Truly, it sounds like something from a dream. Beatles fans who were on the official Magical Mystery Tour bus around Liverpool on Monday got a whole lot more than they bargained for when, on one excursion, their bus pulled up at the traffic lights next to the one and only Paul McCartney.

Macca was in the back of a vehicle, chatting away on his phone to someone on FaceTime, and wouldn't you know it – it was Ringo Starr.

Don’t try working out the odds of that exact sequence of events happening – we'll just say that they're probably very high indeed.

Interviewed by the BBC, the driver of the Magical Mystery Tour bus, Neil Morton, described the moment as “surreal… I had pulled up at the traffic lights on Hope Street when who should I see - Sir Paul with Ringo on FaceTime.

"He waved to us and everybody took photos. The passengers could not believe it."

Needless to say, the encounter was as brief as the time the lights stayed on red. "Nobody really got chance to speak with him," said Morton, who has worked on the Magical Mystery Tour bus for two years. But those photos are proof enough for punters to explain to their family, friends and acquaintances that yes, this really did happen – they went to Liverpool and met the Beatles. (Kind of.)

That’s exactly what Breno Augusto, a Beatles fan from Portugal did. Posting on Twitter/ X afterwards, he wrote: “Imagine exploring Liverpool aboard the Magical Mystery Tour bus -(on Monday) – when, just when you least expect it, you glance at a car and see Paul McCartney inside, chatting with Ringo Starr!!!!”

McCartney was back in town to present an award to the actor Stephen Graham at the Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts (LIPA), which he co-founded back in the 1990s.

The Magical Mystery Tour is, as you might expect from its name, a tour bus that takes tourists around all the main Beatles sites in the city – The Cavern, John and Paul’s childhood houses, Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, the whole shebang. Any sighting of an actual Beatle is an added, completely unexpected extra...

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

Paul McCartney has revealed a few more details about his upcoming duet with Ringo Starr.

It’s called Home To Us and will be featured on Macca’s new album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, which arrives at the end of this month. Interestingly, it also features Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas on backing vocals. And it’s out as a single this coming Friday (May 8).

The track was played – along with others from the new album – at a special fan playback event last night (May 5) at Abbey Road. McCartney was there in person and said of Home To Us: “Ringo went round to the studio and drummed a bit. I said to Andrew (Watt, producer), we should make a track and send it to him. So this song is done totally with Ringo in mind.”

“In writing the song, I’m talking about where we came from. In common with a lot of people, you come from nothing and you build yourself up.

"Ringo was from the Dingle, and that was well hard. He said he used to get mugged coming home, because he worked. Even though it was crazy, it was home to us,” he added.

“I made the song around that idea and sent it to Ringo. He sent me back a version where he just added some lines to the chorus, so I thought, maybe he doesn’t like it. I rang him and he said he thought I only wanted him to sing one or two lines, and I said I’d love to hear him sing the whole thing. So we took my first line, Ringo’s second line, and then we had a duet.”

“We’d never done that before. Then we wanted some backing vocals and I had the idea it would be nice to hear girls. Chrissie Hynde said she’d do it, and Sharleen Spiteri, they’re mates. So they did it.”

However, despite what you may read, it is not the first time the two surviving Beatles have duetted on a track before. Hardcore fans will know that back in 2010 they sang together on Walk With You, a rather sweet song on Ringo’s Y Not album. Going further back, Ringo also provided some backing vocals on Beautiful Night, one of the singles from Paul’s 1997 album, Flaming Pie. He appeared in the video too.

Anyway, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, which McCartney described at the event last night as his “most introspective album to date” is out on May 29.

Ringo Starr has a new album out this week – Long Long Road – and he went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show last night to promote it.

The ex-Beatle trotted out onto the set, looking slim, stylish, and more agile than an 85-year-old has any right to be, and, of course, was hit by a wave of audience affection commensurate with his status as a living piece of shared cultural history.

What do you ask the most famous drummer in the world that he hasn’t been asked fourteen thousand times already? Incredibly, Kimmel found a few things.

When was the last time Ringo was asked to show ID to prove he is who he is? Incredibly, “two tours ago,” he said. “We were touring America, and I didn’t bring my passport or anything, and we got to one airport and they wanted identification.” The drummer simply said to ask any passing punter. “And all these people said ‘IT’S RINGO!!!!’”

Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for the officials in charge, though in the end, they let Ringo on. “They said ‘we’re going to let you on the plane but you’re going to have to be sniffed by the dog. So the dog sniffed me and I got on the plane.”

Aside from his new album, he’s also on a track on the new McCartney album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, which is out in late May. It’s a duet between the two old pals, which was started when Ringo jammed with Andrew Watt at the producer’s studio. “Paul got the song and then put everything else on it. So it was like in reverse – the drums were on first. But it’s really great. It’s amusing, and it’s very real, cos that’s where we come from.”

Kimmel also asked about the upcoming Sam Mendes Beatles biopics. Last year, Ringo met up with Mendes and corrected a couple of things in the script, as well as Barry Keoghan who plays him. “I think he’ll do a really good job,” he said of Keoghan, before adding: “You know the thing I really had to do? I was looking at it like it was a documentary and once I finally said, ‘it’s not a documentary, it’s a film, I could relax.”

As for Long Long Road, it’s another country album after last year’s Look Up and Beaucoups Of Blues from 1970. At a time in life when most artists – most people in general – slow down, Ringo appears to be speeding up: it’s his tenth album of the 21^st Century.

Jack White joined Ringo Starr on stage for a version of With A Little Help From My Friends over the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ringo was performing with his All Starr Band at the Bourbon and Beyond festival that White had played earlier on the same day. For the encore, the White Stripes man scrambled on stage and, together with Starr’s bandmates - Patrick Keeler, Bobby Emmett and Dominic Davis - provided the familiar ‘do you need anybody’ backing vocals Lennon and McCartney sang in the original. There’s also a bit of half-hearted tambourine action from White.

Meanwhile, Ringo can be seen jigging up and down, jumping about and looking in incredible shape for a man who turned 85 in July.

The song was the last of Ringo’s set. “I want to thank everyone for joining me on stage this evening,” he said at the end. “It’s been really great. Thanks for being a great audience. Remember the music. Peace and love! I love you all.”

White wasn’t the only guest star during the show. Starr also brought on Steve Lukather of Toto fame, Colin May of Men At Work and Hamish Stuart from Scottish funk legends The Average White Band and being the generous soul that he is, Ringo allowed them to play some of their signature hits - Rosanna and Hold The Line (both Toto), Down Under and Who Can It Be Now? (both Men At Work) and the AWB’s ageless classic Pick Up The Pieces.

Ringo Starr celebrated his 85th birthday last week and gave an interview to The Sessions Panel in which he recalled the proudest moment of his illustrious career with The Beatles.

It came, he says, during the recording of their debut album, Please Please Me. "We made a record,” he said. “And I went through hell personally, because George Martin had this Andy White session drummer. Anyway, he didn't know they changed drummers, and I was coming. I made him apologise every day."

The incident Ringo is referring to was the Love Me Do session. Pete Best had been evicted from behind the kit just weeks previously and Martin, unsure at that stage about Ringo’s ability, employed a session drummer, White, to play on the band’s debut single. Even more than six decades later, he clearly still feels the slight.

Martin, though, apologised, and was from then on always effusive about Ringo’s abilities. "Yeah, and I've got a lot of footage of George. He had that great line, he said, 'You know, and the Beatles did this,' and somebody said to him, 'Did you have a click track?' He said, 'Yes, we did. Ringo, his name was.'"

To this day, Ringo is very much proud of this. Indeed, later in the interview he reflects that: "God gave me just great time. Jeff Lynne - they did a documentary on him. Jeff would call me over, 'Could you play on this track?' because we live close, and I'd go over, and he'd say, 'Oh, just let me get the click.' I said, 'Jeff, I am the damn click."

He revealed he doesn’t know how he developed that distinctive Ringo ‘feel’. “It's been asked a million times. I don't know how I got to [play like] that. It just happened. And a lot of the way I play [it] just happens. I'll keep the time and play rock or shuffle or whatever, and then I'll come in wherever I come in, because you feel it from your heart.”

Ringo Starr has apparently already had a word with Sam Mendes and caused some rewriting to the upcoming Beatles’ biopics.

The director met his subject recently and over two days the pair worked on the scripts for the drummer’s individual movie, which like the others, is due to hit cinemas in April 2028.

According to the New York Times, Ringo “offered extensive notes” to Mendes to make sure that the movie provides an accurate portrayal of his early life and his first marriage to Maureen Starkey.

“He had a writer - very good writer, great reputation, and he wrote it great, but it had nothing to do with Maureen and I,” says Starr. “That’s not how we were. I’d say, ‘We would never do that.’”

Nevertheless, both Ringo and Mendes are now said to be satisfied with the rewrite. “He’ll do what he’s doing,” Starr said of the director, “and I’ll send him peace and love.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9hszVbIoRg

Elsewhere in the New York Times interview, the drummer, who turns 85 this coming Monday, says he still feels like he’s in his 20s when he looks in the mirror.

"It blows me away,” he reflects. “I look in the mirror and I'm 24. I never got older than 24," he told the NYT, adding to himself, "But guess what? You did."

There’s no doubt Ringo does look good for a man in his mid 80s, but 24? Come on.

Anyway, he puts it all down to a lifetime playing drums: "I love what I'm doing. When I first started... my mother would come to the gigs. She would always say, 'You know, son, I always feel you're at your happiest when you're playing your drums’. So she noticed. And I do."

Barry Keoghan, the actor who is set to play Ringo in Sam Mendes’ forthcoming set of Beatles biopics, has revealed that he met the man himself and has seen his drumming technique up close.

Appearing on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Keoghan – looking impossibly boyish, even at 32 - talked about the encounter.

“I met him at his house and he played the drums for me. He asked me to play but I wasn’t playing the drums for Ringo.” The actor intimated that he was just too nervous. So nervous, in fact, that he even couldn’t look Ringo in the eye.

“It was one of those moments when you’re in awe,” Keoghan said. “(I) just froze.”

Inevitably, being an actor and aware of the huge role that he has coming up, Keoghan was observing the 84-year-old Beatle and inwardly absorbing.

“I was and I said that to him. My job is to observe and take in the mannerisms and study him. But I want to humanise him and bring feelings to it, not just imitate.

“But he was just lovely,” Keoghan told Kimmel. “(We) just sat in the garden chatting away.”

Keoghan was the first of Mendes’s fab four to be cast. Indeed, Ringo himself broke the news last year, saying of Keoghan to Entertainment Tonight: “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many.”

The other actors were confirmed last month at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas. Paul Mescal, who starred in Gladiator II and All Of Us Strangers is yer man McCartney; Joseph Quinn, who you might have seen in Stranger Things, is George; and Harris Dickinson follows in a long line of actors who’ve played John Lennon.

All four movies are all currently pencilled in for April 2028. "I just felt the story of the band was too huge to fit into a single movie, and that turning it into a TV mini-series just somehow didn't feel right,” offered Mendes at CinemaCon as an explanation for the one-film-per-Beatle gambit.

"Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys. They intersect in different ways - sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history."

Ringo Starr releases a new album this week. Look Up is his first for six years and his first to reflect his long-held love of country since way back in 1970, when he cut Beaucoups Of Blues in Nashville.

In a new interview with the Sunday Times, the 84-year-old ex-Beatle has been talking country, his voice and perils of playing new tracks live when you have a much-loved back catalogue at your disposal.

“Country’s been good to me,” he said. “I keep saying Liverpool was the capital of country music. In the streets I lived in every other house had some 18 to 25-year-old who was in the ‘merch’ [ie, the merchant navy]. And you could always tell those kids - there’d be a camel saddle in the living room because they’d been to Egypt. But they also went to America and came back with all the records, so we were getting them before everyone else.”

Much of Look Up is written by T Bone Burnett, who is also interviewed and made some interesting observations about the veteran drummer. “The Beatles started as a skiffle band, as a folk music outfit," he said. "But when Ringo joined them, he was the electricity underneath them. I don’t think they were the Beatles before Ringo joined them. And he was the biggest country fan. George Harrison also was very smitten. He played big-string rock’n’roll on a Gretsch Country Gentleman, which is very much a hillbilly guitar. It’s not a rock guitar. He’s certainly not a rock player, and neither is Ringo. They’re both swing musicians.”

He continued: “For me, rock’n’roll and country are all really woven together. Rock started later at some point. But Ringo, almost everything he did with the Beatles was country. Matchbox, Honey Don’t, What Goes On, Ask Me Why, Act Naturally, even Octopus’s Garden.”

The interviewer also broached the subject of Ringo’s voice; never, it must be said, the most mellifluous of instruments: “I always wanted to be someone else, like Jerry Lee or someone,” he admits. “I mean, I can hold a tune, as long as it’s in my key. And it just worked out with the Beatles because John and Paul were great writers. That’s what made us. And I’d get one song. And a couple of them were really good, you know, With a Little Help from My Friends and Yellow Submarine. They’re still huge and I still do them on tour.”

Ringo is back touring with his All Starr band this summer and revealed that there won’t be too much of the new album in his sets: “In the late '90s, I would put in, like, two or three from the new album, and you could feel the room empty. It happens to everybody.” Indeed he remembers being in the crowd when it happened to Elton John at Wembley in 1975. “I was with his mother. He came on and said, ‘I’m only going to do the new album.’ Me and his mother left after three tracks because we didn’t know them."

Even at the age of 82, Sir Paul McCartney has a work rate that would put many men half his age to shame.

The ex-Beatle has only just wrapped up his mammoth two year Got Back tour, which finished up with two nights a piece in Manchester and London’s O2. After such a physically demanding undertaking, the thoughts of most octogenarians would be turning towards pottering about in the garden or spending more time with the grandkids. Not Paul, whose mind is already on a new album.

The news came via a Q&A with fans on his official website over the weekend. One fan asked if he had any resolutions for 2025, to which Macca replied: "Here's one: finish an album! I've been working on a lot of songs and have had to put it to the side because of the tour. So, I'm hoping to get back into that and finish up a lot of these songs. So, how's about that? 'My New Year's resolution is to finish a new album!' How about that for a teaser? You can do it, Paul!"

He hasn’t made a new record since 2020’s McCartney III, although there was an ‘Imagined’ version of the same record that came out the following year, which included remixes, covers and features from an array of other artists including Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age, Beck and Phoebe Bridgers.

McCartney’s date at the O2 last Thursday was notable for an onstage reunion with his old bandmate Ringo Starr – the first time the two surviving Beatles have performed together in five years. They played the reprise version of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter, and predictably brought the house down.

Ronnie Wood turned up to play on Get Back, with Macca wheeling out a Hofner 500/1 bass he hasn’t played for 50 years since it was stolen. The instrument – which went missing from a van in Ladbroke Grove in 1972 - turned up last year in a loft in Hastings, with McCartney reputedly paying a six figure sum for its return.

Paul McCartney brought the curtain down on his epic Got Back 2024 Tour in style, welcoming fellow Beatle Ringo Starr to the stage, and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, and finally fulfilling the dream of the Lost Bass Project by playing his original Höfner 500/1 bass guitar onstage for the first time in 50 years.

“We’ve been looking for it for 50 years, well, I got it back!” said McCartney, addressing the crowd at London’s O2 Arena. “And here to make its first stage appearance in 50 years... is my original bass! I haven’t played it in 50 years.”

Why so long? The bass, the one that started it all, was stolen out of the back of a van in west London, 1972.

McCartney has had many other Höfner basses in that time, but there is nothing quite like the original, the violin-style four-string that he used to change the face of popular music, recording tracks such as Love Me Do, She Loves You and I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

Decades on, and with the help of the internet, a campaign was launched to reunite Macca with his instrument. The Lost Bass Project took the search global, and it paid off. In September last year, it was found in a house in Sussex.

It had been in the attic all along. The BBC reported that the bass was originally stolen in Ladbroke Grove, before being sold to a pub landlord. After it was found it was authenticated by Höfner and McCartney, he was reunited with the bass in February.

McCartney’s OG Höfner is one of the greatest value purchases in the history of popular music – maybe only Nile Rodgers and his Hit-Maker Stratocaster could rival it. McCartney picked it up in Germany for just £30 while the Beatles were making their bones in their Hamburg era.

“I found a nice little shop in the centre of Hamburg, near a big department store called Karstadt,” said McCartney, speaking with Tony Bacon in 1994. “And I saw this bass in the window, this violin-shaped Höfner. It was a good price, because my dad had always said I shouldn’t do the never-never [buy on credit], but we were earning reasonable money. I liked the Höfner’s lightness, too. So I bought it, and I think it was only about 30 quid.”

Last night it was paying off some more of that £30. McCartney looks a little surprised that it worked when he plugged it in (a bit of theatre; he knows it’s going to be okay), and it had lost known of its power during a hectic performance of Get Back, with Ronnie Wood on guitar.

For Beatles fans, however, the best was saved for last, with McCartney welcoming Starr to the stage for an encore of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and White Album classic Helter Skelter.

He closed the set out with three Beatles classics: Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End.

It was always going to be an emotional night, but Paul McCartney's Got Back tour finale at London's O2 Arena packed more surprises in than most. Not least the astonishing arrival of ANOTHER Beatle - with Ringo Starr stepping on stage to join Paul to perform an encore for the ages.

Paul's final night at The O2 had already been a rollercoaster, from a stunning assortment of Macca's solo, Wings and The Beatles' most beloved tracks, alongside some unexpected shocks. Prior to a bravura performance of Get Back, Paul welcomed The Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood to the stage, to let forth some scintillating licks amid the Beatles' blues-rock classic.

Then there was the moment a pyrotechnic went off slightly early during the incendiary Live and Let Die, capturing everyone by surprise - not least Sir Paul. "It's too loud!" he complained to the crowd afterwards. Or the heartwarming children's choir Paul had assembled to help him belt out Christmas classic, Wonderful Christmastime

But, it was following a magisterial, life-affirming performance of crowd-galvaniser Hey Jude that Paul returned for an encore. The 20,000-capacity venue's collective jaws dropped as McCartney let the cat out of the bag; “We’ve got another surprise for you. Bring to the stage the mighty, the one and only Mr Ringo Starr.”

And, then Ringo arrived - alongside his own drum kit - wheeled into position at the right of Paul. "I've had a great night tonight!" Ringo announced to the crowd, before asking "How about you?"

Paul asked his former bandmate the question that everyone was eagerly anticipating “Should we rock?" Macca then lapsed into his native Scouse, ordering Starr to "Get on your kit lah!"

And boom, the pair dove headlong into a kinetic performance of 1967's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (Reprise), before gear-switching into a savage take on proto-metal monolith, Helter Skelter.

The astonishing reunion was captured by numerous fans, including the video we've shared above from user 71lox (we were in attendance, but our own videos/pics are somewhat further back!)

Following this finger-blistering performance, Ringo waved farewell to the crowd - still blown away at the sight of the surviving Beatles on stage together.

"I'm off now but I've had a great night, love you all - especially this man" Starr said, gesturing to his fellow Beatle. As Ringo left the stage, Paul said to the crowd, "It’s fantastic, playing with me old mate, but there comes a time when we’ve got to go home."

But, while some might be anticipating that the end of this huge 59-date tour, which officially started way back in 2022 might be the 82-year-old's last, Sir Paul was keen to allay any fears, "All that remains to be said is - see you next time!”

Magic.

You’d think Ringo Starr has done everything and achieved all he could possibly want in his incredible life. Not so, it seems. The drummer really wants one more Grammy for the supposedly ‘last’ Beatles track, Now And Then.

In an interview with Music Week, Ringo admitted: “I’d love to win a Grammy. That’s the business I’m in – and the track is good. The last track ever by the boys. We tried it in the ’90s when we got Free As A Bird out, but we didn’t take much interest because it didn’t sound like John, and George got a bit fed up.

"He didn’t want to do a third one and so we just put it to bed, but now they’ve got better equipment. They lifted John’s voice off a cassette, for God’s sake – off a cassette! And it was like John was suddenly in town.”

The genesis of the track is now well known: “He (Paul) said, ‘You know that track we did? Well, I’ll put it together. Are you going to play drums on it?’ I said, ‘Sure, send the files over.’ That’s how we do it now – and I put the drums on and sang on the chorus.”

"He did a great job. He put the strings on and the lead guitar that gave the track its emotion, I feel. So anyway, it worked out really great and let’s hope for a Grammy. We’ll see; a lot of people are up for Grammys.”

Now And Then drew much praise when it was released in November 2023. Lennon sounded more alive, unlike the ghostly presence he was on the 1995 ‘new’ Beatles track Free As A Bird. And it provided the band with an eighteenth UK Number One, their first since The Ballad Of John And Yoko in 1969.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ringo spoke about AI: “We’re all a bit afraid of it, because it can steal you. If they just play any five of my songs into the computer, AI gets all of it and knows my every vocal move. They can have me sing anything and it will sound like me, because it’s taken from my personality. But the good side is the way we used it on Now And Then. God knows where it’s going to go. We’re all worrying about it, but nobody’s really stolen anything yet.”

Ringo is gearing up for the release of a new album early next year. Look Up is his first new record since the pandemic and his first in the country vein since Beaucoups Of Blues in 1970. The album came about after the 84 year old met T Bone Burnett at an event held by Olivia Harrison in LA in 2022. The pair got chatting, Ringo asked Burnett to write him a song and the producer not only came up with nine, but also agreed to produce the new album.

Ringo Starr knows who is going to play him in Sam Mendes’ upcoming series of Beatles biopics. Apparently, it’s Barry Keoghan, who is best known for his roles in The Banshees Of Inisherin and Saltburn.

The information was blurted out in an interview the 84-year-old drummer gave to Entertainment Tonight. When Keoghan’s name was mentioned (the actor has previously been rumoured to be playing John Lennon in Mendes’ project), Ringo said “I think it’s great. I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many.”

The film won’t be released until 2027. As confirmed earlier this year, Mendes has taken on the immense task of telling a story everybody (at least in the UK) thinks they know backwards, but is approaching it from four different angles. So each Beatle will get his own biopic and all will be out in three years’ time, which will mark the 70th anniversary of Lennon and McCartney’s first meeting.

None of the other main roles have so far been cast. There are rumours that Paul Mescal, currently to be seen in Gladiator II, will play Paul McCartney. The actor recently told GQ magazine: “I would love to be involved, but there’s nothing set in stone.”

There’s speculation, too, that Harris Dickinson may get the Lennon role. “There’s nothing I can say about that,” the Triangle of Sadness actor stonewalled when recently interviewed by Dazed And Confused. “It might not be true, it might be, I don’t know... there’s a speculation culture.”

The films have got the official thumbs-up from McCartney and Starr as well as the estates of their fallen bandmates. So the music rights are all sorted. You’re still left to wonder: what could there possibly be left to tell, what fresh angle to pursue about four men whose music and lives have been pored over endlessly for over sixty years now?

During their years as an active band, the Beatles made five feature films. Since their dissolution in 1970 there have no fewer than 18 biopics made about individual band members, and dozens and dozens of documentaries, the most recent of which - the Martin Scorsese/ David Tedeschi project Beatles ‘64, which focuses on their breakthrough year in the US - starts airing tomorrow on Disney+. So there’s a lot for Mendes to compete against, and that’s without taking into consideration what many (including at least two of the actual group) consider to be the greatest Beatles biopic that never was: Eric Idle’s retelling of the story as The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash.

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

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

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...

The Police’s Stewart Copeland has re-issued a deluxe edition of his debut solo album, Klark Kent, an in promotion recently sat down Wired to take part in its regular ‘Tech Support’ interview, where subjects respond to questions from social media.

In doing so, Copeland took the time to explain multiple areas of his drumming style, including why he plays using traditional grip. He also picks the most difficult Police song to play on drums (Spirits in the Material World), as well as naming some of his favourite reggae drumming moments (Lively Up Yourself by Bob Marley and The Wailers, and The Israelites by Desmond Decker).

However, one Twitter (X) user asked Copeland to name the best drummer he’d ever seen live. Without hesitation, Copeland went straight for Buddy Rich — who he’d also name-checked via Rich’s ‘Sister Sadie’ for his response to the most difficult piece of drumming ever — with Mitch Mitchell a close second. 

However, Copeland elaborated on the answer by giving a nod to the more modern end of metal, picking Joey Jordison as a phenom of the kit.

Now, on the younger end of it” he says, “I would say Joey Jordison, sadly departed with Slipknot. That little bastard had chops! You know, kids these days, they start out where we left off. It’s like the Olympics where every year they can jump a little higher, run a little faster. 

“How is that possible? Has the human species evolved in one year? I don’t know, but Joey Jordison [was] doing things with his feet that I aspire to with my hands.”

He goes on to offer tips on tuning the kit, saying that his higher tension on the heads is key to being heard in a busy mix. 

“I tend to go by tuning them up. A little word of advice for bands is when you’re doing your soundcheck and [the toms] sound huge by themselves, but as soon as the band kicks in they disappear…

“By tuning them higher, they may sound a little rinky-dinky without the rest of the band, but as soon as the other music fills in, they cut through.”

Elsewhere, Copeland was asked "Was Ringo any good", to which he went into detail as to why Ringo's groove and inventive approach to orchestration behind the kit absolutely meant he was one of the all-time greats. 

He offered the three versions of The Beatles Love Me Do as a reference for how important Ringo's feel was to the overall sound of the band, adding that he feels the Pete Best version, "Ain't The Beatles", and Andy White's take removes the song's personality. "As you listen, you realise that the charisma isn't on the drum set anymore. That's just some session guy." 

Summarising, Copeland says "[Ringo] was a very good drummer who had an excellent sense of groove. He was imaginative in the way he used drums in a pop song."

Stewart Copeland, Klark Kent Deluxe Edition is available now as 2LP, 2CD physical releases and via digital streaming platforms.

6 September 1968 wasn't memorable for everyone involved in the recording of the Beatles' White Album. 

When we quizzed him for details on the session earlier this year, engineer Ken Scott demurred "I was at the session, but It was just another day at the office so it didn't mean anything at the time. 

"It's become part of history, but I don't remember anything about it. Chris Thomas, who was George Martin's assistant, remembers nothing about it. John Smith, my assistant engineer, remembers nothing about it." 

Luckily, George Harrison himself is on record with better recall of the day he drafted in Eric Clapton to put the gloss on one of his key Beatles tracks, While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

In the Beatles Anthology, Harrison recalls the song's birth as an exercise in randomness: "I was thinking about the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes… The Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be, and that there’s no such thing as coincidence. Every little item that’s going down has a purpose.

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps was a simple study based on that theory. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw ‘gently weeps’, then laid the book down again and started the song."

Not untypically, it seems John Lennon and Paul McCartney weren't overly enthusiastic when recording - the Beatles' first on 8-track - commenced in earnest in September 1968. "I'll tell you, I worked on that song with John, Paul and Ringo one day, and they were not interested in it at all."

"We tried to record it, but John and Paul were so used to just cranking out their tunes that it was very difficult at times to get serious and record one of mine. It wasn’t happening. 

"They weren’t taking it seriously and I don’t think they were even all playing on it, and so I went home that night thinking, ‘Well, that’s a shame,’ because I knew the song was pretty good."

So, a full day's labour at EMI Studio 2 on 5 September ended with 44 half-hearted takes in the can (including 17 earlier passes), and George still unhappy with his own attempts at a solo. 

Engineer Brian Gibson says in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, "George particularly wanted to get the sound of a crying guitar but he didn't want to use a wah-wah pedal, so he was experimenting with a backwards guitar solo. 

"We spent a long night trying to get it to work but in the end the whole thing was scrapped and it was around that time that Eric Clapton started to get involved with the song."

Indeed, it was the very next day that Harrison called in back-up in the form of friend Eric Clapton, both to sort out the troublesome solo and to bring Lennon and McCartney to heel for one last push on the track.

"The next day, I was with Eric, and I was going into the session, and I said, “We're going to do this song. Come on and play on it,” he told Guitar Player in 1987.

"He said, “Oh, no. I can't do that. Nobody ever plays on the Beatles records.”

"I said, “Look, it's my song, and I want you to play on it.

"So Eric came in and the other guys were as good as gold, because he was there. Also, it left me free to just play the rhythm and do the vocal."

In Anthology, Harrison says, "So he came in. I said, ‘Eric’s going to play on this one,’ and it was good because that then made everyone act better. Paul got on the piano and played a nice intro and they all took it more seriously."

"It left me free to just play the rhythm and do the vocal. So Eric played, and I thought it was really good," Harrison remembers.

But one last layer of polish was required. "We listened to it back and he said, “Ah, there's a problem though. It's not Beatle-y enough” – so we put it through the ADT to wobble it a bit."

Harrison would later say, “What happened when Eric was there on that day, and later on when Billy Preston  - I pulled in Billy Preston on Let It Be - it helped. Because the others would have to control themselves a bit more. John and Paul mainly because they had to, you know, act more handsomely.”

Clapton himself hasn't discussed the session much over the years, but did say "I knew George was happy, because he listened to it over and over in the control room."

Job very much done.

BONUS: Just because it's always worth a watch

Acclaimed American musician and synth aficionado Gary Wright has died at the age of 80, it’s been confirmed.

Best known for his ‘70s hits Love Is Alive and Dream Weaver - the latter of which he re-recorded for use in 1992 movie Wayne’s World - Wright began his career in ‘60s British blues-rock band Spooky Tooth, before releasing his debut solo album, Extraction, in 1970.

Wright was also a close collaborator of George Harrison, playing piano on the ex-Beatle’s All Things Must Pass album in 1970 and all of his subsequent releases for the next decade.

Spooky Tooth reformed in 1972, but it was three years later, after the band had split again, that Wright scored his biggest success. The Dream Weaver, his third album, was created almost entirely with keyboards and a drum machine, and yielded big US hits in the form of the (almost) title track and Love Is Alive.

More solo albums followed, and Wright also turned his hand to film soundtracks in the ‘80s. A spot in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band put another Beatle-shaped feather in his cap, and his Wayne’s World contribution helped to introduce Wright’s music to a new generation of listeners..

Justin Wright, Gary’s son, told TMZ that his father died on Monday morning at his home in California. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia for several years.

Gregg Bissonette has not only lived the drummer’s dream, with a long and successful career as a sideman to huge names such as David Lee Roth, Andy Summers, Steve Lukather, Joe Satriani and more, but he continues to live it by fulfilling the role as his favourite drummer’s drummer in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr band.

Bissonette — a musical sponge who is known for his ability to authentically turn his hand to pretty much any style of music thrown in his direction — has backed Ringo since performing double-drums with the former-Beatle in 2003, and recently took to YouTube with a 20-minute video explaining why Ringo is his favourite drummer.

“Who would have known — I sure wouldn’t have known — that in 2003 I would start getting to play double drums with Ringo!” he reflects at the start of the video. “I’ve learned so much getting to play double drums with him. I’ve got this bird’s-eye view and i can see his bass drum, and his hands so well. 

"My goal is to lock in with my favourite drummer. He’s my favourite drummer for many reasons. He’s got the most amazing swing to his playing, he’s got the most amazing dynamics.”

Gregg goes on to highlight some examples, pinpointing the iconic beat and various sextuplet, double-stopped and flam fills from Ticket to Ride. 

He continues by exploring Ringo’s floor-tom-riding groove from She Loves You, his hypnotic beat from Tomorrow Never Knows (including the Anthology II version), and recounts how Ringo once demonstrated the correct way to play TNK without breaking the flow of the ride cymbal.

Key to Ringo’s ‘song-drummer’ style is his awareness of the vocals and melody, and Bissonette uses Drive My Car as an example of Ringo’s attention to these details, demonstrating how he mirrors the rhythm of the vocal melody.

Also included in Bissonette’s breakdown are In My Life, Here Comes the Sun, Come Together (complete with tea-towels) and his “favourite eight bars in music”, Ringo’s solo from The End. It’s an interesting insight from a world-class drummer who has had the opportunity to study one of the most revered drummers of all time, up close for two decades.

Dolly Parton has been joined by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving Beatles, for her cover of The Fab Four’s Let It Be.

McCartney’s voice is clearly audible on the recording, while Starr is reported to be on drums. Mick Fleetwood (a co-producer on the track) and Peter Frampton are also said to feature.

“I was so proud of getting to sing songs like Let It Be with Paul McCartney. He played the piano also and Ringo played the drums,” Parton told live streaming online network TalkShopLive.

“I just asked Paul, because it’s his song, he co-wrote that. So I thought if I could get him to play, I asked him if he would sing on it and he said ‘yeah I’ll sing and I’ll play if you want me to’.

“And then it was after he’d done his vocal that I thought, you know what, because we had done a lot of tracks before - so we had a drummer on it - and we thought, well why don’t we just replace the drummer with Ringo? And that’s what we did because I thought wow, that would be all the [surviving] Beatles.”

Parton’s version of Let It Be will feature on Rockstar, her forthcoming album of rock material that will feature nine original songs and 21 covers, one of which is a medley of Queen’s We Are The Champions and We Will Rock You. The album will be released on 17 November.

Other potential highlights include a new version of Every Breath You Take, performed with Sting, a duet with Miley Cyrus on Wrecking Ball, and the intriguing prospect of a cover of Stairway to Heaven featuring Lizzo. Blondie’s Debbie Harry will appear on Heart Of Glass, Elton John will help out on Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, and Lynyrd Skynyrd have contributed to Parton’s version of Free Bird.

Rockstar was inspired by Parton’s nomination for inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which she initially rejected on the basis that she had not “earned that right”. She later reconsidered, and was inducted at the ceremony in 2022.

Ringo Starr has weighed in on the idea that the surviving members of The Beatles used AI to digitally recreate John Lennon’s voice for a forthcoming ‘new’ Beatles song, as well as confirming that the track features all four members of The Beatles. 

Speaking in an interview with People, Ringo says of the vocal track, "This is absolutely John Lennon's voice, taken off — as neat as we can — a cassette. And that's all I can tell you!”

The Beatles drummer reiterates his point again on an upcoming episode of the Rolling Stone Music Now Podcast, saying that The Beatles would “never” fake John Lennon’s voice using AI. 

He also goes on to confirm that along with Lennon’s vocals, the song features all four Beatles, including George Harrison, “This was beautiful" says Ringo, "and it’s the final track you’ll ever hear with the four lads. And that’s a fact.”.

The confusion surrounding the use of AI came recently when Paul McCartney gave an interview to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in June, where he revealed that there was a new Beatles song in the works. 

As has been widely reported, Get Back producer Peter Jackson and his team including Giles Martin developed and used AI/machine-learning 'De-mix' technology during the making of the documentary in order to isolate instruments recorded on the same track.  

"When Peter Jackson did the film, where it was us making the Let It Be album, he was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano. He could separate them with AI. 

"He’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’".“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on and we just finished it up. It will be released this year."

Macca later took to Twitter to clarify his quote, assuring fans that the new song will not feature any artificially-created Lennon vocals. 

The ‘new’ song is believed to be Now and Then, which was demoed on a cassette tape by Lennon in 1979, and was one of three songs given to the surviving Beatles by Yoko Ono Lennon for 1994’s Anthology. Free as a Bird and Real Love were restored and completed by the remaining members, however Now and Then was left off the collection.

Paul McCartney told Q magazine in 1997 that the song’s exclusion from Anthology was due to George Harrison’s dislike of the tune, calling it “Fucking rubbish”. 

“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it,” McCartney said. “George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”

However, it is believed that overdub sessions took place with Jeff Lynne during the making of Anthology, meaning that Ringo’s statement about all four members featuring on the new song adds further weight to it being Now and Then.