Lennon: Let Him Be

The film is called Let Him Be, and it's a brand new independent Canadian movie, in which two film students believe that they have found John Lennon alive and living in a remote part of Canada.
It all begins when Tim discovers a clip of an old man playing guitar on a tape found jammed inside an old video camera his father gave him. The man in the video is older now but the resemblance to John Lennon is uncanny. Could it be him? It's an absurd idea and one that Tim might have pushed aside were it not for the fact that the man also sounds so much like him. Was it possible that Lennon survived the assassination? Tim decides to document the whole story so that no one could question or doubt what he finds.
It has it's european premiere showing at the film festival in Cardiff on November 19th.
Website: lethimbe.com

Re-meet The Beatles

PopMatters is an international magazine of cultural criticism. Their scope is broadly cast on all things pop culture, and their content is updated daily, Monday through Friday. They provide intelligent reviews, engaging interviews, and in-depth essays on most cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, sports, theatre, the visual arts, travel, and the Internet. Over the next days Pop Matters are re-investigating The Beatles in a series of articles.
Go check it out!

There's a leak

I'm listening to the new Paul McCartney release right now, "Good Evening New York City", well the audio CD's from it anyway. It hasn't really been released yet, but it leaked out into the internet yesterday. I remember 2002's "Driving Rain", that one was all over the internet several months before the release date. The new one's out just a few days before it's in the shops, so I guess things have improved.
It's a rocking couple of CD's this, reflecting the slightly harder sound Paul and his band seems to be into these days. Contributing to this is the fact that all chit chat on stage has been eliminated. Apart from the opening legend "good evening, New York City", we don't get to hear Paul talk in between songs. There's no "let's hear it for John" or "not many people know this, but George was a great ukulele player". Just the songs. And I think that was a good decision, and one that makes repeat plays more likely.
I don't know how to spot where a tool like auto-tune has been in use, but I hear a lot of fans saying that this release is full of it. Sometimes the words come out unintelligible. Like in "Eleanor Rigby", it sounds like Father McKenzie is writing the words for a sermon that no one will hear, no one thumb near. There are a couple of other examples, but I forget.
It's hard to describe Paul's voice now that we know it's been tampered with, but it sounds quite okay. And all these years on the road has made him an ace guitar player. He spent 1989-1993 mostly on the road, then took a long break. But ever since 2002 he's been at it again with the tours. And rumour has it that his current one will be extended over to South America in the New Year. I also believe it's time he went downunder again, he hasn't played there since 1993.
Of course, I'm buying the official release when it hits the shop, I always do. I was just curious, that's all.
The folks over at MaccaBlog will feature this release on their radio station today, so tune in! Or get it elsewhere.

The Beatles in Southend

Image © Copyright Derek Cross

For music lovers in Southend, 1963 was a very special year.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Dave Clarke Five all played at the old Odeon cinema in the High Street. The bands were all photographed that year by music snapper Derek Cross, but the pictures had been forgotten and lay undiscovered in a drawer until recently. All the images are now the subject of a photography exhibition at the Atelier Gallery in Leigh Broadway.

Derek Cross

About 55 images will now be displayed for the next three weeks, giving people a chance to reminisce about their memories of seeing the bands in their heyday.

Val Miller saw the Beatles in 1963 with three schoolfriends who queued outside the Southend Odeon all night to get tickets.
She said: "I remember I was in secondary school at the time. The excitement was overwhelming. It was absolutely amazing. When we got the tickets we were over the moon. They wore the grey suits with the round collars. My favourite Beatle was John Lennon. I just thought he was wonderful and I loved his voice. It sounded so good above the screaming people who were nearly all girls. At the time, the Beatles were so refreshing and so different. It was really well organised and once we were in there, the atmosphere was electric."

Image © Copyright Derek Cross

Gallery owner John Lidster said fans were delighted to relive the glory days of Southend’s music scene.
He said: “There has been quite a lot of excitement. There’s a beautiful portrait of Brian Jones from the Stones and some really nice shots of the Beatles.
“The first time the Beatles played they were second on the bill to Roy Orbison. But they were so popular, they headlined when they came back.”
Limited edition prints are available for sale direct from the gallery. The exhibition, entitled Unseen 1963, will be available to view until Sunday, November 29 every day from 10.30am until 5.30pm, apart from Wednesday.

Atelier Gallery

Unpublished photos for sale

Cameo Auctioneers will hold another "Music, vinyl records & memorabilia" auction on November 10th. Here's the story behind one of their lots:

Seven new black-and-white photos of The Beatles will go up for auction in London on November 10th. The photos were taken at Salisbury Plain with a little Kodak camera by a fan when she was only 13-years-old.

Gwyn Blanchard, then a 13-year-old student, trudged half an hour in the rain with a group of friends to the set of the Fab Four's second film, hoping for an autograph, but wound up being invited for a chat with her idols.
As the teenagers were walking toward the set, the Beatles drove by in their car and then went into their trailer. Blanchard and her friends decided to stand outside, and she said that for a moment, she doubted she would get her signature.
"We were just hoping that if we passed over our notebooks... just our English notebooks from school. We had them out, ready to hand them over when the door opened, and the manager said 'come get them yourselves'."
"John Lennon was sitting down in front of me," Blanchard told Reuters in a telephone interview. "I handed him my notebook first. He handed it then to Ringo and the pen wouldn't work!"
"John was the chattiest. They were joking and laughing."

Several days later she returned to the set, when the Beatles were filming the scene in which they play beside some tanks. Blanchard snapped some photographs as the band-members relaxed between takes.
"It was only a little black plastic Kodak that I had. We were actually quite close."
Blanchard said she had kept the photos and signatures in a box for several decades, but had decided to sell them.
Cameo Auctioneers said the photos, accompanied by the autographs on notebook paper, could fetch 2-3,000 pounds.

Also, some other previously unseen photos of the Beatles are up for sale at the auction, including both photos taken by professional photographers as well as by fans. These include two original black & white photographs taken on the night of the concert at The Riverside Dancing Club, Bridge House Hotel, Tenbury Wells, Herefordshire. Monday 15th April 1963. One unpublished colour photograph of John Lennon & Paul McCartney (see photo above), taken on the beach at Guernsey on 8th August 1963. The original photograph is in very poor condition and no negative exists, but the one for sale is a modern copy and the copyright follows the photo. Also, four original unused freelance photographer`s press photographs of The Beatles. These look like Manchester 1963, with the panda bear and on stage.


Cameo Auction Site

Zemeckis wants Paul and Ringo

Robert Zemeckis wants Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to return to Pepperland. Director Zemeckis is making a 3-D performance-capture adaptation of the classic cartoon movie, "Yellow Submarine." "We haven't gotten the word yet on the two surviving Beatles, whether they're interested in doing it or not," the director said during an interview with MTV's Josh Horowitz.
Paul and Ringo are Zemeckis' first choices. "Of course it would be," he said.
In the 1968 cartoon original, other actors provided the Beatles voices due to The Beatles' busy schedule and quite possibly also because The Beatles were unsure whether the film was a good idea or not. At a private screening of the finished movie, The Beatles were overjoyed about the final result, and Lennon proposed to the movie's director that he could now manage to persuade the boys to go to the studio and re-dub the film with their own voices. Sadly, at that stage it was too late.

Screencaps from the Apple USB

The main menu window

Here are some screen captures from the Apple Remasters USB memory stick, provided by Apple Corps. All images are © Copyright 2009 Apple Corps Ltd. The 16 GB Memory stick comes equipped with a flash-based menu, where you can select music tracks, the mini-documentary videos or the artwork. All music tracks are available both as lossy MP3 files and lossless FLAC tracks. FLAC files may be played directly on your computer by for instance Winamp (with a FLAC plug-in), but if you want to play the FLAC's in the iTunes music player, they need to be converted. FLAC files may easily be converted into WAV files by a freely available FLAC converter, but then you'll need to save them on a hard disc drive, as the 16GB memory stick will probably not have enough room for the WAV files, which are considerably larger than the FLAC files.

Here's a rendering of one of the Abbey Road artwork screens.

And here's the relevant page taken from the booklet that came with the Remaster CD of Abbey Road.

This screencap is from the mini documentary for the "Please Please Me" album. We don't know if the flash interface allows you to play the documentaries in a full screen window.

And the final screen capture is where you select the music tracks. As you can see, the complete catalogue is easily available from the bottom of the screen.

The Apple Beatles Remasters Memory Sticks are available from the official Beatles Stores in Japan, UK, and USA. The price is £200 from the UK store. You can select your nearest store from a menu over at TheBeatles.com.

Magazine Alert: Beatles Nytt 161

The swedish magazine Beatles Nytt has a new issue out. No. 161 follows hot on the heels of the delayed no. 160, and is almost exclusively devoted to the Beatles Remasters and The Beatles:RockBand, apart from a few reviews (Klaus Voorman & Friends:A Sideman's Journey DeLuxe Edition & Yusuf Islam [with Paul McCartney & Dolly Parton] Boots & Sand 7" vinyl single) and a look at the Beatles articles from a few recent magazines. Robert Gille gives the Beatles Remasters a great deal of praise, and details both photo quality, paper quality and gives us a breakdown of differences in timing between the Mono and Stereo versions of the Remasters. For instance, the Help! album is 35 seconds shorter in stereo than in mono, and the 1965 stereo version which has been included on the mono Help CD is 32 seconds longer than the one in the stereo box. After his review he has included a postscript about the sound quality of the Beatles:RockBand remixes and confesses that these are even better than the remasters.
Torbjörn Jackson reviews The Beatles:RockBand and is more into the gameplay than the sound quality.
All in all 36 pages and written entirely in swedish, which of course will also be understood by danes and norwegians.
The back cover is the same photo that was used on the front covers of Norwegian Wood no. 118 AND the recent British Beatles Fanclub Magazine, so we've all been thinking alike.

More formats for the Remasters

Apple and EMI To Release Limited Edition Stereo USB

Following the September 9 (9-9-09) debut of The Beatles’ digitally re-mastered catalogue on CD, Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are pleased to announce the worldwide release of a limited edition of only 30,000 Beatles Stereo USB apples on December 7 (December 8 in North America).

The exquisitely crafted, apple-shaped USB drive is loaded with the critically acclaimed re-mastered audio for The Beatles’ 14 stereo titles, as well as all of the re-mastered CDs’ visual elements, including 13 mini-documentary films about the studio albums, replicated original UK album art, rare photos and expanded liner notes.

A specially designed Flash interface has been installed, and the 16GB USB’s audio and visual contents will be provided in FLAC 44.1 Khz 24 bit and MP3 320 Kbps formats, fully compatible with PC and Mac.

Meanwhile, British music magazine MOJO has been talking to Apple CEO, Jeff Jones about the vinyl remasters.

Paul McCartney - Highway

From the upcoming release "Good Evening New York City"