The podcast, which is called McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, starts on September 20. It promises listeners a fly-on-the-wall opportunity to sit in on recordings of conversations made over many years between Paul McCartney and poet Paul Muldoon as they dissected the people, experiences, and art that inspired his songwriting.
The conversations between the two were a central part of their process in compiling the book The Lyrics: 1965 to the Present, released in hardback in 2021, and just about to be re-published in paperback form – with added chapters.
Over two seasons and 24 episodes the podcast will let us in on how that book came together. We’ll be able to hear what is described as “a combination master class, memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most beloved figures in popular music”.
Each episode will focus on one song from McCartney’s catalog and will span early Beatles through to his solo work.
You can listen to a promo for the new podcast here:
For more background on how it all came about there’s also an interview in The Verge with Justin Richmond, Executive Producer of the podcast. It’s really interesting. “The idea for the podcast came through McCartney’s production team, from the person in charge of special projects. The sort of system that [McCartney and Muldoon] came up with to write [The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present] is that Muldoon turns up to McCartney’s house, turns on his phone, and records a conversation between the two of them. Eventually, the pandemic happened, lockdown, etc., and some stuff was delivered over Zoom.”
“My read on it is that after the stress of getting the book together was relieved, they were sort of realizing that they have hours of Paul McCartney being candid in a really special way. It’s not like this was expertly recorded in the studio. It’s not as if he was sitting down to be Paul McCartney of The Beatles to give an official interview about the band. These [recordings] really have the tenor of someone sitting down with a friend and having a leisurely chat about times past. And McCartney’s “times past” happens to be, for him, The Beatles and Wings and a litany of incredible solo work.”
Season One drops weekly starting September 20. It will feature twelve episodes examining ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘When Winter Comes’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, ‘Here Today’, ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘Jenny Wren’, ‘Too Many People’ and ‘Helter Skelter’.
Season Two will follow with an additional 12 episodes in February, 2024.
(If you don’t want to wait for each weekly episode and need to binge the whole series all at once you can subscribe to Pushkin+ to get access to all of Season One on September 20).
Whichever way you look at it the announcement overnight by Paul McCartney and Penguin Books that the paperback edition of his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present will contain seven additional song commentaries to those in the hardback edition from 2021 is a sneaky marketing ploy to get fans to buy additional copies of content they already own.
Yes, the paperback will have different cover art and will come in one volume (the hardback is split into two separate books), but still, to get McCartney’s thoughts and memories of those seven additional songs we’ll have to fork out yet again…..
The seven new song commentaries will be: ’Bluebird’ ’Day Tripper’ ’English Tea’ ‘Every Night’ ‘Hello, Goodbye’ ’Magical Mystery Tour’ ‘Step Inside Love’
Fans are already reacting to the news – and not in a good way:
“The old bonus track swindle. 😦 I’m sure people who bought the hardback get a free copy.”
“Next up: the expanded hard cover edition with the 7 additions as well as 3 additional additions. This is getting ridiculous.”
“Gotta love marketing. Extra songs for a new book edition, man. I have the hardcover. It’s beautiful. I’m good with what I have…No second bite of the apple from me.”
“I’m waiting for the limited edition cream paper, newspaper, blue paper, green paper, lambskin paper, pink paper, yellow paper, parchment paper, orange paper, purple paper, swirl paper, papyrus paper, 98 bright paper, rolling paper and black paper editions. Each with a unique and previously unreleased song write up! Collect them all!”
The paperback is scheduled for release on 7 November, and preorders are open now in the UK (Penguin) and in the USA (Norton).
Seems this blog is becoming more about Dark Horse Records records than the Beatles lately!
That’s because the label has had a bit of a rush of activity while the Beatle camp has been relatively quiet – unless of course you count all the speculation about a mysterious new release slated for later this year supposedly employing Artificial Intelligence. That’s something the mainstream media jumped on in a big way as AI is a topic du jour at the moment. So much so that Paul McCartney himself took to social media to hose the whole thing down a bit, something he almost never does when it comes to forthcoming releases:
Anyways, while we await news of just what that project is (or is it projects – meaning more than one?), we can focus on Dark Horse as it is Beatle-related, and something many of us collectors like to add into our libraries.
Earlier this week we got this email from Juno, a record store in the UK:
Looks like this will be the next Dark Horse title to look out for, available for pre-order now and out on August 18.
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros Live at Acton Town Hall is remastered by Paul Hicks (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, George Harrison) and will be available on 2LP “cloudy clear” vinyl. It will also be issued for the first time on CD.
Recorded on November 15, 2002, the concert was a benefit for striking fire fighters and would be one of Strummer’s last performances as he passed away from a heart condition just a month later. The performance features a 3-song reunion with his former band mate from The Clash, Mick Jones, who reunited on stage for the first time in almost twenty years. It would also be their last time on stage together.
The double LP will be packaged in a gatefold sleeve featuring never-before-seen photos from the show, plus new liner notes from former Fire Brigade Union Secretary Andy Gilchrist, who introduced the band at the show and led the strikes Joe was supporting.
This will also be the first time the concert has been properly released with full packaging on vinyl, with its extremely limited previous incarnation being a very limited Record Store Day exclusive in 2012 featuring just a DIY-inspired clear plastic sleeve.
Let’s get this straight up front. Luca Perasi’s Paul McCartney: Music Is Ideas – The Stories Behind the Songs (Vol.1) 1970-1989 is a big, weighty tome. It is way more book in real life than you might imagine from seeing it pictured on the web. At over 520 pages Music Is Ideas is thick and packed with tons of useful information. Its an obvious labour of love into which he’s poured an enormous amount of thought, hard work and creative effort.
Obviously Music Is Ideas serves as a very handy adjunct to McCartney’s own award-winning, two-volume set The Lyrics (published in 2021) which covers off a selection of just 154 songs from Paul’s earliest boyhood compositions, his Beatle days, some Wings songs, and solo work to the present day. Perasi’s book however extends and amplifies this with it’s aim (eventually in subsequent volumes) to detail absolutely every post-Beatle composition we know of. This first installment – Volume 1 – closely examines 296 released songs, plus a further 50 unreleased works. It should be said too that The Lyrics is a book Luca Perasi knows extremely well. It was he who officially co-authored the translation for the Italian market.
Music Is Ideas is also a natural partner to the terrific Allan Kozin and Adrian Sinclair release published just at the end of last year, The McCartney Legacy – Volume 1 1969-1973. While that work deals more with the day-to-day life of McCartney (and so far only goes up 1973), these two books together will provide the reader, collector, or anyone even vaguely interested in popular music and the process of songwriting with an in-depth examination of the life and work of one of our most important creative artists.
As mentioned, this latest book includes all the songs released by McCartney on album or as singles, plus side projects or songs written or co-written by him between 1970 and 1989. In other words, everything from McCartney to Flowers In The Dirt. That’s a total of 296 entries. This includes songs he didn’t write himself but has recorded (think Choba b CCCP), plus songs composed and recorded during the preparation of particular albums but maybe not released until much later. These are clustered together at appropriate points in the timeline so as not to be missed. In addition there are 50 completely unreleased songs detailed. There is also an index and a bibliography at the end which is always good to see.
Each entry deals with the story behind the song in detail: its inspiration, the demos that were recorded, as well as the studio recordings themselves. How were they made? Where was each song recorded? Are there alternative versions? And on which album or albums does the work appear?
As you read it becomes clear that Perasi tries to cover off five main aspects for each entry. He begins with an analysis of the songwriting technique employed by McCartney for the particular work – in other words how the song came into being in the first place, and by which means.
A second analysis is around the genre utilized. Paul McCartney’s vast catalogue ranges across experimental and rock’n’roll, to traditional music hall and classical. Over the years he’s dabbled in reggae, blues, folk, country, disco, children’s music and new wave, a huge array of influences – sometimes following but also often leading the way with avant-garde and electronic sounds. So, what are the influences? These are mentioned in each entry.
The third examination in each entry is how Paul worked in the studio to get the recording down. The Beatle years were a steep learning curve for him of discovering just what could be achieved in the studio and how to use the studio as an instrument in itself. So, what were the processes for each recording? These are touched on in each entry in the book.
Fourthly comes an accounting of the instrumentation used on each track. McCartney is well-known as a master of many instruments – not the least of which is his own voice. There is an in-depth look in each entry at who played what, and how. Specific attention is paid to the many vocal influences and techniques employed too. What is the style at play in any given song?
Lastly there’s consideration paid to the lyrics. What is the song about? How has it been written? What is McCartney’s main theme? Perasi breaks down each of the songs in an effort to understand and appreciate the poetry (and sometimes call out the doggerel!) for each entry.
Let’s take one example to illustrate for you what a typical entry might involve. A prime candidate is that quintessential McCartney song from the 1970s – ‘Silly Love Songs’.
This is entry 126 (on page 233) of Music is Ideas. Composition is credited to Paul and Linda. We learn in the first instance that the basic track was put down at Abbey Road Studios on January 16, 1976 with just guide vocals and piano from Paul and drums by Joe English being recorded. Overdubs were added during February. The engineer was Peter Henderson. A faster tempo version that is quite different appears on Give My Regards to Broad Street in 1984, there’s a live version on Wings Over America (1976), and its also appeared on the compilation albums Wings Greatest (1978), All The Best! (1987), Wingspan (2001), Pure McCartney (2016), and as a single in the The 7″ Singles Box (2022). Oh, and a demo alternate version appears on the 2014 release Wings At The Speed of Sound – Archive Collection. This demo is important as it clearly shows – which Perasi expands upon in his entry – that ‘Silly Love Songs’ was already a completely well-defined song. All the different melodies characteristic of the final version are in place. We also learn that, according to an unofficial source, McCartney had second thoughts about the initial arrangement and that a reggae version was tried out but put aside!
Then follows an in depth examination. ‘Silly Love Songs’, Parasi writes, is “…a prime example of McCartney’s polyphonic art, here using a contrapuntal technique, piling three different melodies on top of each other over the same chord pattern. The song….masterfully alternates between verses, chorus, bridge and instrumental breaks, while concentrating on a bass line that is technically simple but full of invention and which binds the whole track together….”
There’s then an explanation of how the song was arranged and how the horn and string arrangements (by Tony Dorsey) were added. Another interesting sidelight for me was that ‘Sha La La’, a hit for soul singer Al Green in 1974, was probably an inspiration: “The link between the two is clear in many respects, such as the horn and string arrangements as well as the melodic and jagged bass line.” True.
The single was a huge hit around the world, reaching number 1 on the Billboard charts in the US, and was also number 1 in Canada and in Ireland. In the UK it peaked at number 2. (Incidentally, it only got to number 20 here in Australia!)
And so similar information is provided for each of the 296 song entries. There’s also a mix of shorter and longer entries for the 50 unreleased tracks, making this book is a great companion as you listen to your Paul McCartney collection.
It all adds up to an intriguing mix of information that truly demonstrates that music is indeed about ideas, and that the prolific PaulMcCartney is never short of them.
Music Is Ideas – The Stories Behind the Songs (Vol.1) 1970-1989 is guaranteed to inform, stimulate, and lead to further exploration of the music.
While we are STILL awaiting a release date from Mobile Fidelity for their audiophile vinyl re-issue of the George Harrison-produced Shankar Family & Friends, Dark Horse has decided to put it out on CD, and as a limited edition “orchid” purple coloured vinyl – remastered by Paul Hicks.
One of the first albums to be released on George’s original Dark Horse Records, its East-meets-West musical styles put Western musicians such as Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Jim Keltner, Klaus Voormann, and Nicky Hopkins side-by-side with Indian-music pioneers Alla Rakha, Ashish Khan, Shivkumar Sharma and Hariprasad Chaurasi.
Shankar Family & Friends is released in 2023 for the first time as a “stand alone” CD (though it was on CD part of this lovely Collaborations box set from 2010).
The purple vinyl and CD were initially slated for a June 9 release, but the date has recently been pushed back to July 14.
There could also be a black vinyl version but we’re not exactly sure. This image is appearing on some store sites:
Image (from l to r): Dhani Harrison and Yusuf with David Zonshine (Dark Horse) and Yoriyos Adamos (Yusuf’s son and manager) at F.P.S.H.O.T.
A number of digital back catalogue albums were almost immediately put up on the Dark Horse releases site indicating they were now available on streaming services. These are all what might be considered his second tier works, definitely not his top-selling LPs. So the wait has been on to see what new content from Yusuf/Cat Stevens might be made available for the first time – and on physical media.
In March the label made this announcement about a brand new studio work and now the wait for that release is almost over because next month (June 16) sees King Of A Land issued on Dark Horse:
The album’s artwork is created by award-winning Canadian children’s illustrator Peter H. Reynolds. As well as the cover art he has created illustrations for each song portraying the album’s lyrical themes in an accompanying 36 page booklet. The vinyl and booklet are housed in a gatefold sleeve.
Dark Horse, with it’s direct association with founder George Harrison, seems to be a natural home for Yusuf. “George has been an immense influence on me, spiritually, from the very beginning. He pioneered certain thoughts and ideas, which stretched way east, and that was very important. He was beginning to explore Eastern mysticism around the time I was hospitalised with TB, in 1968. Lying in bed, I had a lot of time on my hands and ended up reading a Buddhist book called The Secret Path. That was the beginning of my own search for the light.”
“Looking at the jagged journey of my music, beginning as I did in the 60’s, I would say this new record is a mosaic. A very clearly defined description of where I’ve been and who I am.”
In welcoming the singer to the Dark Horse Record label, Dhani Harrison said “I’m thrilled to welcome Yusuf/Cat Stevens to the Dark Horse Records family. Not only is he a great musical legend but his songs could not fit the Dark Horse mythos any better. From his back catalogue, through to the new music we can’t wait for you to hear. Yusuf is without question one of the most influential singer-songwriters of all time. It is a great honour to be able to give his music a home on our humble yet historic label.”
Yusuf has started to tease King Of A Land with some very charming lyric videos:
King Of A Land sounds like it could be something special, very reminiscent of his early 1970’s work. Definitely looking forward to this one.
We appear to be in something of an avalanche of Beatle books at the moment with lots of titles either out now, about to be released, or in the longer-term pipeline.
This is by Luca Perasi, whose previous work on McCartney was the highly-regarded Recording Sessions (1969-2013). Luca was also one of the two official Italian translators of the singer’s own book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, and last year he collaborated with MPL on the label details for McCartney’s epic The 7” Singles Box release. So, he knows his stuff. Keep an eye out for our review of his new book Paul McCartney: Music Is Ideas here soon.
Another one we’ve been informed about but haven’t seen as yet is The Beatles On The Charts. This is by Michael Ventrella who has combed through nearly 60 years of Billboard to compile a list of every song and album that made an appearance in that fabled magazine’s music charts. The end result is an intriguing look at the band’s influence, including their solo efforts. Ventrella assigns points to the positions of each song and album in order to create a list ranging from the least successful to the most successful. Each entry includes a picture of the album cover or single sleeve, along with an analysis of the song or album. It looks like it’d make a great reference book to have in the library:
Looking ahead to June 13 there is 1964: Eyes of the Storm – Photographs and Reflections by Paul McCartney. This features a selection of Paul McCartney’s own photographs and memories from six of the key cities visited by The Beatles across the year 1964. It captures the craziness of the band’s intense life on the road as they steadily rose to fame, with many never-before-seen portraits and snapshots of John, George and Ringo.
As with McCartney’s 2021 book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, a special, extremely limited boxed and cloth-bound edition (175 copies worldwide) of 1964: Eyes of the Storm has been made available as part of an effort to support independent booksellers. You’ll have to be fast and have deep pockets to secure one of these. Check out your local independent store to see if they scored a copy and how they intend to sell it:
In October comes Bruce Spizer’s latest installment in his Beatles Album Series and it is now available for pre-order. The book, the seventh to be published in the series, covers the albums Please Please Me and With The Beatles, as well as their associated singles and the American albums Introducing The Beatles and Meet The Beatles!
And finally worth noting, for release later in the year (November 14 to be precise), is the much-anticipated book by respected author Kenneth Womack on the life and times of famous Beatle roadie, friend, fixer, confidante, and sometimes co-composer, Mal Evans.
This one will be worth the wait as it is an authorised biography, with Womack being given access by the Evans estate to Mal’s diaries and the treasure trove of his vast, never before seen archive including hundreds of drawings and photographs, memorabilia and ephemera from inside the Beatle camp. Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans is published by Harper Collins’ Dey Street Books. Pre-orders for are currently available on Amazon here. Tantalizingly, it will be followed in 2024 with a fully illustrated version. Cannot wait for that one.
Of course if you’re interested in Beatles books generally you must listen to The Beatles Books Podcast. It’s available on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Podbean, or wherever you get good podcasts. Host Joe Wisbey regularly chats to a wide variety of Beatle authors and writers and it is always interesting and informative as he seeks to discover what inspired them to add their particular entry into the 1000’s of books about The Beatles out there. Check it out.
In addition to the two Dark Horse Records releases that came out on Record Store Day just past (see our post here), there are two more physical titles from the newly-revitalised label you might like to track down.
The first came out just a couple of weeks prior to Record Store Day.
Its the late, great Leon Russell’s Signature Songs, an album of solo piano and vocal recordings originally released in 2001 and which has been long out-of-print since.
Signature Songs features stripped-down, unique takes of songs from across Russell’s long and illustrious songwriting career. Songs you will definitely know either recorded by him, or the many artists who covered his songs and had hits with them: ‘A Song For You’, ‘Tight Rope’, ‘Delta Lady’, ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’, and the classic ‘This Masquerade’.
Signature Songs is available on CD, digital download, and is now pressed on vinyl for the very first time.
Here’s the hype sticker:
And the label:
Sometimes you just have to bide your time when it comes to waiting for new releases.
We reported way back in January 2022 that the Mobile Fidelity company intended to issue an audiophile pressing of the1974 George Harrison-produced Dark Horse album Shankar Family ૐ Friends. On it Indian musical virtuosos Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha, Ashish Khan, Kamala Chakravarty, Hariprasad Chaurasia are joined by Western musos like Ringo Starr, David Bromberg, Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins, Jim Keltner, Klaus Voorman and Tom Scott.
Well, truth is we’re still waiting for this one, so you’ll have to be patient.
But, there has been movement at the station…
A press release page has appeared on the Mobile Fidelity website inviting pre-orders. Still no firm release date sadly, but at least you can now pre-order and secure this Dark Horse “Beatle-related” extra for your collection:
That cover is a harbinger of what is contained inside.
Let’s get straight to the point – this is one of the best studies of Paul McCartney and his solo music you are going to find. Epic and essential, full stop.
The McCartney Legacy by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair is the first installment of what will become a multi-volume set. As its subtitle suggests, Volume 1 captures the life of McCartney in the years 1969-1973. That’s immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which he had to recreate himself as both a person and a performer. In musical terms, this first volume takes us from the LP McCartney through to Band On The Run.
This book is a seriously in-depth and revealing exploration of McCartney’s creative and personal life. The thought and research that has gone into it is immediately evident. But it’s not scholarly and cold in tone (as some highly researched books can be). It’s actually a real page-turner! Kozinn and Sinclair write in a conversational and descriptive style that belies the hundreds of interviews, extensive ground-up research, and the thousands of never-before-seen documents they’ve trawled to give us a very approachable and personal story. They are very good storytellers and it is almost guaranteed that every couple of pages you will learn something you didn’t know about Paul McCartney and his music.
Kozinn and Sinclair initially set out to do a book about McCartney’s solo time in the studio, detailing recording dates, personnel, etc. – a bit like Mark Lewisohn’s 1988 book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, but looking at Paul’s solo career. However, following a couple of interviews with former Wings drummer Denny Seiwell and the discovery of a treasure trove of additional information that he had, the pair decided to change tack and broaden the scope of their book considerably.
Once you read this book you’ll have a renewed insight into the music McCartney created across this period. In fact with the clever connections the authors make and the stories they tell you’ll never be able to hear some songs in the same light again. Take for example ‘Another Day’. In late 1970 and early 1971 the song was being recorded and worked on as part of the preparations for the album Ram. But Paul, knowing that in February 1971 he had coming up a key court date in the messy ‘divorce’ proceedings that were under way with his former band mates, wanted a new single to be out and played on the radio to coincide with his and Linda’s court appearance. He settled on that single being ‘Another Day’ to send a subtle message that nothing could faze him. Despite his life and business dealings being publicly picked over, for him this was just another day: “It’s just another day, du-du-du-du-du, it’s just another daaaaaay!”
Alongside the copious information on every page there are many illustrative photographs and memorabilia scattered throughout as well, as are frequent breakout boxes containing the aforementioned dates detailing his recording sessions.
If this truly is the first of a multi-volume set, let’s hope that subsequent volumes arrive much faster than Lewisohn’s 2013 biography of The Beatles. Ten years later we are still waiting for Volume 2 of his epic…..
Kozinn and Sinclair however say they’re well under way with preparations for The McCartney Legacy Volume 2. It should be in stores in late 2024. It will cover the years 1974 – 1980. We can’t wait to read the next installment!
Volume 1 is getting rave reviews. The only criticism of it we’ve seen so far is that the font used is a bit small and spindly to read! (FYI it looks like a slight variation of a font called Brandon Text Light).
You can read a generous extract of The McCartney Legacy here to see if you like what you see.
If audio books are more your thing, here’s an extract from the Introduction, read by Simon Vance, to further whet your appetite:
The McCartney Legacy Volume 1 is published by Dey Street books (an imprint of Harper Collins).
It’s available in hardcover, paperback, e-book and, as mentioned, an audio book and audio CD:
The McCartney Legacy Volume 1 1969-73 is highly recommended.
For many years we’ve catalogued our Beatle collection using a fairly simple Microsoft Word document. There are columns for Artist, Title, Catalogue Number, Year and Place of Manufacture, plus space for any other details – for example does it have hype stickers, inclusions, it’s rarity, and finally a column for a quality rating for the cover and for LP or CD.
Over the years of course this document has grown and grown, and has become more and more bulky and a bit unwieldy to use.
So, why not transfer the whole thing into Discogs, the huge database and marketplace that contains many more details about each entry and is accessible when out and about crate digging or visiting stores if you need to check if you have a particular pressing or release.
With that in mind we’ve slowly been creating entries of what we have in the “Collection” section of Discogs. It’s going to take a while but we’ve been plugging away at it!
Imagine our surprise then, while interrogating the Discogs database, to learn that what we thought were legitimate CDs from The Paul McCartney Collection series from 1993 are actually Russian fakes?
We now have all sixteen CDs in the series but while entering them into Discogs it became apparent that 5 of them were definitely illegal copies:
On the surface they all look entirely legit. The external covers are correct in every detail, as are the CD booklets, and the CDs themselves. They look just like the originals. The barcode numbers match up, and the place of manufacture is listed as Holland (or the UK in the case of the McCartney CD).
However, when you go into Discogs there are usually more intricate details listed to help you identify exactly which country or issue you have. For artists like Paul McCartney, whose work is reproduced in multiple countries, there can be multiple entries to check through to confirm the one you have.
You do this by looking closely at what is etched in the tiny letters and numbers that appear on the “run out” section at the centre of the CD. And it’s here you’ll discover the true place of mastering and manufacture.
For us it was an eye opener to see an odd type of etching on these five of our Paul McCartney CD’s from The Paul McCartney Collection series. For McCartney it shows this:
Discogs says this is a Russian fake. They use the term “unofficial” and it is therefore not permitted for sale on their site.
And finally an “unofficial” version of Tug of War:
The remainder of the CDs we have in this series are legitimate. It’s interesting that when you know you have a fake you can start to see some other tell-tail indicators. The most obvious with these CDs is the printing quality on the disc itself. The fakes are blurry while the legitimates are much more crisp and clear.
Here’s the fake Tug of War CD:
Compare this to a legit version of Band on the Run from the same series:
You can see that Band on the Run is much clearer. A close-up of the small print at the bottom illustrates this even better. Here’s the “unofficial” Tug of War:
And here’s the detail of Band on the Run:
By comparison the Tug of War printing is inferior. It is kind of blotchy and the lettering is unclear.
The subtitle of our blog is “Adventures in Collecting Beatles Music”. Looking out for fakes is part of the adventure I guess. But it’s a bit disheartening to learn that what you thought for many years was legitimate is not so after all.
If in doubt, check out Discogs – it’s a brilliant database.
Beatles Blog 