If you’ve been following any of the forums you’ll be aware that speculation has been rife over the last month or so about new Beatle or Beatle-related releases. Now Ringo Starr has emerged as the first to announce a new release for the Summer.
His record – another EP in what is quickly becoming a series – is called Rewind Forward. It contains four new songs – one of which is written, produced and played on by Paul McCartney.
Rewind Forward is available to pre-order on the official Ringo Starr Store website from today ahead of its release on October 13, 2023.
It is available on digital, cassette, CD, and on 10” black vinyl.
Also, the title track ‘Rewind Forward’ will be available to stream or purchase everywhere this Friday August 25, 2023.
The EP features four new songs: 1. Shadows On The Wall 2. Feeling The Sunlight 3. Rewind Forward 4. Miss Jean
Paul McCartney wrote ‘Feeling The Sunlight’. He also produced and, according to rumours, sings and plays four instruments on the track. So, it’ll be interesting to hear that one.
As to the ongoing speculation about a new Beatle release…..
In 2021 Ringo’s EP Change The World preceded the release of the super deluxe edition of Let It Be in 2021, and his last EP (simply called EP3) preceded Revolver last year. So, theoretically, are we all clear now for a big Beatles announcement?
Great news overnight, especially if you live Down Under.
Paul McCartney and Frontier Touring have announced that the living legend is headed this way in October and November for a series of six concerts. For those of our readers who may not know Australia that well, one interesting thing about this announcement is that the tour takes in two regional centres that are not capital cities: Newcastle in the state of New South Wales, and the Gold Coast in Queensland.
Also, as part of the publicity for the tour McCartney granted a lengthy interview to the Aussie podcast Behind The Hits, hosted by Dave Gleeson. In it he speaks about the Australian tour plus a whole lot more. It’s worth a listen:
Then Paul followed up with a TV interview on one of Australia’s leading news and current affairs shows, ABC 7.30. Here’s the version that went to air. He’s speaking with host Sarah Fergusson:
Or, if you prefer, the extended version of the interview:
Sometimes tip-offs about Beatle stuff come from the most unexpected places…
Beatlesblog is located in Australia, but it took an email from our friend and avid collector Andrey – based in Russia – to let us know about this magazine, out now in Australian newsagents.
Its the latest edition of Australian Guitar and, following Andrey’s email, we simply walked up to to the corner store and got a copy. Wouldn’t have known it was there otherwise!
As you can see, the mag has a major article (13 pages in all) called ‘The Ultimate Beatles Tone Guide’. In it they unpack how the band crafted their sound from the perspective of the instruments and the electronics used.
To do this writer Chris Gill examines 11 specific songs: ‘Please Please Me’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Ticket To Ride’, ‘Michelle’, ‘Taxman’, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, ‘Revolution’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, Let It Be’, and ‘The End’.
Obviously, this article has been published previously in the US by parent magazine Guitar World (and you can read it here), but it’s nice to have a physical copy to flip through.
Being a guitar magazine the focus is entirely on the gear – the makes, model and year of manufacture, the amplifiers, studio speakers, etc. In some cases they even get right down to the likely strings used on the guitars to achieve a particular sound quality.
Gill acknowledges a big part of the challenge here is the great amount of sometimes conflicting information out there about these things. The Beatles themselves, their producer George Martin, and even engineers like Geoff Emerick, have offered over the years conflicting accounts. They even contradict themselves in some of their personal recollections.
So, its a tough ask to get this stuff right. Gill says that what the feature contains are his best efforts to determine the guitars, basses, amps and effects actually used. He admits it is not perfect and in many cases highly speculative (for example the amp used by John Lennon to record his solo on ‘The End’), but he reckons it is a good guideline for any guitarist wanting to replicate those magic sounds.
And yes, there’s a whole section on guitar string specifics. To quote: “Many guitar nerds note that perhaps the most important detail of replicating the Beatles’ tones after their guitars and amps is the types of strings that they used. It is generally believed that Harrison and Lennon used flatwound strings in the early years up until late 1965, just after the release of Rubber Soul. After that, from Revolver and beyond, they apparently switched to roundwound strings.” Check out the section on string theory here.
The feature ends with a short article called ‘Beatles Unplugged – A Guide to the Fab Four’s Acoustic Arsenal’. You can read that too online here:
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).
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:
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.
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.
The Record Store Day 2023 release list has just come out and come April 23 there’ll be at least three titles of interest to Beatle collectors.
Probably the most interesting and hard-to-get will be a re-imagining of John Lennon’sGimme Some Truth best-of compilation which is being re-issued as a boxset containing 9 x 10” white vinyl EPs. Each EP will feature four tracks. Only 500 copies of this will be produced, hence the ‘hard-to-get’ moniker….
Next is the highly speculated 50th anniversary release of Paul McCartney’sRed Rose Speedway in limited edition, Half Speed Master vinyl form:
According to the RSD list there will be 5,000 pressed so this should be much easier to secure. It follows similar Half Speed Master editions of McCartney, Wings Wild Life and RAM.
Then there’s a re-issue of the 1981 Ringo Starr title Stop and Smell the Roses. This is being re-issued on vinyl as a 2LP with six bonus tracks for the first time. It will come in a gatefold with printed inner sleeves, original record labels and specialty color vinyl described as lava lamp effect clear red/white for LP1 and lava lamp effect clear red/pink for LP2. There are 2,500 copies being pressed.
Stop and Smell the Roses will also be issued on RSD as a CD (500 copies).
But wait, there is a George connection too. Dark Horse, the record label he started up (now run by son Dhani Harrison) is releasing not one but two LPs.
The first is by Stairsteps, a band originally signed to the label back in 1975. For Record Store Day 2023 we’ll see their 1976 album 2nd Resurrection re-issued on black vinyl. Billy Preston played synthesizer and served as co-producer alongside Robert Margouleff.
Dark Horse will also have a 20th Anniversary edition of the Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros album Streetcore as a limited edition pressing on white vinyl for RSD:
Beatles Blog 