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Joey Molland, guitarist and last surviving core member of the rock group Badfinger, has died at the age of 77.

The band’s official Facebook page announced Molland’s death, noting that he died Saturday night surrounded by family. No cause of death was provided, but Molland had faced health issues including pneumonia in recent months.

“Thank you, Joey…for keeping the band’s music alive for so long and for being a friend to us all,” the band added.

Molland joined Badfinger — formerly the Iveys, and one of the first...

George Harrison was known as the quiet Beatle, and sometimes also wanted to be invisible.

“Beatle George Harrison, above, is due in court here today to answer assault charges,” John Lennon reads from a newspaper in a scene in Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. “Harrison is accused of assaulting a photographer last May as he and Beatle Ringo Starr left a nightclub.”

The accused looks fairly bewildered, as did much of the audience. The story intermittently creeps back into the documentary, making its presence known while Harrison largely ignores it and moves on.

In The Beatles: Get Back, Jackson shows how news items about The Beatles have a tendency to take on lives of their own. Paul McCartney improvises his version of Michael Housego’s article “The End of a Beautiful Friendship,” about Harrison quitting the band, while the rest of the group rolls through old time rock and roll.

The clarity of Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back brings a lot out in the mix. Audiences can see chord changes and teary eyes. Members of The Beatles’ inner circle also make appearances. Peter Brown, who was Brian Epstein’s assistant, pops by with papers. Longtime friends Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, the managing director of Apple and the band’s road manager, respectively, stick around to make sure the band is getting what they need, while co-producer and engineer Glyn Johns does the same for the audio. Jackson also gives hazy focus to the man who disturbed the sound, Yanni “John” Alexis Mardas, better known as “Magic Alex.”

In The Beatles: Get Back, Magic Alex develops, designs, and delivers a state-of-the-art recording console, which creates far too much hum to be usable in recordings. He also gifts John Lennon with the prototype of a combination rhythm guitar and bass.

During the period of Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, John Lennon and Yoko Ono made many experimental films. One of the techniques they pioneered was film speed. They showed the erection of a building, from scratch, fit into a few minutes of screentime by shooting a few frames per day. Jackson does the opposite in his new documentary, creating a slow-mo cinema verité version of director Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night.

In the greatest jukebox musical ever made, the band has to retrieve an errant band member in time to make a show, and when they make that show, it’s a success. The crowds go wild. Beatlemania is encapsulated for all time. They play all their songs during the long and winding road to the TV station, and during rehearsals. They actually have to escape from prying eyes during rehearsals. We get snippets of old songs,...

In the 50 years since the Beatles split, seemingly every known scrap of their history has been scrutinized and curated for public consumption — every minute of studio tape, every radio broadcast, home and concert recording; every photo and interview and document and snippet of film footage — with one huge exception: the “Let It Be” film.

There are several reasons for this, but only one matters: “Let It Be” is a downer. We see our beloved Beatles breaking up before our eyes.

Originally intended as a spontaneous, “as live as live can be, in this electronic age” documentary of rock as it happens, instead we see the group, who had finished recording the 30-song “White Album” just six weeks earlier, miserably trying to have a jolly ol’ time working up even more tunes for the cameras — in the morning, in a dark and cavernous film studio, during a typically gloomy English winter.

“It was another day at the office,” Ken Mansfield says, recalling the Beatles’ impromptu rooftop concert in January 1969. There’s not even a hint of sarcasm in his voice. The group staged the gig atop Apple Records’ London office at 3 Savile Row, 50 years ago today, with the intention of shooting the ending for what would become their Let It Be film. It was an item on a checklist. Mansfield, who was born in Idaho, was the label’s U.S. manager at the time. “Some of the people in the...

On the morning of January 27th, 1970, John Lennon glimpsed his future. He and Yoko Ono had just returned from a nearly month-long trip to Denmark, where Ono was visiting her daughter with her second husband, Tony Cox, and his new wife, Melinda Kendall. During one of many conversations there, the idea of “karma” was brought up and dissected, and Lennon still had those thoughts in his head when he awoke that January day in his Tittenhurst Park home.

Not long after waking up, he sat down at a piano and,...

Tony Sokol Dec 24, 2018

Crimble comes at the end of every year and The Beatles made it maybe. George Martin biographer chimes in.

The Beatles Christmas messages began as a personal show of holiday gratitude to the band’s fan club, but grew into an annual tradition as important as any evergreen chestnut for a generation. Growing up, the silly off-key carols meant Christmas. They were exciting. They were fun. They were funny. I never in my life worried about offending someone by saying Merry or Happy Christmas because, due to these recordings, I would forever mangle greetings like “Hare Kringle” and “very new jeers.” Inviting Krishna devotees and insult comics into the happy proceedings.

Christmas was never a religious holiday at our house. It rocked. And it all started when radio stations started playing the crimbly greetings. Long after the Beatles broke up, prog and oldies stations alike would keep up the tradition.

For those of us who weren’t lucky enough to attend a Beatles concert in the 1960s, Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week just might be the next best thing. The 2016 documentary traces the band’s rise from a cramped and dank cellar in Liverpool to record breaking television appearances, jam packed stadiums, and—ultimately—rock immortality. Lovingly assembled through rare and often unseen fan home movie footage, Howard’s film also draws on more familiar material—restored to the highest echelons of HD— and new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. All told, it’s a joyous...

Imagine finding one of van Gogh’s early sketches for “Starry Night,” or a rough draft of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. For anyone who loves music, the mammoth 50th anniversary reissue of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is just as good—if not better. The expanded package includes nearly two hours worth of outtakes from the groundbreaking 1967 sessions, offering not only an alternate-universe look at some of the most beloved tracks in the rock canon, but also a fascinating fly-on-the-wall view of four young artists at the height of their power.

Stripped down, occasionally rough and always electrifying,...

When Paul McCartney shocked the world in April 1970 with his announcement of the Beatles' break-up, drummer Ringo Starr added a surprise of his own by becoming (initially, at least) the most musically active member of the former Fab Four.

As he would later recount in the lyrics of "Early 1970," the deceptively jaunty b-side of his 1971 hit "It Don't Come Easy," Starr was the only Beatle who didn't have any serious beef with any other member of the band at the time. Feeling lost without the family dynamic of the musical...

Yesterday, it was announced that G.I. Joe Retaliation director Jon M. Chu will be making a live-action Jem and the Holograms movie with Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions (Insidious, The Purge) and music mogul Scooter Braun producing. They asked fans to get in on the fun by sending submissions of all kinds. They are looking for casting ideas, audition tapes, costume designs, and even music proposals. We thought we'd contribute by casting the movie ourselves, as we are big fans of this 80s animated series and toy line from Hasbro. And of course, we start with Jem, who can only be played by Jennifer Lawrence. Seriously, is there any one else? Take a look at our first cast proposal to the makers of Jem and the Holograms.

1Jennifer Lawrence as Jem/Jerrica Benton

Jem isn't just some throwaway cartoon. It has some of the best writing seen on 80s afternoon television,...

Amy and James Smedley invited the band to their fish and chip shop. Three days later the Magical Mystery Tour dropped in …

The Beatles hadn't been in Taunton for four years – they played their last gig in the Somerset town in September 1963 – but on this Friday afternoon it provided a charmingly odd interlude in a chaotic time for the group. On 27 August manager Brian Epstein had overdosed and died, and Paul McCartney, to prevent a likely split in the band, rushed them into completing the Magical Mystery Tour film. Taking their cue from Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the group, friends and actors piled into a bus and headed for Newquay, Cornwall. At their hotel they met Amy and James Smedley, who invited them to drop by their Taunton chippie. With the group's fondness for acting on "random" events (partly a result of eastern mysticism, partly drug-induced, partly for the...

Calling all Beatles fans… the group’s second feature film, 1965’s Help!, will be released on Blu-ray on Tuesday, June 25 and Wamg is giving away copies to 2 lucky readers.

Directed by Richard Lester, who also directed the band’s debut feature film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, Help! follows The Beatles as they become passive recipients of an outside plot that revolves around Ringo’s possession of a sacrificial ring, which he cannot remove from his finger. As a result, he and his bandmates John, Paul and George are chased from London to the Austrian Alps and the Bahamas by religious cult members, a mad scientist and the London police.

In addition to starring The Beatles, Help! boasts a witty script, a great cast of British character actors, and classic Beatles songs “Help!,” “You’re Going To Lose That Girl,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” “Ticket To Ride,...

The Beatles’ second feature film, 1965’s Help!, is on the way on Blu-ray. On June 24 (June 25 in North America), Help! makes its eagerly awaited Blu-ray debut in a single-disc package pairing the digitally restored film and 5.1 soundtrack with an hour of extra features, including a 30-minute documentary about the making of the film, memories of the cast and crew, an in-depth look at the restoration process, an outtake scene, and original theatrical trailers and radio spots. An introduction by the film’s director, Richard Lester, and an appreciation by Martin Scorsese are included in the Blu-ray’s booklet.

Help!’s Blu-ray edition follows the 2012 release of The Beatles’ digitally restored Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour feature films on Blu-ray, DVD and iTunes with extensive extras. Help!’s restoration for its 2007 DVD debut wowed viewers, earning five-times platinum sales in the U.S. and praise from a broad range of...

John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics have sold for $1.2 million at an auction in New York, purchased by an American private collector over the phone. They were for the Beatles hit A Day in The Life which was the final track of the band’s 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s a double-sided sheet of paper which starts with “I read the news today oh boy about a lucky man who made the grade.” This apparently refers to Guiness heir Tara Browne’s car crash. Browne was a friend of Lennon’s and a society figure who crashed his Lotus Elan sports car in London and died in 1966, after failing to notice a red traffic light. Lennon later commented, “I didn’t copy the accident. Tara didn’t blow his mind out, but it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. The details of...

London, June 19 – John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics to Beatles song ‘A Day In The Life’ were sold for 1.2 million dollars at an auction.

The song, which was co-written with Paul McCartney, was sold at Sotheby’s in New York, reports the BBC.

The song is the final track on the band’s 1967 Sgt Pepper album.

The buyer of the lyrics was an unidentified American telephone bidder.

The lyric sheet was previously held with the Beatles’ road manager, Mal Evans.

Rolling Stone magazine listed ‘A Day in the Life’ at number 26 in its compilation of the greatest.

Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher, in partnership with Revolution Films, will produce a new biopic feature on "The Beatles" based on the 1972 novel "The Longest Cocktail Party: An Insider's Diary Of The Beatles, Their Million Dollar Apple Empire And Its Wild Rise And Fall, by author Richard Dilello.

The rock history book, following The Beatles from their 1967 heyday to their breakup in 1970, was published in 1973 by Playboy Press, then reprinted in 1981 and 2005.

The title is a reference to the habit of entertaining members of the media with expensive drinks, luncheons and perks.

Dilello served as 'house hippie' (Client Liaison Officer) from 1968 to 1970, becoming acquainted with each of the Beatles, their wives, girlfriends and the inner circle of agents/managers, who worked with Apple, including business manager Allen Klein, attorneys Lee and John Eastman, road managers (and Apple directors) Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, press agent and author Derek Taylor, members of Apple bands Badfinger,...

John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for the The Beatles' song "A Day in the Life" are expected to sell for as much as $700,000 when they go under the hammer in New York in June. The lyrics appear on a double-sided sheet of paper, which includes corrections and amendments made in red ink.

"A Day in the Life" is the final track on the band's 1967 "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album and recently came 26th in Rolling Stone Magazine's 500 greatest songs of all time poll. Lennon's writings aren't expected to break the record for Beatles lyrics, set by "All You Need Is Love", which fetched $1 million in 2005.

The lyrics sheet previously belonged to Beatles' road manager Mal Evans. The song itself has a historical element for The BBC banned it from being aired due to lyrics that encouraged drug use.

Ringo Starr's drum skin is expected to fetch £100,000 at auction. The musical accessory, which bears The Beatles logo, was given to a Pink Floyd fan at London's famous Abbey Road Studios by the band's road manager Mal Evans. Now it is the star attraction at the Rock 'n' Roll Art and Soul Fame Bureau auction, to be held in London next Tuesday (28.04.09). Fame Bureau Managing Director Ted Owen said: "The enduring fascination with The Beatles will forever pass between music fans and down through generations." The drum skin is not the only Beatles memorabilia on sale. The incredibly rare 'Beatles Cavern Poster', which advertised their first live show at Liverpool's Cavern Club is expected to fetch between...