You wouldn’t think it, given the roasting temperatures outside, but autumn is not too far away. And with it, another Beatles reissue.

This year it’s Rubber Soul that’s to be given the boxset treatment. Apple Corps has announced that a Special Edition of the 1965 album is coming in early October.

So what’s on offer for this one? Well, it’s very much a question of ‘what’s your budget?’ If your wallet is large enough, you might want to invest in the ‘Special Edition Super Deluxe’, which encompasses five LPs or four CDs. These include sessions and demos, a new stereo mix of the album, the original mono master, the original US version of the album AND an 88-page hardbound book. Oh, and 7-inch of the concurrent Daytripper/ We Can Work It Out double A-side single.

One step down is the ‘Special Edition Deluxe’. For that you just get the new stereo mix and sessions on two CDs or LPs. Then there’s the ‘Special Edition Standard’, which is just a single LP or CD.

Or you could – if you wish – go for the Blu-Ray edition, which will include a new Dolby Atmos mix, “high resolution stereo audio”, and the promo films for both Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out. You pays your money, you takes your choice...

For oh-so-jaded Beatles fans who have now seen decades of this sort of repackaging there is but one genuine selling point. Buried among the sessions and demos disc is a previously unheard John Lennon demo called Little Girl. Up until recently, this song was “not even rumoured” to exist, according to Apple Corps. We don’t yet know what sort of quality it is, or even whether it’s an update of Hello Little Girl, an early Lennon song that was one of the first to be credited to the Lennon/McCartney partnership.

We’ll see soon enough whether it could ever have been a contender for the Beatles’ first really adult album. Rubber Soul was a determined step upwards from Help!, with several of the songs being openly influenced by Motown and other US soul records (hence the title, of course), and with their individual personalities shining through more in John, Paul and George’s songs.

In recent years, Abbey Road has been the hip Beatles album to namecheck. But after spells when Sgt Pepper, Revolver and the White Album have all been the connoisseurs’ choice, perhaps now it’s Rubber Soul’s turn in the spotlight. For what it’s worth, it was apparently always George Harrison’s favourite.

Pre-orders for the Rubber Soul Special Edition are being taken now.

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

1974 saw the release of debut albums by three young rock bands that went on to become legendary.

On their self-titled album, Canadian power trio Rush channeled Led Zeppelin on riff-driven tracks such as Finding My Way and Working Man.

British band Judas Priest played heavy rock – not yet full-blown heavy metal – on their cheekily-titled album Rocka Rolla.

And on another self-titled debut, Kiss, face-painted rock warriors from New York City, combined rock ’n’ roll swagger with British Invasion-inspired pop smarts.

The Kiss album featured songs that would live on in the band’s live set for decades until the final End Of The Road tour in 2023 – dynamic rock anthems such as Deuce, Cold Gin and Black Diamond.

It is one of rock’s classic debuts.

And in the early 2000s, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, the leading figures and main songwriters in Kiss, were asked to name the debut albums they consider to be the greatest of all time.

Inevitably, as two committed Anglophiles, they both looked across the Atlantic.

Simmons picked The Beatles’ US album Meet The Beatles! – a counterpart to the UK LP With The Beatles (which was the band’s second album released in their homeland).

Among the classic songs on Meet The Beatles! are I Want To Hold Your Hand, the band’s first US No 1, I Saw Her Standing There and All My Loving.

The cover of Meet The Beatles! proclaimed it “the first album by England’s phenomenal pop combo”. In fact, its release on 20 January 1964 came 10 days after the release of the group’s US debut proper Introducing… The Beatles.

However, due to the message on the cover of Meet The Beatles!, Simmons considered it their debut, and stated: “Here, for the first time, was a band that played its own instruments. There was no backing band. They wrote their own songs, they sang all the parts. And everybody in the band was a star.”

He continued: “This album was sort of a hybrid of anything and everything that came before it. Paul McCartney could do the Little Richard stuff and Lennon could do the Chuck Berry stuff.

“The Beatles combined of all the great things in rock ‘n’ roll, from Motown to country to rhythm-and-blues to soul, and they put it together in a way that had never been done before.

“Today, still, they’re the hardest band to replicate. It’s easy to be the Stones – you have a singer, a guitar player, and so on. It’s tough as nails to be The Beatles. You not only have to play drums, you also have to sing. You play lead guitar and you gotta sing and write songs.”

Simmons concluded: “The Beatles is the pre-eminent, iconic rock band: the template for what all rock bands, in my opinion, should aspire to.”

Paul Stanley is also a Beatles fanatic, but chose a debut album from 1969 by a British band of a heavier nature.

“The first Led Zeppelin album was an amalgamation of American blues and British sensibilities,” Stanley said. “It took a music form that had already existed and created something new.

“Nobody was singing like Robert Plant before he was. Sure, you had Terry Reid, you had Steve Marriott, you had people out there, but Robert just took it to a whole new place.

“And Jimmy Page, besides being a fiery guitar player, is a brilliant arranger.”

Stanley declared: “To me, Zeppelin was the equivalent of great classical music – it’s Beethoven, it’s Mahler, it’s bombast! And yet they had incredible subtleties and variety in what they did.

“It certainly wasn’t – to coin a phrase – heavy metal. To call Zeppelin heavy metal is at the very least absurd and at worst a sin.

“Zeppelin covered more ground than most bands could ever hope to. And I’d say that first album is the defining album. The first time I heard Good Times Bad Times on the radio, my jaw just dropped!”

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," recalled 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 told Muldoon. "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. 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"

You probably didn’t realise that today (June 25) is Global Beatles Day, did you?

That’s because the idea has been a grassroots-led initiative, led by one superfan Faith Cohen. Now her wheeze has been officially recognised by Apple Corps Ltd, and that body, which looks after The Beatles’ legacy, is honouring it today

Cohen originally picked June 25 because it was the day in 1967 that the group participated in Our World, the first ever multinational satellite broadcast and up to that point the largest TV audience for any one event (over 400 million people tuned in). It was on there that The Beatles premiered All You Need Is Love, the nearest the so-called Summer Of Love had to an anthem and arguably the peak moment in terms of the group’s global reach and influence.

Unfortunately, because it was 1967 the original broadcast was in black and white and we’ve all doubtless seen the grainy clips from it at various times – John Lennon chewing gum whilst clutching his headphones, Mick Jagger clapping out of time and the fusty-looking middle-aged members of the orchestra in their evening dress, looking like they’d been beamed in from 1912.

But today Apple has posted a colourised version of the Our World performance (above). Other than on the Beatles Anthology series from the 1990s this will be the first time it’s been seen – for free, anyway. According to Apple, it will “celebrate the iconic performance’s anniversary, mark Global Beatles Day, and give fans around the world the chance to relive that spectacular, global moment from 1967 and share their reaction in the live chat.”

Tom Greene, Apple’s current CEO has put out a statement, praising Cohen’s initiative: “More than ever, the message of The Beatles, and of All You Need Is Love speaks to something vital for community, connection, and the power of bringing people together. That is what makes Global Beatles Day so special. It asks nothing more than for people, wherever they are, to stop, listen, and share a little joy.”

What else was on Our World? Well other participants included the film director Franco Zeffirelli, who opened his rehearsals for the film Romeo And Juliet to the global TV audience and Leonard Bernstein, who could be seen rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 3 with pianist Val Cliburn. There are also rather less riveting segments that showed workers building a section of the Tokyo subway system and section from Australia about trams in Melbourne. So now you know.

If you want to know more about Global Beatles Day head over to its website at globalbeatlesday.com

The address 3 Savile Row will elicit a nod of recognition from the millions of Beatles fans out there. They know that it used to be the headquarters of Apple Corps, the business venture that the group formed in 1968 with the not unambitious aim of, well, reconfigurating capitalism. Its roof was the venue for the last ever Beatles' gig on 30 January 1969, which ended up being the conclusion to the Let It Be film.

Anyway, it’s been announced today that the building is to opened up as a visitor attraction from next year. Named ‘The Beatles At 3 Savile Row’, it will feature seven floors of material from Apple’s extensive archives as well the recreation of the original studio where Let It Be was partly recorded. And yes, fans will be able to go up to the roof and set foot on the stage – if you can call it that – that saw group’s last ever live appearance.

Apple’s own story is long and convoluted. For years it was tended by Neil Aspinall, the Beatles one-time road manager/ personal assistant/ factotum who gathered all the material for the mid-1990s Beatles Anthology documentary and compilation series and supervised the marketing and managing of the band’s legacy right up until his death in 2008.

The man in charge of Apple Corps now is Tom Greene, who in a statement about 3 Savile Row said: “We’re thrilled to bring Apple Corps back to its spiritual home and give The Beatles’ fans something truly special.

“Every single day, fans are taking pictures of the outside of 3 Savile Row – but next year they can go in and explore all seven floors of the iconic building, including the rooftop where even the railings remain the same from that famous day in 1969.”

The two surviving Beatles have also issued statements. Paul McCartney said: “It was such a trip to get back to 3 Savile Row recently and have a look around. There are so many special memories within the walls, not to mention the rooftop. The team have put together some really impressive plans and I’m excited for people to see it when it’s ready."

Meanwhile, Ringo said of seeing the new 3 Savile Row: “Wow, it’s like coming home.”

We’re not sure yet when exactly the doors of 3 Savile Row will swing open. The visitor attraction does have a website, but you cannot book as yet. There is, however, a mailing list for those who would like to receive updates.

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."

Robben Ford’s head must have been spinning. Here he was, a blues guitar prodigy, barely in his twenties, and having signed up with the LA Express, the fusion band led by saxophonist Tom Scott, the gigs were coming in fast.

There was the tour with Joni Mitchell, playing the material from Court And Spark, their performances captured on tape and released as the Miles Of Aisles live album. Mitchell then called the band back to accompany her in the studio as she tracked The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. It was an education.

As Ford told MusicRadar, Joni Mitchell knew how to produce electric guitar sounds, and these were the kinds of collaborations that a young, talented musician would get into the business for. “She was always the easiest person in the world to be around, to work for, never uptight or heated,” he said.

Ford was not altogether a rookie. In 1971, he and his brothers had the Charles Ford Blues Band, named for their father, and in their early professional assignments they had backed legendary blues harp player Charlie Musselwhite.

Under Scott’s wing, however, Ford was seeing a completely different world, and they had just landed a gig to back George Harrison on his 1974 studio album, Dark Horse. Joni Mitchell and a Beatle in the same year.

Ford grew up in small-town California, in a place called Ukiah, a two-hour drive from San Francisco. It was the best part of a working day from Los Angeles, nigh-on 500 miles on the road. Here he was with a Beatle. Ford lets out a laugh at the memory.

“Well, in those days… I was 22! Twenty-two years old, you don’t know [anything],” he says, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “And I’m from a small town, and had only in the last couple of years, I had spent two years with Jimmy Witherspoon, and that was in LA, and so being exposed to the city [laughs], all of that, really, I was very green.”

The sight of Harrison took a bit of getting used to. Playing music with him, less so.

“When I first met him I was just speechless,” says Ford. “But when we started playing, he gave no direction, he liked the way I played, and I would just be myself.”

The gig was well within Ford’s capabilities. If anything, he was playing within himself. Not that this was a bad thing. It was only when he went out on tour on the Dark Horse Tour that he could stretch out a bit as a player, playing White Album classic While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

“I really enjoyed playing that song; that was where George and I actually traded back and forth,” he told Guitar World, in 2025. “But my style and his were so different, as he was a very simple player, with long notes, and I was into playing a lot of notes.”

The chord patterns, too, were simple. Ford was building a vocabulary of more complex voicings. “Cowboy chords” and open voicings were mother’s milk to him. Ford was playing a Guild Starfire IV semi-hollow electric guitar. He wasn’t much one for effects, just the trusty Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone and an MXR Phase 90. Mesa/Boogie provided his, and Harrison’s, backline.

“It wasn’t difficult to do,” he says, Harrison made him feel totally at ease. “There was nothing that made me feel uptight or insecure.”

Harrison would have had good reason to look on the Dark Horse era very differently. There was a lot to make him feel uptight and insecure. Harrison had marital trouble. His marriage with Pattie Boyd was coming apart.

There was also the ever-attendant pressure as the Beatle alumnus, that everything had to measure up to what he did with John, Paul and Ringo.

Paul McCartney speaks of similar pressures in Man On The Run, the 2025 documentary from director Morgan Neville that charts McCartney’s efforts to get Wings off the ground, to get his life back after the dissolution of the Fab Four. Even when he could outrun the shadow of the Beatles musically, the spectre of legal proceedings against their former manager, Allen Klein, were a different story.

Harrison was down but he was hardly out. After catching Joni Mitchell’s live in London, he liked what he saw of the LA Express and invited them to Friar Park to work with him on his record.

They would ultimately be in illustrious company. Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and Harrison’s fellow Beatle alum Ringo Starr would play on the UK lead single, Ding Dong, Ding Dong, a psychedelic glam-rock stomper for New Year’s Eve that is worth checking out (and cranking loud) for the Phil Spector-inspired production alone. It is a 360º experience.

Its B-side, the instrumental Hari’s On Tour (Express), is also essential listening. On the Dark Horse tour, Harrison would open his shows with it. This was also a track where the LA Express, and the young Robben Ford, would earn their corn.

How do you even categorise this, all that slide guitar, the horns, the propulsive rhythm? Psych-country? Whatever it was, it wasn’t the Beatles, even if the album cover had something of that lysergic Sgt. Pepper’s quality.

Ford also played on the woozy blues of Simply Shady, and joined Harrison on acoustic guitar for the title track, another song that’s deserving of reappraisal.

It was recorded live during rehearsals for the tour, and foreshadowed the criticism that would plague the tour. Harrison’s misfortunes were compounded by laryngitis.

You have to laugh at the “Dark Hoarse” takes that were published following the US tour (surely/hopefully Harrison would have once enough time had gone by), but on record Harrison’s fried voice takes on a Dylan-esque quality, almost overdriven in its attempt to find its place in the mix. It’s more Tom Waits than Taxman. Compare and contrast this with the early 1973 take included as a bonus track on later reissues.

But so what if Dark Horse wasn’t quite as artistically confident as All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s 1971 debut solo masterpiece, or that it didn’t have the promethean magic of the Beatles?

What Dark Horse does have is a sound that’s ripe for rediscovery, some great guitar playing (chef’s kiss for the skronky slide on Māya Love), and the sound of a young guitarist who had officially arrived.

Robben Ford was speaking to MusicRadar in advance of his new studio album’s release. Two Shades Of Blue is available to preorder, out 27 March via Provogue.

• “I said, ‘Oh, Joni, that’s gonna sound terrible. You need an amp, man! You need some tubes vibrating. You need some air! She goes, ‘Would you just try it?’”: Robben Ford reveals how Joni Mitchell helped him nail his guitar tone on a ’70s classic

Anyone looking to pinpoint the moment when The Beatles turned from pop idols into mature artists will inevitably hone in on their landmark sixth studio album Rubber Soul.

Recorded over a four-week period, from 12 October to 11 November 1965, Rubber Soul is The Beatles’ first masterpiece, a hugely influential pre-psychedelia work that draws on folk, soul and pop.

Sonically the album signalled a major shift, as the band incorporated soul-style bass lines, fuzz bass effects, harmonium and sitar. But it also marked a transition in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting, from pop singles to a more cohesive, mature, album-orientated style.

Much of this was due to the ongoing influence of Bob Dylan, the folk-rock jangle of The Byrds and soul artists on the Motown and Stax labels whose music The Beatles soaked up from radio stations across the US during the summer of 1965.

Then, of course, there is the influence of marijuana, which is omnipresent within the mellow tones of Rubber Soul.

By 1965, John Lennon in particular was demonstrating a lyrical maturity that was far more personal and introspective.

On Nowhere Man, Lennon perceives himself as someone with no direction in life, while Norwegian Wood is a veiled account of an extramarital affair.

But of all the songs on Rubber Soul, the most personal and poignant for Lennon is In My Life, a nostalgia-fuelled reflection on his childhood years in post-war Liverpool.

In My Life evokes a wistful nostalgia for the people and places that Lennon had known. It ponders the past, present and future as well as the inevitability of death, offering hope for a new love that will ultimately surpass them all.

In My Life is one of two Beatles songs – the other being Eleanor Rigby – where there is a debate over which Beatle was the primary writer. The lyrics are certainly Lennon’s, but he and McCartney had differing recollections about who actually wrote the melody.

In a 1980 interview with author David Sheff – published in the 2020 book All We Are Saying – Lennon described the song as his “first real major piece of work”, adding that McCartney’s “contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle-eight”.

But in the 1976 Paul Gambaccini-authored book Paul McCartney In His Own Words, McCartney said, “I liked In My Life. Those were words that John wrote and I wrote the tune to it. That was a great one.”

In Barry Miles’ 1997 book Many Years From Now, McCartney shed more light on the song. McCartney recalled visiting Lennon’s house, Kenwood, and Lennon showing him the lyrics.

“I recall writing the whole melody,” said McCartney. “And it actually does sound very like me, if you analyse it. I was obviously working to lyrics. The melody’s structure is very me.

“So my recollection is saying to John, ‘Just go and have a cup of tea or something. Let me be with this for ten minutes on my own and I’ll do it’.”

McCartney recalled that he tried to keep it melodic but a bit bluesy, with minor chords and little harmonies. “And then my recollection is going back up into the room and saying, ‘Got it, great! Good tune, I think. What d’you think?’ John said, ‘Nice,’ and we continued working with it from then, using that melody and filling out the rest of the verses.

“So it was John’s original inspiration, I think my melody, I think my guitar riff. I don’t want to be categorical about this, but that’s my recollection.”

In his 2025 book John And Paul: A Love Story In Songs, author Ian Leslie notes that he tends to believe McCartney’s account as his language is “painstakingly diplomatic” and his story is “so detailed”.

Lennon’s memory is detailed too, notes Leslie, but only when he talks about writing the lyrics, “and though he was happy to take credit for the melody, he never made direct claim to it”.

The tune does sound more typical of McCartney, continues Leslie, although the chord changes are ones Lennon frequently used. Ultimately though, concludes Leslie, “In a sense they were so far inside each other’s musical mind that it doesn’t matter”.

There is no debate over who conceived the idea for the song and wrote the lyrics, though. It was Lennon. His original idea was to write about the bus journey from his Aunt Mimi’s house into the centre of Liverpool.

He first had the idea for the song in 1964, when broadcaster and author Kenneth Allsop asked him why his songs were less revealing and challenging than his books. The question set Lennon thinking and he decided to take a nostalgic look at specific places and memories from his past.

The first draft of the lyrics referenced landmarks from Lennon’s youth, such as the No. 5 bus, Penny Lane, the “tramsheds with no trams” and the Docker’s Umbrella, an elevated railway which closed in 1956 but still provided shelter from the rain for dock workers walking beneath it.

However, for Lennon, this first draft was far too literal.

“In My Life started out as a bus journey from my house… to town, mentioning every place I could remember,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “And it was ridiculous… it was the most boring sort of ‘What I did on my holidays bus trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all.”

Lennon scrapped the first draft, reworked the words and replaced the literal references with a broader meditation on his past. But a few lines from the first draft made it into the revised version.

Structurally, In My Life is imbued with melodic nuances that only The Beatles could create.

The song opens with the iconic guitar intro, a six-note melodic motif played with hybrid picking by George Harrison on his Epiphone Casino, while Lennon strums lightly on rhythm guitar.

This motif is played in A major over A and A7 chords.

Recording of the song took place on 18 October 1965 in Studio Two at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. The Beatles recorded three takes of the main track of the song (drums, bass and guitars) with Take Three being selected as the best.

Lennon’s voice was double-tracked, which in the days before automatic double tracking (ADT) meant he simply duplicated the lead vocal take for a thicker, fuller sound.

From the very first line – “There are places I’ll remember” – McCartney and Harrison contribute harmonies for the lyrics, dropping down to soft ‘ooohs” for the second line, “All my life, though some have changed”, switching back to full harmonies for the “Some forever, not for better” third line and then returning to low-in-the-mix ‘ooohs’ on the fourth line, “Some have gone and some remain”.

It’s a simple but hugely effective arrangement, adding dynamics, light and shade, and elevating the raw intimacy of the second and fourth lines of the verses.

On the bridge that follows there are stops on the first and third lines, which again add contrast. This is reinforced by the presence of tambourine, added by producer George Martin, on the first and third lines of the bridge.

As ever with The Beatles, the chord progressions are deft and inspired, with sevenths and minors being used to real emotional effect.

This is evident at the start of the second and fourth lines of the verses, with the shift from D to D minor introducing a sense of melancholy and longing into the song.

But what really elevates In My Life is its simple purity.

Lennon’s words here are so bare and direct, yet they are imbued with honesty and feeling. By removing the specific visual references of his first draft, the 25-year-old Lennon created a song that is immediately relatable to all. As Ian Leslie put it in his 2025 book John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs, “He succeeded in creating a universal song that is also deeply personal.”

When they laid down the primary sessions, The Beatles left the middle eight blank. Overdubs were then added on 22 October and these included the solo on the middle eight, played by producer George Martin. Lennon told producer George Martin that he wanted something Baroque-sounding and Martin didn’t disappoint.

“In My Life is one of my favourite songs because it is so much John,” says George Martin in Anthology. “A super track and such a simple song.

“There’s a bit where John couldn’t decide what to do in the middle, and while they were having their tea break I put down a Baroque piano solo which John didn’t hear until he came back. He liked it.”

Martin said that his solo was too intricate for him to do live, so he recorded it half-speed and then sped it up, which made the piano sound like a harpsichord.

“I did it with what I call a ‘wound-up’ piano,” he told BBC Radio 2’s Sounds Of The Sixties, “which was at double speed – partly because you get a harpsichord sound by shortening the attack of everything, but also because I couldn’t play it at real speed anyway.

“So I played it on piano at exactly half normal speed, and down an octave. When you bring the tape back to normal speed again, it sounds pretty brilliant. It’s a means of tricking everybody into thinking you can do something really well.”

Rubber Soul was released on 3 December 1965, and In My Life was singled out as one of the album’s standout tracks.

Over six decades on, it is widely regarded as one of The Beatles’ greatest songs. In 2000, MOJO magazine named it the best song – by any artist – of all time.

On 21 November 2025, an alternative version of the song – the first take from the session – was released on Anthology 4 of The Beatles Anthology Collection.

Complete with preliminary chatter, this alternative take offers an intriguing glimpse into the creation of the song.

On In My Life, John Lennon’s childhood reminiscences and observations demonstrated a maturity beyond his years and the emotional weight of those lyrics still resonates strongly today.

“It was unique in its musical and lyrical sensibilities, and expanded the horizons of both,” wrote Bruce Eder of AllMusic in a retrospective review of In My Life. “The song altered the public sensibility not only of what constituted acceptable songwriting in which a rock ’n’ roll composer could engage, but also the range of emotions that rock ’n’ roll musicians were allowed to express.”

Don Was has seen John Mayer’s command of the electric guitar up close. He was in the control room for 2012’s Born And Raised, its 2013 follow-up Paradise Valley, and spent much of 2020 holed up in the studio with Mayer as he made Sob Rock during the pandemic.

Few producers know Mayer’s playing better. So when Was likens Mayer to George Harrison, citing his gift for crafting sounds out of left field that elevate a song, he doesn’t do so lightly.

“His guitar tones are unparalleled,” says Was, speaking to Tom Butwin of the the Everything Mayer Podcast and YouTube show. “They’re not just evocative, cool sounds, but they’re thick, and they’re warm, and they jump out of speakers, and I’m not sure how he does it.”

How he does it is not just a question of gear. You can have the PRS Silver Sky signature guitar. You could get Mayer’s guitar plugin suite from Neural DSP, the Archetype: John Mayer X, which collects captures of not one but three of his most holy grail tube amps.

But Was argues it’s not the same thing. You need his brain and his hands, too.

“Yes, he’s got the best gear you can have, but I’ve played his guitars and I don’t sound like him,” he says.

Was believes casual listeners might miss some of the subtle guitar details in Mayer’s recordings, but these are exaclty the kinds of sounds that catch the ear of players.

“I think people might take that for granted, but that’s one of the first things I notice when I listened to those records after not hearing them for a while,” continues Was. “It’s like, ‘Holy cow, man!’”

This makes him think of Harrison. But he went further, and says – cautiously – that Mayer could be even better than the late Beatle when it comes to teasing out unique sounds from his instrument.

“George Harrison was good at stuff like that, getting distinctive sounds that you only hear once on a certain song but it makes the song heaven, and that’s a strength of John’s,” explains Was. “He has the same thing. You notice I was loath to say John’s better than George Harrison. I just thought that ain’t gonna sit well with people. But he might be better than George Harrison.”

Comparing guitar players is a dangerous game. There is no better, not really, and even if there is, then you can be guaranteed that no one will agree with you. When Was says that Mayer might be better than George Harrison, he places the emphasis on the might.

What Was is in no two minds about is Mayer’s talent for putting a composition together. That is what sets him apart from everyone else he has worked with, e.g. Bob Dylan, the B-52s, the Rolling Stones, and, yes, George Harrison, like in 1990 when Harrison came in to play a solo on Dylan’s Under The Red Sky.

“I’ve never seen anyone with that many ideas for arrangements. He’s never short of ideas,” says Was. “It’s always, you know, ‘We have to do something in this section here.’ He’ll find 10 different, really elegant ways of of making that section work.

“And my job is never to tell him what to play; it’s to help him sort through the wealth of information that he’s laid down, to choose the most effective. His arrangement skills are incredible.”

What is it?

When it comes to music history, few places evoke as much reverence as Abbey Road Studios. From the Beatles’ genre-defining albums and the atmospheric masterpieces of Pink Floyd to chart-topping works from Oasis to countless movie scores, this hallowed ground in London is a living, breathing monument to decades of sonic innovation and continues to operate as one of the world’s best recording studios to this day. So when Gretsch announced it would be the provider of the studio’s first-ever instrument collaboration, you’re damn right we sat up and took notice.

Introducing the Gretsch Limited Edition Abbey Road Studiomatic, officially, the RS201 Studiomatic. As expected, this is a semi-hollow that literally bakes Abbey Road’s technological magic right into its DNA. For the first time ever, Abbey Road has partnered with a guitar maker, and the result is an instrument that promises to deliver studio-grade sound before your signal even hits a single pedal, amp, or audio interface.

The centrepiece is an all-new electronic circuit inspired by EMI’s legendary Rumble filter, originally designed in the 1950s to eliminate unwanted low-end rumble from historic recordings. Now, that filtering power is at your fingertips, giving players unprecedented control to sculpt a polished, record-ready tone straight out of the guitar.

But the Studiomatic doesn’t stop at groundbreaking electronics. Its custom-wound Filter’Tron pickups are described by Abbey Road’s own engineers as having “a real, beautiful attack.” The 2.25” deep maple body features parallel bracing for stability and resonance, while a C-profile maple neck and a bound ebony fingerboard with Neo-Classic Thumbnail inlays make for a smooth, stylish ride up and down the fretboard.

Add in an Adjusto-Matic bridge on an ebony plate, die-cast locking tuners, a complementary set of strap locks, and a striking Abbey Road logo on the headstock, all dressed in a suitably decadent gold finish, and you get a very well-specified guitar indeed.

To seal the deal, the guitar is bundled with a lush burgundy case that is meant to evoke the iconic colour found on everything from the chairs to the doors throughout the studio. The light blue lining of the case is a nod to the underpaint of the doors seen through decades of wear and tear.

There is no question that Abbey Road knows a thing or two about producing timeless music, and Gretsch has the guitar-making down, but will it all come together to make an exceptional instrument that’s more than the sum of its parts? Well, let’s find out.

Specs

• Launch price: $1,579 | £1,249 | €1289
• Made: China
• Type: Hollowbody electric guitar
• Body: Laminated maple
• Neck: Maple, Classic "C"
• Fingerboard: Ebony
• Scale length: 24.6" (625 mm)
• Nut/width: Graph Tech TUSQ, 1.6875" (42.86 mm)
• Frets: 22 Medium Jumbo
• Hardware: Adjusto-Matic bridge, Bigsby B60 V-Cutout, Die-Cast Sealed Locking Tuners, G-Arrow control knobs
• Electrics: Custom Filter’Tron, 2-Position Rumble Filter
• Weight: 7.5lbs/ 3.4 kg
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Classic Walnut Stain
• Cases: Custom hardshell case and exclusive case candy items included
• Contact: Gretsch Guitars

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

From the moment you lay eyes on the Gretsch Abbey Road Studiomatic, it’s clear this is a guitar with presence and prestige. The visually striking burgundy case not only offers robust protection, but also sets the tone for what’s inside, channelling the storied atmosphere of Abbey Road itself - think of it as your own ticket to ride into musical history. The attention to detail is immediately apparent, with the case’s light blue lining nodding to the underpaint of those legendary Abbey Road doors.

Once you open the case, the guitar itself makes a stunning first impression. The classic Walnut finish is deep, rich, and beautifully applied, highlighting the wood grain and shimmering under studio spotlights. Pair that with the guilded gold hardware, and you’ve got a guitar dripping with vintage mojo.

Every element feels intentional and expertly executed, from the bound ebony fingerboard with its sharp Neo-Classic Thumbnail inlays to the V-Cutout Bigsby B60.

More importantly, the build quality lives up to the impressive visuals. The guitar arrives impeccably set up, with low, buzz-free action and spot-on intonation. Hardware feels solid and reassuring, from the Bigsby vibrato to the strap locks, and the parallel-braced maple body is both resonant and sturdy.

It’s the kind of instrument that feels ready for the studio - or the stage - without a single tweak. A lot like Abbey Road itself, the Studiomatic feels built to stand the test of time, blending classic looks, premium craftsmanship, and a little studio magic in every detail.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★½

Thankfully, the Gretsch Abbey Road Studiomatic isn’t just a guitar that looks the part; it absolutely delivers when it comes to playability. One of the first things you notice when picking it up is the exceptionally comfortable neck. Gretsch opted for a classic C-profile that feels just right in the hand: not too chunky for fast lead lines, but substantial enough to anchor big chords and complex fingerings. The smooth-bound ebony fingerboard and well-dressed frets add to the premium feel, gliding under your fingers whether you’re playing up high or digging in for rhythm work.

The RS201 really reminds me of the ever-popular Electromatic G5422TG. Yes, they differ in many ways, from the Trestle Block bracing of the G5422TG to Parallel Tone Bars of the Abbey Road model, as well as the Studiomatic sporting an ebony 'board while the Electromatic gets the less desirable laurel, but both share the same “classic-C” neck profile, 12" fingerboard radius, 24.6" scale length, and medium jumbo frets. So purely from a feel point of view, these models feel incredibly similar - dare I say, identical.

A big playability plus on the Studiomatic is its factory setup with 10-gauge strings. Gretsch’s choice here makes a lot of sense, for many players, 10s hit that sweet spot between ease of bending and solid rhythmic foundation. To me, the tension feels familiar and welcoming, whether you’re a blues bender, a jazzy chorder, or a rock strummer. Unlike the new Synchromatic Falcon, which ships with heavier 11s and can feel a bit stiff for some players right out of the box, the Studiomatic’s 10s offer a more universal playing experience.

The action is set low and pretty even, measuring around 1.4mm on the high E string and 1.6mm on the low E string, at the first fret, with no fret buzz or dead spots. It makes for effortless playability up and down the neck. The parallel-braced maple body adds to the comfort, being lightweight and perfectly balanced whether you’re playing seated or standing. The cutaway gives easy access to the upper frets, inviting you to explore the entire range of the instrument.

As expected, the Bigsby vibrato moves smoothly for subtle shimmers or expressive dives, but does take some breaking in. For the first few sessions, it has a tendency to throw the guitar out of tune, but if you exercise some patience, you’ll be rewarded with a stable tuning eventually.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

When it comes to tone, the Gretsch Abbey Road Studiomatic is anything but ordinary. This guitar was created to deliver studio-grade sound at your fingertips, and much of that magic comes down to its unique electronics - a collaboration between Gretsch and the legendary engineers at Abbey Road Studios themselves.

At the heart of the Studiomatic’s sonic identity lies its groundbreaking rumble circuit, inspired by the EMI-designed low-frequency filter used at Abbey Road since the 1950s. Originally developed to eliminate unwanted subsonic noise from classic recordings- think rumble from London’s underground trains or the thump of heavy footsteps on studio floors - this circuit has been reimagined for guitar, giving players direct access to Abbey Road’s signature clarity and polish.

The rumble circuit is more than a mere high-pass filter. It’s a dual-mode system, selectable via an elegant rotary switch on the upper bout. Each mode subtly reshapes the instrument’s low-frequency response, allowing you to tailor your tone, whether you’re after vintage jangle, focused punch, or full-bodied warmth.

With the circuit bypassed, the sound is completely open and natural. Here, the Studiomatic’s custom Filter’Tron pickups shine, delivering classic Gretsch chime and bite with a vibrant midrange and crisp top end and an almost boomy low end. This setting is full of dynamic response, the kind of sound that lets your picking nuances and fingerstyle details ring out, perfect for everything from Beatles-style clean arpeggios to more modern, articulate lead work.

Switch to the second mode, and the rumble circuit engages Abbey Road’s famous 100Hz high-pass filter. This is where the magic really happens. The low end tightens up, eliminating any muddiness and pushing your sound forward in a mix. Chords become more defined, bass frequencies are controlled, and every note retains clarity. It is particularly evident when it was introduced to my favourite Big Muff fuzz pedal. It’s the secret weapon for recording guitar tracks that sit perfectly in a dense mix, just like the studio greats did. You’ll notice how this mode lets your playing cut through, with a sense of air and detail.

The second mode shifts the filter to a more pronounced setting, rolling off even more low-end for a truly vintage tone. This is the setting for those classic 1960s pop and rock tones, where every strum feels crisp. It’s ideal for layering guitars in the studio, preventing low-frequency buildup, and giving each part its own space. It’s worth noting that on its own, this setting sounds a little weak and some may even say a little lacklustre, but add it to a full-band mix and it makes sense. While it’s fun to have a bold, bass-heavy tone at home when you’re practicing, in a recording scenario, that extra low end tends to muddy up the mix, masking the bass guitar and kick drum.

Beyond the electronics, the custom-wound Filter’Tron pickups are remarkable in their own right. Voiced in collaboration with Abbey Road’s engineers, they possess a lively attack and a sweet, singing sustain. Clean tones are glassy and three-dimensional, with just enough bite to stay present without ever sounding too harsh. Roll back the volume or tone controls, and the sound mellows beautifully, staying musical and expressive across the entire range.

Add some overdrive, and the Studiomatic roars to life. The pickups retain their character, never becoming muddy or thumpy, while the rumble circuit keeps your low end in check. I'd say this is a guitar that’s equally at home on jangly pop, bluesy riffing, or even harder rock.

Verdict

Abbey Road may have waited decades to put its legendary name to a physical instrument, but I’d argue that it was well worth the wait. To me, the Abbey Road Studiomatic RS201 isn’t just a collection of cool features; it’s a tool designed to make your recorded guitar sound better, right out of the box.

In the studio, it means less time fighting EQ and more time making music. On stage, it means a consistent, polished sound no matter what amp or pedalboard you’re using. And for home recording enthusiasts, it offers a taste of Abbey Road’s legendary studio wizardry in a package you can actually afford.

In short, the sound of the Abbey Road Studiomatic is a bridge between past and present, combining Gretsch’s classic character with Abbey Road’s relentless pursuit of sonic excellence – d’you know what I mean?

MusicRadar's verdict: This guitar is a love letter to one of the most famous recording studios of all time. Every detail feels thoughtfully designed, and thankfully, it has the playability and sound to match. Okay, most people won't need the more extreme setting of the onboard Rumble circuit, but it will certainly come in handy for some.

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Picture this scenario: one day in the summer of 1968 you sit down and write an achingly heartfelt song inspired by the beauty of the Scottish Highlands and six months later you record a version whose stripped-down instrumentation only elevates the emotive sentiment of the song.

Four months after that, the song is released but what you hear when the stylus drops on the acetate is radically different from the version that you remember.

Layered across the 3:30 running time of your composition is a prominent array of orchestral and choral overdubs. To be precise: eight violins, four violas, four cellos, three trumpets, three trombones, two guitars, and a 14-strong female choir.

For the writer of the song, Paul McCartney, the addition of such lavish orchestration and choral arrangements on his song came as an utter and unwelcome shock.

The first thing McCartney did was to write a blunt letter to the band’s business manager Allen Klein.

In his letter to Klein, McCartney demanded that many of the orchestral arrangements be lowered in volume and that the harp at the end be removed entirely.

McCartney had another instruction for Klein: “Don’t ever do it again,” he wrote. Then he called in the lawyers.

The details of McCartney’s response came to light in December 2024, when 300 pages of legal documents relating to The Beatles’ break-up came up for auction.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Denise Kelly of Dawson auctioneers told the BBC when the documents came under the auctioneer’s hammer on 8 December, 2024 – the 44th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

McCartney’s letter to Klein set in motion a convoluted stream of legal wrangles that would finally result in the official end of The Beatles on 29 December 1974, four years after the band themselves had broken up on 10 April 1970.

But for all the depressing legal implications that it sparked, The Long And Winding Road remains one of Paul McCartney’s finest and most personal compositions.

55 years after the song was released as a single, the song occupies an illustrious place in McCartney’s peerless back catalogue.

It was mid-August 1968 when Paul McCartney and his new girlfriend and future wife Linda Eastman left his house in London’s St John’s Wood and drove 550 miles north to High Park Farm, near Campbelltown on the Kintyre peninsula in the southwest of Scotland.

McCartney had bought the farm two years earlier on 17 June 1966 after reportedly being advised to invest in property. Actress Jane Asher, his girlfriend at the time, helped him choose the property.

By 1968, it proved the ideal place for McCartney to find solace away from the arguments and dissolving relationships within The Beatles. The remoteness and beauty of High Park Farm also made it a perfect location to write.

McCartney wrote Blackbird during that time at the farm and it seems likely that he also wrote Her Majesty then. It was certainly there that he came up with The Long And Winding Road.

“I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles,” McCartney told Mike Merritt of the Sunday Herald in 2003. “I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration.”

In his 2010 book Fab: An Intimate Life Of Paul McCartney, writer Howard Sounes notes that the title The Long And Winding Road had its literal roots in the narrow B842 road on the Kintyre peninsula, “stretching up into the hills” of the remote Highland setting towards Campbeltown.

But the title also became a metaphor for the tensions that were threatening to pull The Beatles apart as well as the impending bittersweet end of McCartney’s relationship with the band.

McCartney was also expressing anguish over the direction of his personal life. “It's a sad song because it's all about the unattainable,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “The door you never quite reach. This is the road that you never get to the end of."

The Long And Winding Road is essentially a piano ballad. McCartney has described the song as “slightly jazzy” which would have certainly fitted the style of its imagined recipient Ray Charles.

Written in the key of E-flat major, the song incorporates elements of its relative minor, C minor. For all the syrupy lushness of the orchestration on the original Phil Spector mix, the ascending horns actually imbue the song with all the stately melancholy of a Northern brass band.

Interestingly, it has no chorus and, unusually for The Beatles, no harmonies. Loss and nostalgia resonate throughout the song, which is both heartfelt and heartwarming, yet there’s a directness to McCartney’s gentle vocal delivery and arrangement that veers clear of overt sentimentality.

Melodically it soars and falls with marked shifts of emotion, punctuated by dramatically accented stops, such as at 47 seconds in when McCartney sings “The wild and windy night…”

His vocals sound natural and unforced, almost vulnerable at times, and with graceful vibrato as he shifts effortlessly through his range.

McCartney never sent the song to Ray Charles, but he did envisage it as a song written for another artist.

When he returned to London from Scotland, he recorded a demo of the song, during one of the sessions for the ‘White Album’.

He then offered the song to Tom Jones on the condition that Jones release it as his next single. Jones reportedly later recalled that he turned it down as his record label was about to issue Without Love as a single.

McCartney then sent a demo to Cilla Black, who would eventually release it in 1972.

By the start of 1969, however, McCartney had decided to record the song with The Beatles.

On 7 January 1969, during the band’s filmed footage at Twickenham Studios for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary Let It Be, McCartney premiered the song to the band.

When The Beatles relocated to their own hastily-created Apple Studio in the basement of their Saville Row offices, they recorded several takes of the song, on 26 January and again on 31 January 1969. These sessions were captured in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed 2021 three-part documentary Get Back .

The line-up in the studio was McCartney on lead vocals and piano, George Harrison on guitar, John Lennon on a Fender Bass VI six-string bass guitar, Ringo Starr on drums and guest pianist Billy Preston on Fender Rhodes electric piano.

Instrumentally, there are some stellar performances in The Long And Winding Road: McCartney’s simple and emotive piano performance, Ringo’s effortlessly fluid ride and hi-hats, George Harrison’s wonderfully subtle Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar flourishes through a Leslie speaker.

But one performance that was allegedly far from impressive was John Lennon’s bass line, as pointed out by Ian MacDonald in his acclaimed 1994 book Revolution In The Head.

“It features some atrocious bass-playing by Lennon, prodding clumsily around as if uncertain of the harmonies and making many comical mistakes,” wrote MacDonald. “Lennon’s crude bass playing on The Long And Winding Road, though largely accidental, amounts to sabotage when presented as finished work.”

Despite such misgivings, MacDonald was awestruck by McCartney’s achievements on the song. “The Long and Winding Road is one of the most beautiful things McCartney ever wrote. Its words, too, are among his most poignant, particularly the reproachful lines of the brief four-bar middle section. A shame Lennon didn't listen more generously.”

Criticisms of Lennon’s playing on the song were highlighted by music critics and fans when the song was released as a single on 11 May 1970 and became The Beatles’ 20th and final No.1 single in the US Billboard Hot 100.

In reviews of the album Let It Be, released three days earlier than the single on 8 May 1970, many reviews criticised Spector’s use of orchestration. Rolling Stone’s critic John Mendelsohn was particularly damning of Spector, concluding: “He's rendered The Long And Winding Road ... virtually unlistenable with hideously cloying strings and a ridiculous choir”.

In the years and decades that followed Paul McCartney harboured a sense of disappointment over the mixing over some of the tracks on Let It Be and particularly The Long And Winding Road. A chance meeting in the early 2000s with the Let It Be director Michael Lindsey-Hogg sparked a discussion about releasing a remixed, stripped-down version of the original Let It Be album to accompany the film.

Before his death on 29 November 2001, George Harrison gave his approval for such a project and McCartney then received Ringo Starr’s and Yoko Ono’s agreement to release a remixed, stripped-down version of the album.

Apple’s Neil Aspinall then picked up the phone to call Abbey Road veteran engineer Allan Rouse, asking him to take a stab at remixing it.

On 17 November 2003, Let It Be… Naked was released. Of all the tracks on this remixed and reimagined album, The Long And Winding Road underwent the most profound transformation. Stripped of Spector’s schmaltzy strings, the raw purity of the song emerges as McCartney and the band always imagined it.

McCartney wasn’t the only one delighted with the remixed version of The Long And Winding Road. Ringo Starr too was elated.

“The Long And Winding Road blew me away without the strings,” Starr told Mike Merritt of the Sunday Herald in 2003. “There’s nothing wrong with Phil’s strings, this is just a different attitude to listening. But it’s been 30-odd years since I’ve heard it without all that and it just blew me away.”

In his 2021 book The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, McCartney delves into the background and impact of The Long And Winding Road.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of this song is that it seems to resonate in very powerful ways,” he wrote. “For those who were there at the time, there seems to be a double association of terrific sadness and also a sense of hope.”

He went on to add that the song’s distinctive sound was due to him attempting to imitate other artists to “keep things fresh.”

“Often when I write a song, I do a bit of a disappearing act myself,” said McCartney. “For example, I imagine it having been recorded by somebody else – in this case Ray Charles.

“There’s always someone else you can invoke,” he continued. “You can put on a mask and a cloak as you’re writing something, and it takes away a lot of the anxiety. You discover as you get through it that it wasn’t a Ray Charles song anyway; it was yours. The road leads not to Campbeltown, but to somewhere you never expected.”

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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.”

We wouldn’t like to put a figure on the number of times we’ve heard The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun (let’s just say: lots) but we’ll freely admit that we’ve never really noticed the synth parts before.

Neither, as it happens, had YouTube synth investigator Anthony Marinelli, but once he had heard them, he set himself the challenge of working out what they were and recreating them.

Earlier this year, Marinelli reported his findings in a video, and it’s a fascinating watch.

“It’s a classic song and I didn’t even realise it had synthesizer on it for decades,” he admits. “When I found out it had synthesizer on it I had to delve into it and see what’s going on. It took a little bit of critical listening, but now I can’t imagine the song without synthesizer.”

He concludes that there are actually four synth parts, all of which appear to have been created on The Beatles’ Moog Modular 3P synth, which shipped on 15 January 1969. As luck would have it, Marinelli’s own Moog 3C left the factory just six days later and has a very similar set of specs, so he has pretty much the perfect tool for the task at hand.

The first synth part arrives after just a few strums of George Harrison’s guitar intro, and features three triangle waves in unison. Then we have the main lead sound that drops at the start of the second verse.

Next, at the point when the song slips free of its 4/4 moorings and goes all ‘uncommon time signature’ - a compositional quirk that’s believed to have been inspired by Harrison’s love of Indian music - we get a buzzy bass. Marinelli says that he initially suspected that this was created by running the Moog through a guitar amp, but later decided that it was probably all done on the synth itself, with various settings cranked to the max to create that overdriven sound.

Finally, as we hit the third verse, we get that signature ‘whistle sound’. “These lines just kind of sing along with the arrangement,” reckons Marinelli, who goes deep on all four sounds and shows you how he recreated them.

Check out the full video above. As Marinelli says, it might just help you to “discover something new about one of the most loved songs in history”.

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.

Here’s some interesting news: a new study has shown that the most inspiring artist for aspiring guitarists isn’t The Beatles. Or any band from the classic era of rock and pop. It’s Ed Sheeran.

How so? UK retailer guitarguitar analyzed all the most-viewed tabs and chord sheets on the Ultimate Guitar site and examined the page views for all 3,424 songs. And yes, Sheeran has come out on top. His 229.5 million tab views beats The Beatles’ 226.1 million. Taylor Swift is a distant third with 167.8 million.

This, you have to say, is encouraging news if we’re thinking about the long-term health of guitar music. An artform whose canon is ossified is a dead one, and – whatever you think of his music – it’s clear Sheeran has inspired more than a few younger players out there. He’s probably increased sales of loop pedals a fair bit too.

Regarding the most popular songs, Hallelujah – written by Leonard Cohen but popularised by Jeff Buckley - comes out on top. Second is Wonderwall but third is Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours, a result which will probably surprise even Mr Mraz. The top five is completed by Sheeran’s Perfect and Can’t Help Falling In Love, a standard popularised by Elvis.

So yes there’s no Seven Nation Army in the Top Ten, nor Come As You Are or Stairway To Heaven. Maybe people know them off my heart now?

Interestingly, Adele – not a name you’d associate with guitar music in any shape or form – comes in at Number Six amongst artists, a testament to the popularity of her songs.

Announcing the list, Adam Speck, Marketing Director of guitarguitar, put out a statement, saying: “It’s no surprise to see artists like Ed Sheeran, The Beatles, and Taylor Swift leading the list, with their timeless songs that translate beautifully to guitar.”

“From classic ballads like Let It Be to modern favourites like Perfect, these are the tracks people dream of being able to pick up and play. What’s really encouraging is that so many of these songs are completely achievable for beginners with a bit of practice.”

A firm favourite topic for Beatles obsessives to kick around during those long-into-the night deliberations is just which of their eleven (we don’t count Magical Mystery Tour or Yellow Submarine, okay!) studio LPs was their singular best.

Whether you’re a Revolver man, an Abbey Road girl or your softest spot is reserved for their 1963 debut Please Please Me (we know there’s a few of you out there), what really isn't a matter of opinion is that on the wider cultural stage, it remains 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that is the most synonymous with the Beatles at the peak of their powers.

For many, it remains the greatest album in pop’s storied history. It’s certainly one of the most interesting from a technical and band narrative point of view, being the first of the Beatles' studio-based career.

In fact, it was this vivid cauldron of a record that solidified the very idea of ‘the album’ in popular culture, and underlined its status in devotees as the most crucial component of an artist's canon.

“The pop revolution was driven by 45s - an LP ‘the prize’ for success and even then comprising two hits and a lot of filling,” said writer David Hepworth in his album-centred book A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives.

“It was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that changed all that: not merely a collection of songs but an album - though one might call it a song cycle. After Pepper nothing was ever the same again and the acquisition of albums was an essential part of every student’s life.”

Expanding on Revolver’s initial forays into unknown sonic regions tenfold, Pepper found John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr firmly shunning the trappings of their prior identity as a mass market, entertainment spectacle.

Instead, inspired by the pioneering studio work of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, they decided to use their hard-won global platform to metamorphose into a creative force the likes of which the world had never seen.

Connecting the musical threads that spanned Britain’s past and present - and rippling with the philosophy of the counterculture - the Beatles recast themselves as the house band of the Summer of Love.

The Fab Four were no more. Enter Sgt. Pepper's titular psychedelic troubadours, the Lonely Hearts Club Band. This overt casting-off of their previous identity was quite literally depicted by the iconic Beatles-at-their-own-funeral cover art by Peter Blake.

On a strictly musical level, the album’s high points were many. There was the sinister Victoriana of Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, the heart-string tugging social commentary of the stately She’s Leaving Home and of course, the grand finale’s hallucinogenic collision of high art and acid culture depicted on the sweepingly epic A Day in the Life.

The Beatles had speedily mastered the art of using the studio as instrument, and painstakingly crafted innovative work which left the boundaries of contemporary pop music a distant speck in the rear-view mirror.

At the heart of this kaleidoscopic set lay perhaps its most profound cut. We’re talking about that Indian-instrument suffused second-side opener, Within You Without You, written and performed by George Harrison. With a little help from a few of his, non-Beatle, friends…

Backing Harrison on this most unusual of ‘Beatle’ recordings were an eight-piece string ensemble (corralled by George Martin) and a collection of Indian musicians, playing dilruba (a bowed sitar-type instrument), tamboura (a drone-setting lute, also known as a tanpura), tabla (a pair of hand drums, popular in Hindustani classical music) and swarmandal (a harp-like, plucked-box zither.)

Enchanted by the sitar ever since he had his first cursory dabble (the story goes, that this happened during the making of the Beatles’ second movie Help!), George was eager to lay his guitar to one side and incorporate his new fixation into Beatle songs.

This ambition had started gently with the sitar's incongruous, use on Rubber Soul’s Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), and expanded more overtly with the sparkling Love You Too on Revolver and its defined presence within the swirl of that album's mind-expanding conclusion, Tomorrow Never Knows.

Within You Without You, though, represented a full-blooded, far-reaching leap into the depths of the Indian classical musical tradition.

For passive pop-picking listeners on the 1960s, it would be extremely difficult - ludicrous perhaps - to even countenance that the artist behind this exotic, Indian-instrument defined piece was the very same act that just a couple of years prior had been doling out pop confectionary like I Feel Fine and Day Tripper.

It was during the interim between the group’s announcement that the touring days were over (August 1966) and the beginning of work on Sgt. Pepper (November 1966) when George truly immersed himself in Indian culture. Spending six weeks in India, Harrison was engrossed in the language, traditions, music and spirituality of the formerly British Empire-ran subcontinent.

He returned a changed man.

Hindu philosophy had resonated profoundly with the 23 year-old. In particular was the notion of the Krishna consciousness. “I always felt at home with Krishna. You see it was already a part of me,” Harrison explained in an interview with the Hare Krishna Movement in 1982. “I think it’s something that’s been with me from my previous birth… It had been slowly fitting together.”

When not fervently mantra-chanting or bathing in the Ganges (the river where his ashes would eventually be scattered after his death from cancer in 2001), Harrison took up the challenge of fully mastering the sitar under the tutelage of respected virtuoso, Ravi Shankar.

Under Shankar’s tutelage, Harrison regularly repeated the sargam scale - a run through the notes of the octave that underpin the Indian musical scale (Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni).

These daily exercises soon became muscle memory to Harrison, and the gradual note progression ultimately shaped the melodic contours of Within You Without You.

“When George showed his interest in sitar and said he would like to learn a little more, I told him very clearly that sitar is not like guitar where you can just learn it on your own,” Shankar explained in Andy Babiuk’s The Beatles’ Gear. “You have to undergo many years of study, like with the violin and cello or any of the Western classical instruments. It takes ten to fifteen years to reach a good standard, because it is not just the playing of it. You have to learn the whole musical system. So what George did, along with many others, was to take up the sitar and just start to play. They produced a sort of sound that to us sounded really ridiculous.”

“Within You Without You was written after I had got into meditation,” George recalled in his 1980 book I Me Mine. “We had entered into the All You Need Is Love consciousness after the LSD period. The song was written at Klaus Voormann’s house in Hampstead, London.”

Voormann, an artist and musician, was a longtime friend of the band since the Hamburg days, and the artist behind the Revolver cover. They two men had been discussing characteristically weighty subjects, namely the idea that invisible forces permeate the world. During a lull in the conversation, Harrison noticed his old friend’s recently acquired harmonium.

Curious, George asked Klaus if he could have a tinker.

“[That’s] when the song came to me,” remembered George in I Me Mine. “The tune came first, then the first sentence, ['We were talking about the space between us now'] I finished the words later.”

The lyrics that poured from Harrison were reflective of his spiritual renewal in India, and a newly-attuned radar for those enigmatic forces that he believed swam in the spaces we couldn’t see.

These weren’t just the esoteric concerns of the East, Harrison felt, but they pervaded the lives of ordinary people in the West, too.

The problem was, in George's view, that many couldn’t, and never would, be aware of these imperceptible bonds. Partly because they didn’t want to, and partly because of the distractions of the modern world.

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth
Then it's far too late
When they pass away

“There are so many people who don’t understand the sentiment of Within You Without You,” Harrison explained in the Beatles Anthology. “They can’t see outside themselves, they’re too self-important and can’t see how small we all are.”

These themes, though broadly critical of the erosion of spirituality, also jibed strongly with the overall, consciousness-raising philosophy of acid-advocating intellectuals like Timothy Leary. The song’s intimation of ‘the truth’ corresponded with Leary’s concept of ‘ego death’, the notion that blurring the boundaries of the self via psychedelic substances was key to tapping into a deeper truth.

These types of philosophical ideas were becoming trendy as the utopian, hippie movement began to gain prominence.

This was, perhaps in part, a reaction against the horrendous, televised images of horror taking place in Vietnam that were then being played out in living rooms across the Western world. The youth had naturally started to question government, and the established order of things.

Back to the Beatles, and despite being relieved to no longer have to go out on tour, Harrison was missing the band cohesion during the more technically-demanding Sgt. Pepper sessions. “Sgt. Pepper was the one album where things were done slightly differently,” Harrison reflected in The Beatles Anthology. “A lot of the time, we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much. It became an assembly process - just little parts and then overdubbing.”

This yearning for yesteryear certainly wasn’t at the forefront of Harrison’s mind when it came to working to the album’s Paul McCartney-directed concept (which George had little interest in), and Within You Without You was developed distantly from his bandmates.

“My heart was still out there [in India]”, Harrison was quoted as saying in The Beatles Anthology. “[Working with the Beatles again] felt like going backwards.”

This feeling of detachment was further compounded by the fact that his first song pitch for the group’s eighth LP, Only a Northern Song (which would later appear on the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine) was dismissed by the Beatles’ producer George Martin as ‘Too boring’.

Martin instructed Harrison to ‘come back with something better’ for his one and only contribution to the record. That had to sting.

Fuelled by this rejection, Harrison turned to working his idea for Within You Without You into what is surely in the running for the most audacious piece of music on the album.

It was a piece of creative retribution that sounded unlike anything that had ever been heard before on a chart-topping Western pop record.

As George further recounted in the Beatles Anthology, the arrangement of Within You Without You was based upon a piece of music that Ravi Shankar had recorded for All-India Radio. “It was a very long piece - maybe 30 or 40 minutes - and was written in different parts, with a progression in each,” recalled Harrison. “I wrote a mini version of it, using sounds similar to those I’d discovered in his piece. I recorded in three segments and spliced them together later.”

Principally recorded on March 15th 1967 within Abbey Road’s Studio 2 (then known as EMI Studios), Harrison went all-in on setting the appropriate mood.

Decking out the studio with Indian tapestries, Harrison turned down the lights, lit some incense and attempted to conjure the distinctly Eastern vibe that he hoped would infuse the track.

Seasoned Beatle-engineer Geoff Emerick aided Harrison, digging out some of Abbey Road’s tatty throwrugs so the instrumentalists could sit and play together, emulating a traditional set-up.

“The Abbey Road throwrugs were completely moth-eaten and dilapidated… but it was the thought that counted,” Emerick recollected in his book Here, There and Everywhere.

Performed on the track were a pair of tamboura (two were played by Harrison himself alongside Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall) whilst the tabla, two dilrubas and an additional tamboura were performed by Amiya Dasgupta, Anna Joshi, Amrit Gajjar and Buddhadev Kansara respectively.

These musicians were all members of the Asian Music Circle - a London-based group which had been set-up to promote Indian and Asian styles of music and dance in Western culture. What better conduit to the ears of the West than its biggest band’s eagerly anticipated new album.

Additional overdubbing would expand the instrumental palette further with the addition of the swarmandal, which is used to weave the glissando, harp-like ornamentation at the song’s start. There was also space for Harrison to, of course, beautifully thread his sitar.

Following a ‘marathon’ recording session, George’s dreamy lead vocal was tracked early in the morning of the next day.

“George tackled the lead vocal, and he did a great job. Mind you, he does sound quite sleepy on it,” recalled engineer Geoff Emerick in Here, There and Everywhere. “[It’s] hardly surprising since he’d been up all night working on the track! Fortunately, that lethargic quality seemed to perfectly complement the mood of the song.”

Emerick also illuminated how he close-mic’d the tablas, and added signal processing to make them a little bit more sonically exciting. “Everyone was amazed when they first heard a tabla recorded that close and with the texture and the lovely low resonances.”

“It was not a commercial song by any means,” producer George Martin later recalled. “But it was very interesting. [George Harrison] had this way of communicating music by the Indian system, a seperate language almost. [Sounds] like ‘tiky tiky ta ta taaa’, which came from the rhythms suggested by the tabla player. You had to get inside that and work out what it was about.”

Directing proceedings based on a memorised structure, Harrison’s composition oriented around the Khamaj thaat (the Indian equivalent of the Mixolydian mode), Within You Without You’s music etched its way atop a constant drone that gravitated around C (later sped up to the key of C# when being edited for time). Harrison’s serene, undulating vocal melody was mirrored by the dilruba - a typical approach in many Indian music forms.

Meanwhile, the propulsive tabla rhythms were grounded in a 16-beat rhythm known a tintal during the verse and chorus, played at a medium tempo.

This was a pattern similar to 4/4, yet differed as one measure encompasses the entire 16-beat cycle. Its steady, symmetrical pattern kept a 16-beat (4+4+4+4) pulse throughout the main part of the song.

During the middle-section, this tabla beat entered into an organic call-and-response interplay with the other instruments in 5/4 time, an approach referred to in the Indian classical musical tradition as jawab-sawal (question/answer), before ultimately landing back on the 16-beat tintal rhythm of the opening.

Harrison's deep study of Indian musical forms was in obvious evidence, but there was another element that elevated the track even further…

The final magic touch came with the ingenious decision to marry these traditional Indian techniques with instruments typically found in the West.

George Martin’s inspired string ensemble, tracked on the final day of recording for Sgt. Pepper, united eight violins and three cellos from the London Symphony Orchestra to complement, contrast, mimic and blend with the Indian landscape.

The two Georges worked tirelessly to find the common linkage between the instruments, painstakingly mapping the swooping and bowing of the dilruba's movements and carefully communicating the microtonal slides to the English ensemble.

The resulting interplay bridged these two, very different, musical traditions. It was, essentially, a divine handshake between West and East in sound.

Although an impressive technical accomplishment, the instrumentation echoed the underlying lyric’s philosophical intimation that deeper powers bond every human being, regardless of culture and geography.

“I found it very fascinating actually working with George on that,” George Martin stated in an interview, shared below. Him trying to get from English musicians what the Indians were already giving us. It started with George working with a dilruba player.”

Within that same video, Martin demonstrated how their work entwined the dilruba and violin, and how George Harrison ‘answered’ on sitar. He points to the pizzicato strings and a ‘slurpy’ cello as being examples of how they managed to find the connective tissue between distinct musical languages.

Although the song was hugely different to everything else on Pepper, Harrison’s only concession to the record’s loose theme was the addition of humoured crowd noise [Taken from Abbey Road’s sound effect collection, Volume 6: Applause and Laughter] at the song’s end.

Although initially added to relieve the heaviness of the track’s grander themes, Harrison judged that it also worked in reference to the supposed context of the surrounding record. “You were supposed to hear the audience anyway, as they listen to Sgt. Pepper's Show,” Harrison told Hunter Davies in his authorised biography.

As the opener to Sgt. Pepper’s second side, Within You Without You was quite the most unexpected turn a Beatles album had taken to date.

It demonstrated the full reach of George Harrison’s musical abilities. A studious, questing talent that was further proved via the fruits of his work across the next few Beatle records. A blinding array of songs that included While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes the Sun and Something.

Whilst some contemporary listeners were unsurprisingly baffled by the track (some still are), and derided its musical aspirations as pretentious, an equal number fell under its spell.

“This ambitious essay in cross-cultural fusion and meditative philosophy has been dismissed with a yawn by almost every commentator since it first appeared,” wrote the late Beatles-scribe Ian MacDonald in his still-essential Revolution in the Head. “[But] Within You Without You is central to the outlook that shaped Sgt. Pepper. Stylistically, it is the most distant departure from the staple Beatles sound in their discography - and an altogether remarkable achievement for someone who had been acquainted with Hindustani classical music for barely eighteen months.”

Despite not contributing to the song, John Lennon was a notable presence in the studio on the day it was recorded. Although he, according to Geoff Emerick, looked bored during the session, Within You Without You would strike a chord with Lennon, and stand up as one of his very favourite George songs, even over a decade later.

“He’s clear on that song,” John Lennon would later enthuse of Within You Without You in his Playboy interview in September 1980, just three months before his tragic murder. “His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent. He brought that sound together.”

Paul Mescal, who as we set know is set to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ upcoming series of Beatles biopics, has been talking about his training for the role.

For a start - and as you might expect - he has been learning to play guitar and bass left-handed.

“It’s been pretty intense,” the actor said in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “It would just be crazy to not play it left-handed, you know? You’d be like, ‘Nah. I like [McCartney] a lot, but I don’t love him.’ That would be the messaging if I didn’t play left-handed. And he’s the fucking coolest man on planet Earth, I think.

“I’ve always been a massive admirer of his music generally, but the thing I’m in total admiration for is his work ethic, [which was] absolutely relentless. I think it’s just an objective fact that the work that he made has changed the world.”

As part of his preparation, Mescal met – and even played with - the man himself. “I will never forget it as long as I live,” he said. “That’s the coolest thing that my job has ever afforded me. I was kinda having an out of body experience, like [thinking] I was in drama school nine years ago and now I’m sitting here opposite Paul McCartney and we’re playing Blackbird. To be sat in front of somebody playing one of the most famous, most covered songs of all time. But then to be sat in front of the person who that came out of his mind, I was like, 'I love my job.'"

Then there’s the reading. Mescal has been busy absorbing Ian Leslie’s acclaimed book John & Paul: A Love Story In Song. “He reframes this whole relationship for me. We understand it as something that became incredibly antagonistic, which it was for a period, but also it was, to my mind, the greatest creative collaboration that we’ve maybe ever had as human beings - definitely in modern times.”

He is, he admits “obsessed” with the Beatles at the moment. “It’s part of my job, but it’s also the way that my brain is wired. I’m excited about listening to music, writing music, absorbing music, going to shows, all of these things - they start with an intensity with the job and then kind of become my personality for a bit.”

The search for Paul McCartney’s missing Höfner 500/1 bass guitar is to be told in a new documentary.

Titled, The Beatle And The Bass, the film unpacks all the drama behind the search for McCartney’s ‘Violin’ bass, which went missing in 1972, reportedly stolen out of the back of a van in London (some reports say Ladbroke Grove, others Notting Hill) and was subsequently the subject of a global hunt led by investigative journalists Scott and Naomi Jones.

Spoilers ahead: we know how this movie ends, or at least, how the search for the bass went.

The Lost Bass Project was successful. It located the stolen Höfner in September 2023. McCartney was reunited with it in February 2024. And in December 2024 it made a dramatic return to the stage for the climax of Macca’s triumphant Got Back 2024 Tour at London’s 02 Arena, with McCartney welcoming Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood to the stage to perform Get Back.

It was the first time in over 50 years that he had played it in anger.

McCartney completed a historic night by bringing fellow Beatle Ringo Starr onstage to sit in with him on drums for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter.

As reported by Variety, The Beatle And The Bass has been commissioned by BBC Arts and will be produced by Passion Pictures, the company behind the award-winning Christopher Reeve documentary, Super/Man. McCartney will play a starring role.

“I think anything that’s nicked, you want back, especially if it has sentimental value,” he said. “It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, where did it go? There must be an answer…”

McCartney got his answer when the bass turned up in the attic of someone’s house in Suffolk, England. But some answers only invite more questions. How did it get there? What has it been doing all of this time?

We do know where this story started. McCartney got this bass right at the beginning of the Beatles, when they’d swapped Liverpool for Hamburg and were cutting their teeth playing clubs night after night. McCartney went gear shopping and it caught his eye.

“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.”

Having found McCartney’s Höfner, The Lost Bass Project has turned its attention to another of guitar’s great mysteries, the whereabouts of the Gibson ES-345 that Michael J Fox as Marty McFly played during Back To The Future.

The Joneses have officially been put on the case as Gibson’s global hunt for one of the most iconic electric guitars in pop culture continues. It is still missing, but Gibson CEO and president Cesar Gueikian teased a Custom Shop replica release of the McFly ES-345, which appears to be anachronistically badged as a “1955” model. Cute. Accurate to the movie, not to the model’s history.

That hunt, too, will surely be a documentary in the making – if they can find it. But then the best mysteries are those we can't solve. Come to think of it: has anyone seen Eric Clapton's 'Beano' Les Paul?

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.

The Beatles heritage industry is gearing up once more with the announcement today (August 21) that the whole Anthology series of compilations, plus the documentary and book are to be reissued, repackaged and revamped this autumn.

So here are the deets: The original three Anthology albums, which were released – as I’m sure you’ll recall if you’re over 35 – in a veritable blaze of publicity thirty years ago, are coming out on November 21, all remastered by Giles Martin and with the addition of live and bonus tracks.

Plus there's a new fourth Anthology album, which comprises tracks that didn’t make the cut in 1995, plus new 2025 mixes of Free As A Bird and Real Love. The former, the much-hyped ‘new’ Beatles single was, for many, a letdown in 1995, largely because John Lennon’s voice sounded very much as it was: a faint whisper from an eighteen-year-old cassette tape. Now, using the same technology that catalysed the release of Now And Then it’s clear and clean. Result.

On the downside – there’s still no sign of Carnival Of Light. This is the 14-minute avant-garde track that was recorded in early 1967. Largely the work of Paul McCartney, its inclusion on Anthology 2 was vetoed by George Harrison. And it seems it hasn’t got past Harrison’s widow (or perhaps Ringo and Yoko Ono) this time either.

Meanwhile, The Beatles Anthology documentary, originally an eight-part series shown on Sunday evenings in late 1995, has been restored by the Apple Corps production team, together with Peter Jackson.

There is also the addition of an Episode Nine, which shows behind-the-scenes footage of Paul, George and Ringo’s reunion in 1994/95 as well as new interviews in which they reflect on their lives as Beatles.

The catch? Whereas the original Anthology was on free-to-air ITV, you’ll need a Disney+ subscription for this new version. It will be streaming on the platform from November 26.

Finally, the Beatles Anthology book is being reissued in a 25^th Anniversary edition. It’s an accompaniment to the documentary series and features interviews with the four Beatles, plus colleagues such as Neil Aspinall, George Martin, Derek Taylor and others. Featuring over 1300 photos, artwork and memorabilia from the band’s archive, it’s out on October 14. A Christmas gift, perhaps, for the Beatles nut in your life?

Apparently, when the original Anthology albums were being put together in the mid-1990s, George remarked to Paul that they should call the next compilation ‘Scraping The Bottom Of The Barrel’. Somewhere in the cosmos, the Quiet One is surely smiling wryly to himself.

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.”

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.

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."

Hey - can you play bass? Are you left handed? Do you look good in a suit? Can you roll your eyes skywards and look ever-so-slightly wistful?

If the answer to all those questions is yes, then you could be the Bootleg Beatles' next Paul McCartney.

Yes, the veteran tribute band are looking for a new member. The current incumbent, one Steve White, is moving on to pastures new and the band – who have been going since 1980, many decades longer than the Beatles themselves managed – have advertised for a replacement on Instagram.

Read more: The Bootleg Beatles: “The Beatles could overdub as much as they like. We don’t have that luxury live on stage”

The band wrote: “We’re very sad to announce that Steve White, our fab Macca for over 10 years, is retiring from full-time touring with BB’s this Autumn. He has been an outstanding contributor to this wonderful BB ‘institution’ and we all wish him well with his future musical projects.”

The band went on to say that “the search is on” for a new bassist, who has the “look, the voice, bass guitar and keyboard skills” of McCartney.

The successful applicant will be their fourth Macca in all. In their 45-year history the band have gone through four Lennons, four Ringos and are currently on its second George. The original band was formed by members of the cast of Beatlemania, a Broadway show that was one of the first theatrical tributes to the Fab Four. Since then they have played around the world, including countries that the Beatles themselves never reached, including the Soviet Union and Israel.

It’s fair to say that being a Bootleg Beatle is among the steadiest gigs any musician is ever likely to get. If it sounds like your bag send a CV, photos video and audio clips to auditions@bootlegbeatles.com

Beyoncé has said goodbye to her London residency with some warm words for the man who wrote one of the songs she performed during each of her six performances at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

We’re talking, of course, about Paul McCartney’s Blackbird, a reworked version of which appeared on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album and is being sung by the star at each stop on the corresponding tour.

And while the much-hoped-for London appearance from the former Beatle sadly didn’t happen - that’s got to be on the cards at some point, surely? - Beyoncé did offer a sartorial nod to his family by wearing some of his daughter Stella’s clothes, and she’s now paid tribute to McCartney senior in an Instagram post.

“Thank you, Sir Paul McCartney, for writing one of the best songs ever made,” she wrote. “Every time I sing it I feel so honored. And it is a full circle moment to wear your beautiful daughter’s design.”

Beyoncé’s thank you follows the appreciative post that McCartney delivered in the wake of Cowboy Carter’s release, in 2024.

"I am so happy with Beyoncé’s version of my song Blackbird,” he said on Instagram. “I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place. I think Beyoncé has done a fab version and would urge anyone who has not heard it yet to check it out. You are going to love it!”

Beyoncé’s new message, meanwhile, also included a shout out to the estimated 275,000 people who came to see her during the course of her six London shows.

“Thank you, London, for creating unforgettable memories for me and my family,” she said. “Holla at ‘ya when I come on tour again!”

The Cowboy Carter roadshow is now set to roll into Paris, where Beyoncé will play three shows at the Stade de France, beginning on 19 June. The star will then return to the US for dates in Houston, Washington, DC, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.

Kiss star Gene Simmons is one of the most famous musicians in the world — but when he names his favourite bass player of all time, he admits: “I couldn't shine his shoes.”

Speaking to MusicRadar about his own approach to bass and his key influences, Simmons hails Paul McCartney as the GOAT.

“I started off like McCartney started off,” he says. “I started by learning to play chords on guitar.

“As a 14 or 15 year-old kid, I just taught myself, looked at people's fingers and eventually started to write those early, stupid songs, some of which developed into tunes that were recorded [on Kiss albums].

“And then it occurred to me, much later — late teens or so — that maybe I should play bass, because I wanted to be in a band, and I'd have a better chance of being in a band by being a bass player, because everybody wanted to play guitar or drums.

“So I switched to bass, and I could write a few tunes and sing okay.

“And with bass, the very first guy that just blew me out of the water was McCartney. To this day when I'm listening to Dear Prudence or some of those other great Beatles songs, you remember the bass part. You’re aware of what the bass is doing.

“That doesn’t happen with The Rolling Stones," Simmons says. "And I love the Stones! But name me a bass part [in a Stones song] that you remember. You might go, ‘Oh yeah, during that song here's what the bass was doing.’ But you're unaware of it.

“Even in Led Zeppelin, John Paul Jones was so great, but your ear doesn't go to what the bass is playing in those songs.

“With McCartney, it's like a string quartet. You have the high notes over there playing, but you can hear what the cello is doing.

“And maybe his approach to bass playing has to do with the fact that he was a guitar player first and foremost.”

Another bassist Simmons admires is the late James Jamerson, who performed uncredited on many of the greatest Motown hits including You Can’t Hurry love by The Supremes, Reach Out I’ll The There by the Four Tops, Dancing In The Street by Martha And The Vandellas, My Girl by The Temptations — and much of Marvin Gaye’s classic 1971 album What’s Going On.

Simmons says of Jamerson’s style: “Just the feel of it is incredible. It's a rumble and a feel.”

It was this kind of feel that Simmons attempted to recreate on Kiss tracks such as Cold Gin, from the band’s self-titled debut album.

“That’s exactly right,” he says, “because I had listened to a lot of Motown.

“The first music I ever heard in America was black music, and if you ever hear a James Brown record you're aware that drums and bass are playing completely differently.”

Simmons also loved the way Ronnie Wood played bass for The Jeff Beck Group before making his name as a guitar player with the Faces and The Rolling Stones.

“Ron Wood is a decent guitar player,” Simmons says, “but what he did on bass in the Jeff Beck Group is one of the pivotal moments where I started going, ‘Wait a minute — what’s going on here?’

"Those first two Beck records [Truth and Beck-Ola] I still play today, and what Ron Wood did on bass is phenomenal.”

He continues: “There’s another guy named Felix Pappalardi who was a producer — he produced Cream and the Youngbloods and stuff like that — and he also got together with [guitarist] Leslie West and formed Mountain. His bass playing in that band, you take note of it.”

Simmons acknowledges The Beatles’ influence in his own band’s early music.

“Kiss was a strange band,” he says, “in the sense that we had three part harmonies, classic song structure — ABA, like Beatles kind of stuff — but there were some heavy riffs in there.”

He cites the song Black Diamond — another, like Cold Gin, from the band’s debut album — as a perfect example of the creative process between himself, guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley and lead guitarist Ace Frehley.

He recalls: “Paul would be writing songs and I'd be writing songs and sometimes we’d write together.

“Paul played me the song Black Diamond. I'm going, ‘Okay, let me just try playing it with you, let me do the root. And I started playing along, which is not blues, it's more classical, but it's just what I heard here.

"We said to Ace, ‘Hey, double up on my bass part, and Paul can just strum the chord.’ And all of a sudden we said, ‘Wait a minute, that's kind of hooky. Let's all play that bass part, which sounds like a horn part or something.’”

Simmons concludes: “There are no rules in any kind of music. You can pick and choose your influences and try to apply it to your thing.

“It's like food. You know, Indian food and English food use the same things — meat and potatoes and salt and pepper — but Indian food tastes different to English food. It's how you put it together that gives it the unique flavour.”

The Beatles' most famous album — perhaps the most famous album ever made — was released on 26 May, 1967.

And 58 years later, Kiss star Gene Simmons says he is still amazed by what the Fab Four created with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Simmons tells MusicRadar that he and Kiss co-founder Paul Stanley call Great Britain a “holy ground” for rock music.

“Paul and myself, being Anglophiles, we’ve always been fascinated by that small island,” he says.

“It is a small place. America is bigger than Europe, the land mass is bigger.

“You can fly five and a half hours from LA and not get to New York. In Europe, two or three hours and you're anywhere you want.

“But this little island somehow produced the most iconic bands, the most talented writers and singers of all time — The Beatles and the Stones and The Kinks and Queen and on and on and on and on. It’s just amazing.”

Simmons believes the cultural exchange between British and American rock is unbalanced.

“Name an American band that can even get close to the Stones, Beatles, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd,” he says. “Come on!

“And yes, America invented rock ’n' roll. But we gave you The Grateful Dead and you gave us Led Zeppelin!”

Simmons reserves the greatest admiration for The Beatles.

“In Britain you have the royals and all that,” he says, “But for me, The Beatles made it holy ground.

“I still remember the fascination of hearing Sgt. Pepper for the first time. It's The Beatles — but they're pretending to be another band?

“And then they introduce Billy Shears for the second song? And it's an amazing song, and heartfelt. [Sings the opening lines to With A Little Help From My Friends] ‘What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me?’

“I remember going, ‘What it this?’ It breaks all the rules.

"It was almost music hall stuff. And I was like, ‘What?!’”

Simmons finishes with a little Beatles trivia — and a trip of the hat to Ringo Starr.

“Here's a statement of fact,” Simmons says. “When all of them went solo, and George Harrison came out with this enormous triple album, All Things Must Pass, it took me a year to just digest all that.

“But Ringo had more number one single hits in America than any of the other Beatles.

“That,” he says, “is crazy!”

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."

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.

Despite tensions that would see John Lennon leaving and the band’s eventual split a few months later, the recording sessions for 1969’s Abbey Road saw The Beatles at a creative peak. A mix of rock, pop, blues and prog, the album’s musical influences are diverse and there’s inspiration aplenty for all budding guitarists even now, 50 years on.

George Harrison’s lead work on Come Together and Something is considered some of his most expressive and melodic playing, and Sun King takes influence from Brit blues legend Peter Green’s instrumental work in Fleetwood Mac’s classic Albatross.

George’s Leslie-driven Telecaster tones on Something are without doubt a major part of Abbey Road’s sonic trademark as are the double-tracked arpeggios on I Want You (She’s So Heavy).

All of this means there’s plenty of material for us guitarists to learn from - and ‘less is more’ is the overriding lesson. Aim for understated lead lines that could stand on their own as vocal melodies and you’ll be on the right track.

We’re also looking at a cool Beatles chord trick below, but it’s also worth thinking about how to solo over parallel changes - we recommend targeting notes from the chords. For example, if you’re changing from D to Dm, the only note that changes is F# in the D chord and F in the Dm, so make sure to land on these in your leads.

1 Parallel chords

2. Arpeggios with modulation effect 

Simple arpeggios like these can be heard throughout Abbey Road, notably on tracks like Something, Sun King and Octopus’s Garden. The line in bar 1 could easily be developed into a lead idea – it’s almost the same shape as the C# minor pentatonic scale after all. The altered chord at the end is pure Beatles!

3. Melodic lead 

Abbey Road features some of George Harrison’s finest playing and songwriting. This lick focuses on his use of the major pentatonic scale to create cool melodies and motifs. The finger slide between notes is a handy way to move from the 5th position up as high as the 17th fret. A neck pickup and spring reverb give authentic ambience.

• How to play like John Lennon: 4 key guitar lessons from the early Beatles era

Pete Best – the original drummer in the Beatles – has announced that he has officially retired.

For many years he has run his own group, The Pete Best Band and they had been pencilled in to play the Beatles Museum in Liverpool this coming August. However, his bandmate (and half-brother) Roag Best has cancelled the appearance and confirmed that this is the end of the road for the veteran drummer.

He posted on Twitter/X: “Well what an absolutely wonderful ride we’ve had. However, everything comes to pass. My brother Pete Best has announced today he is retiring from personal appearances and performing with the group. His daughter has informed me it’s due to personal circumstances.”

Best himself reposted his bro’s tweet, and wrote: “I had a blast. Thank you.”

He has had, it must be said, a unique career. His name has become a byword for misfortune in music; the luckless member sacked before success is invariably referred to as a band’s ‘Pete Best’. Carrying that weight of infamy around for decades could easily have seen him go under. Indeed in 1967 he attempted suicide, and was saved by his brother Rory.

He drifted into regular work and for years worked in a job centre in Liverpool. In the late 1980s he was convinced to give music another go after playing a one-off gig at a Beatles convention. And so the Pete Best Band has been a going concern for the past 37 years.

The basement in his old family home, at Hayman’s Street, West Derby, which his mother opened as the Casbah Club and saw a number of early Beatles gigs, has for years been an unofficial Beatles museum, albeit one in which history stops in August 1962. That was when - two months before the release Love Me Do - Brian Epstein informed him that the band didn’t require his services any more.

It was reported last year that Best and his brother had converted the Casbah into an Airbnb. There are five separate apartments, each named after a Beatle – John, Paul, George, Stuart and Pete. But no Ringo. Of course.

Best though is insistent that he has never felt resentment towards the man who replaced him. “As far as I’m concerned, it happened 60-odd years ago,” he told the Guardian last year. “I’ve lived my life, I’ve had a great life. It did cause me initial heartache and resentment, but that’s showbusiness.”

So... we now know the identities of the four actors who will play the lead roles in the upcoming Sam Mendes-directed Beatles biopics.

Mendes appeared on stage with his on screen fab four at CinemaCon, an annual event for the movie industry last night in Las Vegas. He also confirmed that all four biopics will be out in the same month: April 2028. Those few weeks look likely to be busy ones for Beatles fans (of which there are just a few) and potentially lucrative ones for cinema chains around the world.

So the band consists of Harris Dickinson, who joins an illustrious line of actors including Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ian Hart (twice!) to have played John Lennon; Paul Mescal, who as predicted by many is Paul; Stranger Things star Joseph Quinn is George, and as already know (because Ringo himself inadvertently broke the news last year) Barry Keoghan plays the drummer.

“We’re not just making one film about the Beatles – we’re making four,” Mendes said at CinemaCon. “Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply.”

He explained that he had been trying to make a film about the Beatles “for years, but I finally gave up”. The “story was too big for one film” and he didn’t want to make a television series.

“There had to be a way to tell the epic story for a new generation,” he told the audience, adding: “I can assure you there is still plenty left to explore and I think we found a way to do that.”

On stage, the four actors recited a line or two from Sgt Pepper’s’ title track: “It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill, you’re such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us.”

Mendes’ project is certainly ambitious. For one thing the Beatles’ story is now so well known that you’d think every possible angle has already been covered.

Previous biopics have concentrated on one part of the story – the Hamburg years (Backbeat) or the relationship between Brian Epstein and Lennon (The Hours and The Times) – and been reasonably successful within that remit.

Does Mendes attempt to tell the whole story in each of the four films, risking repetition (and audience boredom)? In any case isn’t the Beatles’ thirteen-year career too unwieldy, complex and multi-layered to cram into a two-hour running time?

I guess we shall see. Meanwhile, one wonders if the public fascination and craving for all things Beatles will ever be sated? Arriving nearly 60 years after their final split, these biopics are unlikely to be the final word...

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.”

Billed as the final single from The Beatles, Now and Then was always going to be a big deal. The track, which is nominated for Song of the Year at this weekend’s Brit Awards, has its roots in a 1977 demo recorded by John Lennon.

Its mix features all four original members - Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with the late Lennon and George Harrison - and comes with a long history that includes an aborted mid-’90s attempt at a finished release.

There’s another headline-grabbing element to the eventual release of Now and Then though. As has been widely, and on occasion a little misleadingly reported, the track’s creation has been made possible thanks to the use of neural network technology. Or, as how some have more flatly termed it - AI.

This latter fact seems to have led to misconceptions among some fans, as the track’s co-producer Giles Martin (son of late Beatles producer George Martin) demonstrates in an exclusive video for MusicRadar.

“I think there is this supposition that we used AI to recreate something, or to perhaps enhance John Lennon's voice,” Martin tells us. “This simply wasn't the case. All we did was clean a cassette recording he had made all those years ago.”

It’s true that some of the public reaction to Now and Then, particularly in the wake of its recent Grammy win for Best Rock Performance, has led some to raise a suspicious eyebrow. But this perception stems from the entirely false notion that the track has harnessed some form of generative AI. Which it very much hasn't.

That misconception may well stem from a 2023 interview Paul McCartney gave to Radio 4’s Today Programme, in which the Beatle announced that he had recently completed work on a song created with the help of artificial intelligence.

In reality, the innovative technology that allowed for the creation of Now and Then is the same that was used to assemble Get Back - Peter Jackson’s lengthy and hugely revelatory three-part documentary shot during the making of what would become Let It Be in 1969.

Jackson’s team made use of machine learning technology - which they dubbed MAL (in reference to both 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, and Beatles' long-serving roadie Mal Evans) - in order to isolate instruments, sung vocals and dialogue from the original tapes.

The same technology was later used by Martin to produce the new stereo remix of Revolver. Released in 2022, this pristine-sounding version of the 1966 classic was created using stems separated from the original four-track master tapes.

In our video, Martin addresses the misconception directly by demonstrating the technology in action. First, Giles shows how it’s capable of separating the individual instrument parts of Revolver opener Taxman, and then by playing the separated stems of Lennon’s original recording of Now and Then.

Giles spotlights something vital; “the important thing here is to realise that we're not generating anything. AI is not creating John's voice. John's voice existed on that cassette, and we made the song around him.”

Reviving Now and Then

That original demo on which Now and Then was constructed has its roots in a 1977 demo recording created by John Lennon in his Dakota Building apartment in NYC.

Following Lennon’s death in 1980, two cassettes of demo recordings were given to McCartney containing the unfinished version of Now and Then along with three other work-in-progress songs, Free as a Bird, Real Love and Grow Old With Me.

In the mid-’90s the surviving Beatles worked on completing those demos with producer Jeff Lynne around the release of The Beatles Anthology.

Free as a Bird and Real Love were completed during those sessions, and released as singles to promote a trilogy of expansive compilations of studio outtakes and early demos.

Although an attempt was made to create a finished version of Now and Then - the third in this planned trilogy - the track was ultimately abandoned due, at least in part, to the difficulties of working with a poor quality demo recording.

Thanks to the machine learning technology used on Get Back, it became possible to isolate a clean audio file of Lennon’s vocals from the original demo recording.

The final version of Now and Then, which was eventually released in November last year, was produced by McCartney and Martin based around that vocal recording.

Despite incorporating parts written and recorded across a span of almost 50 years, Martin claims that any challenge involved in mixing these disparate elements was overridden by the natural cohesion between contributions of the four original members.

“There's always a challenge in mixing anything and getting everyone to settle down,” he says. “But as this was all the Beatles playing, they obviously compliment each other beautifully in what they do. There wasn’t too much of a challenge.”

Martin would be right to push back on the perception that AI has made some sort of creative contribution to the song. Although the technology has been instrumental in allowing its creation, there’s nothing that has been written or generated by anything other than real musicians.

Surviving Beatles McCartney and Ringo Starr contributed new instrument and vocal parts, while George Harrison’s guitar parts from the aborted ‘90s sessions were also incorporated into the arrangement, along with a newly recorded string arrangement.

“It was purely Paul's decision to work on this record, and he led that decision based on having heard the work that we've done with Peter Jackson,” Martin tells us.

That’s not to say Now and Then sticks religiously to Lennon’s original vision. Along with the additional instrumentation, the final version adds new lyrics and omits a pre-chorus from Lennon’s demo. These creative decisions were taken by McCartney, though.

While there’s plenty for Beatles fans to debate around Now and Then’s various iterations and its place within the band’s canon, any supposed questions around the ethics of AI are something of a misnomer.

What’s more, while the MAL technology used but Peter Jackson’s team has been trailblazing and is undeniably impressive (as anyone that’s seen Get Back can attest) mass-market technology is already catching up on those capabilities.

The separation tools used in the creation of Now and Then aren’t a million miles away from similar stem seperation tech now included in the likes of Apple’s Logic Pro and Image-Line's FL Studio.

In other words, as much as Now and Then remains noteworthy and is without question an impressive achievement, the 'AI' element is really one of the less interesting parts of its story.

Artificial influence

While Martin and McCartney didn’t employ AI as a generative or creative tool in producing Now and Then, that’s not to say that doing so is beyond the realms of what’s technologically possible.

We’re living in a time where machine learning and AI-driven tech is making a lot of new concepts possible, or at least easier to achieve, from remixing old recordings to creating full ‘deepfake’ versions of late musicians.

For Martin, however, there are definite lines that shouldn’t be crossed when it comes to tampering with the legacy of musicians like Lennon and Harrison.

“It's fundamental that if any technology is used in a recording, it should be done with the artist's approval,” he tells us. “The idea that anyone could generate an imitation or deepfake of an artist without their permission, or even create a deepfake recording of anything is, I think, very dangerous. It's really important that the artist owns their own voice, when it comes to using this technology.”

The discussion around AI’s use in the creation of Now and Then is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll see in the near future, as rapidly advancing AI technology makes its mark on society.

The impact of machine learning and generative tech is likely to be particularly prevalent in creative industries like music production.

“It may provide more of a threat if used in the wrong way,” Martin says. “As someone who embraces technology in the same way that my father and The Beatles did, I think that it's up to the user to make the right decisions based around how they use the technology.”

The link between The Beatles and cutting-edge recording technology is nothing new, of course.

The recording sessions the band undertook with George Martin at Abbey Road pioneered numerous techniques, from double tracking to tape manipulation and early forms of sampling. There’s a solid case to be made that this latest use of cutting-edge tools fits perfectly into their spirit of innovation.

"[Me and my father] actually worked on a John Lennon song together, called Grow Old with Me, which he did a beautiful string arrangement for,” Martin recalls. “At that time, I remember us struggling to get a better vocal out of the cassette recording we had. This is exactly the sort of technology we would have probably used if we were doing the record again.”

The Beatles Now and Then is nominated for Song of the Year at the 2025 Brit Awards.

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.

If you’re tempted to have a flutter on who will win Record Of The Year at this year’s Grammys, it might be worth taking a look at a study which predicts who will win the prize at the ceremony next month.

The study - put together by ‘in store music providers’ Startle - has analysed the winners of the award over the last 50 years - including their respective tempi, danceability, artist age, genre and gender - and has made a bold prediction.

It says that Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso has an odds-on chance of winning - 80%, in fact.

Espresso ticks many of the right boxes. It’s positive, danceable, upbeat and very catchy. If Carpenter does scoop the prize it will be the second time in a row that a Disney Channel alumnus has won the award, after Miley Cyrus picked up Record Of The Year in 2024 for Flowers.

Behind Carpenter with a 71% chance of winning are the Beatles with Now And Then. OK, it didn’t sell/stream as many as Espresso, but among the factors in its favour is that, incredibly, though they have been nominated four times, the Fabs have never won this award.

Also the Grammy academy has in the past tended to go for the safe, conservative option. And after having female solo artists winning in four of the last five years, the judges may prefer to go with a male group this time.

If they wanted to be more daring, they could go for Kendrick Lamar’s Drake diss track Not Like Us, which has a 70% chance of winning, the same figure as Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! However, despite it becoming the most streamed track of the year on Spotify, Startle rates the chances of Billie Eilish’s Birds Of A Feather at just 61%. Eilish won the award in 2020 and 2021 and it would be a surprise if she converted those into a hat-trick, the study suggests.

Startle’s survey also unearths some other fascinating figures. Male solo artists are still the most likely to win the award - they picked up 26 of the last 50. Female solo artists have won 16 times and mixed gender groups just seven times. And there has been one non-binary winner - Sam Smith in 2016, although at the time the singer still identified as male.

Zak Starkey has been talking about how moved he felt when he played the Cavern in Liverpool recently.

The ex-Oasis drummer, who of course is the eldest son of one Ringo Starr, was there with his new group Mantra Of The Cosmos. But he also found time to play alongside fellow ex-Oasis man Chris Sharrock with the Cavern’s own Beatles tribute band, something that left him somewhat nervous.

"We set up two kits and we double drummed the Beatles show,” he explained. “It was amazing because I was shitting it.”

"I've never been nervous in my life - I've been on stage since I was 12 years old - but it's holy music. I know it, but I don't know the drum bits... But as soon as I walked on it was like being picked up and carried by the music."

Starkey has arguably been the most musically successful of all the Beatles’ offspring. He’s played all over the world, on the biggest stages, not only with Oasis, but also with The Who - indeed it was Keith Moon who gave him his first drum kit, aged 8 - as well as Johnny Marr and The Lightning Seeds amongst others. In many ways, he’s as safe a pair of hands as his old man.

And now he’s popped up in Mantra Of The Cosmos, which is something of a supergroup consisting as it does of Andy Bell, the Ride (and ex-Oasis) guitarist, Shaun Ryder and Bez. They’ve also been joined on their latest single, Domino Bones (Gets Dangerous), by Noel Gallagher, who sings the chorus vocal. The single is available exclusively through the Cavern’s own website.

Noel, who you can always depend upon to chip in with an apt soundbite, said of the group: “Mantra Of The Cosmos is like Dylan, Dali and Ginsberg on a rocket ship to the moon to have it with the Clangers.”

Starkey also praised the venue for allowing them to perform two shows in the same day, which meant they were able to cover the costs of the crew and expenses to put on the gigs as a band not signed to a major label.

He said that he feels more needs to be done to support smaller venues like the Cavern: “It’s alright spending billions on great big arenas like they have in Manchester but no one’s looking after little venues. Great big arenas are great for big, boring bands but they’re not for up and coming bands.”

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."

You’d be a hard-hearted soul not to feel at least a shred of sympathy for Julian Lennon. It can’t have been easy, for all the reasons you’d expect. Though he’s enjoyed a decent-ish career in music (Top Ten hits, Grammy nominations) he’s never really escaped the long shadow cast by his old man.

Now, in a revealing interview in the Observer this weekend, Julian has opened up about all this. Ostensibly it was to promote his new collection of his photographic work, Life’s Fragile Moments. But conversation inevitably turned to his lifelong struggle to escape that shadow.

“It had always been, ‘John Lennon’s son, John Lennon’s son’,” he said. “And I’m going, for f’s sake. I said, what I need to do for me, first and foremost, is to build up a body of work, a foundation that I can stand on, that nobody can take away from me. And I continue to do so. It’s not to show off, it’s just to prove to myself that I can actually do this stuff. I’m not interested in fighting other people’s opinions.”

When asked what he made of the current resurgence of interest in the Beatles, he said: “It’s news to me half the time. I’m not part of the inner circle - I never have been. You have to realise that when Dad left, when I was between three and five (it was a bit of a process), it was just mum and me, and we had nothing to do with the Beatles or Dad. I visited him on the odd occasion but we were very much on the outside. I’m thankful that Sean and I get on like a house on fire - we’re best buddies and he tells me what he can, but things are pretty secret on the Beatles front.”

He said he felt unbothered by this and that acceptance was something he’d learned from his mother: “It was watching how she handled what she was dealt with love and grace and positivity. I saw that that’s the only way forward. You take the high road, you be the better person and try to learn from all the crap that’s thrown at you. Without question, I’ve had my moments of depression and I still deal with some very serious anxiety on occasion, but the only way is to push yourself through. Wallowing’s no good - been there, done that.”

Life’s Fragile Moments is out now, but Julian also said he’d started working on a memoir, albeit one with a difference: “I felt it would be nice to tell my side of the story but it’s not going to be your standard autobiographical book. I want something based more on art and emotions.”

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.

Movie auteur Ridley Scott – while having zero to do with the project – may have just given away the ending of one of the movie industry’s current favourite plotlines: Which four hot young rising stars are being lined up to play The Beatles in Sam Mendes’ upcoming new series of biopics?

The Gladiator II director was attending a screening of the movie at a Director’s Guild of America event and taking part in a Q&A with fellow movie master Christopher Nolan. During the conversation, Scott confirmed to Nolan that his next movie would be the thriller The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic tale which – it’s rumoured – will see Scott once more teaming up with Gladiator II star Mescal.

When pressed by Nolan as to the presence of Mescal in The Dog Stars, Scott not only confirmed his presence but also let slip the Beatles news that’s so far only been rumoured: “Yes,” Scott replied regarding his re-teaming with Mescal, before only digging himself into a Beatles hole by changing his reply to: “Maybe… Paul is actually stacked up, doing The Beatles next. So I may have to let him go.”

With rumours already abounding of Mescal on board Sam Mendes' movies in the role of Paul McCartney, that’s pretty much all the proof we needed.

Mendes’ dramatised version of the band’s sprawling story aims to set right the record for previous The Beatles non-documentary myth-making by going in hard on the details by giving each of the fab four their own separate movie, each complete with origin story, journey to fame and fortune, battles, bust-ups and beyond.

Yup. The Beatles are the new Iron Man, Captain America, Spiderman and Hulk, it seems and the project looks like the heavyweight Beatles movie that fans – buoyed up by factual fare such as the band’s own Anthology documentary, Martin Scorsese’s Living In The Material World, and Peter Jackson’s Get Back – have been crying out for.

After all, anything’s got to be better than 1979’s mop-topped Birth of The Beatles…

While Mendes is confirmed as being on the job: “I’m honored 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,” Mendes said in a statement back in February, Mescal isn’t as yet so forthcoming.

When grilled on the project, Mescal told Entertainment Tonight that: “It would be an incredible story to be attached to. The fact that Sam Mendes is attached to direct, like truly, it would be a dream come true.” But when asked more directly if the role was in the bag, Mescal replied, “No, no, no – we’re not going there.”

And there’s more hot Beatles unmasking afoot.

News of Mescal’s anointment comes hot on the heels of Ringo Starr himself accidentally (apparently) revealing that Saltburn heartthrob (and ex-Sabrina Carpenter beau) Barry Keoghan will be playing him as part of the movie series.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, drummer Starr gave Keoghan his endorsement when pressed. “Well, I think it’s great, and I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons,” Starr confirmed, before joking. “I hope not too many.”

A hoard of legal papers relating to the Beatles' break up and final legal separation have been discovered and will be auctioned off later this month.

Over 300 pages of typed documents compiled by the group’s various advisors and legal representatives were found in a cupboard where they had been stashed since the 1970s. Auctioneers Dawsons are selling them on December 12 in Maidenhead – they are expected to fetch anywhere between £5000 and £8000.

Denise Kelly, Head of Entertainment and Memorabilia at Dawsons said that the documents had only been discovered in bthe last year after the seller’s brother died. They reveal how fiendishly complicated, and exhausting, the whole process was: "As I read the minutes of meetings - notes which included discussions between the legal teams and accountants - I wondered how on earth they were going to sort everything out, and at times I could sense panic in the room as more and more complexities came to light.”

"One of the lawyers even suggested during one meeting when they had gone round and round and round in circles: ‘Would it be easier if The Beatles just retired?’"

She added: "It has crossed my mind that if I were a script writer, these documents would be all I'd need to tell the real story of what led to one of the best-selling bands in history splitting up and going their separate ways."

As we all know, the Beatles' break-up was drawn-out and acrimonious. Though the group had ceased to function as a creative unit after the release of Abbey Road in 1969, the four were still linked as one legal entity via Apple Corps, which had by then fallen under the control of Allen Klein. 

Paul McCartney essentially had to sue his three bandmates, and Klein, to break up the partnership. This he began in early 1971, but as is the way when large sums of money are at stake and lawyers are involved, things dragged on for years. The final documents ending The Beatles were only signed in December 1974, fifty years ago this month.

Inevitably, the legal marathon coloured the four members’ songwriting. George Harrison’s Sue Me Sue You Blues, from his 1973 Living In The Material World album comments in typically sardonic fashion on the whole turgid process: ‘Hold your Bible in your hand/Now all that's left is to find yourself a new band’.

Later in the year McCartney and Wings released Band On The Run. The title track is in itself a metaphor for escape from the legal morass, pivoting as it does on the phrase ‘if we ever get out of here’, which Harrison had a habit of using during the Beatles’ endless legal meetings.

Beatles '64 drops onto Disney+ today, and it's a must-watch for any fan of the Beatles or, damnit, music full-stop. And happily, you can watch it on Disney+ for just $2.99 if you take advantage of this limited-time Hulu/Disney+ bundle deal.

Using lovingly-restored footage originally shot by David and Albert Maysles, it charts the band's epochal storming of the US, and showcases the Fab Four at their Fabbest, as yet undaunted by global fame and full of the infectious energy and sense of outright fun that endeared them to an adoring world.

It also features new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, archive material from Lennon and Harrison and a number of talking heads who can attest to the seismic impact the Beatles made on America in that year.

These include A-listers such as Berry Gordy, the late Ronnie Spector and Smokey Robinson who says: “They were the first white group that I’d ever heard in my life who said ‘yeah we grew up listening to black music.”

Whilst Scorsese on this occasion is the doc’s producer, the director is David Tedeschi, who also worked with him on the George Harrison documentary Living In The Material World. In an interview with NME, Tedeschi has talked about how the Maysles managed to get such incredible footage: “They weren’t well-known,” he reveals. “We don’t really know how they got hired – there’s no real record – but they were remarkable. It’s one thing for them to be with the Beatles – who are of course tremendously charismatic – day after day, so the band get used to them and they have a very nice rapport.”

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.

If viewed within the bewildering context of the history of western music, the triad is one of the absolute bedrocks of all the harmony that we hear, and despite its roots back to classical music, it's a mainstay for all forms of commercial music.

As the name suggests, a triad is a chord which is made up of three notes. Knowing which three notes to employ is not a rocket science, but it does require a very small degree of musical knowledge, coupled with exceptionally simple numeracy.

We have to revisit our basic musical scale, and for the moment we'll stick with C major.

If you look at a music or piano keyboard, start by locating the note C. As we already know (if you have read our article on scales) C major uses all of the white notes that we see on our keyboard.

We can extract the notes that we require to create our triad based on C major, beginning with the note which we call the 'root'. This is the first note of our scale, the note C.

The next note that we need to add is described as the 3rd of our chord or triad. It's exceptionally simple to locate this, as we just count up three notes, ensuring that we count the root note as the first note. If you have done your maths correctly, you should hit the note E, which in triad circles can also be described as the mediant.

The final note that we need for our triad is described as the 5th or dominant. Once again, count up five notes from our root, and you should hit the note G.

If we piece all of that together, our triad of C major consists of the notes C, E and G.

Major to minor

Each of the notes in the triad are important in their own way, however the 3rd of the chord is incredibly influential, as it dictates whether your triad is either major or minor in tonality.

As you may know, major chords sound bright and happy, where as minor chords sound more melancholic or sad.

Locate the 3rd of our C major triad (which should be the note E) and drop it by one semitone, to an Eb. Your chord should immediately sound different and no longer the happier sound that it once was.

If you are a fan of science fiction, you may also notice that if you switch from a major to a minor chord in quick succession, it sounds very reminiscent of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, an original orchestral work by Richard Strauss. Imagine that theme without that chordal shift. This is triad theory in action.

Other triads and harmony

Of course, not all triads have to be chords of C major or minor. You can use the process, of selecting the 1st (root), 3rd, and 5th degree of either a major or minor scale, to construct any triad, in any key.

Relating this process back to your chosen scale, will always make the process easier, until it becomes second nature.

Triads are also exceptionally useful for forming a basic harmonic structure, if sketching out a song or composition.

You will notice that if you move the shape of the triad up and down your musical keyboard, you will find other nice sounding chords/triads, which remain associated with your home key of C major.

Try moving your triad up the scale as a block chord, just using the white notes of C major. Be sure to maintain the full triad shape. You’ll hear the associated chords of F major, G major and A minor.

These three chords, alongside the original root position C major triad, form the construct for more songs in pop history than any other!

These chords are used on everything from The Beatles to Billie Eilish, and every genre of music that adopts any form of basic harmony.

Read the previous instalments in our ongoing theory series below

- The pillars of music theory made simple
- How to become a master of melodies
- A quick guide to reading music
- How to understand rhythm when reading music
- Understanding scale theory