musicians for the session was £367 (equivalent to £8,512 in 2025), which, even for a Beatles session, was deemed an extravagance.

Martin set about writing the framework of a score for the orchestral musicians as the part they were being asked to improvise was more akin to avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.

“What I did there was to write … the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra,” recalled Martin in All You Need Is Ears. “At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note … near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar … Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.”

In the spirit of the time, The Beatles hosted the orchestral session as a ’60s-style happening, with guests such as Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Pattie Boyd, Donovan and Michael Nesmith sashaying through the studio doors in their psychedelic finery.

The Beatles asked the orchestral musicians to wear costume pieces with their formal wear.

“When I went back into the studio the sight was unbelievable,” recalled George Martin. “The orchestra leader, David McCallum, who used to be the leader of the Royal Philharmonic, was sitting there [with] a bright red false nose. He looked up at me through paper glasses. Eric Gruenberg, now a soloist and once leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was playing happily away, his left hand perfectly normal on the strings of his violin, but his bow held in a giant gorilla’s paw.”

Recording separate run-throughs by the half-orchestra presented a challenge.

Three of the four tracks on the multi-track master tape were already filled and Martin and Emerick needed a minimum of two tracks to record the orchestra’s run-throughs of the crescendo.

Martin then sought the help of EMI Studios technical manager, Ken Townsend.

As Townsend recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recordings: “George Martin came up to me that morning and said to me ‘Oh Ken, I’ve got a poser for you. I want to run two four-track tape machines together this evening. I know it’s never been done before, can you do it?’

“So I went away and came up with a method whereby we fed a 50 cycle tone from the track of one machine then raised its voltage to drive the capstan motor of the second, thus running the two in sync.

"Like all these things, the ideas either work first time or not at all. This one worked first time.”

On 20 January and 3 February 1967, the track was refined with additional overdubs and remixing.

In the latter session, McCartney and Ringo Starr re-recorded their bass and drum parts respectively.

In The Beatles Anthology (2000), Ringo discussed his drum fills in A Day In The Life.

“I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song,” Ringo said. “For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' – boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood."

The final overdub was the huge, climactic piano and harmonium chord, recorded on 22 February 1967.

By then, most of the people who had been present at the recording of A Day In The Life were aware that what they were hearing marked a profound shift in popular music.

David Crosby of The Byrds was one of the first outsiders to hear A Day In The Life, when he visited The Beatles at EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road on 24 February, 1967. He recalled his reaction when he heard the song.

"Man, I was a dish-rag,” Crosby told writer John Harris for a March 2007 feature in Mojo magazine. “I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that.”

Ron Richards, producer of The Hollies, was among the EMI staff attending the half-orchestra recording for the 24-bar section. In his book The Complete Beatles Recordings, Mark Lewisohn describes Richards as sitting "with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I just can't believe it ... I give up’.”

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on 26 May, 1967.

As the closing song on the album, A Day In The Life was the subject of intense scrutiny.

In a review in The New York Times, published on 18 June 1967, critic Richard Goldstein called the song “a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric” going on to write that A Day In The Life “stands as one of the most important Lennon–McCartney compositions … [and] an historic pop event”.

Almost 60 years on, A Day In The Life is widely regarded as The Beatles’ greatest song.

Both haunting and hummable, it is the most forward-looking song on Sgt. Pepper and one that contrasts the mundanity of everyday life with the extraordinary and the existential.

Its power rests on it being the true sum of its parts, a song that captures the combined brilliance of The Beatles.

David Bowie was in the closing stages of recording his Young Americans album when he decided to record a cover of The Beatles’ Across The Universe — primarily as a strategic move to entice John Lennon to come down to the studio.

It was January 1975 at Electric Lady Studios in New York’s Greenwich Village, and Lennon had only just reunited with Yoko Ono after his infamous ‘lost weekend’ period of estrangement.

Lennon accepted Bowie’s invitation, but any thoughts of Across The Universe were soon forgotten.

Instead, over the course of one day, Bowie, Lennon and guitarist Carlos Alomar wrote and recorded a whole new song — Fame, a biting critique of stardom and celebrity that blended funk and soul with Bowie’s idiosyncratic avant-garde style.

The song would give Bowie his first No.1 single in the US, knocking Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy off the top slot, and giving him his first crossover success in the United States.

The song’s lean, muscular funk groove — self-deprecatingly dubbed “plastic soul” by Bowie — alienated many fans, particularly in the UK.

But as ever, Bowie’s creative instincts were flawless.

50 years on from the release of Fame, the song still sounds vital, fresh and remains an enduring classic within his peerless back catalogue.

Bowie and Lennon first met via actress Elizabeth Taylor on 20 September 1974. Four days earlier Taylor had attended a Bowie concert in Anaheim, and she and Bowie quickly became good friends.

Taylor invited Bowie to the 21st birthday party of Dean Martin’s son Ricci, in Beverly Hills. When Bowie arrived he found Taylor talking to John Lennon, his then partner May Pang, and Elton John.

“I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way,” recalled Bowie in a speech while receiving an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in 1999. “Although there were only a few years between us, in rock ’n’ roll that’s a generation, you know?

“So John was sort of [in Liverpool accent] ‘Oh, here comes another new one’. And I was sort of [thinking] ‘It’s John Lennon! I don’t know what to say. Don’t mention The Beatles, you’ll look really stupid’. And he said, ‘Hello, Dave.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got everything you’ve made – except The Beatles’.”

Bowie made contact with Lennon again at the beginning of January 1975.

In a 2021 BBC Radio 4 and 6Music programme called Bowie: Dancing Out In Space, producer Tony Visconti recalled that Bowie was terrified of meeting Lennon again and asked Visconti to accompany him to “buffer the situation”.

Visconti recalled: “About one in the morning I knocked on the door and for about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren’t speaking to each other. Instead, David was sitting on the floor with an art pad and a charcoal and he was sketching things and he was completely ignoring Lennon.

“So, after about two hours of that, he [John] finally said to David, ‘Rip that pad in half and give me a few sheets. I want to draw you’. So David said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’, and he finally opened up.

“So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John, and they kept swapping them and then they started laughing and that broke the ice.”

One week later, Lennon arrived at Electric Lady Studio after being invited by Bowie, for the one-day session that would yield Fame.

It was guitarist Carlos Alomar who provided the sonic catalyst for the creation of the song that became Fame.

Bowie had asked Alomar to come up with a guitar riff for a cover of Foot Stomping, the 1961 hit by Los Angeles doo-wop group The Flares, with the idea that he and Lennon might record it.

But when Bowie heard the infectious riff that Alomar had created, he immediately latched on to it and deemed it too good to waste on a cover version.

Alomar’s riff is a funky and infectious one-line syncopated phrase, built around the chord of F7. It’s a simple yet powerful hook that inspired both Bowie and Lennon.

Opinions vary as to exactly who was in the studio that day. Certainly, Bowie, Lennon, Alomar and producer Harry Maslin were. And it seems likely that the core band on Young Americans — guitarist Earl Slick, bassist Emir Ksasan and drummer Dennis Davis — were also present, as were Bowie’s backing vocalists Ava Cherry and Luther Vandross.

But in his autobiography, Guitar, Earl Slick recalls meeting Lennon — for what he thought was the first time ever — five years later on the sessions for Lennon’s Double Fantasy album in 1980.

When Slick walked over to Lennon and said, ‘Good to meet you’, Lennon reportedly laughed and said ‘Good to meet you again’.

Slick wrote of Lennon: “He insisted we met during the Young Americans sessions, but I didn’t remember any of it. I took his word for it, though, because he seemed sure and I was pretty out of it in 1975, so anything was possible!

"I mean, my fingers were working just fine, because the record sounds okay, but who knows where my brain was at. But how could I forget meeting John Lennon?”

On that January day in 1975, as Alomar played his cyclical riff, Lennon began singing the word ‘Aim’ over the pattern, which Bowie soon changed to ‘Fame’. From that point, the song took on its own momentum.

Lyrically, the song hones in on the hollowness of celebrity, examining Bowie’s disaffection with stardom, the destructive nature of fame and the immense pressures it places on artists. It was a subject that Lennon clearly had a great deal of experience of too.

By 1975, the subject of fame had a far more personal and literal meaning for Bowie.

He was embroiled in impending lawsuits that would result in the end of his relationship with manager Tony Defries over a costly musical theatre project called Fame, conceived by Defries and his company MainMan.

The show closed after just one night on Broadway and its failure had a devastating impact on Bowie and Defries’ relationship.

Bowie would go on to describe the song Fame as “nasty, angry” and admitted it was written with “a degree of malice” which was aimed at MainMan.

As Peter Dogget noted in his 2012 biography The Man Who Sold The World: Bowie And The 70s: "Every time in Fame that Bowie snapped back with a cynical retort about its pitfalls, he had [Defries] and [Defries's] epic folly in mind."

Doggett cited the line "bully for you, chilly for me" as an example.

Lennon also had a similarly sour experience, reportedly telling Bowie that he had been cheated out of money.

The whole subject of fame inspired Bowie and Lennon to vent their own feelings and experiences through the song, throwing lines about in a fast and furious creative fusion.

Questions have been raised over the extent of Lennon’s contribution to the writing of Fame.

In his book, Doggett suggested that Lennon made the “briefest lyrical contributions” but Bowie later said that Lennon was the energy and inspiration for the song, which was why he received a songwriting credit along with Bowie and Alomar.

Fame is an inspired work. Alomar’s guitar riff is both rhythmic and melodic, a spiky and spidery funk line that anchors and elevates the whole track. Maslin and Bowie’s production is inspired as they take Lennon’s acoustic rhythm track and twist and corrupt it with myriad techniques, while the vocals are transformed into both rhythmic and melodic elements.

Bowie contributes stabs of fuzz-drenched guitar that are positioned like a brass section in the mix. The whole approach is one of angular techniques and boundless levels of lateral thinking.

Fame was released as the second single from the Young Americans album on 2 June 1975 in the United States and on 25 July in the UK.

While it reached only No.17 in the UK, it rose to No.1 in the States.

In a 1987 issue of US publication Musician, Bowie said he had “absolutely no idea” the song would do so well, adding: “I wouldn't know how to pick a single if it hit me in the face.”

The song thrust Bowie into the mainstream and opened up a whole new vista of opportunity, such as in November 1975, when he appeared on the iconic TV programme Soul Train.

Bowie later confessed he was extremely nervous and had a few drinks to calm himself before appearing on the show.

Fame and the album Young Americans marked a whole new blue-eyed soul and R&B direction for Bowie, one that he would pursue until embracing electronic music on Station To Station (1976).

The Fame collaboration was the beginning of a special friendship between Bowie and Lennon, forged by mutual admiration. It was a friendship that would last until Lennon’s tragic death in 1980.

On the JohnLennon.com site there is a comment Lennon made about Bowie: “I must say I admire him,” Lennon said. “The vast repertoire of talent the guy has. I was never around when the Ziggy Stardust thing came because I’d already left England, so I really didn’t know what he was, and meeting him doesn’t give you much more of a clue because you don’t know which one you’re talking to… but we seemed to have some kind of communication together and I think he’s great. The fact that he can just walk into that and do that. I could never do that.”

For Bowie, the collaboration and subsequent friendship was particularly special.

“It was just a joy to work with him in the studio that one time,” said Bowie, also quoted on the JohnLennon.com site. “When I asked him what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, he said, ‘Yeah it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on!’ I was impressed, as I was at virtually everything he said.

“He was probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life… a real humanist. And a really spiteful sense of humour, which of course being English, I adored.”

Bowie recalled that as their friendship developed, he and Lennon spent a lot of time getting to know each other in “a lot of bars” in New York.

“We spent hours and hours discussing fame, and what you had to do to get it, to get there," Bowie said. "If I’m honest it was his fame we were discussing, because he was so much more famous than anyone who had been before.”

On the morning of Thursday 19 January 1967, the four members of The Beatles arrived at Studio One of EMI Studios Abbey Road to record the song that is now regarded by many as the greatest composition they ever created.

The song was A Day In A Life, a magisterial and mind-blowing achievement that was unlike anything that had gone before.

It was chosen as the closing track on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album – it had to be, nothing else could follow it – and when the final gargantuan E major piano chord crescendo is played simultaneously by Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr and roadie Mal Evans (along with producer George Martin on harmonium), it marks an emotive and iconic closure to one of the most momentous songs in recording history.

In many ways, the creation of A Day In The Life is two wholly separate yet intertwined stories: the writing of the song and the arduous technical challenges that had to be overcome to realise it.

It was the morning of 18 December, 1966 when John Lennon reportedly sat down at the piano at his home Kenwood, in Surrey, after reading two articles in The Daily Mail that would inspire the lyrics for A Day In The Life.

The first was about Tara Browne, a 21-year-old millionaire playboy and a friend of Paul McCartney’s, who had been killed in a car crash after driving his Lotus Elan through a red light in South Kensington and crashing into a stationary van.

As Lennon began to construct a chord sequence, the lines began to form. “He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the lights had changed/A crowd of people stood and stared…”

The next story that caught Lennon’s attention was a piece about potholes.

“I was writing the song with the Daily Mail propped up in front of me on the piano,” recalled Lennon in 1967, ”There was a paragraph about 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered.”

By mid-January, the melody and most of the lyrics were written, and Lennon went to McCartney’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood to present the song to him.

In his book The Lyrics, McCartney recalls that the song’s opening lines were actually a joint effort. It was also McCartney who contributed the song’s pivotal line, “I’d love to turn you on”.

“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on A Day In The Life,” Lennon told Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, in 1970.

Lennon continued: “The way we wrote a lot of the time: you'd write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.”

When Lennon first sang A Day In The Life to the band in the studio, they wanted to record the track immediately.

At that point, the song had the working title of ‘In The Life Of …’ and it featured Lennon on piano, McCartney on Hammond organ, George Harrison on acoustic guitar and Ringo Starr on congas.

They taped four takes of the rhythm track, at which point Lennon switched to acoustic guitar, while McCartney was on piano and Harrison was on maracas.

Despite swift progress, there was one obstacle – a 24-bar gap in the middle of the song that they didn’t know how to fill.

They decided to simply leave the 24 bars blank and then decide later what to put in that gap on the tape.

Mal Evans, the band’s longstanding tour manager and roadie, was allocated the task of counting off the bars during the recording and then setting an alarm clock off at the start of the 24th bar to let the band know it was almost time to resume playing.

The recording mics picked up this alarm and engineer Geoff Emerick was unable to eliminate it from the mix.

While Lennon had most of the song in place, he was unsure how to proceed. “For the first bit, [John] said to me, ‘I don’t know where to go from here,” recalled George Martin in the book All You Need Is Ears. “So, Paul said, ‘Well, I’ve got this other song I’ve been working on. What do you think of it?’. This ended up being the middle bit and so they joined the two bits together to make one song.”

In direct contrast to Lennon’s part, the middle eight section that McCartney came up with was bouncy and upbeat.

And in a remarkable stroke of luck, its lyrics related directly to the sound of Mal Evans’ alarm clock. “Woke up, got out of bed/Dragged the comb across my head”.

This section was designed to follow whatever they decided to put in the 24-bar gap.

Lennon suggested creating something that started out small and grew into something huge.

McCartney was drawn to this idea and suggested that they could achieve this with a full orchestra.

George Martin assured them that there was no way that EMI would pay for a full orchestra to record 24 bars of music. Then, in a suggestion so simple that it borders on near-genius, Ringo suggested they simply hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.

As it turned out, the orchestral segment was recorded multiple times, filling a separate four-track tape machine, and then four different recordings were overdubbed into one single massive crescendo.

The orchestral part was recorded on 10 February 1967 in the vast Studio One at EMI Studios, with Martin and McCartney conducting a 40-piece orchestra.

The total cost of hiring the musicians for the session was £367 (equivalent to £8,512 in 2025), which, even for a Beatles session, was deemed an extravagance.

Martin set about writing the framework of a score for the orchestral musicians as the part they were being asked to improvise was more akin to avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.

“What I did there was to write … the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra,” recalled Martin in All You Need Is Ears. “At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note … near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar … Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.”

In the spirit of the time, The Beatles hosted the orchestral session as a ’60s-style happening, with guests such as Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Pattie Boyd, Donovan and Michael Nesmith sashaying through the studio doors in their psychedelic finery.

The Beatles asked the orchestral musicians to wear costume pieces with their formal wear.

“When I went back into the studio the sight was unbelievable,” recalled George Martin. “The orchestra leader, David McCallum, who used to be the leader of the Royal Philharmonic, was sitting there [with] a bright red false nose. He looked up at me through paper glasses. Eric Gruenberg, now a soloist and once leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was playing happily away, his left hand perfectly normal on the strings of his violin, but his bow held in a giant gorilla’s paw.”

Recording separate run-throughs by the half-orchestra presented a challenge.

Three of the four tracks on the multi-track master tape were already filled and Martin and Emerick needed a minimum of two tracks to record the orchestra’s run-throughs of the crescendo.

Martin then sought the help of EMI Studios technical manager, Ken Townsend.

As Townsend recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recordings: “George Martin came up to me that morning and said to me ‘Oh Ken, I’ve got a poser for you. I want to run two four-track tape machines together this evening. I know it’s never been done before, can you do it?’

“So I went away and came up with a method whereby we fed a 50 cycle tone from the track of one machine then raised its voltage to drive the capstan motor of the second, thus running the two in sync.

"Like all these things, the ideas either work first time or not at all. This one worked first time.”

On 20 January and 3 February 1967, the track was refined with additional overdubs and remixing.

In the latter session, McCartney and Ringo Starr re-recorded their bass and drum parts respectively.

In The Beatles Anthology (2000), Ringo discussed his drum fills in A Day In The Life.

“I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song,” Ringo said. “For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' – boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood."

The final overdub was the huge, climactic piano and harmonium chord, recorded on 22 February 1967.

By then, most of the people who had been present at the recording of A Day In The Life were aware that what they were hearing marked a profound shift in popular music.

David Crosby of The Byrds was one of the first outsiders to hear A Day In The Life, when he visited The Beatles at EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road on 24 February, 1967. He recalled his reaction when he heard the song.

"Man, I was a dish-rag,” Crosby told writer John Harris for a March 2007 feature in Mojo magazine. “I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that.”

Ron Richards, producer of The Hollies, was among the EMI staff attending the half-orchestra recording for the 24-bar section. In his book The Complete Beatles Recordings, Mark Lewisohn describes Richards as sitting "with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I just can't believe it ... I give up’.”

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on 26 May, 1967.

As the closing song on the album, A Day In The Life was the subject of intense scrutiny.

In a review in The New York Times, published on 18 June 1967, critic Richard Goldstein called the song “a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric” going on to write that A Day In The Life “stands as one of the most important Lennon–McCartney compositions … [and] an historic pop event”.

Almost 60 years on, A Day In The Life is widely regarded as The Beatles’ greatest song.

Both haunting and hummable, it is the most forward-looking song on Sgt. Pepper and one that contrasts the mundanity of everyday life with the extraordinary and the existential.

Its power rests on it being the true sum of its parts, a song that captures the combined brilliance of The Beatles.

It's one of the most iconic album covers of all time: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr strolling across a zebra-striped street called Abbey Road in St John's Wood, north London.

It is an image as memorable as the moon landing - and one copied by tourists on a daily basis. (Even a few bands have paid homage, most notably Booker T & The MGs.)

Ironically, the shot was a last-minute decision.

During the recording of what was to be their swan song, The Beatles toyed with several titles, and Everest, a reference to the brand of cigarettes their late chief engineer, Geoff Emerick, smoked, was the favourite.

"But the band decided they didn't want to trek to the top of Mount Everest to shoot the cover," Emerick told us, with a laugh whne we spoke to him in 2014. "So Ringo said, 'Why don't we just shoot the cover outside and call it Abbey Road?' Like many a Ringo suggestion, it won out."

During his tenure with The Beatles, Emerick had a few good ideas of his own - many of his sonic innovations, starting with the album Revolver, broke new ground and established techniques that are emulated to this day.

But Emerick almost sat out Abbey Road. Having begun his career at EMI Studios at the age of 15 in 1962 as a lowly tape copier and becoming, under the stewardship of George Martin, one of The Beatles' most-trusted sound architects, he quit working with the band during the recording of the double-LP The Beatles aka 'The White Album.'

"The group was disintegrating before my eyes," says Emerick. "It was ugly, like watching a divorce between four people. After a while, I had to get out."

A year later, however, he was drawn back to work with Martin and The Beatles with the promise that the band would be on their best behaviour.

Emerick missed a few sessions for the album that would eventually rename EMI Studios, but in the end, he says, "I'm glad I came back for the final bow. To have missed being a part of the Abbey Road album, I'd still be kicking myself."

Things must have been pretty awful during 'The White Album' for you to up and leave. Walking out on The Beatles - not many people would have done that.

"Oh, it was a nightmare. I was becoming physically sick just thinking of going to the studio each night. I used to love working with the band. By that point, I dreaded it. Getting out was the only thing I could do."

Even so, you returned because the band promised to make nice and get along for Abbey Road.

"That's right. It came about through a conversation George Martin had with Paul. I had left EMI, but I was employed by The Beatles and was overseeing the construction of a new studio for them at Apple.

"After Let It Be, which I understand was not very pleasant for anybody, Paul was very keen to make a record the way the band used to. He wanted George Martin and I behind the console and everybody working together. He said things would be better than what they had been."

Did you take Paul at his word, that there would be a spirit of harmony?

"Yes, I did take him at his word. And John said the same thing to George Martin. In the back of my head I might have had some reservations, like, 'Well, we'll see…' But I was surprised and pleased at how everybody got along."

Did you have any idea while you were cutting Abbey Road that it would be The Beatles' last album? Was anything said to that effect?

"I didn't think it would be the last one. And nothing was said to indicate that, at least not to me. As far as I understood it, we'd be working on another record in the new studio I was building at Apple. The band was getting along better. The mood wasn't bubbly and fun all the time, but it was a hell of a lot better than during the previous year.

"The only hint they gave me or anybody was on the album cover, where they're walking across the street. For people who don't know the geography, they're actually walking away from the EMI Studios - or Abbey Road, as everybody knows it now. This was intentional on their part - they didn't want to be seen as walking toward the studio. When I saw that photo, I did think to myself, 'They're sending a message.'

"By that time, they'd been literally incarcerated at EMI. They grew to truly hate the place. It certainly wasn't the most luxurious studio in the world. It was cold and quite uncomfortable, and EMI was always quite slow to embrace new technologies - we were the last to get four-track and eight-track recording decks. In fact, Abbey Road was the first album where I got to use an eight-track console."

I'm curious: The Beatles were the biggest band in the world - still are, really. Couldn't they have told EMI, "We want a better console, better accommodations"?

"No, it was against the rules at EMI. I remember at one point they wanted some covered lights in Studio Two, a bit of mood lighting, and the word they got back was 'We can't do that sort of thing.' So the band ended up setting up their own little area in Studio Two, with little lamps of their own and things to make it more homey."

Ringo's drumming is extraordinary on Abbey Road, his tom fills especially. But there's a different sound to his drums as well; they envelop the songs.

"I chalk that up partly to the technology. For the first time we were using a transistorized mixing console. Up to this point, all the albums had been recorded on a tube desk. But this luxurious transistorized desk had a limiter and compressor on every channel and selectable frequencies - it was quite a change.

"Regarding Ringo's drums, this was the first time I was able to record his kit in stereo because we were using eight-track instead of four-track. Because of this, I had more mic inputs, so I could mic from underneath the toms, place more mics around the kit - the sound of his drums were finally captured in full.

"I think when he heard this, he kind of perked up and played more forcefully on the toms, and with more creativity."

Ringo was still draping tea towels over his drums, something he started around the time of Hey Jude and The White Album

"That's right. He did that on a couple of things. Come Together, Something…those are the ones that come to mind.

"You know, now that I recall, the transistor desk wasn't without its problems. It delivered a bit of a softer sound - the guitars, the bass, the snare and the bass drum were all a bit softer and warmer. It took a little bit of time for the guys to get used to it.

There wasn't the kind of out-and-out fighting and bickering that you witnessed in '68, but there was tension. Didn't Ringo walk out again, as he did during 'The White Album'?

"Yeah. that was because John wasn't happy with the drumming on Polythene Pam. He had some problems with Ringo's performance and Ringo got pissed off and split for a couple of days. But he came back and redid the track and John was pleased.

"That was the only bit of real tension - well, except for the fact that John absolutely hated Maxwell's Silver Hammer. My word, that song drove him totally mad, and he certainly made everyone aware of how much he hated it." [laughs]

The Moog synthesizer was a new addition to The Beatles' lineup of instruments on Abbey Road. Do you recall any new guitars or drums coming in?

"No. I really couldn't pay attention to that side of things, although I was quite fascinated with what they were doing with the Moog. I was more concerned with tones and getting sounds right. Don't forget, before then, everything was being monitored in mono; this was the first album we recorded in stereo."

Abbey Road: Geoff Emerick's track-by-track

Come Together

"I remember John came in with a basic framework for the song, but at first he played it a lot faster. Paul suggested slowing it down and making it more 'swampy.' John quite liked that idea.

"Some weird things happened, though: Initially, Paul played the electric piano part, but John kind of looked over his shoulder and studied what he was playing. When it came time to record it, John played the electric piano instead of Paul. Paul might have been miffed, but I think he was more upset about not singing on the choruses – John did his own backing vocals.

"Ringo used the famous tea towels on his drums on Come Together, a terrific effect. Loud drums would have destroyed the song's spooky mood."

Something

"George had a smugness on his face when he came in with this one, and rightly so - he knew it was absolutely brilliant. And for the first time, John and Paul knew that George had risen to their level.

"Paul started playing a bass line that was a little elaborate, and George told him, 'No, I want it simple.' Paul complied. There wasn't any disagreement about it, but I did think that such a thing would never happened in years past. George telling Paul how to play the bass? Unthinkable! But this was George's baby, and everybody knew it was an instant classic."

"George really hit a personal best as a guitarist, as well. He played a guitar solo, but a few days later he decided be wanted to redo it. By that point we only had one track left and that was for orchestral overdubs. George cut a new solo live with the orchestra. It was a gamble, but he did it in one take, and it was beautiful."

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

"There were two struggles going on with this song: Paul and John fighting over whether it should even exist! [laughs] John called it 'more of Paul's granny music.' But there was my own struggle coming up with the sounds that should go on it.

"For the hammer bits, we actually had to rent a proper blacksmith's anvil. The thing weighed a ton, as did the hammer used to strike it. Ringo tried but he just couldn't hoist the hammer in a way that allowed him to hit the anvil with the correct timing, so Mal Evans [one of The Beatles' roadies], who was a large man, he wound up doing it.

"The other thing was the Moog synthesizer solos in the middle and end, which sound almost like a Theremin. The Moog was a fascinating new instrument for everybody - George, in particular, loved working with it – but Paul played these solos. He tinkered around until he got a really incredible, spacey sound that worked quite well."

Oh! Darling

"[EMI engineer] Phil MacDonald worked on this one.

"I remember hearing that Paul kept rehearsing the vocal lying on his back, and that he used to come to the studio quite early, before any of the other guys were supposed to be there, just so he could do it over and over again. He was searching for something, a Little Richard vibe perhaps.

"Artists are artists - you never know what drives them to do what they do, but you can't deny the end result, which is one of his most powerful vocals. He cut the final take standing up, I believe. It's something John could have probably knocked out in a couple of passes, but Paul had to work himself up for it."

Octopus's Garden

"George worked a bit on this song with Ringo, but I'm not sure how much he contributed. Ringo always felt shy about showing any of his songs to the other guys, but George was very keen on this number, so that helped. And it was a really good song – one of Ringo's best."

"There's this fun bit where you hear bubbles, as if you're underwater. Ringo tried blowing bubbles into a glass of water which we mic'd very close.

"In the end, I recorded his vocals, fed them into in a compressor and triggered them with this pulse-like tone that created a wobbly, 'bubbly' sort of sound."

I Want You (She's So Heavy)

"A fascinating song, very indicative of John's mood at the time - he was consumed with all things Yoko.

"It goes from hard rock to almost jazzy, bossa nova. Of course, there's the famous ride-out, the riff being repeated many times. George put some very intense Moog sounds down and Ringo played with a wind machine - the whole thing grew louder and louder till it got close to a breaking point.

"I thought the song was going to have a fade out, but suddenly John told me, 'Cut the tape.' I was apprehensive at first - we'd never done anything like that. 'Cut the tape?' But he was insistent, and he wound up being right. The track, and side one, ends in a very jarring way."

Here Comes The Sun

"Another George winner, and again, he knew it - his confidence was growing each day.

"Ringo's tom fills really make the song, but funnily enough, he hated doing them because he could never remember what he was did one take to the next. I think that's why his fills are so spectacular - he felt that he would never reproduce them, so he'd better get 'em right.

"We added some orchestration to it, but nothing that overwhelmed. I think George was starting to like the idea of 'bigness' at that point, something he obviously carried over when he made All Things Must Pass with Phil Spector."

Because

"John said that this was based on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, on hearing Yoko play it and asking her to play it backwards. Personally, I can't hear the connection at all.

"It was an amazing recording, and probably the first bit of real camaraderie between the boys. I think they liked putting down their instruments and just singing together for a change. John, Paul and George sat in a semi-circle to do the harmonies and Ringo sat off to the side to lend moral support."

"We recorded the vocals multiple times until we finally had it right, but the funny thing was, each take was brilliant. They sang flawlessly. So what you have is nine-part harmony: three Beatles' voices times three. They made up their own choir."

The mini-suite: You Never Give Me Your Money, Sun King, Mean Mr Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came In Through The Backroom Window, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End

"Sun King and Mean Mr Mustard were two separate songs, but we did record their backing tracks together.

"The same for Polythene Pam and She Came In Through The Bathroom Window - they were recorded together as well. Of course, the overdubs were done on different days and in different studios.

"Each track could have stood on its own, and I suppose Sun King does sound like it's a complete song in its own right. A concept started to come from Paul to tie the songs together, which helped to make the numbers seamless and unified.

"The same thing held true for Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight: everybody was firmly on board with unifying the songs - well, except for John, who had to be talked into it. He didn't want to do another 'concept album' like Sgt Pepper.

"And then, of course, we get to the famous parts of The End, the drum solo and the three-way guitar solos. The thing that always amused me was how much persuasion it took to get Ringo to play that solo. Usually, you have to try to talk drummers out of doing solos! [laughs] He didn't want to do it, but everybody said, 'No, no, it'll be fantastic!' So he gave in - and turned in a bloody marvelous performance!

"It took a while to get right, and I think Paul helped with some ideas, but it's fantastic. I always want to hear more - that's how good it is. It's so musical, it's not just a drummer going off.

"The idea for guitar solos was very spontaneous and everybody said, 'Yes! Definitely' - well, except for George, who was a little apprehensive at first. But he saw how excited John and Paul were so he went along with it. Truthfully, I think they rather liked the idea of playing together, not really trying to outdo one another per se, but engaging in some real musical bonding.

"Yoko was about to go into the studio with John - this was commonplace by now - and he actually told her, 'No, not now. Let me just do this. It'll just take a minute.' That surprised me a bit. Maybe he felt like he was returning to his roots with the boys - who knows?

"The order was Paul first, then George, then John, and they went back and forth. They ran down their ideas a few times and before you knew it, they were ready to go. Their amps were lined up together and we recorded their parts on one track."

"You could really see the joy in their faces as they played; it was like they were teenagers again. One take was all we needed. The musical telepathy between them was mind-boggling."

Her Majesty

"Putting that on the album was a complete error. Paul had done a little demo of that, and [assistant engineer] John Kurlander ended up splicing it onto the end of the album's reel by accident.

"It was never supposed to go on at all. But after the acetates were made, Paul heard it and liked it, so it stayed. Quite an odd way to end a record of this nature, but as always, the Beatles made strange things work."

John Lennon's 10 greatest songs with the Beatles and beyond

It is regarded by many as the best song that John Lennon ever wrote for The Beatles - and that was a view held by Lennon himself.

Lennon once described Strawberry Fields Forever as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote”, adding that, along with Help!, “they were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it”.

Strawberry Fields Forever is quite simply a masterpiece, a poignant, heartfelt song that bridges the innocence of Lennon’s post-War childhood with the kaleidoscopic, heady sensation of ’60s psychedelia.

It is also a landmark moment in the rich back catalogue of The Beatles.

Like everything within the exhaustively chronicled career of The Beatles, there's no shortage of opinions on when exactly John Lennon first came up with the germ of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Forums were abuzz in late 2024, when a clip in the Beatles ’64 documentary showed Lennon in a New York hotel room at the height of Beatlemania playing what certainly sounds like the opening, descending melody of Strawberry Fields Forever - on a Melodica. Some observers were not convinced.

What is fairly certain is that Lennon wrote the whole song between 26 September and 6 November 1966 in Spain, during filming for the Richard Lester-directed film How I Won The War, a black comedy in which Lennon plays hapless Private Gripweed.

In David Sheff’s 1980 book, The Last Major Interview With John Lennon And Yoko Ono, Lennon recalled the writing of Strawberry Fields Forever: “We were in Almeria,” he said, “and it took me six weeks to write the song.

“I was writing it all the time I was making the film. And as anybody knows about film work, there’s a lot of hanging around.

“I have an original tape of it somewhere, of how it sounded before it became the psychedelic sounding song it became on record.”

Like the Paul McCartney-penned Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever was Lennon’s nostalgia-fuelled look back to his childhood years in Liverpool.

Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army children’s home in the leafy Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon had lived since the age of five with his Aunt Mimi at ‘Mendips’, 251 Menlove Avenue.

One of Lennon's childhood treats was the garden party held each summer, near the home, where a Salvation Army brass band played.

"There was something about the place that always fascinated John,” said Mimi in Hunter Davies’ book, The Beatles. “He could see it from his window. 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.’”

When Lennon wrote the song, it was also informed by his experiences with LSD.

In the The Beatles Anthology, Lennon described the song as “psychoanalysis set to music”.

“The second line goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree’,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “Well, what I was trying to say in that line is, ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius’… What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is, ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.’”

Lennon continued to work on the song at his house Kenwood, in Weybridge, Surrey, recording demos when he returned from filming in Spain. He also included parts played on a mellotron, an instrument he bought in August 1965.

On 24 November 1966, all four Beatles arrived at Studio 2 of EMI Recording Studios [now called Abbey Road Studios] to begin work on the song. This was the first activity by the band since they completed their final tour of the US on 29 August 1966.

For Lennon, who had felt vulnerable and unable to connect with any of the cast during the filming of How I Won The War, reuniting with the band was a revelation.

"I was never so glad to see the others,” he was quoted as saying in Jonathan Gould’s 2007 book, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America. “Seeing them made me feel normal again."

Strawberry Fields Forever would become one of the most technically complex recordings The Beatles ever attempted.

The song was recorded over eight dates in the final weeks of 1966: 24, 28 and 19 November and 8, 9, 15, 21 and 22 December.

The band, producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick would spend an unprecedented 55 hours of studio time completing the song.

Take One on 24 November began with Lennon playing the band the song on his acoustic before he changed to his Epiphone Casino for the recording.

McCartney played the mellotron and wrote the melody for that instrument on the introduction.

This take opened with a verse instead of the chorus, beginning with the line, “Living is easy with eyes closed”.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to this version, with George Harrison’s overdubbed slide guitar on the choruses really elevating Lennon’s vocal.

On 28 November, the band reconvened to try a different arrangement, featuring McCartney’s mellotron intro followed by the chorus.

The band re-recorded the song again on 29 November, using the same arrangement. Harrison added arpeggio chord patterns and Lennon’s vocal was recorded with the tape running fast so when it played back at the normal speed his voice was lower, with a slurred effect.

As ever, McCartney delivers an impeccably judged bass line beneath the crystalline jangle of the guitars.

George Harrison’s cascading swarmandal [Indian harp], which intros the second and third verses, injects an Eastern flavour to the sound.

As with Dylan, Lennon’s lyrics spill effortlessly over stanzas, the lyrics seemingly driving the form and direction of the song’s structure.

Lennon added a second vocal over the chorus, and final overdubs included piano and additional bass.

The subsequent mixdown became Track 7 - and the first minute of this version would be used for the final released version of the song.

At this point, Lennon wanted to try something different with the song and turned to George Martin for help.

In Joseph Brennan’s 1996 book, Strawberry Fields Forever: Putting Together The Pieces, Martin said of Lennon: "He'd wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous. He asked me if I could write him a new line-up with the strings. So I wrote a new score.”

This new score utilised four trumpets and three cellos.

The sessions for Martin’s brass and cello arrangement took place on 15 December.

The musicians included cellist Joy Hall, the first woman to appear on a Beatles song.

Martin’s string and brass parts enhanced the Indian flavour of the song.

As Ian McDonald noted in his 1994 book, Revolution In The Head, Martin’s scoring of the cellos would "[weave] exotically" around McCartney's "sitar-like" guitar figures before the coda.

As the sessions rolled on, overdubbing and editing continued at a pace.

At the end of December 1966 Lennon reviewed acetates of the previous version, Take 7, and the new remake, Take 26.

According to Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recordings Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962-1970, Lennon told Martin that he liked both the “original, lighter” take 7 and “the intense, scored version” of take 26.

Then, in a decision that only someone with boundless creative vision yet no engineering knowledge would make, Lennon asked Martin to simply stick the two versions together.

“There are two things against it,” Martin replied, as reported in Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “They are in different keys and different tempos. Apart from that, fine.”

“Well,” Lennon reportedly said, “You can fix it.”

And so it was that on 22 December, 1966, George Martin and Geoff Emerick sat in the control room of Studio 2 at EMI Abbey Road Studios and pondered how to splice the two versions together.

Armed with only a pair of editing scissors, a couple of tape machines and a varispeed control, Emerick and Martin embarked on some trial-and-error experimentation.

By speeding up the playback of the first takes and slowing down the playback of the second, Emerick eventually managed to get them to match in both pitch and tempo.

Take 7, which opened the song, was left in its original key of B flat major, while Take 26, recorded in C major and at a faster tempo, was slowed by 11.5 per cent, which brought the tempos and keys of both versions into line.

They had fulfilled Lennon’s seemingly impossible request, “with the grace of God, and a bit of luck,” said Martin.

The edit can be heard on the finished, released version at precisely 60 seconds in, immediately prior to the words “going to” in the second chorus.

The joining of the two versions marked the completion of Strawberry Fields Forever, nearly a month after recording began.

On 13 February 1967, Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A-side with Penny Lane.

In line with the band’s usual practice of not including tracks released as singles on albums, Strawberry Fields Forever was omitted from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a decision which George Martin later acknowledged was a “dreadful mistake”.

Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was the first Beatles single since Please Please Me in 1963 not to reach No. 1.

The song reached No. 2 in the UK, kept from the top slot by Englebert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me.

Music writer Peter Doggett noted that the failure of Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane to reach the top slot was “arguably the most disgraceful statistic in chart history”.

Doggett described Strawberry Fields Forever as "the greatest pop record ever made" adding that it is “a record that never dates, because it lives outside time”.

The stunning inventiveness of Strawberry Fields Forever left both fans and critics bewildered and breathless.

It was the sound of The Beatles taking a huge creative stride forward.

In the States, the song marked the point at which writers sought for the first time to elevate pop to a higher cultural plain. A 1967 feature in Time magazine led the way:

“[The] Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of.

“They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music.”

John Lennon is the latest musician to be honoured by the UK's Royal Mint with their own commemorative coin.

The Mint’s ‘music legends’ series celebrates influential artists. Others who have been honoured in this way include David Bowie, Shirley Bassey, Queen and Lennon’s old songwriting partner, Paul McCartney. In Lennon’s case the honour is timed to mark what would have been his 85th birthday later this year.

Designed by Henry Gray, the coin features Lennon’s name and a portrait of the man - based on Bob Gruen’s classic photo of him on the roof of a New York penthouse - and the word ‘Imagine’. Prices start at £18.50: as with all commemorative coinage you won’t be able to use it in the shops, as it’s for collectors only.

Of course, quite what Lennon himself would have made of it is impossible to know. Maybe he would have smiled wryly at the irony of the use of Imagine - a song that asked us to ‘imagine no possessions’ - to flog, well, money. Maybe he just wouldn’t be bothered.

Rebecca Morgan, director of commemorative coin at the Royal Mint, said: “Arguably one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time, Lennon’s achievements as an artist, activist and advocate for peace continue to live on and will now be forever remembered on a coin.

“Lennon’s portrait has been captured in meticulous detail and in a fitting tribute will be released in the year which the artist would have celebrated his 85th birthday. Still admired by millions of people and generations worldwide, we hope this coin and its design will be treasured for many years to come.”

If you’re a numismatist (coin enthusiast - there’s your word for the day) or a Lennon fan or maybe both, you can pick up the commemorative Lennon coins from the Royal Mint website on 17 March.

The trailer for the upcoming One To One: John & Yoko documentary has been released.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald, the film maker best known for The Last King Of Scotland and Touching The Void, as well as Bob Marley and Whitney Houston documentaries, it covers John and Yoko’s first year in the US, in the run-up the One To One benefit concerts of August 1972. These shows, at New York’s Madison Square Garden, would be the last full-length gigs Lennon played.

It was a time of intense political activity for the couple, who were living in Greenwich Village and had fallen in with radicals such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. This in turn was putting them under the scrutiny of the Nixon administration, who were on their tail with a view of deporting them. It would be several years before they obtained a green card that allowed them to stay in the United States.

For Lennon it was a time of forging a new role for himself, away from his past and the burden of being a Beatle. “I fell in love with an independent creative genius,” he says in the trailer. “I started waking up.”

For Yoko’s part there was still the prejudice she faced – partly racial, partly due to her supposed role in ‘breaking up the Beatles.’ “I was considered a bitch in this society,” she says sardonically. “Since I met John, I was upgraded into a witch.”

The shows were a benefit for the children of the Willowbrook institution on Staten Island. A recent TV news report had uncovered shocking neglect and physical and sexual abuse at the home and Lennon was keen to improve his public image after the critical mauling the Some Time In New York City album had received.

One To One, which also featured Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Sha Na Na, was by all accounts, a huge success. Lennon’s set ended with Give Peace A Chance and fans streamed out onto the Manhattan streets still singing and chanting the anthem. It could have been 1969 again.

Sean Ono Lennon was also involved in the new film - he produced and remixed the concert audio for the movie - which also mixes home movies and phone calls, as well as footage of an intricate reconstruction of the John and Yoko's Greenwich Village apartment and snippets of 1970s television.

One To One: John and Yoko is out in cinemas and on IMAX screens on 11 April.

Framus has unveiled a replica of John Lennon’s iconic Hootenanny 12-string guitar that last year fetched a record-breaking $2,857,500 at auction.

The guitar was reverse engineered using a 12-string Hootenanny from the Framus Vintage Museum, with the German guitar brand building it to the exact same specifications as the original, right down to the trapeze tailpiece.

It arrives with the blessing from the late Beatle’s family, and with Framus’ promise that it has “the sound you recognize when you hear You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.” Though you’ll have to play the chord progression – G / Dsus4/ Fadd9 etc – yourself.

“We contacted Lennon’s estate and received its cooperation in releasing this guitar,” says Nicolas Wilfer, CEO, Framus. “We are very proud to bring this unique instrument back to life. We are convinced that we will inspire many Beatles fans all over the world with this beautiful acoustic guitar.”

The 2025 Hootenanny reissue offers the 12-string Hootenanny in Vintage Tinted High Polish and Vintage Sunburst Satin, and there is a six-string version too. That is sips in Vintage Sunburst High Polish and Vintage Tinted Satin.

After the money that changed hands for the original auction last May, that 12-string might get you some second looks from Beatles fans; it’s hard to overstate the cultural significance of Lennon’s Hootenanny.

It was easy to under-estimate its value. When it was listed, Julien’s Auctions placed an $800,000 estimate on it. Not exactly beer money. But the guitar that Lennon (and George Harrison) used during the sessions for Help!, and then on Rubber Soul, tracking Norwegian Wood and Girl with it, turned out to be the most expensive Beatles guitar to sell at auction.

It had quite the back story, having been lost for over 50 years then found in the attic.

How could anyone lose a John Lennon guitar? Well, this was the ‘60s. Lennon gave it to Gordon Waller of Peter & Gordon, one of Lennon/McCartney’s production clients, it ended up with Waller’s manager, and spend decades in the attic.

Found in early 2024, its provenance was verified by Beatles gear authority Andy Bubiuk and made its way to auction. Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions said it was akin to finding a Rembrandt or Picasso.

“It still looks and plays like a dream after having been preserved in an attic for more than 50 years,” he said. “To awaken this sleeping beauty is a sacred honour.”

Well, something of that sacred honour can now be bestowed upon anyone with just over a grand to spare on a stunning retro acoustic. Both versions of the Hootenanny share a lot of design DNA. You’v got solid spruce on top, solid sapele on the back and sides.

These acoustics were originally inspired by classical guitars, so the rosewood fingerboards are flat. The 12-string has a slightly wider nut, measuring 50mm at the zero fret, while the standard six-string measures 44mm.

There are 19 silver nickel frets. Bodies are bound by ivory-and-black binding on the top and ivory back binding. The wooden rosette and black pickguard? These look very cool.

You can see more of them at Framus. Priced €999 and €1099 respectively, they are available now and that price includes a hard-shell guitar case to keep it in good health should you leave it in the attic and forget all about it.

Instant Karma (We All Shine On) was written and recorded on this day, 27 January, in 1970 and released one week later.

Instant Karma was released in February 1970, slap-bang in the middle of the Beatles' tortured implosion - Lennon had already demanded "a divorce" in September 1969, McCartney had proclaimed the "Beatles thing is over" in Life magazine in November, and the band 'officially' split in April 1970.

Its rapid inception and execution stand as a counterpoint to the erstwhile Fab Four's increasingly difficult collaboration, as documented in the temporarily redemptive but also undeniably challenging sessions documented in 2021's Get Back documentary and its progenitor, 1970's Let it Be movie.

It's not hard to see a contrast with the way an unfettered Lennon felt working under his own steam. As he recalled, in a fascinating oral history revealed alongside a mix of 10 takes of the track, “It was great because I wrote it in the morning on the piano; went to the office and sang it; I thought, ‘Hell, let’s do it,’ and we booked the studio.”

The Plastic Ono Band, Lennon's collaboration with Yoko Ono, had already released Give Peace a Chance, recorded during the couple's Montreal "bed-in" pro-peace demo in Summer 1969.

Back in early 1970, once Lennon knew he had a song in Instant Karma, he put in a call to George Harrison, who in turn enlisted an at-hand Phil Spector, famously not Paul McCartney's cup of tea, but generally a man with a studio plan.

“John phoned me up one morning in January and said, ‘I’ve written this tune and I’m going to record it tonight and have it pressed, up and out tomorrow. That’s the whole point – ‘Instant Karma!’ – you know?" said Harrison.

“So I was in. I said, ‘OK. I’ll see you in town.’ I was in town with Phil Spector, said to Phil, ‘Why don’t you come to the session?’

"There were just four people: John played piano, I played acoustic guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Alan White on drums. We recorded the song and brought it out that week; mixed, instantly, by Phil Spector."

Andy Stephens was tape op on the day and, of Spector’s contribution said, “John kept trying to pull him to the fore. Spector stood back and didn’t volunteer or dictate much at all.”

As Lennon himself recalled the start of the session, “Phil came in and said, ‘How do you want it?’ I said, ‘You know, 1950’s but now.’ And he said, ‘Right!’ And boom! I did it in just about three goes. He played it back and there it was. I said, ‘A bit more bass’, that’s all. And off we went.”

Stephens: “Then Lennon really pulled him out: ‘C’mon, Phil!’ Once he got into his stride, it was like all hell breaking loose. Tape machines, tape loops, tape delays, echo chambers, you name it!"

Alan White, primarily Plastic Ono Band’s drummer but also a more than competent keys contributor, recalled Spector’s effect once fully engaged. “Phil wanted to have everything doubled up and made it sound like one.

"So it was John and myself on one piano and the other piano had Klaus playing, just layering all these different pianos and then he’d never put just one tambourine on a record; he had to have fifteen of them!”

Of his defining contribution, the track’s dry, pounding drum part, White said “I had an idea of what I wanted to do… It came naturally – and John said, ‘Alan, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. It’s wonderful.’

The results quickly - yes, almost instantly - spoke for themselves, says Klaus Voorman, Plastic Ono Band bass go-to and once even rumoured to be McCartney's replacement in a semi-reformed Beatles line-up known as The Ladders. "We went into the control room, stood at the back and it started and it was so incredible. The sound was just like we had heard in the headphones but with all these incredible effects.

"Then I knew it, because I heard that sound and I thought, this is the Phil Spector sound. It’s very, very simple. He has got these effects on the pianos and these wavering sounds.

"The bass and the kick drum were completely clean. The voice was more or less clean. So that was typical for Phil Spector. And I love Phil Spector. I loved him then. From then on, it was incredible. Beautiful. I loved it."

Instant Karma hit UK record stores within 10 days, debuting on 6 Feb, and US shelves on 20 Feb, going on to be the first million-selling single by a solo Beatle.

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year.

Best of 2024: If you're Paul McCartney picking favourites is a thankless task – the sheer breadth of his seven years of writing songs with the Beatles would be enough to dodge the question. But he does have a special place in his heart for one particular Revolver creation, and it showcases why his songwriting could be so different… and yet familiar.

As he admitted with the remarkable dream state account that conjured up the song Yesterday, the influence of the previous generation would often seep into McCartney's creative mind. This was the music of his parents and music-loving family that were embedded in his childhood memories. 

"One of my favourite songs because of its structure is Cheek To Cheek," revealed McCartney of the 1930s influence of American songwriter Irving Berlin in the podcast McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. "As sung by Fred Astaire. And I liked it very much before it starts off, 'Heaven, I'm in heaven… then the middle eight, 'Will carry me through to… heaven…' It's just like, yes! The way it just resolves up its own tail I always found wonderful. And I think somebody said I do it in this.

This being Here, There And Everywhere. This is a cornerstone moment in McCartney's rapid evolution as a songwriter in the 1960s, and a frankly staggering piece of work for a musician who was just 24 years old when Revolver was released in 1966. 

McCartney likens the song's structure to a journey with an unexpected destination. "I like the fact that we think that we're on a path on the Moors, and we think we're going for a walk and then suddenly we've arrived where we've started," he explains in the podcast. "And it's not like we've gone around in a circle, it's more magical than that – we've come to another beginning of the path."     

"It's this trick where you're suddenly where you were but it's surprising – you're where you were, but you're not. Because you can see back where you came from and you're definitely not there. You're at a new place, but it's tricked you and it's got the same scenery again."

Nevertheless, the song has a defined introduction before its verse in eight measures that are never repeated. And again, it's the influence of the past that's very clearly being referenced by its writer.

"John and I were fascinated by this idea that in the old days they did this complete ramble that didn't appear to be like [the rest of] the song at all," explains McCartney of his and John Lennon's mindset. So while much is made of the Beatles' revolution in pop music in song and production approach, it was also partnered with clear nods to the past at times. 

It was Lennon who indirectly facilitated Here, There And Everywhere in the first place. "I remember writing this song while waiting for John one day," recalls McCartney in the podcast. "I'd gone out to his house in Weybridge for a writing session and he wasn't always up so I would have 20 minutes, half an hour while someone told him I was here, and he would get up."

And that's seemingly all it took for McCartney to start the ball rolling, alone with an acoustic guitar. "I remember sitting out by his swimming pool at his house in Weybridge and I had my guitar because I was ready for the writing session. And so I sat out and started something… I just went nice and smoothly so by the time I came to write with John, by the time he deigned to get up and have his coffee, I would have something to go on. "

Lennon is also credited on the song, but it's a McCartney composition… as far as he remembers.

"It does sound like something I might have done by the poolside and just sort of delivered to him," he tells Muldoon during the podcast episode focussed on the song. "Because it doesn't sound like anyone else's work – it sounds like one head."

So why the credit for both musicians? 

"Paul and I made a deal when we were 15, Lennon told Playboy magazine in an interview three months before his murder. "There was never a legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write together that we put both our names on it, no matter what." Notably, Here There And Everywhere was a song Lennon also deeply admired. In 1 1972 interview with Hit Parader he confirmed the song was written by McCartney alone, and described it as "a great one of his." But unusually, he also told his bandmate similar in person. 

"I was rooming with John… in the hotel we were staying at," McCartney told Howard Stern in 2018 about filming skiing scenes around Obertauern in Austrian Alps during March 1965 for the film Help! with the other Beatles. "And we had – it was a cassette I think, in those days – of the album [demos]! And we play Here There And Everywhere and he said: 'Wow! That’s a really great song!'"

That would place the song's writing to when McCartney was only 23 years-old, and it's surprising that the demo was in existence over a year before the song was recorded at Abbey Road for the Revolvr album in mid-June, 1966. By his own admittance, this kind of direct compliment was a rarity amongst the members of the band ("Because we're guys!"), but coming from McCartney's main songwriting partner/rival it was a huge moment. 

"It was really nice! I remember it to this day, you know, exactly where I was when he said it! Uh, it was great, yeah! It really gave me a lot of confidence in that song, and in my writing."

McCartney spoke about the incident before in the Beatles Anthology book from 2000. "John and I shared a room and we were taking off our heavy ski boots after a day’s filming, ready to have a shower and get ready for the nice bit, the evening meal and the drinks," he recalled. "We were playing a cassette of our new recordings and my song Here, There And Everywhere’ was on. And I remember John saying, ‘You know, I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.’ Coming from John, that was high praise indeed."

Even McCartney himself is somewhat fascinated with his own work on this song in retrospect. "I like the line 'Changing my life with the wave of her hand' he tells Paul Muldoon on the Puskin podcast A Life In Lyrics. "I look at those kinds of lyrics now and think, where did that come from? What was I thinking of – the queen, waving out of a royal carriage or just my love [who] can just do it by hardly doing anything… it says a lot in a line."

Here, There And Everywhere remains McCartney's favourite song he's written, when under pressure to answer, running Yesterday to a close second. "I'm often asked what my favourite song I've ever written is and I don't ever really want to answer it," McCartney told Muldoon. "But when pushed I'd go to Here, There And Everywhere."

• Rubber Soul: How The Beatles raised their game in 1965 to create a masterpiece that "broke everything open"

A fascinating letter written by John Lennon has been unearthed, inviting Eric Clapton to join a ‘supergroup’ that would, in Lennon’s words “bring the balls back in rock 'n’ roll.”

It’s expected to fetch up to £150,000 when it’s auctioned off next week. International Autograph Auctions Europe SL, which is holding the online sale, has described it as “one of the rarest forms of Lennon’s personal communications available.”

The Lennon letter is dated 29 September 1971 - shortly after the release of the Imagine album and the Lennons’ move to New York. In it, the ex-Beatle proposes a group that would include Klaus Voormann on bass, Jim Keltner on drums, Nicky Hopkins on piano and Clapton as lead guitarist.

“You must know by now that Yoko and I rate your music and yourself very highly. You also know the music we have been making and hope to make,” Lennon writes, before referring to the recent Concert For Bangladesh, which took place in New York in August 1971.

“After missing the Bangladesh concert we began to feel more and more like going on the road, but not the way I used to with the Beatles,” he added. “I consider Klaus, Jim, Nicky, Phil, Yoko, you could make the kind of sound that could bring back the balls in rock ’n’ roll.”

“I know I can bring out something great in you… I hope to bring out the same kind of greatness in all of us,” he writes. “No one will be asked to do anything they don’t want to… no contracts. We’re not asking for your name… it’s your mind we want.”

Lennon had been a huge admirer of Clapton for a while. The pair had played together at the Rolling Stones’ Rock N’ Roll Circus in December 1968, and when George Harrison briefly quit The Beatles the following month during the fraught Let It Be sessions, it was Lennon who immediately suggested roping Clapton in as a replacement.

After the Beatles split, the ex Cream man went on to back Lennon on his Cold Turkey single and played live with a version of the Plastic Ono Band at a UNICEF fundraiser in late 1969.

There is no more detail in the letter about the project Lennon had in mind, and it’s not known how (or even whether) Clapton replied. The guitarist might well have had his fill of supergroups by then, having already passed through Cream and Blind Faith.

He was also battling heroin addiction and as well as struggling with his attraction to Patti Boyd, then married to George Harrison. There’s a hint Lennon knew about this when he writes: “Both of us have been thru the same kind of shit/pain that I know you've had - and I know we could help each other in that area.” Lennon himself had his own on/off relationship with heroin during the late '60s/early 70s.

In the event the group never happened, and Lennon turned his attention to combining activism with songwriting on his next album, Some Time In New York City. But the Clapton letter provides a fascinating ‘what-if’, a road not taken for two of rock’s most iconic names.

RECORDING WEEK 2024: The Beatles Abbey Road album was released on September 26, 1969, a little over 55 years ago. Join us now on a track-by-track deep dive, alongside a man who was there to witness its making, Geoff Emerick, the Beatles' late chief engineer...

Classic interview: It's one of the most iconic album covers of all time: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr strolling across a zebra-striped street called Abbey Road in St John's Wood, north London.

It is an image as memorable as the moon landing - and one copied by tourists on a daily basis. (Even a few bands have paid homage, most notably Booker T & The MGs.)

Ironically, the shot was a last-minute decision.

During the recording of what was to be their swan song, The Beatles toyed with several titles, and Everest, a reference to the brand of cigarettes their late chief engineer, Geoff Emerick, smoked, was the favourite.

"But the band decided they didn't want to trek to the top of Mount Everest to shoot the cover," Emerick told us, with a laugh when we spoke to him in 2014. "So Ringo said, 'Why don't we just shoot the cover outside and call it Abbey Road?' Like many a Ringo suggestion, it won out."

During his tenure with The Beatles, Emerick had a few good ideas of his own - many of his sonic innovations, starting with the album Revolver, broke new ground and established techniques that are emulated to this day.

But Emerick almost sat out Abbey Road. Having begun his career at EMI Studios at the age of 15 in 1962 as a lowly tape copier and becoming, under the stewardship of George Martin, one of The Beatles' most-trusted sound architects, he quit working with the band during the recording of the double-LP The Beatles aka 'The White Album.'

"The group was disintegrating before my eyes," says Emerick. "It was ugly, like watching a divorce between four people. After a while, I had to get out."

A year later, however, he was drawn back to work with Martin and The Beatles with the promise that the band would be on their best behaviour.

Emerick missed a few sessions for the album that would eventually rename EMI Studios, but in the end, he says, "I'm glad I came back for the final bow. To have missed being a part of the Abbey Road album, I'd still be kicking myself."

Things must have been pretty awful during 'The White Album' for you to up and leave. Walking out on The Beatles - not many people would have done that.

"Oh, it was a nightmare. I was becoming physically sick just thinking of going to the studio each night. I used to love working with the band. By that point, I dreaded it. Getting out was the only thing I could do."

Even so, you returned because the band promised to make nice and get along for Abbey Road.

"That's right. It came about through a conversation George Martin had with Paul. I had left EMI, but I was employed by The Beatles and was overseeing the construction of a new studio for them at Apple.

"After Let It Be, which I understand was not very pleasant for anybody, Paul was very keen to make a record the way the band used to. He wanted George Martin and I behind the console and everybody working together. He said things would be better than what they had been."

Did you take Paul at his word, that there would be a spirit of harmony?

"Yes, I did take him at his word. And John said the same thing to George Martin. In the back of my head I might have had some reservations, like, 'Well, we'll see…' But I was surprised and pleased at how everybody got along."

Did you have any idea while you were cutting Abbey Road that it would be The Beatles' last album? Was anything said to that effect?

"I didn't think it would be the last one. And nothing was said to indicate that, at least not to me. As far as I understood it, we'd be working on another record in the new studio I was building at Apple. The band was getting along better. The mood wasn't bubbly and fun all the time, but it was a hell of a lot better than during the previous year.

"The only hint they gave me or anybody was on the album cover, where they're walking across the street. For people who don't know the geography, they're actually walking away from the EMI Studios - or Abbey Road, as everybody knows it now. This was intentional on their part - they didn't want to be seen as walking toward the studio. When I saw that photo, I did think to myself, 'They're sending a message.'

"By that time, they'd been literally incarcerated at EMI. They grew to truly hate the place. It certainly wasn't the most luxurious studio in the world. It was cold and quite uncomfortable, and EMI was always quite slow to embrace new technologies - we were the last to get four-track and eight-track recording decks. In fact, Abbey Road was the first album where I got to use an eight-track console."

I'm curious: The Beatles were the biggest band in the world - still are, really. Couldn't they have told EMI, "We want a better console, better accommodations"?

"No, it was against the rules at EMI. I remember at one point they wanted some covered lights in Studio Two, a bit of mood lighting, and the word they got back was 'We can't do that sort of thing.' So the band ended up setting up their own little area in Studio Two, with little lamps of their own and things to make it more homey."

Ringo's drumming is extraordinary on Abbey Road, his tom fills especially. But there's a different sound to his drums as well; they envelop the songs.

"I chalk that up partly to the technology. For the first time we were using a transistorized mixing console. Up to this point, all the albums had been recorded on a tube desk. But this luxurious transistorized desk had a limiter and compressor on every channel and selectable frequencies - it was quite a change.

"Regarding Ringo's drums, this was the first time I was able to record his kit in stereo because we were using eight-track instead of four-track. Because of this, I had more mic inputs, so I could mic from underneath the toms, place more mics around the kit - the sound of his drums were finally captured in full.

"I think when he heard this, he kind of perked up and played more forcefully on the toms, and with more creativity."

Ringo was still draping tea towels over his drums, something he started around the time of Hey Jude and The White Album

"That's right. He did that on a couple of things. Come Together, Something…those are the ones that come to mind.

"You know, now that I recall, the transistor desk wasn't without its problems. It delivered a bit of a softer sound - the guitars, the bass, the snare and the bass drum were all a bit softer and warmer. It took a little bit of time for the guys to get used to it.

There wasn't the kind of out-and-out fighting and bickering that you witnessed in '68, but there was tension. Didn't Ringo walk out again, as he did during 'The White Album'?

"Yeah. that was because John wasn't happy with the drumming on Polythene Pam. He had some problems with Ringo's performance and Ringo got pissed off and split for a couple of days. But he came back and redid the track and John was pleased.

"That was the only bit of real tension - well, except for the fact that John absolutely hated Maxwell's Silver Hammer. My word, that song drove him totally mad, and he certainly made everyone aware of how much he hated it." [laughs]

The Moog synthesizer was a new addition to The Beatles' lineup of instruments on Abbey Road. Do you recall any new guitars or drums coming in?

"No. I really couldn't pay attention to that side of things, although I was quite fascinated with what they were doing with the Moog. I was more concerned with tones and getting sounds right. Don't forget, before then, everything was being monitored in mono; this was the first album we recorded in stereo."

Abbey Road: Geoff Emerick's track-by-track

Come Together

"I remember John came in with a basic framework for the song, but at first he played it a lot faster. Paul suggested slowing it down and making it more 'swampy.' John quite liked that idea.

"Some weird things happened, though: Initially, Paul played the electric piano part, but John kind of looked over his shoulder and studied what he was playing. When it came time to record it, John played the electric piano instead of Paul. Paul might have been miffed, but I think he was more upset about not singing on the choruses – John did his own backing vocals.

"Ringo used the famous tea towels on his drums on Come Together, a terrific effect. Loud drums would have destroyed the song's spooky mood."

Something

"George had a smugness on his face when he came in with this one, and rightly so - he knew it was absolutely brilliant. And for the first time, John and Paul knew that George had risen to their level.

"Paul started playing a bass line that was a little elaborate, and George told him, 'No, I want it simple.' Paul complied. There wasn't any disagreement about it, but I did think that such a thing would never happened in years past. George telling Paul how to play the bass? Unthinkable! But this was George's baby, and everybody knew it was an instant classic."

"George really hit a personal best as a guitarist, as well. He played a guitar solo, but a few days later he decided be wanted to redo it. By that point we only had one track left and that was for orchestral overdubs. George cut a new solo live with the orchestra. It was a gamble, but he did it in one take, and it was beautiful."

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

"There were two struggles going on with this song: Paul and John fighting over whether it should even exist! [laughs] John called it 'more of Paul's granny music.' But there was my own struggle coming up with the sounds that should go on it.

"For the hammer bits, we actually had to rent a proper blacksmith's anvil. The thing weighed a ton, as did the hammer used to strike it. Ringo tried but he just couldn't hoist the hammer in a way that allowed him to hit the anvil with the correct timing, so Mal Evans [one of The Beatles' roadies], who was a large man, he wound up doing it.

"The other thing was the Moog synthesizer solos in the middle and end, which sound almost like a Theremin. The Moog was a fascinating new instrument for everybody - George, in particular, loved working with it – but Paul played these solos. He tinkered around until he got a really incredible, spacey sound that worked quite well."

Oh! Darling

"[EMI engineer] Phil MacDonald worked on this one.

"I remember hearing that Paul kept rehearsing the vocal lying on his back, and that he used to come to the studio quite early, before any of the other guys were supposed to be there, just so he could do it over and over again. He was searching for something, a Little Richard vibe perhaps.

"Artists are artists - you never know what drives them to do what they do, but you can't deny the end result, which is one of his most powerful vocals. He cut the final take standing up, I believe. It's something John could have probably knocked out in a couple of passes, but Paul had to work himself up for it."

Octopus's Garden

"George worked a bit on this song with Ringo, but I'm not sure how much he contributed. Ringo always felt shy about showing any of his songs to the other guys, but George was very keen on this number, so that helped. And it was a really good song – one of Ringo's best."

"There's this fun bit where you hear bubbles, as if you're underwater. Ringo tried blowing bubbles into a glass of water which we mic'd very close.

"In the end, I recorded his vocals, fed them into in a compressor and triggered them with this pulse-like tone that created a wobbly, 'bubbly' sort of sound."

I Want You (She's So Heavy)

"A fascinating song, very indicative of John's mood at the time - he was consumed with all things Yoko.

"It goes from hard rock to almost jazzy, bossa nova. Of course, there's the famous ride-out, the riff being repeated many times. George put some very intense Moog sounds down and Ringo played with a wind machine - the whole thing grew louder and louder till it got close to a breaking point.

"I thought the song was going to have a fade out, but suddenly John told me, 'Cut the tape.' I was apprehensive at first - we'd never done anything like that. 'Cut the tape?' But he was insistent, and he wound up being right. The track, and side one, ends in a very jarring way."

Here Comes The Sun

"Another George winner, and again, he knew it - his confidence was growing each day.

"Ringo's tom fills really make the song, but funnily enough, he hated doing them because he could never remember what he was did one take to the next. I think that's why his fills are so spectacular - he felt that he would never reproduce them, so he'd better get 'em right.

"We added some orchestration to it, but nothing that overwhelmed. I think George was starting to like the idea of 'bigness' at that point, something he obviously carried over when he made All Things Must Pass with Phil Spector."

Because

"John said that this was based on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, on hearing Yoko play it and asking her to play it backwards. Personally, I can't hear the connection at all.

"It was an amazing recording, and probably the first bit of real camaraderie between the boys. I think they liked putting down their instruments and just singing together for a change. John, Paul and George sat in a semi-circle to do the harmonies and Ringo sat off to the side to lend moral support."

"We recorded the vocals multiple times until we finally had it right, but the funny thing was, each take was brilliant. They sang flawlessly. So what you have is nine-part harmony: three Beatles' voices times three. They made up their own choir."

The mini-suite: You Never Give Me Your Money, Sun King, Mean Mr Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came In Through The Backroom Window, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End

"Sun King and Mean Mr Mustard were two separate songs, but we did record their backing tracks together.

"The same for Polythene Pam and She Came In Through The Bathroom Window - they were recorded together as well. Of course, the overdubs were done on different days and in different studios.

"Each track could have stood on its own, and I suppose Sun King does sound like it's a complete song in its own right. A concept started to come from Paul to tie the songs together, which helped to make the numbers seamless and unified.

"The same thing held true for Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight: everybody was firmly on board with unifying the songs - well, except for John, who had to be talked into it. He didn't want to do another 'concept album' like Sgt Pepper.

"And then, of course, we get to the famous parts of The End, the drum solo and the three-way guitar solos. The thing that always amused me was how much persuasion it took to get Ringo to play that solo. Usually, you have to try to talk drummers out of doing solos! [laughs] He didn't want to do it, but everybody said, 'No, no, it'll be fantastic!' So he gave in - and turned in a bloody marvelous performance!

"It took a while to get right, and I think Paul helped with some ideas, but it's fantastic. I always want to hear more - that's how good it is. It's so musical, it's not just a drummer going off.

"The idea for guitar solos was very spontaneous and everybody said, 'Yes! Definitely' - well, except for George, who was a little apprehensive at first. But he saw how excited John and Paul were so he went along with it. Truthfully, I think they rather liked the idea of playing together, not really trying to outdo one another per se, but engaging in some real musical bonding.

"Yoko was about to go into the studio with John - this was commonplace by now - and he actually told her, 'No, not now. Let me just do this. It'll just take a minute.' That surprised me a bit. Maybe he felt like he was returning to his roots with the boys - who knows?

"The order was Paul first, then George, then John, and they went back and forth. They ran down their ideas a few times and before you knew it, they were ready to go. Their amps were lined up together and we recorded their parts on one track."

"You could really see the joy in their faces as they played; it was like they were teenagers again. One take was all we needed. The musical telepathy between them was mind-boggling."

Her Majesty

"Putting that on the album was a complete error. Paul had done a little demo of that, and [assistant engineer] John Kurlander ended up splicing it onto the end of the album's reel by accident.

"It was never supposed to go on at all. But after the acetates were made, Paul heard it and liked it, so it stayed. Quite an odd way to end a record of this nature, but as always, the Beatles made strange things work."

• Get more recording stories and features at Recording Week 2024 here!

One of John Lennon’s closest confidants during the latter part of his life has written a book and in a new interview with Spin magazine has talked about his life and his relationship with Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Elliot Mintz was a radio and TV broadcaster who found himself in Ono’s orbit in 1971 and stayed in close contact with the couple throughout the rest of the decade. He is one of the few people who was in regular contact with Lennon throughout his ‘house husband’ years of the late 70s when he seemed to have disappeared completely.

He paints a portrait of the ex-Beatle as in turns melancholic, competitive and insecure about his standing in music history. His attitudes towards two of his contemporaries – Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan – bear this out.

“He felt the Rolling Stones got the kind of adulation and respect that ‘The Mop Tops’ didn’t, and that the Stones were perceived as the revolutionaries because they came forward with Street Fighting Man as opposed to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,” Mintz says.

“He loved Mick Jagger, and the two of them spent countless nights together in London. But when he would get really angry about it, he’d called them ‘the Rolling Pebbles.’”

“He had that same kind of envy of the way people perceived Bob Dylan,” he continues. “He insisted to me he was a far better writer than Dylan was. It was a love-hate thing. He loved Bob’s earlier work, but he liked the simpler, direct stuff… We would have these conversations where John would insist that I Am the Walrus was superior to anything that Bob had ever penned.”

And of course, he was still competitive with his old partner. “John as a solo artist didn’t sell a lot of albums compared to Paul McCartney. That bothered him. So did the adulation that Paul received when he’d go out on the road, which was all rightfully deserved, in my opinion.

"He believed he was a creative genius. He believed that throughout his entire life. When he was in art school, he thought he was brilliant.”

“That’s a very confining place to find yourself, because you really believe that you’re sitting at a dining room table and you’re alone,” Mintz points out.

“You’re not being celebrated. Especially between 1975 and 1980, he felt like the pieces just didn’t seem to fit, and it caused him great personal anguish.”

Mintz’s book We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me is out now. The author, now 79, explained why, after all this time, he decided to spill the beans: “I had received in recent years some encouragement from Sean Ono Lennon to tell my tale, (but also) I thought to myself, ‘If not now, when?’

"If I didn’t tell my story at this moment, people would have to get a Ouija board to hear me speak.”

On 19 October, Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones will celebrate as his band is inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. But long before Foreigner hit big in the ’70s and ’80s with iconic songs such as Cold As Ice, Hot Blooded, Waiting For a Girl Like You and the worldwide number one I Want To Know What Love Is, Mick befriended The Beatles in the ’60s when he was working as backing musician for French rocker Johnny Hallyday. And this led to a long association with John Lennon.

As Mick recalled to Outlaw magazine in 2019: “The Beatles played at the Olympia in Paris in 1964, and also on the bill was the singer I was backing, Sylvie Vartan, who became Johnny Hallyday’s wife.

“One night we did our thing, the curtain came down, and as we were changing over on the stage for The Beatles to go on, John Lennon was running and we almost bumped into each other and my guitar swung round and fell to the floor.

"I said, ‘Oh f*ck!’ I was cursing away, and John came up behind me and said, ‘Hey lad, I didn’t know you were English! Come and have a bevvy with the boys afterwards!’ So I went back with them to their hotel, and they ended up taking me under their wing for a week.”

He described the excitement of witnessing Beatlemania at its height.

“I was living A Hard Day’s Night – swanning around Paris with The Beatles, screaming girls everywhere they went. And I would take them out to the hot R&B clubs in Paris. It was a crazy few days.”

In the late ’70s Mick had an apartment in New York adjacent to the Dakota Building, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono were living.

“I saw Yoko more than John,” he recalled. “They were in their own kind of world. I’d seen John here and there in studios. But our kids used to play together, my stepson Mark [Ronson] and John’s son Sean. They hung out a lot at our place, getting up to mischief. I had to straighten them out a few times.”

On December 8, 1980, the day John Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota, Mick was just a short distance away, recording with Foreigner at Electric Lady studios.

As he remembered: “We were working on a song called Woman In Black [from the album 4]. That was sort of eerie. We were right in the middle of doing vocals, and somebody rushed in an announced the sad news. I’ll always remember that.”

Mick described Lennon’s death as a devastating loss.

“John was the one who had invited me to have a drink with The Beatles,” he said, “so to me he was special. And he had a big influence on me as a songwriter. I can’t say I favoured one or the other, Paul [McCartney] and John – they were both unique. I was inspired by their music, as so many other people were too. But for me, there was something stronger in there. John’s death had a huge effect on me.”

As every Beatles nut knows, yesterday was John Lennon’s birthday – he would have been 84. So it’s probably an appropriate day for his son, Sean Ono Lennon, to announce a groovy, rather opulent new edition of his 1973 album Mind Games.

Lennon (who shares a birthday with his old man; he turned 49 yesterday) has teamed with the Swedish tech firm Teenage Engineering to launch the Mind Games limited edition OB-4. This is a custom-made bluetooth speaker and radio with a two-hour loop recording function that allows you to rewind, time-stretch and loop live radio. But this edition includes design inspired by the artwork of the Mind Games album – which, as fans know, features a mini Lennon on a beach overshadowed by a Yoko-mountain.

The OB-4 comes loaded with lots of exclusive content for the truly obsessive Lennon fan out there You get no less than six sets of new mixes of the album - the Ultimate mixes, the Elemental mixes, the Elements mixes, the Evolution documentary, the raw studio mixes, and the outtakes. In addition to this, there are nine meditation mixes, a new metronome, and nine mantras.

The ‘meditation’ mixes in this case are nine re-edits of the album’s title track that have been created to help listeners relax and guide them in their, er, meditation.

Sean seems very happy with it with the package. In a statement he said: “I’ve been a massive fan of Teenage Engineering since they first announced the OP-1 at NAMM in 2010. 

"I have been thrilled to watch the company evolve into the world’s most fascinating musical design team. It is a dream come true to be able to collaborate with the Mind Games album OB–4 speaker. The idea of gamifying the Mind Games album has manifested as an incredible limited edition speaker and radio that will allow you to modify this classic John Lennon album in ambient mode in a way that’s never been done. I truly can’t wait for people to try it!”

Best look away from the price tag. At $999 (£764) the Mind Games OB-4 doesn’t come cheap.

The original Mind Games album came out in October 1973 during a turbulent time in the ex-Beatle’s life. Hassled by the US immigration authorities and recently separated from Ono, he was also dealing with the backlash from the overtly political material he had released on his previous album Some Time In New York City. 

At the time Mind Games wasn’t a huge success, either critically or commercially. The title track, now regarded as one of his classic anthems, could only reach a rather sorry Number 26 in the UK charts.

There’s a new documentary on the way about John Lennon and Yoko Ono that focuses on the early years of the couple’s time in New York.

One To One: John And Yoko looks at their first eighteen months in New York and the build up to the One To One benefit gigs for Willowbrook State School, a home for special needs children in August 1972. They would be his last full length concerts.

The documentary features fully restored footage of the shows, with remixed audio produced by John and Yoko’s son, Sean. The film also boasts previously unseen material from the Lennon archives, including phone calls and home movies recorded by Lennon and Ono themselves.

The director is Kevin Macdonald, who was also behind the camera for the Oscar winning One Day In September, as well as Touching The Void (2003), The Last King Of Scotland (2006) and Marley (2012).

“I wanted to make a film that surprises and delights even the most dedicated Lennon and Ono fans by focusing on one transformative period in their lives and telling the tale through their own words, images and music,” the director said. 

“Built around the beautiful 16mm film footage of the only full-length concert John gave after leaving the Beatles I hope the film will introduce the audience to a more intimate version of John and Yoko - while also reflecting their politically radical and experimental sides.”

The film also explores the prejudice Ono faced not only from Beatles fans, but from the group themselves. “I know for sure that whenever the reporters meet Paul, George or Ringo, they would ask, ‘What do you think about Yoko?’” she says in the film. 

“Now, whenever they ask me about the Beatles, I said, ‘Beatles are four beautiful, very intelligent, creative, artistic people… and they’ve outgrown the group.’ Whereas none of the Beatles made any comment on me. Have you heard of any comment about me in the press by the Beatles? They ignored me. That’s male chauvinism.”

“Society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man who is one of the most powerful people in our generation. And some of his closest friends told me that probably I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should give up my work and that way I’ll be happy,” she said. “Because the whole society started to attack me, and the whole society wished me dead, I started to stutter.”

She continued, “I consider myself a very eloquent woman, and also an attractive woman. And suddenly, because I was associated with John, I was considered an ugly woman, ugly Jap, who took your monument away from you. 

"That’s when I realized how hard it is for women. If I can start to stutter, being a strong woman, it is a very hard road.”

As yet there is no confirmed premiere date for One To One: John and Yoko.

An amp that is believed to have been used by John Lennon during the Beatles’ Cavern days has been rediscovered after over 60 years.

It’s a Vox AC15 Twin and whilst it’s yet to be absolutely verified by an expert it looks likely to be the guitar amp Lennon purchased from Hessy’s Music in Liverpool in July 1962. It has the same serial number – 4563 - and corrected dated internal components. The fact that AC15s are exceedingly rare – apparently only 30 were produced during this era – weighs in its favour too.

If so, it’s the same one that Lennon used for the Beatles’ first EMI recordings and thus can be heard on Love Me Do and Please Please Me. It was also used when the band played the Cavern during the second half of that year.

Lennon owned it for less than a year. In 1963 Brian Epstein inked an endorsement deal with Vox, at which point Vox’s owner Jennings Musical Instruments paid off the Lennon’s hire purchase agreement and supplied him with a spanking new AC30. The AC15 was probably sold on at that point.

Where it went to after that we don’t know, although its new owner has said he was told it had been kept in storage for over twenty years prior to its recent listing.

The owner wishes to remain anonymous, but apparently spotted it on an auction site last year. It had been painted black and needed some sprucing up but was in full working order after more than sixty years. “It was like going back 60 years,” said Nathan Hodgson, a representative of the new owner of the first time he tried it. “You can imagine what it would have sounded like in the Cavern in the heady days of the ’60s.”

In an interview with our friends at Guitar World, the owner said that whilst they thought it might be a version of a Lennon amp when they investigated further alarm bells starting ringing: “When I got the pictures checked, with the specification (and serial number) in the Vox book, I suddenly noticed it was the same as John Lennon’s amp. I couldn’t believe it.”

In the end, the price they paid was a mere £16,000, which is a fraction of its possible resale value. Given that a 1964 Vox AC30 that Bill Wyman once played went for over £106,000 in 2020, then you could possibly double that figure. 

“The owner knew it was significant but I don’t think he realized quite how significant it could be,” says Hodgson. “We’ve since spoken to a few auction houses who have said it could be £100,000 to £250,000, maybe more.”

And when it is finally sold on, the owner has stated that they intend to donate a portion to LIPA (Liverpool Institute Of The Performing Arts) which was founded by Paul McCartney in 1996.

• If you know anything about the amp or its timeline – or would like to make inquiries about it – please get in touch with Guitar World at guitarworld@futurenet.com with the subject line 'Lennon Vox'.

George Harrison is sitting in a vast soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios, explaining to Ringo Starr and film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg how a BBC2 sci-fi series called Out Of The Unknown, that he watched the previous evening, has inspired a new song. Harrison is sporting the same black fur coat he wears on the iconic rooftop concert and perched on his knee is John Lennon’s 1965 Epiphone Casino.

It’s mid-morning on Tuesday 7 January, 1969 and the next Beatle to arrive is Paul McCartney. “Good morning,” says the bearded bassman chirpily as he strides across the floor. “Do you wanna hear a song I wrote last night?” Harrison asks him. “It’s just a very short one, called I Me Mine”.

What follows is a beautifully plaintive and sparse rendition with Harrison’s voice sounding particularly pure. “Lovely” exclaims Lyndsey Hogg. McCartney, with hands in pockets, stands beside Harrison and stares down at his fingers on the fretboard, but says nothing. Then John Lennon arrives. Harrison, now standing, runs through the song again but speeds it up. “Run along son, see you later,” jokes Lennon. “We’re a rock and roll band you know”.

If one incident highlights the tortuous position that George Harrison found himself in as part of The Beatles then this is it. It’s just one of a number of incidents captured in Peter Jackson’s three-part 2021 documentary Get Back, in which Harrison employs impressive levels of tenacity and tact to push his own songs forward to Lennon and McCartney. Their songwriting partnership was a source of both inspiration and frustration for George. They are ostensibly the gatekeepers, two strong personalities locked into an even stronger autonomous partnership.

Only in the months leading up to The Beatles’ break-up was Harrison’s contribution and his songwriting abilities finally acknowledged by its two principal songwriters. “Until this year our songs have been better than George’s,” said McCartney bluntly in the Get Back film. “Now, this year, his songs are at least as good as ours."

In the years and decades following the break-up of The Beatles, George Harrison’s contribution to the band would be completely reassessed and his songs, such as Something and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, would be recognised as some of The Beatles’ greatest works.

As Frank Sinatra said of Something in his introduction to the song during a performance in 1982: “It’s one of the best love songs I believe to be written in 50 or 100 years… it really is one of the finest.”

Despite such accolades, Harrison possibly felt undervalued within The Beatles at times. Subsequent comments also suggest that he may have contributed to more Beatles songs than he is given credit for.

In a 1987 interview for the TV series W. 57th Street, the whole issue of songwriting credits came up when broadcaster Selina Scott asked Harrison for his reaction to a comment from John Lennon.

“In an interview before his death, John Lennon said he was really hurt by you, that you’d never mentioned in your autobiography any of the influences that he had on you,” said Scott.

“He was annoyed because I didn’t say that he had written one line of this song, Taxman,” replied Harrison. “Did you tell him that?” asked Scott. “Well I didn’t because he was already dead after that” replied Harrison, “but the point to that was that I also didn’t say how I wrote two lines to Come Together or three lines to Eleanor Rigby, you know, I wasn’t getting into any of that. I think in the balance I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have with me.”

Scott then cited Lennon mentioning that Harrison had idolised him as a young boy. “Well that’s what he thought,” laughed Harrison. “I liked him very much, he was a groove, he was a good lad, but at the same time he misread me. He didn’t realise who I was and this was one of the main faults of John and Paul. They were so busy being John and Paul, they failed to realise who else was around at the time.”

In the same interview Harrison touched on the legacy of being a Beatle. “It just annoyed me that people got so into The Beatles. It’s not that I don’t like talking about them, I’ve never stopped talking about them… in the end it’s like ‘Oh sod off with The Beatles’ you know?’'”

By 1969, Harrison was feeling smothered by his existence as a Beatle. Things famously came to a head when Harrison said to McCartney: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

It took Harrison leaving the band on 10 January 1969, with the witty, parting riposte of “See you ‘round the clubs”, for McCartney and Lennon to really take stock of his contribution. Although as Paul McCartney says in Martin Scorcese’s documentary Living In The Material World, he and John were well aware of George’s talents.

“We didn’t underestimate George. We knew that he was peaking as we got to those records. He’d not been really interested in the beginning I don’t think. And because John and I did so much of the writing he could just leave it to us. But I think he realised you know that there was something in this, [that] artistically and financially it was a good thing to get into. At that time we realised that he was really coming up with the goods.”

Few issues will drive a wedge within a band faster than the subject of who wrote what on which song. And when that band is The Beatles, the creative and commercial stakes couldn’t be higher.

After the Beatles’ break-up, Lennon took a number of verbal swipes at his former band members, and uncredited songwriting contributions were a theme. In a 1980 interview with Playboy magazine, Lennon talks about the writing of Eleanor Rigby but refers only to McCartney. George’s own alleged contribution to that song is not mentioned.

"It's his first verse,” said Lennon about McCartney, “and the rest of the verses are basically mine. But the way he did it was... he knew he'd got the song, so rather than ask me, 'John, do these lyrics' because, by that period, he didn't want to say that to me, okay..."

But this is not how Paul McCartney remembers it. “John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80–20 to me,” McCartney said in Barry Miles’s 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “So what he said was, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics', while he was fiddling around with the tracks or arranging it, at the other part of the giant studio and EMI.”

A number of accounts cite Harrison coming up with the intro/bridge line for Eleanor Rigby. In David Scheff’s book All We Are Saying, Lennon is quoted as saying: “I do know that George Harrison was there when we came up with ‘Ah, look at all the lonely people’. [Paul] and George were settling on that as I left the studio to go to the toilet, and I heard the lyric and turned around and said, ‘That’s it!’”

There is no firm evidence that George came up with the line, only that he was there when it was written. But it’s one of the Beatles songs on which all the band had an input. All were present when McCartney presented the first verse and melody, as was Lennon’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who in Kenneth Womack’s 2014 book All We Are Saying, remembers Lennon’s contribution amounting to “virtually nil”.

In Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, George talks about writing credits for Lennon/McCartney songs and he uses Eleanor Rigby as an example of a track on which his name is not credited, despite having made the contribution.

Of course, ideas and suggestions often occur spontaneously and quickly. No-one is sitting there logging who has contributed exactly what and it’s often difficult to remember in retrospect who came up with a particular phrase, motif or chord. It’s clear from Peter Jackson’s film that The Beatles helped each other out with ideas, as is the case when George Harrison works with Ringo on Octopus’s Garden.

Similarly, it seems quite possible that Harrison could have contributed a line or two of lyrics to Come Together although there is no documented evidence to suggest that he did. When he mentioned in the 1987 interview that he contributed lines to Come Together, he may simply have been using a random song to demonstrate a broader point.

One song that George certainly did have a hand in though was She Said, She Said, the final track recorded for the Revolver album, inspired by an LSD-influenced conversation between John Lennon and actor Peter Fonda.

In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison recalled helping Lennon construct the song from "maybe three" separate segments that Lennon had. Harrison described the process as “a real weld”. In his 2017 book Who Wrote the Beatle Songs?, author Todd Compton credits Lennon and Harrison as being the song's true composers.

It’s been claimed that Harrison didn’t want a co-write credit. It’s also been claimed he became thoroughly disillusioned when he didn’t receive one. Whatever the truth, it demonstrates that on at least one occasion, George Harrison had a hand in co-writing a song for which he received no songwriting credit.

For George, the break-up of The Beatles signified creative emancipation. He was soon revelling in his post-Beatles life and the solo opportunities it brought him. He topped the UK and US charts with the hugely acclaimed All Things Must Pass triple album (1970) and his 1973 album Living In The Material World was a critical and commercial triumph.

Speaking on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Harrison said he was overcome with relief when The Beatles’ broke up and compared it to leaving the family home.

“Some people can’t understand that, you know, because The Beatles were such a big deal. They can’t understand why we should actually enjoy splitting up, but there’s a time. People grow up and leave home or whatever they do. They go for a change, and it was really time for a change.”

It was a view echoed by Harrison in an interview with Musician magazine in 1987. “I just got so fed up with the bad vibes,” he said. “I didn’t care if it was The Beatles. I was getting out.”

• The 5 George Harrison post-Beatles songs you need to hear

The Beatles are the most recognisable band of all time. Their music has stood the test of time for seven decades. They were at the forefront of the rock revolution of the 1960s and they paved the way for many musicians to follow in their footsteps – especially guitarists.

Even though the band's recording career lasted less than a decade, their influence has remained strong to this day with modern bands still quoting the Fab Four as an influence on songwriting and techniques.

Through their stellar catalogue of music, there are so many lessons we as guitar players can learn and use in our own playing. In this lesson we’re going to talk about five things you can learn from John, Paul and George to put to use right away.

Check out the video and follow along with the tips below on subjects including chord progressions and fingerpicking.  

1. Using the relative minor for contrast

When writing a song, having contrasting sections is important because this is one trick that hooks the listener in and keeps their attention. Contrast also allows a song to move through different moods and emotions.

One thing the Beatles did to create this effect is to switch to a relative key for a section change. In this example, we’re going to use the song Misery from 1963 Please Please Me. This song is in the key of C Major. All keys have a relative key which means it shares all the notes/chords with another key. C Major’s relative key is A Minor. These two keys share the same notes and chords:

Although both keys share the same chords, the emphasis is on the I chord, this is the chord that gives the key it’s overall identity. If your progression focuses on the I as a major chord, the progression feels Major, if it emphases the I as a minor chord, the opposite is true.

We can use this as a turning point in a song to keep the overall key and chord sequence intact, but change the mood of the song.

In the song Misery, the verse progression uses the chords C, F and G, but the chorus switches to Am, C and G. This change creates a contrasting section that takes on a different feel.

2. The minor IV chord

If you want to add a little bit of excitement into your major chord progressions, you can take a leaf out of the Beatles and add a Minor IV chord. This is a chord that is not usually found in a major key, but introducing it can be a really great way to spice up a chord progression.

This works great in slower songs, such as the classic In My Life.

This song is made up of an A Major (I), E Major (V), F#m (VI) and D (IV), but after the D chord, there is a brief move to the Dm (Minor IV) before returning to the root.

While the Minor IV chord does not necessarily fit into the key, it can be a great passing chord on the way back to the root. It creates a moment of tension before resolving back to the I chord. 

3. Outlining a chord progression

If you are playing in a two-guitar band, or just want to write two guitar parts that weave in and out of each other, you can learn a lot from the Harrison/Lennon approach.

In the song I Saw Her Standing There, you can hear two different guitar parts that are both different, but complementary to each other.

One guitar is playing a I IV V progression using E7, A7 and B7 chords while the other is playing two different parts over the progression. The first part is an E7 triad without the E note, mixed with a simple lead lick. The second part is a walking blues style riff that frames the chords being played by the other guitar.

In isolation, both parts are very different, but when overlaid on each other, they create a really interesting sound where one guitar plays the straight chords and the other frames the progression with other voicings or single notes.

Using deceptive cadences

Sometimes when you hear a new song for the first time, or you write a chord progression on your guitar, you may have a sense of familiarity even if you’ve never heard or played that particular piece before. This is cause by our ears recognizing things in the composition that it deems familiar.

This is usually chord progressions. As we found in our study of Taylor Swift's hit songs, we have these, and specific chord resolutions and movements that we hear in most of our favourite tracks. Our ears become tuned to hearing these things.

If you want to add something to a song that breaks this familiar feeling, you can use a deceptive cadence. This is when we bring a new chord into the progression that does not belong to the progression before resolving it back into the progression that we expect.

In the Beatles track P.S I Love You we hear this in action. The track is in the key of D Major, so we expect these chords:

For the most part, this is what we get. However, before the track goes to the C, you’ll notice an out of place Bb Major chord being played. This would be a bVI chord, which is not part of the major key of D major. This borrowed chord creates a feeling of tension before going back to the C chord which we expect to hear.

A deceptive cadence is a great way to attract some attention to a part of a song by making the listener really aware that something has changed. This doesn’t just work with a bVI chord. You can try this with any chord that is not part of the key you’re playing in. 

5. Paul McCartney's Blackbird fingerpicking

The picking pattern for the song Blackbird is probably one of the biggest Beatles riffs that people play wrong. Often notated as entirely fingerpicked, this classic track is actually played by Paul McCartney with a really unique fingerstyle approach.

Rather than picking every single note, the pattern utilizes single-picked notes along with micro strums with the index finger.

The pattern can be broken up into two halves. The first half involves playing the A and B strings with the thumb and index finger at the same time. Then you play the G and B strings with the index finger in a mini downward strum motion, before up picking the single B string with the same index finger.

The second half starts with the A string being played with just the thumb, the B string being picked with an index finger upstroke and ending on an index finger downward, micro strum of the G and B strings. 

This rhythm can be applied to other chords and used in your own songwriting to create some fast-paced feeling fingerstyle riffs and progressions. Try it with some open and barre chords and feel the driving energy that it gives your own chord progressions.

• "The Beatles were never afraid to experiment with their chord choices inside songs": here are 4 to inspire your guitar playing

The Beatles have written some of the most iconic pop and rock songs of all time. The songwriting dynamic between each member has given the world hit after hit. Inside these hits are some fantastic chord choices.

The Beatles were never afraid to experiment with their chord choices inside songs. In this lesson we’re going to look at four chords from their catalogue of mega hits.

Fadd9

Any Beatles fan will recognize this chord from the instant they hear it… this is the iconic Hard Days Night chord. This chord has been hotly contested ever since guitar players developed a love of arguing on the internet. 

The chord is best seen as an Fadd9, a simple F Major chord with the add9 note at the top. It can also be viewed as a G9sus4/F because of the notes included in the chord, but given the key of the song, Fadd9 is the most logical name for this chord.

F#m7

This variation of an F#m7 chord appears in the chorus of the track Hey Jude. The recorded version is played with a capo on the 1st fret.

This is a nice alternative to a standard m7 chord to use in progressions. By placing the b7 note at the top of the chord an octave higher than where it first appears. This gives the chord a very rich and melodic flavour.

Am7/G

In the intro to the song While My Guitar Gently Weeps, this Am7/G chord appears. The first part of the song is a continuous Am chord with a moving root that walks down. This is a useful technique to create the feeling of movement without changing your overall chord.

The addition of the G is what makes this an Am7, without the G this would be a standard Am chord.

You can use this theory in your own songwriting by trying different root notes with the chord.

E7b9

The intro to the track I Want You (She’s So Heavy) contains this E7b9 chord which is a really moody-sounding voicing that makes for a perfect dominant 7 substitution. As guitar players, we’re very accustomed to the E7#9 chord, otherwise known as the Hendrix chord. 

Switching the 9 for a b9 takes the chord to a whole new place. It has an element of suspense to it and works great as a passing chord on the way to a resolution.

• 'At his musical core, John Lennon had a wonderful way with chords': Here are 4 of his Beatles voicings and guitar rhythm ideas to inspire you

There are shows, albums, songs that changed the trajectory of musicians' lives – they may have even inspired the dream that made them aspire to be musicians. But these are usually pockets of experiences, from hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio to being in the eye of the storm at a Sex Pistols gig in 1977. But what about impacting millions at the same moment in time? Well that actually happened once in front of an estimated 73,700 million people.

"Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material", Bruce Springsteen wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born To Run of seeing The Beatles perform five songs on the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday 9 February 1964. "Rock 'n' roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out ... and opened up a whole world of possibilities."

Television was a door to the world in the '60s, where perhaps the internet has become a huge chasm now. There had been seismic moments in rock n' roll before this with Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, but no band had ever affected so many people at once. 

The testament is how many young people were watching that day who later became music icons: "I remember exactly where I was sitting", reflected Chrissie Hynde later. "It was amazing. It was like the axis shifted ... It was kind of like an alien invasion." 

As we'll see, the list of artists inspired that day goes on. But what did the Beatles themselves make of their first American television appearance?

“[There are] a trillion people who say that, ‘I knew that’s what I wanted to be when I saw you four-headed monster on the telly … I’ve got to be part of this'," Paul McCartney reflected in the podcast McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. “Our current manager of Beatles’ Apple Records says that, Bruce Springsteen says that, David Letterman says that. They all formed on that night, formed this future for themselves. And there we were in Liverpool [a few years earlier] forming this future, in the same kind of deal.”

For McCartney and Lennon those moments had come from hearing and seeing The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. They saw what they could be. 

"Buddy Holly for us was amazing, for a number of reasons. He sang and played guitar," reflected McCartney on the podcast. "Elvis just sang and Scotty Moore played guitar. [Buddy] not only played guitar, he played the solos – normally if you played guitar  [and sang] there was another guy who played lead guitar but Buddy sang, played guitar and played the solos. He also wrote the stuff – so this was like an all-inclusive one-man band. We really thought that was great – this is what we have to do."

In this context, and even at this early stage in the Beatles creative arc, they were already unwittingly about to pass the torch on. And Buddy's influence with his horn-rimmed glasses even helped Lennon feel more comfortable wearing his own spectacles in public. Then there was the name of his band, The Crickets.

"My memory of it was that we were striving to find something with a dual meaning, because of The Crickets," explained McCartney. 

By 1964 the Beatles had already ticked off some of their ambitions including number-one records and appearing on Sunday Night At The Palladium. The US was part of their dream – the home of many of their influences. And the biggest show for them there was hosted by Ed Sullivan.

It was already nearly 16 years in by the time the Beatles performed three separate appearances on their US visit. It held a Sunday night on CBS, the vaudeville-style entertainment show was a rite of passage for any entertainer trying to gain a foothold on the hearts and minds of the US public. Elvis Presley had appeared in 1956 – Sullivan caving in during a ratings battle after vowing to never have The King perform in front of the show's family audience.

Such was the perception of rock n' roll trailblazers at the time, but by 1964 the demand was undeniable, with Beatlemania in full force across Europe and was now storming the Atlantic, with records sales fuelled by radio play alone up until then. 

Sullivan had seen the furore around the band in person when he was travelling through Heathrow airport in late 1963. The Fab Four were returning to the UK from Stockholm after a TV appearance and were greeted by a throng of enthusiastic fans. Sullivan could see the parallels with Elvis in the previous decade.

"We were arriving from Stockholm into London airport and at the same time the Prime Minister and the Queen Mother were also flying out, but the airport was overrun with teenagers," George Harrison noted to the US press in 1964. "Thousands of them waiting for us to get back. Ed Sullivan arrived at that time and wondered what was going on."

Sullivan offered Brian Epstein a single show slot, but the shrewd Beatles manager countered with a lower fee in exchange for three appearances and top-billing. The deal was done. 

The Beatles arrived in the US at New York's JFK Airport on 7 February 1964 and were duly greeted by an estimated 3,000 fans. Beatlemania had truly arrived before they'd even set foot on the tarmac, and the band's charismatic display at their first press release only swelled the waves of excitement around their arrival. The Ed Sullivan taping show two days later would be the musical payoff that proved the hype was justified, with a reported 50,000 people applying for tickets to watch it in person. 

The appearances were the focus of the trip, after all. "We're over here to do three Ed Sullivan TV shows, and meet the press, and a bit of a rest on Miami Beach," explained Harrison, who had actually beaten his bandmates to US soil the previous September when he visited his older sister Louise in Illinois. 

"Now yesterday and today our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agreed with me that the city never has the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool, who call themselves The Beatles," began Sullivan at 8pm EST on 9 February in CBS Studio 50 in New York as he introduced the band. "Now tonight, you're gonna twice be entertained by them. Right now, and again in the second half of our show. Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles. Let's bring them on."

Before he could finish the live audience had already erupted. McCartney counted the band in and The Beatles went into All My Loving with full gusto. The Beatles had arrived in New York and millions of US living rooms and they had all the moves and chops that only a well-honed live unit could know. They made it look easy…

But the idea that the band could just waltz in and deliver the goods in the US is a falsehood; despite their undeniable musical talents, the Beatles had to put the prep work in for the Ed Sullivan Show. They knew the stakes were high for their debut performance on national television in the US. But there was a problem nobody could have foreseen. 

Following another press conference at the Plaza Hotel where they were staying New York in the morning of Saturday 8 February, Lennon, McCartney and Ringo Starr headed off for a walk in Central Park, where they were followed by around 400 enthusiastic female fans. 

But George Harrison was absent. He had a high temperature, and his appearance for the show was in jeopardy. After a visit from a doctor, his sister Louise came to his aid, administering medicine every hour while everyone waited to see if that would be enough.  

According to the Beatles Bible, the rest of the band travelled by limousine to the CBS studios on Broadway at 1.30pm the same day to begin the first of several rehearsals their appearance on the The Ed Sullivan Show. Fans slowed the journey as they moved to get a glimpse of the musicians and mounted police were forced to intervene.

The rehearsals weren't focussed on musical performance and sound-checking as the priority, the band and camera crew had to be prepared for the television performance side. Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall and the show's production assistant Vince Calandra stood in for George as camera positions were assigned and rehearsed. 

The band's dedication to detail was revealed when they reportedly asked to view a playback of the rehearsal footage – apparently a first for any musical guest on the show. 

"The main thing I was aware of when we did the first Ed Sullivan Show was that we rehearsed all afternoon," remembered Ringo Starr in The Beatles Anthology. "TV had such bad sound equipment – it still has today, usually, but then it was really bad – that we would tape our rehearsals and then go up and mess with the dials in the control booth. We got it all set with the engineer there, and then we went off for a break."

That's when the second potential disaster struck.

"The story has it that while we were out, the cleaner came in to clean the room and the console, thought, ‘What are all these chalk marks?’ and wiped them all off," recalled Starr. "So our plans just went out the window. We had a real hasty time trying to get the sound right."

George and the sound mostly recovered (McCartney would later comment that he thought Lennon's mic was too low) for the main event the next day and by the second song of the show's performance, the preparation was clearly paying dividends as the band nailed their camera cues. 

McCartney was on lead vocals again on a cover of Meredith Wilson's Til There Was You – a ballad to win around the skeptical parents, perhaps? It didn't last long as the band fired things up with She Loves You to showcase the full force of the Lennon/McCartney/Harrison harmony machine, the latter Harrison on his Gretsch Country Gentlemen. In under seven minutes The Beatles had lit a creative fire that would blaze for decades.

"I was 13, and already somewhat of a music fan," Tom Petty told Paul Zollo for the Grammy Awards site in 2014. "This was the great moment in my life, really, that changed everything. I had been a fan up to that point. But this was the thing that made me want to play music. You saw that it could be done. There could be a self-contained unit that wrote, recorded and sang songs. And it looked like they were having an awful lot of fun doing it.

Petty's parents were dismissive and left the room during the performance, but he and his brother were captivated.

"These weren't days when you had rock and roll on television very frequently at all. And [the Beatles] were so ready for it," he added. "They're so professional, and they have their act so down. Their presentation is beyond compare. It's amazing, when you watch it now, how aware they are of where the cameras are, and what to do. And their songs were just fantastic, and so original. They were the right people at the right time at the right spot with the right songs.

The musical impact soon became evident.

"Really, within weeks of that show, you began to hear the sounds of garage bands on the weekends leaking through the neighborhood — of kids out in the garage playing," recalled Petty. "And it became my mission to find an electric guitar, and to meet friends who could play with me. And that happened rather organically. So many people were doing it.

Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Forgety would later recount the impact of seeing the performance on the song I Saw It On TV, from his 1985 solo album Centerfield: 'We gathered round to hear the sound comin' on the little screen / The grief had passed, the old men laughed, and all the girls screamed / 'Cause four guys from England took us all by the hand/ It was time to laugh, time to sing, time to join the band.'

The list of future musicians from the baby boomer generation hit by a thunderbolt of inspiration that night goes on… Billy Joel, Heart's Nancy Wilson, Gary Rossington, Gene Simmons, Geddy Lee, Joe Perry, Marky Ramone,  Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, Elliot Easton, Foreigner's Lou Gramm, Richie Sambora, future Bruce Springsteen bandmate Steven Van Zandt, Steve Lukather and Micky Dolenz. 

The night The Beatles first played the Ed Sullivan Show, boy, that was something. Seeing them on TV was akin to a national holiday," Joe Perry told MusicRadar in 2009.  "Talk about an event. I never saw guys looking so cool. I had already heard some of their songs on the radio, but I wasn't prepared by how powerful and totally mesmerizing they were to watch. It changed me completely. I knew something was different in the world that night."

Future Bon Jovi star Richie Sambora was equally entranced. “One of my earliest memories was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room of the house I grew up in and looking up at the black-and-white TV set and watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show," he told us in 2009. "I was five years old and I remember thinking, ‘Wow! That’s what I want to do.’ I know it sounds absurd – most five-year-old boys say they want to be firemen or policemen or baseball players, or even the president. Not me. I wanted to be one of the Beatles. 

"They were the most incredible thing I ever saw. I couldn't put it into any kind of historical context at the time - I couldn't rank it with the Kennedy assassination or anything like that - but I knew, even at that young age, when I barely knew anything about anything, that I was witnessing something truly life-changing. And not just for me, but for everybody as well."

Any budding songsmiths who missed out on the show's barnstorming intro could have caught the outro of I Saw Her Standing There and I Want To Hold Your Hand to seal the deal. The Beatles had realised their ambition of becoming writers and performers that Buddy Holly inspired them with, and now America knew it too. 

As agreed with Epstein, two more Sullivan broadcasts would follow, and this is where it gets confusing; earlier in the day on 9 May and before the five-song show debut the band performed Twist And Shout, Please Please Me and another version of I Want To Hold Your Hand that would be used for broadcast of the Ed Sullivan show on 23 February.

The Beatles' performance for the Ed Sullivan Show on 16 February reached an estimated 70 million people and saw them perform on a stage at the Hotel Deauville in Miami Beach for a broadcast of the songs She Loves You, This Boy and All My Loving. They also closed the show with I Saw Her Standing There, From Me to You, and I Want to Hold Your Hand.

The band, by then evolved into their Help! era, would come back over a year later on August 14 1965 to perform a six-song set. By then the musical landscape had changed around their impact, an influence on songwriting, performance and even fashion that's still felt today. 

"We were aware that Ed Sullivan was the big one because we got a telegram from Elvis and [his manager] the Colonel," reflected George Harrison on the impact of that day in '64 when they helped set a record for US television viewing figures. "And I’ve heard that while the show was on there were no reported crimes, or very few. When The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, even the criminals had a rest for ten minutes.” 

• The lost 1971 John Lennon and Yoko Ono interview on the Beatles' split when they insisted Michael Parkinson wore a black sack over his head

The late Michael Parkinson is rightly regarded as one of the premier television interviewers in the UK and the list of stars that appeared on his BBC chat show encompassed nearly every big name from the '70s to the early 2000s. It's a surprised then to discover that the BBC wiped most of its first series – including a bizarre but revealing 1971 appearance by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

This wasn't unusual at the time; for reasons cited including the broadcaster having no concrete policy on archiving until 1978 and simply needing to wipe tapes so they could be reused, or destroyed as they weren't deemed of value. This meant early episodes of iconic shows including Dr Who, Not Only Peter Cook By Dudley Moore, Hancocks Half Hour, Steptoe And Son and The Avengers were lost forever. Mostly…

In 2009's An Audience With Michael Parkinson, he revealed that a recording of his 1971 interview with Lennon and Ono existed, despite the whole first series of his chat show that it was a part of being wiped from the BBC archive.

Lennon's appearance on show at the time was vital for Parkinson. He was struggling to attract big guests for its initial eight-week run but already knew the Beatle to call in a favour. At the time there were still many questions hanging over the real reasons for the Beatles' April 1970 parting, with contrasting perspectives beginning to surface. Parkinson recalls how Lennon was initially reluctant to revisit that particular subject. 

"He came back to me about a day later and said, 'We've talked about this, I hate talking about the Beatles, you know that,'" Parkinson remembered Lennon telling him. But he would appear on the show, under two conditions. The first being that his partner Yoko Ono appeared with him. This wasn't surprising at all. The second condition was.

"[He said], 'If you want to talk about the Beatles, you have to climb inside a sack and do the interview about the Beatles in a sack,'" recounted Parkinson. "I would have it hanging upside down off the Sydney Harbour Bridge just to get John in the studio."

This wasn't as random as it might first appear. In 1969 Lennon and Ono had given an infamous press conference at the Sacher Hotel in Vienna, Austria where they introduced the concept of 'bagism' – their goal for total communication, and the duo spoke from inside a giant white bag.

The idea was a visual way to illustrate their goal of removing potential prejudice based on physical appearance from the conversation – therefore helping to take each other's viewpoints and ideas more seriously. This was total communication.

Two years later and it was apparently still on Lennon and Ono's minds as they appeared on Parkinson's show as agreed. Following Lennon's murder in December 1980, the BBC contacted Parkinson to ask about showing the interview again. Then they hit an obstacle – the corporation hadn't just erased the tapes, but the whole first series of the Parkinson chat show. It was lost, until years later when Parkinson was contacted out of the blue by a film producer in America who was making a feature film called Imagine (released in 1988) on Lennon and asked permission to use the footage of the interview that was sitting on his desk.

The producer wouldn't reveal where he'd got it from but the bootleg footage was indeed genuine. The previously lost footage of the interview – captured in 16mm film  and then stretched to 35mm and colourised from a black and white TV broadcast – has still never been shown in full, but the Audience With Parkinson show at least let's us see a key moment segment when Lennon tackles the still-sensitive subject of the Beatles' split… and the sack comes out.

To his credit in the clip shown below Parkinson feigns surprise, and Ono seems especially enthusiastic about him putting the sack on as the conversation approaches the Fab Four. Lennon is especially animated when confronted with the claim that Ono may be responsible for the split, and is understandably passionate about fighting the misconception.

"Listen, I'll tell you –people on the street and kids do not dislike us," began an indignant Lennon. "It's the media – I'm telling you. It's not us. We go on the street and the lorry drivers wave, 'Hello Yoko, hello John – all that jazz. And I judge it by that. My records still sell well. Her records sell alright. People in general aren't [bothered] even though they've had this propaganda."

As Parkinson presses Lennon on whether Ono's presence during Beatles sessions may have led to tensions with the other members Lennon is forthright. "The tension was already there, you see," he responds. "After Brian died…"

At that point Lennon remembers the bag clause. And out comes the large black sack with Parkinson putting it over his head, with Lennon citing that "It's total communication if you're in the bag". Yoko points out that Parkinson, "Looks very elegant". 

The interview continues. "When Brian [Epstein, Beatles manager] died we got a bit lost," continues Lennon. "We needed a manager. Because all of us are artists… we can't manage ourselves or look after ourselves in that way. But it's a lot for four big heads like the Beatles to stay together for such a long time."

Then comes perhaps the crux of Lennon's perspective on the Beatles dissolution – especially George Harrison's situation, and it's hard to argue with.

"Then there's the thing of making, or making it big and breaking into America," he adds. "We had a goal together, but when we reached the age of 28 or 29 it began to be, 'What's the goal? We've made it.' We were getting more talented and George began to write lots of songs. He couldn't even make an album – he was lucky to get a track on an album. 

"We all started to get interested in our own music and going different ways," Lennon continued. "If you hear our separate albums, they're similar but our personalities have developed and they were a bit stifled in the Beatles I think. Between us now we sell ten times more records than the Beatles did individually if you added them all together. We're doing far better than we were then."

At this point Lennon breaks into laughter, probably realising that talking to a man wearing a giant black sack is somewhat absurd. Parkinson's wish to come out of the bag is granted. And it would be fascinating to hear what Lennon and Ono talk about next but as yet, the rest of the footage is not available online.

"It's an important document of a friendship with John," concluded Parkinson looking back on the interview in 2009. "And also a reminder of the part he played actually in making the show a success. When he did this the floodgates opened." 

• Paul McCartney: "I had been able to accept Yoko sitting on a blanket in front of my amp… but then when we broke up, John turned nasty"

John Lennon’s Framus 12-string acoustic guitar has been sold for almost $2.9 million in a recording-breaking auction.

The early '60s 'Hootenanny' guitar, which Lennon played during the recording and filming of Help!, can be heard on tracks like You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, I’ve Just Seen A Face, It’s Only Love, Girl and Norwegian Wood. 

Its price surpasses the $2.4 million that Lennon’s Gibson J160E went for at auction in 2015, making it the most expensive piece of Beatles guitar memorabilia. Auctioneers Julien’s had set an upper estimate at a relatively low £800,000.

The guitar had been missing, presumed lost for years. The story goes that Lennon gifted it to Gordon Waller, one half of the '60s pop duo Peter and Gordon. He then passed it on to one of their road managers, whose attic it remained in for decades until a family who owned the property were looking to move house and discovered it. They phoned Julien’s who put two and two together and identified it as the lost Help! Guitar.

Having already been thrown on a skip, its Maton case wasn’t in great shape, but the guitar itself was still in tip-top condition. It’s a 5/024/12 flat top Hootenanny model, with a mahogany neck and rosewood fingerboard, as well as a Trapeze tailpiece and rosewood bridge.

“Finding this remarkable instrument is like finding a lost Rembrandt or Picasso,” said Darren Julien, co-founder of the auction house. 

“It still looks and plays like a dream after having been preserved in an attic for more than 50 years. To awaken this sleeping beauty is a sacred honour.”

He described it as “the greatest find of a Beatles guitar since Paul McCartney’s lost 1961 Höfner bass guitar.”

The Lennon Framus isn’t the most expensive guitar to sell at auction though – that honour still resides with the old Martin D-18e that Kurt Cobain played in the MTV Unplugged session, which went for $6 million in 2020. 

Cobain’s Mustang which he used in the Smells Like Teen Spirit promo was also auctioned for $4.5 million and last year a custom-built Kramer that Eddie Van Halen played in the Hot For Teacher video sold for almost $4 million at auction.

Julien’s is currently on the final day of its Music Icons series of auctions, with today’s top attraction being a Cloud 3 guitar which once belonged to Prince. That beauty is expected to fetch over $600,000.

Day Tripper, I Feel Fine, Revolution, Lady Madonna, Hey Jude, We Can Work It Out, She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Don't Let Me Down… just some of The Beatles' classics that never made a studio album. 

That's how good Paul, John, George and Ringo were in their seven years, seven months and 24 days together as a band. But there's a true Beatles b-side that fascinates even more than those songs, and it found them and their studio geniuses at the point of accelerated evolution.

“This is a song I wrote about people who are always moaning about the weather all the time,” John Lennon once said of the Revolver-era Rain. The word 'I' there suggesting the Lennon / McCartney credit the song carries needn't apply. 

This is in contrast to Lennon's memory of the genesis of Rain's A-side, Paperback Writer's. "I think I might have helped with some of the lyrics," he told Hit Parader Magazine in 1972. "Yes, I did. But it was mainly Paul's tune." But he clearly saw Rain as his song. Indeed, in the same interview, it was one of a number of Beatles songs he listed as being written by himself.  

Paul McCartney remembered things differently. Though noting Lennon was the more dominant contributor to the song, he said it was still a "70-30" authorship and seemed to play the idea of his late bandmate as its instigator down. “I don’t think he brought the original idea, just when we sat down to write, he kicked it off,” McCartney claimed to Barry Miles in his 1997 biography of the Beatle, Many Years From Now. 

“Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing and what we got on to was that it’s no bad thing," he said of its inspiration. "There’s no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back.”

Authorship aside, McCartney and Lennon's reading of Rain's songs's lyrical meaning seems to be quite literal, but on the sonic side, it was clear Lennon may have wanted to go much further on Rain than what the band ended up releasing.

“It was the first time I discovered [backward music],” he told Rolling Stone in a 1968 interview. “On the end of Rain you hear me singing it backwards. We’d done the main thing at EMI and the habit was then to take the songs home and see what you thought a little extra gimmick or what the guitar piece would be.

“So I got home about five in the morning, stoned out of me head," Lennon remembered after recording the main session in the studio. "I staggered up to me tape recorder and I put it on, but it came out backwards, and I was in a trance in the earphones, what is it — what is it?” he said. 

Lennon was hooked on what he heard. “It’s too much, you know, and I really wanted the whole song backwards almost, and that was it,” he admitted. “So we tagged [the backwards part] on the end. I just happened to have the tape the wrong way round, it just came out backwards, it just blew me mind.” 

This small outro seemed revolutionary for a pop song in 1966 – coming just over two months before the release of Tomorrow Never Knows on revolver. But despite Lennon's belief that it was "the first backwards tape on any record anywhere", it wasn't. Backmasking – purposefully recording a vocal line backwards onto tape – dates back to the 1959 song Car Trouble by US vocal group Eligibles adding some comedy lines from an imagined girlfriend's angry father. But the Beatles' first use of it brought it into a sharp mainstream focus that was a far cry from the novelty, though trailblazing context of the Eligibles. 

Revolver closer Tomorrow Never Knows is the most famous use of a backwards guitar solo (played by George Harrison) and probably came first as far as a studio recording is concerned (recording on it began about a week before Rain and Paperback Writer). Lennon's happy accident with Rain came in the same month of April 1966. But there's much more to this song to define it as not just historically important, but progressive is terms of musicianship and sound.

This extends to the other Beatles and the unofficial members outside of the Fab Four. Producer George Martin and the experimental spirit of engineer Geoff Emerick's moves towards changing the role of a recording studio from simply capturing performance to playing an instrument-like role in musical creation were coming to fruition. 

It was Emerick – then just 20 years old and newly made engineer for the Revolver sessions on the recommendation of George Martin – who decided to amplify the dynamics of Ringo Starr's intricate fills on the song against the recording conventions of EMI at the time. The results delighted the drummer, but it's hard to deny he drew something extra from himself with his performance.

"My favorite piece of me is what I did on Rain," Starr reflected in 1984. "I think I just played amazing. I was into the snare and hi-hat. I think it was the first time I used the trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat. 

"I think it's the best out of all the records I've ever made. Rain' blows me away. It's out in left field. I know me and I know my playing... and then there's Rain."

The song, the sound, the feel – Rain sounds like British indie rock decades ahead of its realisation. No wonder it inspired Liam Gallagher & Co's pre-Oasis moniker before brother Noel changed their fortunes with Live Forever. Emerick's influence on the sound of Rain went even further than Ringo.

"Rain also had an unusual sonic texture, deep and murky," recalled the late engineer in the Howard Massey co-written 2006 book Here, There And Everywhere: My Life Recording The Music Of The Beatles. "This was accomplished by having the band play the backing track at a really fast tempo while I recorded them on a sped-up tape machine. When we slowed the tape back down to normal speed, the music played back at the desired tempo, but with a radically different tonal quality."

The Beatles' studio team had already discovered the value of this in the Tomorrow Never Knows sessions, but the practical reality of what was needed to achieve it is striking. The band played the original speed in the key of A (or not quite as I'll explain later), and when slowed it was in the key of G. Take a listen to the instrumental recording of Rain above to hear just how fast that original backing track speed was too. 

The performances beyond Starr's also play crucial parts in this crafted psychedelic three-minute wonder.  The bassline is surely one of McCartney's greatest in a notable period for his low-end prowess. A sibling of Revolver's Taxman, his verse parts don't repeat as his inventive melodic lines flow through the changes of what is mostly just two chords (G major and Csus2). McCartney's groove has a suitably watery quality in the song.

McCartney's bass was arguably more prominent on Rain and Paperback Writer than on any previous Beatles recording. He was bolstered by the sustain of his ’64 Rickenbacker 4001S – a move from the Hofner influenced by the more powerful low-end mix he was hearing in Motown soul from the US of the time. But the guitars are less simple to credit for sure.

Rain was tracked during the two sessions on Thursday 14 April 1966 – recorded the day after the majority of Paperback Writer was laid down. Work on the track, including overdubs and mixing was completed on 16 April with the song released with Paperback Writer on 30 May. We know from Andy Babiuk's superb Beatles Gear book that for the A-side session Lennon was photographed in the studio with a newly acquired orange Gretsch 6120 around that time - that was reportedly never seen again afterwards. 

It's tempting to attribute the droning quality of Harrison's arpeggiated chords to that of the Indian classical music Harrison had discovered during the filming of Help in 1965. This had resulted in the use of a sitar on Rubber Soul's Norwegian Wood later in the same year. The tape manipulation certainly aided to the ethereal quality of Rain's guitar, and the electronically double-tracked vocal sounds pioneered by Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend played their part too. 

The band recorded five rhythm takes for the song in Abbey Road's EMI Studio 3 with the fifth decided as the keeper. Lennon also sang vocal harmonies with himself on the chorus. But hearing the original speed version of Rain still reveals an atonal quality to the guitar that feels slightly sitar-like to my ears. And it's due to the tuning. As Mike Pachelli reveals in his insightful lesson above, the guitars were originally tuned above concert A in reality before the recording was slowed down – somewhere around A#. 

It's never been confirmed for certain what guitars were used on Rain. There are a three in contention; an Epiphone Casino, Lennon's new Gretsch or George's mainstay 1964 Gibson SG standard he's seen with for one of the song's multiple promotional videos. 

Yes, videos in the plural – seven in total for between Rain and Paperback Writer. The former's three videos were not just unusual for a Beatles b-side, but arrived at a time when the precedent of any promotional video for a song didn't exist. The idea came about for a very specific reason.

"The idea was that we’d use them in America as well as the UK," Harrison explained in the Beatles' Anthology book. The guitarist had been keen for the band to focus on studio work over promotional live performances and the concept of a video suited these ends. "Because we thought, ‘We can’t go everywhere. We’re stopping touring and we’ll send these films out to promote the record.’ It was too much trouble to go and fight our way through all the screaming hordes of people to mime the latest single on Ready Steady Go! Also, in America, they never saw the footage anyway.

"Once we actually went on an Ed Sullivan show with just a clip," Harrison added. "I think Ed Sullivan came on and said, ‘The Beatles were here, as you know, and they were wonderful boys, but they can’t be here now so they’ve sent us this clip.’ It was great, because really we conned the Sullivan show into promoting our new single by sending in the film clip. These days obviously everybody does that – it’s part of the promotion for a single – so I suppose in a way we invented MTV.

Add that one to the list of Beatles innovations too then. 

• "Because I don't read music, I didn't know what the melody that went with it was": Paul McCartney explains why his musical limitations and "stealing" benefitted the Abbey Road medley that gave us The Beatles' true swansong

Though the split had already effectively happened, it was on this day, 10 April, in 1970 that the world finally knew - The Beatles were (almost certainly) over. 

On 9 April, Paul McCartney's PR team sent out advance copies of his forthcoming solo debut, McCartney, with a press kit that featured a Q&A with Paul. You can read the full interview at The Paul McCartney project, but the key bombshell read...

Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?: No.

Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?: Time will tell. Being a solo album means it’s the start of a solo career… and not being done with the Beatles means it’s a rest. So it’s both.

Is your break from the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal difference or musical ones?: Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t know.

Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment eg, when you thought ‘wish Ringo was here for this break? No.

The following day, the papers - obviously - went big on the news, and the understandable hot-take was that Paul McCartney had quit The Beatles. Paul himself is said to have instantly regretted his interview. 

"It was all a misunderstanding," he told The Evening Standard two weeks later. "I just thought 'Christ, what have I done? Now we’re in for it', and my stomach started churning up. I never intended the statement to mean 'Paul McCartney quits Beatles."

When approached for comment on the day of the reveal, Lennon responded, in typically acerbic mode, "It was nice to find that he was still alive. Anyway, you can say I said jokingly, 'He didn't quit, I sacked him!'".

George Harrison, as so often, kept his counsel, refusing to comment, while Ringo Starr played dumb, saying it was “all news” to him. 

Years later, according to The Beatles: Off the Record, Lennon revealed: "I was cursing because I hadn’t done it. I wanted to do it; I should have done it. ‘Ah, damn, shit! What a fool I was’… We were all hurt that he didn’t tell us what he was going to do. I think he claims that he didn’t mean that to happen, but that’s bullshit."

Apple, in the eye of the storm, released the following Derek Taylor penned release at the end of the day.

"April 10 1970: Spring is here, and Leeds are playing Chelsea tomorrow, and Ringo and John and George and Paul are alive and well and full of hope.

The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you.

When the spinning stops – that’ll be the time to worry. Not before.

Until then, the Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on. The beat goes on."

This lyrical take on the day's events is sharply at odds with another hastily issued Apple statement, released on behalf of Lennon, Harrison and Starr, which read “They do not want to split up, but the present rift seems to be part of their growing up. ... At the moment they seem to cramp each other's styles. Paul has called a halt to the Beatles' activities. They could be dormant for years.”

Cue 50 years of he-said, she-said speculation and recrimination, at least amongst the fans and press, a decades-long autopsy in no way foreshortened by Paul's early attempts at damage control.

Speaking to The Evening Standard 11 days after the initial media storm triggered by his release, McCartney made the point that the fab other three had already walked out at different points. "The real break-up in the Beatles was months ago. First Ringo left when we were doing the White Album, because he said he didn’t think it was any fun playing with us anymore. But after two days of us telling him he was the greatest drummer in the world for the Beatles, which I believe, he came back. 

"Then George left when we were making Abbey Road because he didn’t think he had enough say in our records, which was fair enough. After a couple of days, he came back.

"And then last autumn I began to feel that the only way we could ever get back to the stage of playing good music again was to start behaving as a band again. But I didn’t want to go out and face two hundred thousand fans because I would get nothing from it, so I thought up this idea of playing surprise one-night stands in unlikely places, just letting a hundred or so people in the village hall, so to speak, and then locking the doors. It would have been a great scene for those who saw us, and for us, too.

"So, one day when we had a meeting I told the others about my idea, and asked them what they thought of it. 

"John said, “I think you’re daft.” I said, “What do you mean?” I mean, he is John Lennon, and I’m a bit scared of all that rapier wit we hear about. And he just said again, “I think you’re daft. I’m leaving the Beatles. I want a divorce.”

"Well, none of us knew what to do, but we decided to wait until about March or April of this year until our film, Let It Be, came out. But I was bored. I like to work, I’m an active person. Sit me down with a guitar and let me go. That’s my job.

‘Anyway, I hung on for all these months wondering whether the Beatles would ever come back together again… and let’s face it I’ve been as vague as anyone, hoping that John might come around and say, “All right lads, I’m ready to go back to work,” and naturally enough, in the meantime, I began to look for something to do. And the album, McCartney, turned out to be the answer in my case."

Over 50 years later, McCartney was still having to fight his corner in the blame game. Speaking on BBC Radio 4 in 2021, he insisted, “This was my band, this was my job, this was my life, so I wanted it to continue." 

And when This Cultural Life interviewer John Wilson asked about the songwriter's decision to go solo, McCartney is very clear; “Stop right there. I am not the person who instigated the split. 

"Oh no, no, no. John walked into a room one day and said I am leaving the Beatles. Is that instigating the split, or not?”

Adding that the other members were then left to "pick up the pieces", McCartney reveals the confusion of who instigated the Beatles' 1970 split was due to Allen Klein, the band's new manager at the time following the death of Brian Epstein in 1967. McCartney hadn't been in favour of hiring Klein, but John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had outvoted him. Klein instructed the four members to keep quiet about the news while he dealt with the business side.

“So for a few months we had to pretend,” McCartney explains to Wilson. “It was weird because we all knew it was the end of the Beatles, but we couldn’t just walk away.” 

John Lennon's iconic status as a result of his songwriting means his work will remain part of pop culture forever. 

Regardless of whether you think he’s a genius or not, his primitive and driving rhythm style took '50s rock n' roll sensibilities and put them into the mainstream for a new generation. He then helped The Beatles transcend pop and open the possibilities of studio recording for bands. 

At his musical core, John Lennon had a wonderful way with chords. In this lesson we’re going to look at four, with rhythm ideas from The Beatles that will give your own playing an instant John Lennon flavour.

1. Partial minor barre chord

With a two-guitar lineup in The Beatles, Lennon was often seen to play partial or alternate chord voicings to compliment George Harrison.

This four-string minor barre chord, as heard in the frantic stumming of All My Loving is a great example of how playing a smaller chord voicing can free up space for other instruments in the mix, especially when strummed fast.

2. THAT infamous Hard Days Night chord

Now this is a hotly debated chord. Is it a Dsus4? Did it have a G in the bass? There are many variables here. 

It is fairly well accepted that Lennon played this Fadd9 shape with the open A string and his thumb playing the low F. George Harrison played another add9 variation, which Paul McCartney and producer George Martin also added their sonic stamp to this infamous chord.

3. The Minor IV concept

This is not so much a song specific chord, but more of a concept. If you’re writing a chord progression and you want to add some Lennon flavour, throw in a minor variation on your 4 chord.

If you’re doing a 1 4 5 in A, you’d be using A, D and E. Play that progression and throw a Dm on the end. The minor 4 chord is not in the key, but provides a Lennon-esque resolution back to the root.

4. Driving Blues Groove

It’s hard to avoid the fact that The Beatles were early pioneers of hard rock. Tracks like Come Together and Get Back feature a rock-solid, bluesy stomp laid down by Lennon.

This is your basic 12-bar blues style shuffle but played a little straighter.

• John Lennon and George Harrison: 10 guitar lessons you can learn from their Beatles era

On 12 October, 1965, the four members of The Beatles arrived at EMI Recording Studios in Abbey Road, London to begin work on their sixth album, which would become Rubber Soul. This was the first time that they had been able to record an album free of concert, radio or film commitments and they seized the opportunity. Over the next four weeks, Studio Two, they pushed sonic boundaries and unveiled a set of songs that was unlike anything they had written or recorded before.

The album that emerged would signal a gigantic shift from their previous release Help! and would have a huge impact on their peers. Almost six decades on from its release, Rubber Soul remains one of the most influential albums of all time.

For The Beatles, the sounds and social upheavals of America had a galvanising impact. In August 1965 they had undertaken a 16-date tour of the US, where they were exposed to the rousing soul of Motown and Stax as well as the raw, politicised folk-rock of Bob Dylan and The Byrds. By the time they returned to Abbey Road their musical horizons had been significantly broadened. 

On this album the band blended folk, rock and soul, and explored mature themes, with socially conscious lyrics.

“Things were changing,” said Paul McCartney in The Beatles Anthology documentary series in 1995. “The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff like Thank You Girl, From Me To You and She Love You… we’d come to a point where we thought, ‘We’ve done that. Now we can branch out into songs that are more surreal, a little more entertaining’. And other people were starting to arrive on the scene who were influential. Dylan was influencing us quite heavily at that point.”

Rubber Soul was also their first album that was influenced by marijuana. “Grass was really influential in a lot of our changes, especially with the writers,” reflected Ringo in the 1995 Anthology documentary. “We were expanding in all areas of our lives, opening up to a lot of different attitudes.”

The band already had one track ready, Wait, a leftover from the Help! Sessions. But the song that really kickstarted the album was Drive My Car, a direct homage to the Stax sound the band loved. The song’s bass-heavy R&B Stax feel had much to do with George Harrison, who was infatuated with Otis Redding’s 1965 hit Respect. 

The song was conceived by McCartney who arrived at Lennon’s Weybridge home for a writing session, with the tune in his head. "The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which are always fatal [to songwriting],” recalled McCartney in a 1994 interview, quoted in Far Out magazine. 

“I came in and I said, 'These aren't good lyrics but it's a good tune’. Well, we tried, and John couldn't think of anything, and we tried, and eventually it was, 'Oh let's leave it, let's get off this one’. So we had a break... then we came back to it, and somehow it became 'drive-my-car' instead of 'gol-den-rings,' and then it was wonderful, because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came."

The lyrics, rich in sexual innuendo, focus on an aspiring actress who hires a ‘chauffeur’. Drive My Car was recorded on 13 October 1965 in a session that ran well after midnight. This was the album on which McCartney first used a Rickenbacker 4001S bass, with a fuller, punchier tone that would become a defining feature of the sound on Rubber Soul. McCartney opted for a Vox AC100 amp and a Fender Bassman. Lennon and Harrison, meanwhile, played through Vox AC30 and AC100 amps.

This was also the album on which Stratocasters were used for the first time. “I decided I'd get a Strat, and John decided he'd get one too," Harrison is quoted as saying in Andy Babiuk’s 2016 illustrated book, Beatles Gear. “So we sent out our roadie, Mal Evans… and he came back with two of them, pale blue ones. Straight away we used them on the album we were making at the time, Rubber Soul.” 

George's would give his '62 Strat a Day-Glo makeover in 1967 ahead of the Magical Mystery Tour album – it would be nicknamed Rocky and he'd continue to use it for slide well into his solo album years. 

On Drive My Car, Harrison plays a Stax-style bass line on his new Strat and McCartney doubles up on the Rickenbacker bass. This was also the song on which McCartney played his first guitar solo on a Beatles track, a slide solo, with his 1962 Epiphone Casino. 

Harrison and Lennon’s new Sonic Blue Strats can be heard across the album but they really shine through on Nowhere Man, particularly on Harrison’s solo. But the genesis of the song was the result of a frustrating few hours in the studio for John Lennon. 

“I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down,” Lennon told Playboy magazine in 1980. “Then Nowhere Man came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down.”

Another new instrument that featured on the album, on tracks such as If I Needed Someone, was Harrison’s new Rickenbacker 360/12, which he had acquired when the band played a show in Minneapolis on 21 August 1965. 

The Rickenbacker was presented to him by a local guitar store at a press conference that day and he played it on stage that evening. “That’s fab,” Lennon reportedly said as Harrison was presented with the guitar, “Where’s mine?”

Rubber Soul was the album on which the band started to strive for more expressive sounds and arrangements. On Girl, high equalisation was applied to Lennon’s voice to capture the hissing sound as he drew breath. Lennon put a capo on the eighth fret of his Gibson J-160E, which made it sound like a bouzouki, enhancing the Meditarrenian flavour of the song – McCartney had written part of the music that was used in the outro while on holiday in Greece in September 1963.

In the song Girl that John wrote, there’s a Zorba-like thing at the end that I wrote which came from that holiday," McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. "I was very impressed with another culture’s approach because it was slightly different from what we did. We just did it on acoustic guitars instead of bouzoukis."

The Word, with its concept of universal love, features a stunningly fluid bass groove and rhythmic piano from McCartney, the latter being heavily manipulated using compression and equalisation.

On Harrison’s Think For Yourself, McCartney recorded two bass tracks, one through a distortion unit, which is credited as 'fuzz bass' on the sleeve credits. EMI built their own distortion boxes, although it’s possible McCartney used a prototype Vox Tone Blender.

A real high point on the album is Lennon’s Norwegian Wood, initially recorded with the working title of This Bird Has Flown. It was the first track by a rock/pop band to feature sitar, played on a cheap instrument bought by George Harrison from an Indian gift shop in London’s Oxford Street. It was the start of Harrison’s interest in Indian culture.

It’s to George Harrison’s eternal credit that he refused to be daunted by the songwriting prowess of Lennon and McCartney. On Rubber Soul, he contributes two songs, If I Needed Someone, one of his best compositions, and Think For Yourself.

“Songwriting for me, at the time of Rubber Soul, was a bit frightening because John and Paul had been writing since they were three years old,” recalled Harrison in the Beatles Anthology book, published in 2000. “It was hard to come in suddenly and write songs. They’d had a lot of practice… I had to come from nowhere and start writing, and have something with at least enough quality to put on the record alongside all the wondrous hits. It was very hard.”

As the recording progressed, the influence of the soul music of Stax and Motown and the electric folk of Dylan really came to the fore. Harrison’s Think For Yourself was inspired by Dylan’s Positively Fourth Street, while You Won’t See Me has a distinct Motown feel. McCartney’s Michelle meanwhile, is evocative of wistful French pop.

Then of course there is In My Life, a beautifully sparse and evocative song in which Lennon looks back on the Liverpool of his youth. In Mark Hertsgaard’s 1996 book A Day In The Life: The Music And Artistry Of The Beatles, Lennon is quoted as saying the song is his “first real major piece of work”.

As Rubber Soul took shape, it became clear that this was a record that was being conceived as a single cohesive work. “I think Rubber Soul was the first of the albums that presented a new Beatles to the world,” explained George Martin in Kenneth Womack’s 2017 book Maximum Volume: The Life Of Beatles Producer George Martin (The Early Years, 1926-1966). "We were thinking about the albums as an entity of its own and Rubber Soul was the first one to emerge in this way."

George Harrison is quoted in Far Out magazine as saying in 1990 that Rubber Soul was his favourite Beatles’ album. "We certainly knew we were making a good album. We did spend more time on it and tried new things. But the most important thing about it was that we were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren't able to hear before."

Rubber Soul was released on 3 December 1965 to universal acclaim and promptly went to No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. The album blazed the trail for the emergence of albums as creative works in their own right and prompted a major shift away from singles. For The Beatles’s peers, it was a real lightbulb moment. 

“Rubber Soul blew my mind,” recalled Brian Wilson in an interview with Paste magazine in 2004. “I liked the way it all went together, the way it was all one thing. It was a challenge to me to do something similar. That made me want to make Pet Sounds, I didn’t want to do the same kind of music, but on the same level… It wasn’t pop music; it was something more advanced.” 

The album had a galvanising impact on the band’s peers such as the Stones and heralded in an era when for the first time, rock music was culturally legitimised and regarded as having real artistic merit.  The album “broke everything open,” recalled Steve Winwood in John Kruth’s 2015 book The Bird Has Flown: The Enduring Beauty Of Rubber Soul Fifty Years On. “It crossed music into a whole new dimension and was responsible for kicking off the sixties rock era." 

Dylan was a profound influence on Rubber Soul. But six months after he had been roundly booed at the Newport Folk Festival for fielding a full electric band, The Beatles too melded folk with rock and created something all their own. For UK folk artists meanwhile, it was also a wake-up call. As folk singer-songwriter Roy Harper recalled in a piece entitled The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs in the July 2006 issue of Mojo magazine: “They’d come onto my turf, got there before me, and they were kings of it, overnight. We'd all been outflanked.”

• John Lennon and George Harrison: 10 guitar lessons you can learn from their Beatles era

In the latest extension to The Beatles Universe, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison will each get a full feature-length scripted biopic helmed by acclaimed director Sir Sam Mendes, it has been confirmed.

Details are naturally scarce at this point, but the movies will collectively "tell the astonishing story of the greatest band in history," culminating in The Beatles' breakup in 1970.

“I’m honoured to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” said Mendes, the acclaimed director of American Beauty and highly-rated Bond outings Skyfall and Spectre.

The fab four biopics are officially sanctioned by Apple Corps, guardians of The Beatles' IP and legacy, and have been signed off by the surviving Beatles and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison.

“To have The Beatles’ and Apple Corps’ blessing to do this is an immense privilege,” said co-producer Pippa Harris (Mendes also takes a co-production role, alongside Harris and Julie Pastor). 

"We intend this to be a uniquely thrilling, and epic cinematic experience: four films, told from four different perspectives which tell a single story about the most celebrated band of all time."

“Theatrical movie events today must be culturally seismic," added Tom Rothman, chair and chief executive of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture Group "Sam’s daring, large-scale idea is that and then some.”

While a release schedule is still unknown, Sony have teased an "innovative release cadence" and early whispers indicate a staggered, possibly overlapping rollout, with 2027 the target. We'll bring you more details and, hopefully, the first trailers, soon...

As Beatles fans, we'll always be grateful to Peter Jackson's 2021 epic Get Back documentarty series for showing the band's final throes in a more positive, rounded and less wholly antagonistic light than the 1970 Let It Be movie. Despite the forces pulling and pushing the band apart, there's plenty of mutual respect, creative energy and, yes, fun to go around.

But the sessions did come freighted with plenty of tense moments, and there was at least one song that every Beatle except McCartney would have happily binned from those sessions, one that Lennon in particular took unambiguously against.

When Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick ran through the Abbey Road track-by-track for MusicRadar he bluntly recalled “John absolutely hated Maxwell's Silver Hammer. 

“My word, that song drove him totally mad, and he certainly made everyone aware of how much he hated it."

"There were two struggles going on with this song: Paul and John fighting over whether it should even exist! [laughs] John called it 'more of Paul's granny music.' But there was my own struggle coming up with the sounds."

Granny Music it may have been, but Maxwell's Silver Hammer also saw the Beatles, never shy of exploring technology, getting the hang of a new-fangled instrument, the synthesizer.

"The other thing was the Moog synthesizer solos in the middle and end,” said Emerick. “It sounds almost like a Theremin. 

“The Moog was a fascinating new instrument for everybody - George, in particular, loved working with it – but Paul played these solos. He tinkered around until he got a really incredible, spacey sound that worked quite well."

McCartney first brought the song to The Beatles on 3 January 1969, during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions so meticulously documented in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary, where you can see McCartney’s first tentative run-throughs with the rest of the band.

"I hate it,” recalled John Lennon in an interview with Playboy in 1980. “He made us do it a hundred million times. He did everything to make it into a single and it never was and it never could've been… we spent more money on that song than any of them in the whole album." 

Ringo Starr was equally blunt. "The worst session ever was Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” he said. “The worst track we ever had to record. It went on for f*****g weeks. I thought it was mad."

To be fair, George Harrison was more ambivalent, if not enthusiastic. “Sometimes, Paul would make us do these really fruity songs. I mean, my God, Maxwell's Silver Hammer was so fruity… We spent a hell of a lot of time on it. 

“And it's one of those instant sort of whistle-along tunes, which some people will hate, and some people will really love it.”

Just this month McCartney has defended the song (again), while admitting his perfectionist approach to recording may have been too much at times. 

“I was very keen on it, it took a little bit long to record,” he says in the latest episode of his A Life in Lyrics podcast. 

“I remember the guys getting pissed with me. Occasionally, I in particular would take too long because I was trying to get what was in my head.” 

• Read more: Abbey Road track-by-track
• Listen: Paul McCartney's A Life in Lyrics

Guitar lessons: As John Lennon once claimed, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” So it's not surprising that US rock ’n’ roll provided the major influence on his early playing style, as well as rockabilly and skiffle. 

His guitar role during The Beatles’ early years was mainly confined to rhythm, laying down solid grooves, establishing harmonic foundations and providing a backdrop for George Harrison’s infectious riffs and carefully crafted solos. 

John mainly played electric guitar, but he also played acoustic on both ballads and up-tempo numbers, using simple eighth-note strum patterns copied from early rock ’n’ rollers like Buddy Holly. 

The most important part of recreating John’s style is to play aggressively, and to pay attention to the way he uses minor chords, often in major progressions.

Click in top right of tab to enlarge

1. Chuck Berry-influenced soloing 

John Lennon didn’t play many solos in the early days of The Beatles. However, one of his best-known solos comes on Long Tall Sally, originally a Little Richard tune.

Our example showcases doublestops (two-note chords) and raucous string bends.

2. Passing chords and a minor IV chord 

The F and Gm chords are the key to The Beatles-esque style here. The F chord doesn’t belong in the key (D major), but works well as a passing chord between F#m and Em. 

In bar 4, the Gm chord (also not from the key signature) provides an unusual resolution back to the root.

3. Muscular R&B electric rhythm style 

Use down-picking to recreate John’s aggressive electric rhythm style. Play the open sixth string between position shifts to propel the groove along. 

Try releasing the pressure off of your fretting hand briefly between strums to introduce that magical ‘bounce’ to your performance.

4. Syncopated barre chords

Fret the full six-string barre shape throughout bars 1 and 2, using your pick to sound the low or high notes as indicated. 

Release the pressure from your fretting hand to create the eighth-note rests. In bars 3 and 4, switch to down-picking, releasing your fretting hand between strums to create a staccato effect.

Guitar lesson: learn 4 fab Beatles chords (including A Hard Day's Night)

Today, we're looking back at the work of an undeniable musical genius on the sad anniversary of John Lennon's death. 

Instant Karma was released in February 1970, slap-bang in the middle of the Beatles' tortured implosion - Lennon had already demanded "a divorce" in September 1969, McCartney had proclaimed the "Beatles thing is over" in Life magazine in November, and the band 'officially' split in April 1970.

Its rapid inception and execution stand as a counterpoint to the erstwhile Fab Four's increasingly difficult collaboration, as documented in the temporarily redemptive but also undeniably challenging sessions documented in 2021's Get Back documentary and its progenitor, 1970's Let it Be movie.

It's not hard to see a contrast with the way an unfettered Lennon felt working under his own steam. As he recalled, in a fascinating oral history revealed alongside a mix of 10 takes of the track, “It was great because I wrote it in the morning on the piano; went to the office and sang it; I thought, ‘Hell, let’s do it,’ and we booked the studio.”

The Plastic Ono Band, Lennon's collaboration with Yoko Ono, had already released Give Peace a Chance, recorded during the couple's Montreal "bed-in" pro-peace demo in Summer 1969.

Back in early 1970, once Lennon knew he had a song in Instant Karma, he put in a call to George Harrison, who in turn enlisted an at-hand Phil Spector, famously not Paul McCartney's cup of tea, but generally a man with a studio plan.

 “John phoned me up one morning in January and said, ‘I’ve written this tune and I’m going to record it tonight and have it pressed, up and out tomorrow. That’s the whole point – ‘Instant Karma!’ – you know?" said Harrison.

“So I was in. I said, ‘OK. I’ll see you in town.’ I was in town with Phil Spector, said to Phil, ‘Why don’t you come to the session?’ 

"There were just four people: John played piano, I played acoustic guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Alan White on drums. We recorded the song and brought it out that week; mixed, instantly, by Phil Spector."

Andy Stephens was tape op on the day and, of Spector’s contribution said, “John kept trying to pull him to the fore. Spector stood back and didn’t volunteer or dictate much at all.”

As Lennon himself recalled the start of the session, “Phil came in and said, ‘How do you want it?’ I said, ‘You know, 1950’s but now.’ And he said, ‘Right!’ And boom! I did it in just about three goes. He played it back and there it was. I said, ‘A bit more bass’, that’s all. And off we went.”

Stephens: “Then Lennon really pulled him out: ‘C’mon, Phil!’ Once he got into his stride, it was like all hell breaking loose. Tape machines, tape loops, tape delays, echo chambers, you name it!"

Alan White, primarily Plastic Ono Band’s drummer but also a more than competent keys contributor, recalled Spector’s effect once fully engaged. “Phil wanted to have everything doubled up and made it sound like one. 

"So it was John and myself on one piano and the other piano had Klaus playing, just layering all these different pianos and then he’d never put just one tambourine on a record; he had to have fifteen of them!”

Of his defining contribution, the track’s dry, pounding drum part, White said “I had an idea of what I wanted to do… It came naturally – and John said, ‘Alan, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. It’s wonderful.’

The results quickly - yes, almost instantly - spoke for themselves, says Klaus Voorman, Plastic Ono Band bass go-to and once even rumoured to be McCartney's replacement in a semi-reformed Beatles line-up known as The Ladders. "We went into the control room, stood at the back and it started and it was so incredible. The sound was just like we had heard in the headphones but with all these incredible effects.

"Then I knew it, because I heard that sound and I thought, this is the Phil Spector sound. It’s very, very simple. He has got these effects on the pianos and these wavering sounds.

"The bass and the kick drum were completely clean. The voice was more or less clean. So that was typical for Phil Spector. And I love Phil Spector. I loved him then. From then on, it was incredible. Beautiful. I loved it."

Instant Karma hit UK record stores within 10 days, debuting on 6 Feb, and US shelves on 20 Feb, going on to be the first million-selling single by a solo Beatle.

Today, we're looking back at the work of an undeniable musical genius on the sad anniversary of John Lennon's death. Also on this day, in 1966, the Fab Four began work on a new track, Strawberry Fields Forever...

In celebration of the life of one of the 20th Century's most important and influential artists, we asked you to nominate their favourite Lennon songs. Here's the top 10, compiled from your votes…

10. And Your Bird Can Sing (Revolver, 1966)

The breakthroughs and standards set on Revolver could fill a book. But even when The Beatles weren’t trying to best themselves - and Lennon would later refer to And Your Bird Can Sing as one of his “throwaways… fancy paper in a box” - they still came up with magic.

Guitar players particularly adore this rollicking, upbeat rocker for its twisting twin-guitar melody played by George Harrison and Paul McCartney. Basically, if you can nail this sucker, you’ve passed the audition. And for a splendid time guaranteed for all, check out the unused take (from the Anthology 2 CD) below in which John and Paul are giggling hysterically throughout.

9. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Rubber Soul, 1965)

Lennon's opaque account of an affair from Rubber Soul has been the subject of much speculation over the years. What is beyond question, apart from the languid beauty of the melody, is that Norwegian Wood was a product of a period of transition for The Beatles.

A heavy Dylan influence saw Lennon begin to come of age as a lyricist, while the band's increasing experimentation in the studio meant that even this simple folk song was adorned with Harrison's hypnotic sitar, foreshadowing the spiralling psychedelia of Revolver the following year.

8. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967) 

Although Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band was pretty much Paul McCartney’s baby, John Lennon’s contributions (such as on the mesmerising A Day In The Life) were crucial to its artistic whole. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, in fact, with its surreal, almost nursery rhyme lyrics about “cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis” seemed to sum up the Summer Of Love all on its own.

Widely assumed to be a reference to LSD because of its title, true Beatle obsessives know that the song originated from a drawing Lennon’s son Julian made which he called 'Lucy - in the sky with diamonds.' John quickly latched on to the phrase and created his ultimate sonic daydream.

The track changes both meter and keys and features The Beatles playing a variety of instruments (tambura, Lowrey organ). Lennon would later rail against the heavy production values on Sgt Pepper, but he must have had a soft spot for this number as he guested on friend Elton John’s cover in 1974.

7. Jealous Guy (Imagine, 1971)

If you've seen the new Beatles: Get Back three-part film you'll be reminded of the fact that Jealous Guy began life in India in 1968 as Child Of Nature, following the same Maharishi Mahesh Yogi lecture that inspired Paul McCartney's Mother Nature's Son. But it's history with the Beatles actually goes back further to The White Album. 

While Mother Nature's Son made the cut for The White Album, Child Of Nature didn't, although Lennon continued to experiment with it well into the Get Back sessions. Following a complete lyrical rewrite, the song was eventually recorded as Jealous Guy and released on the Imagine solo LP in 1971.

Jealous Guy's apologetic lyric paints a picture of a reconstructed Lennon in stark contrast to the man who wrote "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man" in 1965.

6. Revolution (The White Album, 1968)

The B-side to Paul McCartney’s Hey Jude, John Lennon’s blistering Revolution formed what might be one half of rock’s greatest-ever single (with the closest contender being, ironically enough, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever).

Amid machine-gun-like distorted guitars and walloping drums, the song features Lennon firing off some of his most potent political salvos. As a flipside to Hey Jude, it’s a night-and-day dichotomy.

Originally, Lennon had wanted Revolution 1, the slower, horn-flavored version on The White Album, to be on the single, but McCartney and Harrison argued that it wasn’t worthy. Infuriated, and with everything to prove, Lennon gathered the band (along with Nicky Hopkins, who played electric piano) to cut this balls-out, uptempo single rendition, with guitars going direct into the recording console to the point of sonic overload (much to the dismay of engineer Geoff Emerick) creating that unforgettable fuzztone.

While the lyrics on Revolution 1 saw Lennon appearing to have it both ways - he sings “count me out/in,” when it came to destruction - on the rave-up single version, recorded just weeks later, he had apparently made up his mind, stating categorically that you could count him “out.”

5. Working Class Hero (John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1971) 

This stripped down moment from the Plastic Ono Band LP finds Lennon at his most Dylan-esque. While the mood echoes Masters Of War, Lennon's lyric has a timeless resonance that articulates the homogenisation of the working class individual better than any other pop songwriter either before or since.

"They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV / and you think you're so clever and classless and free / but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

4. I Am The Walrus (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967)

Recorded just four years after the release of Please Please Me, popular music's most original song drags the listener through the looking glass into a lysergic wonderland.

Playground rhymes, police sirens, nonsense imagery, Allen Ginsberg, acid, Lewis Carroll and the desire to write something that defies analysis - "Let the fuckers work that one out!" - all inform a song that would be astonishing even as a solo acoustic piece. Then there's the outrageous arrangement and production to consider; even when measured by the standards set by The Beatles in 1967, this is way, way out there.

3. Strawberry Fields Forever (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967)

If Hey Jude/Revolution might be pop's greatest ever single, we're going to go out on a limb and say that Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever is absolutely, categorically the high watermark for the pop single as art.

Like McCartney's glorious Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever finds its writer immersed in nostalgia for his Liverpool childhood. Typically, Lennon's reverie is more introspective and psychoanalytical, they key line here being "No-one I think is in my tree / I mean it must be high or low," which sees the author acknowledging both his own social dislocation and the proverbial fine line between genius and insanity.

In production terms, Strawberry Fields is a stone cold psychedelic masterpiece for which George Martin and Geoff Emerick deserve huge credit, with Martin's brass and cello score and Emerick's editing scissors and varispeed control helping to translate Lennon's lucid dream into sound.

2. Imagine (Imagine, 1971)

Dozens of songs become anthems, but only a hallowed few are elevated to the status of worldwide treasures. John Lennon’s elegant and spellbinding plea for a planet in which all people “can live as one” tops the latter category - and will remain there for as long as this thing called music exists.

Over a gracefully played piano, tracked at his home studio in Tittenhurst, England (the Imagine album would mark the last time Lennon recorded in the UK), he conjures up a Utopian ideal in which all borders - religious, economic and governmental - are abolished.

Backed by Klaus Voorman on bass and Alan White on drums, Imagine comes alive with the lush but never overbearing string arrangement of Phil Spector, the legendary ‘Wall Of Sound’ producer who helmed Lennon‘s stark 1970 Plastic Ono Band disc. Beyond its myriad musical charms, the most startling aspect of Imagine is the artist’s own self-assessment: "You may say I'm a dreamer / but I'm not the only one.“

Lennon was famous for insisting that he wasn’t anything special, but Imagine is the work of a major creative force operating at the zenith of his powers.

1. Happiness Is A Warm Gun (1968)

It was a close and hard-fought race. A Day In The Life might have been voted the greatest Beatles song, but votes for it were discounted on the basis of it being very much a group effort with McCartney penning the middle section. Meanwhile, Paul and John argued over who composed In My Life's heartbreaking melody. So, the winner of our poll turns out to be something of an underdog, but one hell of a tune all the same...

Coming in at the top spot is arguably one of Lennon’s darkest and most unorthodox recordings, but one which is endlessly fascinating, revealing new facets with each listen.

Its title inspired by the front cover of a gun magazine, the song was banned by the BBC for Lennon’s intriguing sexual wordplay. For years, fans believed the track contained references to drugs (specifically heroin, which Lennon was using at the time), but he denied that claim.

Musically, Happiness Is A Warm Gun is notable for its frequent shifts in time signature. Talk about progressive rock: in just under three minutes the song contains tempos of 4/4, 6/4, 6/8, 9/8, 7/4 - you name it; it never repeats itself. John Lennon might never have studied music formally, but he was capable of providing an education for millions. And give it up for Ringo, who keeps the beat steady throughout.

George Harrison's 10 greatest Beatles songs

While the fears that artificial intelligence was being used to create some kind of synthetic John Lennon were unfounded on the final Beatles recording Now And Then, AI can still be used to tinker with the 'what ifs' and it's now been put into action by musician Timmy Sean to help generate a version of the song as if The Beatles recorded it in 1964. It's impressive stuff.

The song is reimagined as an acoustic strummer with 12-string guitar from George Harrison, while Lennon and McCartney share vocals with the guitarist. This arrangement definitely has legs as a lost Beatles For Sale offcut, and all the music and vocals were recorded by a real musician before AI got involved.  

"This recording contains no samples of other recordings," says Timmy Sean. "The music and vocals were performed and recorded by a real live human, and then the lead vocals I sang were then run through AI filters to replicate the tones of Paul, John, and George’s voices."

Check it out above and follow more from Timmy Sean over on his YouTube channel. 

The discovery of flanging – that being the tape-phasing, jet plane, comb-filter effect – was widely attributed to The Beatles and George Martin. We say 'was' because we questioned the very history of the effect in this feature and think others should be given some credit. However a recently unearthed George Martin interview reveals a slightly odd version of these flanging events.

George Martin, of course, helped the Beatles make some of the most famous recordings ever committed to tape at Abbey Road studios. Together with engineers like Geoff Emerick, they famously explored all sorts of techniques including tape loops, backwards recording and multitrack recording. 

It was during the recording of Revolver and the track Tomorrow Never Knows that the Fab Four's innovative studio techniques reached something of a peak.

Emerick introduced a new way of recording John Lennon's voice through a Leslie cabinet for the famous lo-fi sounding vocals in the song. Meanwhile, maintenance engineer Ken Townsend inadvertently introduced a flanging effect on Lennon's vocal. He recorded two identical vocals together, with one slightly delayed through a second tape machine. 

This process is artificial double tracking or ADT and was used because Lennon hated recording his vocals twice. Hear the multiple vocal processes in full effect here.

The phasing and flanging effect of ADT was introduced if the speed of one of the tape machines was altered slightly. Lennon loved the effect so much he wanted to know how it worked. 

George Martin didn't want to bother explaining the real science behind the effect to Lennon so said, "we take the original image and split it through a double vibrocated sploshing flange with double negative feedback." Lennon understood Martin's joke but would later ask for 'Ken's flanger' whenever he wanted the phasing effect on his voice.

The term 'flange' stuck and has become the widely used name of the famous effect. However, in our earlier feature we revealed that (at least) two other musicians had recorded the effect previous to The Beatles.

One was on a track called The Big Hurt by Miss Toni Fisher, which was written by Wayne Shanklin in 1959. It was produced at Gold Star Studios with engineers Larry Levine and Stan Ross helping to record it on a 2-track tape machine. 

They realised that the required vocal they'd recorded was too low in volume so used a similar voice doubling technique. Larry recalled of the recording: "Wayne comes in and says 'I want to try something and that is to double her voice and the way to do that is to make a copy of this tape and play both tapes simultaneously'".

While trying to make the doubled-up recording, the tape machines ran out of sync as their speeds varied. This resulted in the flanging effect which Wayne loved, so it was kept on the final recording.

However there was an earlier, more subtle example of flanging. Electric guitar pioneer Les Paul was also something of a recording wizard and would invent various effects and sound on sound multitrack recording techniques.

Paul apparently came up with the phasing effect in the 1940s and 50s when he mixed two acetates together on variable speed record players. Again this was mixing two identical audio parts together and the speed of one slightly varying. 

You can hear the effects on the 1952 track Mammy's Boogie here.

As you can hear, it's pretty subtle and, forced into a conclusion and answering the question 'who invented flanging?' we opted to give the prize to Wayne as his use was more deliberate and more used as a dramatic recorded effect. 

But while Wayne might have (accidentally) created the effect, the naming of it, we agreed, had to be down to George Martin and john Lennon. Martin came up with the joke word, and Lennon kept on using it. 

However, a 1983 interview with George Martin in Home & Studio Recording puts an odd slant on the story. Martin still recounted the same story with Lennon as follows.

"So 'flange' was just another of our joke words," he said, "and when we first did ADT on John's voice and let him hear the result he thought it was absolutely marvellous, he came up and said 'fantastic, what you done, that's great and what do you call it?'. And I said to him, 'Oh, it's very simple, John, all we've done is taken the voice, split it in two, and added a double wiflocated sploshing flange'. Which was just a bit of gobbledegook. And he laughed and said after that 'well let's flange the voice again'."

(You might notice that in this version, Martin uses the word 'wiflocated' instead of 'vibrocated' but we're not splitting hairs.)

Martin then went on to reveal more… 

"I was quite surprised some years later to be working in America and have someone talk to me about flanging," he said. "I said 'where do you get that from', and he said 'I don't know, it's a way of treating the voice electronically with tape'. I said 'yes I know that but where did you get the word from', and he said 'well they get it from putting their finger on the flange of the thing.'" The thing being the tape reel to slow it down and create the effect. 

So what is strange is that Martin completely made up the name 'flange' as a joke, but that in the States the effect – possibly handed down from Wayne Shanklin or even Les Paul who both recorded in the country – was also called flanging. 

In the interview, Martin doesn't explain the coincidence and sounds perplexed because it sounds like the two sets of studio engineers were using the same term for the same effect in different countries unaware of the other's usage. Or it could be that his use of the word had become so widespread that it had reached the States and engineers had assumed the flange was part of the tape reel or machine.  

The latter option is the more likely, but either way, we're still going with Les Paul as the inventor, but Wayne as the first to popularise the effect. But as to who came up with the name, well that's just become a wiflocated and sploshing mystery. 

• Read more: "I said, 'I wish Sting was here', and they said 'He is, he’s here on holiday!'": Mark Knopfler, George Martin and more on 10 years, 70 albums, massive hit singles, a hurricane and a volcano – the incredible story of AIR Studios Montserrat

At 9:27pm on 29 August 1966, the four members of The Beatles walked on stage at Candlestick Park in San Francisco to play their last ever show in front of a paying audience. It was a cold, windy evening and fog shrouded the stadium, which was home to the San Francisco Giants. The Beatles were running late and the backstage area was rammed. 

“The dressing room was chaos,” the show’s compère, disc jockey ‘Emperor’ Gene Nelson of KYA 1260AM, said in Keith Badman’s The Beatles Off The Record. "There were loads of people there. The press tried to get passes for their kids and the singer Joan Baez was in there. Any local celebrity, who was in town, was in the dressing room. They were having a party."

The show was the last of 18 concerts on a 13-date tour of North America, with the band playing two gigs on some dates. The Beatles recognised the significance of the Candlestick Park concert and took steps to capture the moment. 

"Before one of the last numbers, we set up this camera on an amplifier," recalled George Harrison in The Beatles Off The Record, "Ringo came off the drums, and we stood with our backs to the audience and posed for a photograph, because we knew that was the last show."

• Paul McCartney on bass: "When we met Elvis, I was like, ‘You’re trying to learn bass, are you, son? Sit down, let me show you a few things’"

The decision to stop playing live was the culmination of a year in which their fame had taken a deeply malevolent turn. Protests, violence and death threats now impinged on their lives. 

The problems began on 29 July 1966, when an interview with John Lennon by UK journalist Maureen Cleave was republished in US teen magazine Datebook. "Christianity will go," declared Lennon. "It will vanish and shrink… We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity."

The comments provoked outrage among far right religious groups. Over 30 radio stations banned The Beatles from the airwaves and some stations in the Deep South staged mass burnings of Beatles records. The controversy spread to Mexico, Spain and South Africa, and the Vatican denounced Lennon’s comments. 

Brian Epstein flew to New York and hastily arranged a press conference at the Astor Tower Hotel in Chicago. According to Steve Turner’s book, Beatles ‘66: The Revolutionary Year, Lennon broke down in tears in front of Epstein and the band’s press officer Tony Barrow, while preparing to meet the reporters. 

“It had got dangerous,” recalled Paul McCartney in Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years. “And we were threatened. We knew we weren't being blasphemous, we weren’t anti-Jesus. In fact, we all had pretty religious upbringings, really, but you do see John as sort of a broken man, ‘cause he realised, he had to apologise. It was gonna be the only thing that would stop this. He's longing to break out of it, and do a joke, but he knows he can’t.”

For The Beatles, it was the beginning of an increasingly volatile period. At the end of June, after shows in Munich, Essen and their old stomping ground Hamburg, The Beatles flew to Japan, where they played five nights at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, a venue normally reserved for martial arts. They received death threats from far right groups who felt the venue’s spiritual status had been violated. 

But the troubles really started when they played two shows in the Philippines on 4 July 1966. After one of two shows at the Rizal Memorial football stadium in Manila, they unwittingly failed to attend a breakfast reception on 5 July hosted for them by the president’s wife, Imelda Marcos. 

“We put the TV on, and there was a horrific TV show of Madame Marcos screaming, ‘They’ve let me down!’” recalled Ringo Starr in the 1995 documentary project The Beatles Anthology. “There were all these shots with the cameraman focusing on empty plates and up into the little kids' faces, all crying because the Beatles hadn’t turned up.”

When road manager Mal Evans went down to the hotel reception, he found that all security and support from staff had been withdrawn, as had the police escort to whisk them to the airport. Epstein was forced to phone ahead and plead with the pilot of their KLM flight to delay take-off. 

A process of intimidation, instigated by Marcos officials, hampered them all the way. Taxi drivers suddenly seemed to forget how to get to the airport. 

When they did get there, all the escalators were turned off and The Beatles and Evans were jostled, punched and kicked. Once on board the plane, Paul McCartney recalled that “we were all kissing the seats”. After a stop-off in India, the Beatles returned to Heathrow on 8 July and spoke of their experience in an interview with ITN. 

“We got pushed around from one corner of the lounge to another, you know,” said McCartney. “And so they started knocking over our road managers and things, and everyone was falling all over the place.”

Ringo later described their ordeal in Manila as “the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me”.

The events in the Philippines prompted The Beatles to privately question Brian Epstein’s management of their tours. When told that Epstein was booking a tour for 1967, Lennon and Harrison said that the 1966 one would be their last. 

When asked by ITN what was next on the band’s schedule, George Harrison quipped: “We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans.”

The 1966 US tour began with two shows in Chicago on 12 August. Ticket sales were noticeably down on the previous year. Sales for their return to Shea Stadium were down to 45,000, which was 10,000 less than on their 1964 tour. At Candlestick Park, only 25,000 tickets were sold for the 42,500 capacity stadium, leaving whole sections of seating empty. 

The drop in ticket sales was partially attributed to the fallout from Lennon’s ‘We’re more popular than Jesus now’ comment. This was fresh in people’s minds when the band played two shows at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis on 19 August 1966. 

The radio boycotts, record burning and protests were still taking place. Six members of the Klu Klux Klan picketed outside the venue, dressed in full robes. In the middle of playing If I Needed Someone, an incident occurred that would help galvanise their decision to stop touring.  

“There had been threats to shoot us, the Klan were burning Beatle records outside and a lot of the crew-cut kids were joining in with them,” recalled John Lennon in 1974. “Somebody let off a firecracker onstage and every one of us – I think it’s on film – looked at each other, because each thought it was the other that had been shot. It was that bad.”

The tour was riddled with other mishaps. At Busch Memorial Stadium in St Louis on 21 August, heavy rain resulted in the band playing beneath a makeshift corrugated iron shelter. 

“It felt like the worst little gig we’d ever played at even before we’d started as a band,” said Paul McCartney in the 1995 documentary series The Beatles Anthology. “We were having to worry about the rain getting in the amps and this took us right back to the Cavern days – it was worse than those early days… 

“After the gig I remember us getting in a big, empty steel-lined wagon, like a removal van… We were sliding around trying to hold on to something, and at that moment everyone said, ‘Oh, this bloody touring lark – I’ve had it up to here, man’."

Until that moment, McCartney had been the one band member urging the others to keep playing live. "I’d been trying to say, ‘Ah, touring’s good and it keeps us sharp. We need touring, and musicians need to play. Keep music live’. I had held on to that attitude when there were doubts, but finally I agreed with them."

There was another reason to stop touring. The PA systems at venues such as Candlestick Park were little more than speaker address systems for announcing scores to the crowds attending baseball games. They were shrill, trebly and woefully inadequate for bands. 

Another factor was that The Beatles were increasingly unable to emulate the recordings they created in the studio. By the 1966 US tour, Paperback Writer was the only song from their latest album Revolver to make it into the set. Much of the set consisted of dated 12-bar covers such as Rock And Roll Music and Long Tall Sally, that they had been playing since the Cavern days. 

As The Beatles walked on stage on 29 August 1966, only Ringo had lingering doubts about stopping touring. “There was a big talk at Candlestick Park that this had to end,” he recalled. “John wanted to give up more than the others. He felt that he’d had enough. I never felt 100 per cent certain until we got back to London.”

After the show, the Beatles were rushed to the airport in an armoured car. They flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles, arriving at 12:50 am. At one point during the flight, Harrison was heard to say: “That’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”

Harrison had been the first to tire of Beatlemania. In a quote from Martin Scorsese’s 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World, George expanded on the group’s decision. 

“We’d been through every race riot, and every city we went to there was some kind of a jam going on, and police control, and people threatening to do this and that ... and [us] being confined to a little room or a plane or a car. We all had each other to dilute the stress, and the sense of humour was very important ... But there was a point where enough was enough.”

The 1968 animated film of Yellow Submarine is inextricably linked with the Beatles – not just their music but their imagination, ideas and identity. But, with the exception of one scene to meet a contractual obligation, the voices of the band featured in the film were provided by actors and not John, Paul, Ringo and George. It later emerged that John Lennon in particular was unsatisfied with the creative involvement the band had and not receiving credit for the ideas they had provided for the film.

YouTube channel Beatles Bible recently cast Lennon's views on the film in a stark light – using audio from The Lost Lennon Tapes radio series that features Lennon's 1980 interview with David Sheff for Playboy, he doesn't hold back when talking about the background to the exclusive song the Beatles provided for the film's soundtrack; Hey Bulldog. He described the people involved in the film as "gross animals" – with the exception of artist Alan Aldridge, who had first illustrated the Yellow Submarine in November 1966 following the Beatles' Revolver album.

Lennon accused the film's writer of "lifting all the ideas for the music out of our heads and not giving us any credit, like Eric Segal writing Lennon-esque lines straight from [Lennon's 1964 poetry and short stories book] In His Own Write-style".

"We had nothing to do with that movie," Lennon added, referencing contractual obligation to former American production and distribution company United Artists. "We sort of resented them… it was the third movie we owed these United Artists and Brian [Epstein, Beatles manager] had set it up and we had nothing to do with it."

The context may well have been the Lennon's growing dissatisfaction with the Beatles' involvement in film. Though the band clearly enjoyed 1964's A Hard Day's Night, Lennon was reportedly less enamored with the band's control over 1965's Help and 1967's The Magical Mystery Tour had been poorly received by critics and audiences, despite the success of its soundtrack.  

Lennon did enjoy the finished movie but noted where some of its characters had come from. "I like the movie, I like Heinz's [Edelmann, illustrator] artwork but they got all the ideas for the glove in the sky, and the thing that sucks people up was my idea. They said, 'Have you got any monsters?' and I said , 'Yeah there's Horace the vacuum cleaner in the swimming pool'. Which was a thing you could buy and it went round the pool sucking up the things. I said, 'That could be a monster'. They just took him…"

Lennon's pool monster creation features in Beatles Book Monthly, No. 52, Nov. 1967 - accompanying an article called John At Home, Part Two. 

Aside from his own score, the film's soundtrack features a host of Beatles favourites along with the title track. Hey Bulldog was noted in being a new song to Beatles fans that hadn't been released before. But Lennon seems slightly dismissive of it in the interview.

"It's a good-sounding record that means nothing – nice lick on the piano and all that." 

Though it's credited as a Lennon-McCartney song, Lennon described it as "me" in the Sheff interview, though it shares the distinction with McCartney's Lady Madonna as being a Beatles songs based around a piano riff. 

"I remember Hey Bulldog as being one of John’s songs and I helped him finish it off in the studio, but it’s mainly his vibe," noted McCartney in Barry Miles's book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. "There’s a little rap at the end between John and I, we went into a crazy little thing at the end."

Hey Bulldog was recorded during what was supposed to be a filming session for the Beatles' promo video for the 1968 Lady Madonna single, which would be backed by Harrison's The Inner Light as the b-side. This explains why a video exists of the song – the Lady Madonna camera crew remained in the studio filming as the Lennon and McCartney worked on Hey Bulldog. But the footage captured that day would remain lost for 30 years. 

"On February 11, they recorded Hey Bulldog at Abbey Road, while I filmed the entire process", remembered friend of the band Tony Bramwell in his book Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With The Beatles. "We didn’t need any promo material for Bulldog, but Paul had also recorded Lady Madonna, the song he had written in memory of his mother, which did need some promotional film. I cut the Bulldog shoot, using the bits of the lads playing and sitting about in the studio, and we used that. Then it vanished, completely disappeared. 

"We thought it had been stolen, as things often were if not nailed down. Over thirty years later, in August 1999, my original film was rediscovered and used with a reissue of Bulldog to go with the revamped digital version of Yellow Submarine." And you can see that footage above. 

Lennon had originally titled the song 'Hey Bullfrog" and reportedly got its name when Paul McCartney tried to make Lennon laugh by barking like a dog during the recording of the song's basic track. This new title appears in the outro's vocals and producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick left McCartney's barking in, alongside shouting and screaming noises from the two songwriters. 

"That was a really fun song," Emerick recalled to Mark Lewis for The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. "We were all into sound texture in those days and during the mixing we put ADT on one of the ‘What did he say? Woof woof’ bits near the end of the song. It came out really well."

The song's tenth take was decided to be the best, with George Harrison adding a distorted intro with his SG, later borrowed by Lennon to track the solo. 

Emerick was especially impressed with McCartney's bass playing on the song, and he would cite it as one of the Beatles' final true group efforts in the studio with equal musical contributions. Days after they would fly to India to study meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 

Along with the Beatles' other songs from the soundtrack, in 1999 it would be one of the first times the band's music had been remixed, completed by Peter Cobbin at Abbey Road Studios using the original multitrack tape and released as the Yellow Submarine Songtrack. Only Sgt Pepper cut A Day In The Life is absent – it was used in the film but never appeared on the musical soundtrack release.