The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years

Posted on June 21, 2016 by beatlesblogger

Lots more detail on the forthcoming new Beatles film Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years have been released today. Here’s the poster:

And here’s the official trailer:

And here is the official press release from the distributors, StudioCanal:

THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK – THE TOURING YEARS

TEASER TRAILER AND POSTER FOR RON HOWARD’S

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM RELEASED TODAY, WORLD PREMIERE CONFIRMED

STUDIOCANAL ANNOUNCES INTERNATIONAL RELEASE DATES AS PART OF A WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL EVENT

LONDON, PARIS June 20, 2016 – Academy Award®-winner Ron Howard’s authorized and highly anticipated documentary feature film about The Beatles’ phenomenal early career The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years has set its World Premiere Date in London’s Leicester Square 15 September 2016 and debuts the first trailer from the film and the official poster to launch the campaign, it was announced today by Imagine Entertainment, White Horse Pictures and Apple Corps Ltd. STUDIOCANAL is an anchor partner on the film having acquired UK, France, Germany and Australia and New Zealand rights.

Featuring rare and exclusive footage, the film is produced with the full cooperation of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison. White Horse Pictures’ Grammy Award®-winning Nigel Sinclair, Scott Pascucci and Academy Award®-winner and Emmy® Award-winner Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment are producing with Howard. Apple Corps Ltd.’s Jeff Jones and Jonathan Clyde are serving as executive producers, along with Imagine’s Michael Rosenberg and White Horse’s Guy East and Nicholas Ferrall.

STUDIOCANAL RELEASE DATES:

UK – 15 September 2016 – WORLD PREMIERE / IN CINEMAS

FRANCE – 15 September 2016

GERMANY – 15 September 2016

AUSTRALIA / NZ – 16 September 2016

Richard Abramowitz’s Abramorama will handle the US theatrical release of the film on September 16. The US release is set to be an event driven experience with a few special surprises planned for cinema goers.

The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years is based on the first part of The Beatles’ career (1962-1966) – the period in which they toured and captured the world’s acclaim. Ron Howard’s film will explore how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came together to become this extraordinary phenomenon, “The Beatles.” It will explore their inner workings – how they made decisions, created their music and built their collective career together – all the while, exploring The Beatles’ extraordinary and unique musical gifts and their remarkable, complementary personalities. The film will focus on the time period from the early Beatles’ journey in the days of The Cavern Club in Liverpool to their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966.

Hulu is championing the film in the US as presenting partner. Hulu has the exclusive US streaming video on-demand rights to the film on SVOD beginning September 17^th – marking the first feature film to debut on Hulu following its theatrical premiere. The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years is the first film acquired by Hulu’s Documentary Films arm which will serve as a new home for premium original and exclusive documentary film titles coming to Hulu.

Award-winning Editor Paul Crowder is the editor. Crowder’s long-time collaborator, Mark Monroe, is serving as writer. Marc Ambrose is the supervising producer.

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BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK – THE TOURING YEARS

This project was originally brought to Apple Corps by One Voice One World, which has conducted extensive research around the globe, including inviting Beatles fans to send in clips of home movies and photos that they acquired during this extraordinary period. OVOW’s Matthew White, Stuart Samuels, and Bruce Higham are co-producing the film.

Nicholas Ferrall is the executive in charge of production for White Horse Pictures, assisted by executives Jeanne Elfant Festa and Cassidy Hartmann. The Beatles documentary is one of the first projects under Nigel Sinclair’s new White Horse Pictures banner, which he founded in 2014 with long-time business partner Guy East. Their recent documentary, David Gelb’s A Faster Horse, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received rave reviews.

The Beatles began touring Europe in late 1963, after an extraordinary arrival on the British scene in 1961 and ‘62. However, it was their much-heralded Ed Sullivan appearance on February 9, 1964 that caused The Beatles’ popularity to explode. By June, the band had commenced their first world tour, and continued on a relentless schedule for two subsequent years. By the time the band stopped touring in August of 1966, they had performed 166 concerts in 15 countries and 90 cities around the world. The cultural phenomenon their touring helped create, known as “Beatlemania,” was something the world had never seen before and laid the foundation for the globalization of culture.

Beatlemania was not just a phenomenon. It was the catalyst for a cultural shift that would alter the way people around the world viewed and consumed popular culture. This film explains what it was about that particular moment in time that allowed this cultural pivot point to occur, examining the social and political context of the time, and revealing the unique conditions that caused technology and mass communication to collide. The film also explores the incomparable electricity between performer and audience that turned the music into a movement – a common experience into something sublime.

Three Beatle Books

Posted on June 18, 2016 by beatlesblogger

We attended a huge charity bookstall is support of the very important work done by the Lifeline organisation. They hold these book sales regularly and there’s always a very good selection of music books, Compact Discs, and sometimes vinyl LP’s.

This time around we scored three nice Beatle books.

The first we spied in the stacks was The Beatles Album by Julia Delano:

Published by Bison Books in the UK, this dates from 1991 and is a large-ish hardback book with a dustcover. Inside it is a chronological re-telling of the Beatle story, mostly pictorial: The rear cover:

The second book we found was Geoffrey Giuliano’s The Illustrated John Lennon, published by Sunburst/PRC in 1993:

It is a thin hardback with a dustcover.

The book is part of a series and an accompanying item to Giuliano’s similarly formatted The Illustrated George Harrison. (There’s also an Illustrated Paul McCartney in the set – which we don’t have).

The final book we found was David Sheff’s Last Interview: All We Are Saying – John Lennon & Yoko Ono. This version was published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 2000:It is the UK release in hardback, and is a revised and updated edition of Sheff’s original publication from back in 1981 which was called The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (which we also have in paperback, published by New English Library press in the United States).

As Google Books says: On the 21st anniversary of his death, a poignant John Lennon document back in print [detailing] Lennon’s last interview before his assassination on December 8, 1980. It was first published in Playboy in a 20,000 word format in November that year. It saw limited distribution in the US in its full form as a 200-page book, reflecting 20 hours of tapes made that September, but was never seen elsewhere, and is now a collector’s item. This new, revised edition is published with the rare participation of Yoko Ono.

The Beatles Cartoons

Posted on June 11, 2016 by beatlesblogger

As a child I can remember watching The Beatles cartoons on TV.

I don’t think they’ve ever been officially released. This six DVD set is decidedly dodgy, but it contains every episode, plus the sing-along “bouncing ball” songs, trailers and intro’s and outro’s as extras:

Here’s the rear cover:

The discs are fairly obviously burned onto printable blank DVDs (read: “manufactured at home”), but they are of a reasonable quality and the makers have gone to a little bit of trouble with the graphics:

The quality on screen is similar (possibly even a little bit better) to this example on YouTube:

Rolling Stone magazine has a good article on the background to The Beatles TV cartoon series.

An Unusual Beatles “1” CD

Posted on June 6, 2016 by beatlesblogger

We were at a record fair the other day and picked up The Beatles 1 compilation CD from 2000. The front cover looks familiar:

As does the rear:

That is, until you look more closely at the fine print – just below the barcode:

There it says quite clearly, in bolded letters, “Not resale in the EU“. Never seen that before. Then there’s the disc itself:

Looks rather standard, but it too has the words “Not resale in the EU. LC 0299” in the small print around the perimeter:

Anyone seen this one before, or know what it means?

Martin Scorsese Exhibition – George Harrison Documentary

Posted on June 5, 2016 by beatlesblogger

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia is currently hosting a massive exhibit featuring the work of legendary film director Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese of course was responsible for George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the 2011 landmark documentary on the life and work of George Harrison.

In the exhibition, which we visited last week, there’s a section on Scorsese’s love of music and the numerous documentaries he’s made over time including The Last Waltz (from 1978 detailing The Band’s last ever concert); No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (his 2005 documentary on Dylan’s early years); and Shine A Light (a 2008 concert film featuring the Rolling Stones live at the Beacon Theatre in New York).

Playing on a large screen within the exhibition are extracts from George Harrison: Living in the Material World:

The Scorsese exhibition runs at ACMI until September 18. It’s well worth a look.

Beatles Memorabilia and Records Auction

Posted on June 4, 2016 by beatlesblogger

There’s an interesting auction of some cool Beatle items coming up at Heritage Auctions in the USA on June 24 and 25.

The auction is part of a much larger entertainment consignment. The Beatles section starts here.

Amongst the autographs, photographs, ticket stubs and records on offer are two items that caught our eye.

First was this unique poster prepared for Apple/Capitol Records in 1970. It was for distribution to record stores owners as a Christmas greeting:

Second was this very rare example of a working prototype device that Apple employee (and so-called “electronics wizard”) Magic Alex actually produced:As the auction site says: Yanni Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas was associated with the Beatles during the 1965-1969 period, part of that time as head of Apple Electronics, which was a money-losing failure. He impressed the Beatles, especially John Lennon who coined his nickname, with his gadgets and big ideas to revolutionize the consumer electronics business. Mardas claimed he could build them a 72-track recording studio which never materialized. Other of his ideas that never quite worked out include: a flying saucer, loudspeaker wallpaper, a personal pocket force field, invisible paint, and color-changing paint….

The Simpsons – McCartney Episode

Posted on June 3, 2016 by beatlesblogger

Always wanted to get a copy of this for the collection, and now we have. It is part of a “Best Of” series of videos that has the episode starring Linda and Paul McCartney:

The Simpsons episode of interest is called ‘Lisa the Vegetarian’, which was the fifth episode in season seven originally. It first aired in the US in October, 1995.

From Wikipedia: In the episode, Lisa decides to stop eating meat after bonding with a lamb at a petting zoo. Her schoolmates and family members ridicule her for her beliefs, but with the help of Apu, Paul, and Linda McCartney, she commits to vegetarianism. The pair’s condition for appearing was that Lisa would remain a vegetarian for the rest of the series. The episode makes several references to McCartney’s musical career, and his song ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ plays during the closing credits.

During ‘Lisa the Vegetarian’, Paul says, “If you play ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ backwards, you’ll hear a recipe for a really ripping lentil soup.” The song is played during the closing credits, and Paul’s reading of the recipe can be heard if the sound is played backwards.

The recited recipe can be heard (played forwards) in the extra features on The Complete Seventh Season DVD boxset.

Official 12″ Remixes of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’

Posted on May 20, 2016 by beatlesblogger

Following a very limited and mysterious white label vinyl issue in March of two re-mixed versions of the Paul McCartney and Wings song ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’, comes news of an official release on 12″ vinyl and digital download.

This puts ownership of these versions of the song within the realms of possibility for us mere mortals who couldn’t possibly have afforded the exorbitant prices the limited editions were fetching on auction sites like eBay.

The initial, white label releases had two remixes by German DJ/remixer Timo Maas and Canadian producer James Teej. The “official” release will have three. According to the track listings online, the 12″ will include a “radio edit” version of the song.

The vinyl is available for pre-order now and will be released on May 27 in Europe and Canada. No US listings for the physical product have yet appeared, but the US Amazon site is listing a digital download that’s available now.

Here’s the artwork:

Beatle Vinyl Collector Books for Spanish, French and Japanese Releases

Posted on May 5, 2016 by beatlesblogger

We received an intriguing email the other day from a marketing company called IM Digital alerting us to the publication of three new Beatle books for collectors. They are written by musician and collector Juan Carlos Irigoyen Pérez, and they detail across three separate volumes, every Beatle release in Spain, France and Japan respectively:

As you can see from the covers, these are Beatles discographies with full-colour illustrations of every release (single and LP) on the Odeon or Apple labels for Spain (between 1963-1972); for France (between 1963-1970); and Japan (between 1964-1970).

There appear to be both English and Spanish editions available, and the books are for sale on Amazon worldwide, both in paperback and e-book form.

Amazon has a “Look Inside” feature giving a peek at a few pages. You can see inside Spain here, France here, and Japan here.

Juan Carlos Irigoyen Pérez has also posted three youTube videos with more info:

Beatles Blog

Adventures in collecting Beatles music

Category Archives: Beatles

The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years

Three Beatle Books

The Beatles Cartoons

An Unusual Beatles “1” CD

Official 12″ Remixes of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’

Beatle Vinyl Collector Books for Spanish, French and Japanese Releases

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