The Beatles In the News 2008

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December

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December 18, 2008  Paul McCartney, Britney Spears top "Idol" wish list

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former Beatle Paul McCartney and pop star Britney Spears are at the top of Simon Cowell's celebrity wish list as possible mentors on the upcoming season of "American Idol."

But the chances of getting McCartney to appear on the most-watched American television show seem slim.

"We try every year to get Paul McCartney on but for whatever reason he won't come on," the British judge told reporters on a conference call on Wednesday.

Cowell said he would welcome the chance to see Spears on the show, which returns for its 8th season on January 13. The singer is on a comeback roll with a No.1 album and upcoming tour after almost two years of personal woes.

"She would be first on the list. I would love to see her mentor the contestants. But if she doesn't want to do that and she wants to come on the show to perform, I would welcome her any time," Cowell said.

He said he would also like to see Beyonce and would welcome back singer-songwriter Lionel Richie and movie director Quentin Tarantino, who was a guest judge in 2004.

"American Idol" has produced some bonafide stars since its 2002 debut, including Grammy award winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood.

Former contestants Jennifer Hudson and Jordin Sparks were both nominated earlier this month for Grammys.

"I absolutely love it when that happens," Cowell said. "There is so much snobbery in the music business about what we do on this show. So I think it is fantastic."

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December 14, 2008  Report: McCartney says he's the political Beatle

November

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November 29, 2008  Eleanor Rigby document fetches $177,000

LONDON (Reuters) – A 97-year-old document that contains clues to the identity of Eleanor Rigby, the subject of one of the Beatles' best-loved songs, sold for 115,000 pounds ($177,000) at auction on Thursday.

The total fell well short of high estimates of around 500,000 pounds for the piece of Beatles memorabilia.

The money will go to the seller Annie Mawson and her charity the Sunbeams Music Trust (www.sunbeamsmusic.org), which uses music to help people with special needs.

The manuscript is a salary register from Liverpool City Hospital and features the name and signature of E. Rigby, a scullery maid who has signed for her monthly wage. Her annual earnings were 14 pounds.

According to Mawson, the document was sent to her in 1990 by former Beatle Paul McCartney when she wrote to him on behalf of her charity.

"I wrote ... to Paul and asked him for half a million pounds. But by the end of the letter I just said 'Look, I know you're a very caring person and I feel it's a privilege to share my story with you'," she told Reuters before the sale.

"Nine months later, in June 1990, this amazing envelope arrived in the post. It was nine months after I'd written to him, which was part of the mystery because you always think it ended up in the waste paper basket."

She said the envelope containing the document dated 1911 featured an official Paul McCartney tour stamp. The singer was on a world tour around that time.

Mawson did not immediately realize the importance of the register until she read the list of names and spotted E. Rigby.

The document offers one of the clearest clues yet as to the identity of Eleanor Rigby, the woman in the song of the same name who dies alone with no one to mourn her. According to music Web sites, previously McCartney has said the heroine of the poignant song was fictional.

The grave of an Eleanor Rigby was also discovered in the churchyard of St. Peter's in Woolton, Liverpool, close to where McCartney met John Lennon in 1957.

"I wonder just how much Paul McCartney meant to unmask when he passed it on," said Ted Owen, managing director of the Fame Bureau which sold the manuscript in London.

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November 25, 2008  Comic Peter Kay's Geraldine duets with rocker Macca at Stella McCartney's Christmas light switch-on

A reality television star managed to do the unthinkable - steal the limelight from one of the most famous musicians in the world.  Comic Peter Kay's reality television star character Geraldine was the star of the show as Macca's daughter, Stella McCartney switched on the Christmas lights at her Mayfair store.  Beatles legend Sir Paul, 66, and Peter, 35 got together to switch on the shop’s Christmas lights.  Dressed in full drag regalia, the comic cracked jokes onstage before being joined by the famous Beatle onstage albeit a little late.  The singalong went on for half an hour as Sir Paul had arrived late, and guests were freezing after being kept waiting while Sir Paul was stuck in traffic.  But trouper Kay kept the crowd amused, even jumping into the assembled paps at one point.  The pair burst into song, singing Macca's 1979 hit 'Wonderful Christmastime' at Macca’s daughter Stella’s store in Mayfair, central London.  The pair were reunited after McCartney, who recently spoke out against reality television shows, was a guest on the comedian's spoof show Britain's Got Pop, infront of an audience which included Marie Helvin, Lulu and Kate Moss.  Sir Paul gave advice to Geraldine, who, viewers were told, had once been a male piano player on a ferry.
McCartney arrived with a glamorous looking Nancy Shevell, who wore a silky minidress and knee high boots.  Recently the Beatle broke his silence about his relationship with the American businesswoman.  'I just like being in love,' he told the Sunday Times.  And Mrs Shevell – an American businesswoman who's amicably separated from her husband – says she isn't stressed by his mega-fame.  'I'm a cancer survivor, I run a trucking company and I've got a 16-year-old to raise. That's stress.'  Meanwhile Sir Paul made his stance on reality television clear, as he likened it to a car crash, but admitted he watched it.  The ex-Beatle claimed shows like the X Factor did not encourage musical creativity.  Sir Paul, 66, said: 'I think there is too much of it. You can't turn on the telly without somebody being judged by four people, whether they are on ice, or on the stage or in the jungle.  'I'm not very keen on it.  'I watch it like everybody. It's compulsive viewing but so is a traffic accident. It doesn't encourage creativity.'  The musician also expressed his happiness that Barack Obama won the US presidential election.  'I was so pleased that he won that it occurred to me that if I ever got asked I could sing Michelle to his wife,' he said.

Meanwhile in New York, Sir Paul's former wife, Heather Mills, who once took part in a US TV dancing competition, was seen leaving the Soho House hotel, sporting a new, shorter hairstyle with a fringe.

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November 16, 2008 McCartney hopes to release funky Beatles track

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August 23, 2008 Want to live in the Dakota?

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August 4, 2008 Photo appears to show McCartney at Clear Lake Circle K

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August 12, 2008 Copy of Beatles contract for sale in London

LONDON - Brian Epstein's copy of his management contract with The Beatles, a pact that proved to be worth millions, is being offered for sale in London next month.

The four-page document, signed Oct. 1, 1962, by John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey — Ringo Starr's real name — carries an estimated price of $480,000. The Fame Bureau auction house said Tuesday it had scheduled the sale for Sept. 4 at the Idea Generation Gallery.

The contract, also signed by Harold Hargreaves Harrison and James McCartney on behalf of their underage sons, gave Epstein a 25 percent cut of the band's earnings, provided they made more than $400 each per week.

"The word is that he made more money than the Beatles did during his period of time," said Ted Owen, managing director of The Fame Bureau.

He said the contract was offered for sale by a northern England businessman and Beatles collector who has asked to remain anonymous.

The contract marked the moment when all the pieces were in place for a global outbreak of Beatlemania.

Epstein first heard of The Beatles when a customer went to his record store in Liverpool asking for "My Bonnie," in which the group backed singer Tony Sheridan.

After arranging to hear the group perform at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, Epstein was impressed.

"They were fresh, honest and had, what I thought, a sort of presence and star quality, whatever that is," Epstein later recalled.

Epstein had been guiding the group since December 1961, and had secured a recording contract with EMI. With a nudge from producer George Martin, Epstein fired drummer Pete Best in August 1962 and brought Starr into the group, and their first big hit, "Love Me Do," was ready for release.

"Brian put us in suits and all that and we made it very, very big," Lennon once said. "But we sold out, you know.

"We were in a daydream till he came along. We had no idea what we were doing."

Epstein died from a drug overdose in 1967, at age 32.

According to the Brian Epstein Web site, http://www.brianepstein.com, a first, five-year contract was signed by the group on Jan. 24, 1962, but Epstein didn't sign it.

Epstein managed several other successful acts from Liverpool, including Gerry & The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas and Cilla Black.

Also up for auction: a Bechstein grand piano that can be heard on The Beatles' "White Album" and "Hey Jude."

Owen estimated the piano will sell for $570,000 or more.

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August 12, 2008 John Lennon's Killer Denied Parole

Los Angeles (E! Online) - If Mark David Chapman wants to know what it's like to be free, well, he'll have to just imagine.

For the fifth time since becoming eligible for release, John Lennon's killer was denied parole from New York's Attica Correctional Facility Tuesday.

Parole board members issued a brief one-page decision on the denial after meeting with Chapman, saying that despite his clean disciplinary record since 1994, his release "would not be in the best interest of the community."

Or, more likely, in the best interest of Chapman's safety.

"It's dangerous for him to come out," Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, told the New York Daily News Monday. "Not only for us, but for himself."

Ono added that she had personally asked parole officials to deny Chapman's request.

The 53-year-old will remain in Attica for at least two more years before becoming reeligible for parole. He has so far served 27 years of a maximum life sentence behind bars.

For the two people unaware, Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for gunning down the former Beatle outside his Manhattan apartment building, the Dakota, on Dec. 8, 1980.

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July 2008

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July 15, 2008  Beatles producer Martin honored in Los Angeles

By MICHAEL CIDONI
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Sir George Martin, the classically trained producer who helmed the Beatles recordings from their mop-top phase through their late musical masterworks, was honored Saturday night in Los Angeles.

Martin, 82, received a career award from The Recording Academy's Grammy Foundation, which provides education programs for future music professionals and works to preserve musical history.

Martin is the most successful record producer of all time, according to the academy, with more than 50 chart-topping hits and one-billion units sold. He also holds the record for the longest run of No. 1 pop-chart hits in history, spanning 36 years.

Martin, who has said he is hard of hearing, sprinted by reporters on the event's arrivals line. But son Giles Martin spoke on behalf of his father, with whom he remixed original recordings to create the soundtrack for "Love," the popular Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas production inspired by The Beatles' music.

Receiving the Recording Academy tribute "is a huge honor for him," Giles Martin told AP Television. "But he always said, 'They give me an honor for still being alive.' You know, because he's English, and we're very self-deprecating. But it's a huge honor for him. And his life has been the music industry."

Event attendees included John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, who recalled her first time meeting Martin.

"I was very surprised," Ono said. "He was obviously from a classical background. And he had that sort of demeanor - of a person who was a very sophisticated gentleman, an English gentleman."

George Harrison's widow Olivia Harrison said it took a little time for her late husband to warm up to Martin, who first met in 1962.

"Well, I think, they were so young," she said. "And George, he always said that he was always like the adult in the room. And, you know, you look now, and there wasn't that much age difference. But, you know, they were just four scruffy guys. But he enabled them to manifest their music for what they heard in their heads."

And, clearly, John, Paul, George and Ringo remain important to Martin, who spent the bulk of his award-acceptance speech talking about The Fab Four.

"Yoko and Olivia are here tonight," Martin noted. "Paul and Ringo can't be here, because they're doing their own tour. They're workaholics. I can't understand why, but they are. I've been so lucky to work with so many wonderful people, and great talent all my life. ... I miss a lot of people. I miss so many people who have died on me. God knows I'm old enough. But younger people have left the scene, and I miss them, as you do, great people. John and George particularly."

The event also included a concert saluting Martin and the songs he helped make famous, with guest performers including songwriter Burt Bacharach, guitarist Jeff Beck and singer Tom Jones.

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July 10, 2008  Lennon 'Peace' lyrics sell at auction for $833,654

Writer Gail Renard, right, poses in front of the handwritten by John Lennon lyrics for the song 'Give Peace A Chance' song, that was sold in a Christie's auction for 350,000 british pounds, $692,000, in London, Thursday July 10, 2008. Renard was given the note by John Lennon himself when he along with his wife Yoko Ono staged the famous Bed-In demonstration in a hotel room in Montreal, Canada in 1969.

LONDON - Christie's auction house has sold John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance" for $833,654.

The lyrics were written during Lennon's 1969 Bed-in protest for peace at the Queens Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

Christie's spokeswoman Zoe Schoon said Lennon gave the sheet to 16-year-old Gail Renard during the eight-day Bed-in.

Lennon wrote the lyrics and recorded the song in the hotel room with about 50 guests, who included singer Petula Clark and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

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July 2, 2008  First sighting of Paul McCartney's new eco-car that was flown 7,000 miles from Japan

By Liz Thomas

Sir Paul McCartney may be congratulating himself on his choice of vehicle.

He's always been a supporter of green issues and driving a hybrid car (albeit a rather large and luxurious one) would seem to be the right choice.

But his £84,000 Lexus is in fact responsible for stamping a huge carbon footprint on the environment.

This is because the car was flown 7,000 miles from the factory in Japan. That single journey created more than 14 tons of carbon dioxide - 20 times more than if the vehicle had been shipped by sea.

The first sighting of Paul McCartney's much talked about eco-car

That's a great deal more than Sir Paul's driving might have produced had he decided to opt for a conventional car.

The 65-year-old was photographed in the maroon Lexus LS600h for the first time as he was driven to his London recording studio yesterday.

A spokesman for environmental management consultancy Carbon Footprint said: 'Sir Paul would have to drive 36,100 miles in the car to create the same amount of carbon dioxide as that single flight. It's a ridiculous situation.'

The Lexus LS600h was sent to the former Beatle from Japan as a gift from the car manufacturer. It features a powerful five litre V8 petrol engine.

However, it produces relatively low carbon emissions of 219g per kilometre - comparable cars in terms of size and power have emissions of 249g per kilometre.

As a hybrid it also has an electric motor, powered by batteries, which can be used to power the car at low speeds, such as when it is in traffic, and produces no emissions.

Such is vegetarian Sir Paul's passion for issues surrounding animal rights and the environment that he took out the leather interior and had it replaced with cloth.

The singer demanded that no animal products were used in his new car and it has been fitted with a hand-stitched green woven fabric.

Lexus has enjoyed a close relationship with Sir Paul. The company sponsored his 2005 tour of the U.S. and produced a one-off McCartney-themed hybrid SUV, which was sold to benefit an antilandmine charity.

He has, in the past, praised the firm for producing environmentally sensitive cars. His fashion designer daughter Stella also drives a Lexus.

Lexus said of the decision to send the vehicle by plane: 'To ensure the car's quality and security, as well as to meet marketing deadlines, it was airshipped on a regularly-scheduled commercial flight to the UK.'

A spokesman for Sir Paul declined to comment.

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July 1, 2008  'Lost' Beatles tape airs on BBC Radio

By GREGORY KATZ, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - A Beatles interview from the 1960s in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney discussed the way they composed songs together was broadcast on British radio Tuesday after it was found in a film can in a damp garage in south London.

The Beatles were at the height of their immense popularity when the tape was recorded at Scottish Television studios on April 30, 1964. The band had recently toured America, winning huge audiences on the Ed Sullivan show and shooting to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

The interview was only broadcast in Scotland and sat in a film canister until it was discovered by film historian Richard Jeffs, who was astonished to find the familiar Liverpudlian accents of the Beatles on the tape. It was not immediately clear who owned the garage or why the film was there.

The audio portion of the tape was found to be still usable for radio broadcast, allowing the British Broadcasting Corp. to showcase its interview 44 years after it was recorded.

On the nine-minute tape, Lennon describes the fateful day in rock-and-roll history when he first encountered McCartney. Both were unknown teenagers at the time.

"I was playing at a garden fete in the ... village where I lived just outside Liverpool, playing with a group, and he came along and we met," said Lennon, who was a member of a soon-to-be-forgotten skiffle band at the time.

McCartney said they were introduced by a mutual friend called Ivan.

Lennon and McCartney became fast friends — once they found out they had skills in common, and a shared taste for American stars like Fats Domino and Little Richard — and they soon joined up with teenage guitarist George Harrison to form the nucleus of what would become the Beatles.

Drummer Ringo Starr would come much later, just before the group started its string of unforgettable No. 1 hits.

On the tape, Lennon and McCartney — hailed by many as the finest British songwriters of the 20th century — discussed the haphazard way they composed together during the Beatles' early days, when they were under intense pressure to generate hits while keeping up a bone-crushing touring schedule.

McCartney said that the two usually worked on songs together but that sometimes Lennon wrote songs completely on his own.

"Normally we sit down and try and bash one out," said McCartney. "But then again, there's no formula, because he (Lennon) can come up with one one day completely finished. We still say we both wrote it, though."

The two principal songwriters, who would later have a falling-out as the band was breaking up, sounded extremely relaxed and affectionate with each other.

McCartney said they used whatever instrument was available when composing.

"Well, you know, it depends," he said. "Sometimes we write them on old pianos, anything that's lying around."

McCartney, who would later pen classics such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "Let It Be," told the interviewers that he and Lennon started off writing comical songs, including his first effort, the largely forgotten, "I Lost My Little Girl."

While the Beatles eventually wearied of the pressures of live performances, when they couldn't hear their own songs because of the noise from the fans, McCartney said in 1964 that they adored the attention they received from their screaming, fainting female fans.

"We love that," he said. "The atmosphere in the theaters. It's marvelous."

The BBC posted a notice on its Web site indicating that the precious tape, and a number of others found at the same time, are now being kept in a temperature-controlled warehouse to protect them from the ravages of time.

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June 23, 2008  'Guitar Hero,' 'Rock Band' soon playing Beatles?

Beatles music may soon be strumming a new tune via air guitar video games, according to a report in The Financial Times.  Apple Corps and EMI, which respectively represent The Beatles' business interests and ownership of its master recordings, have reportedly been in discussions with video game publishers Activision and MTV Games.

Under a possible deal that could be worth several million dollars, users could put their air guitar to use while listening to The Beatles and playing Activision's Guitar Hero or MTV's Rock Band games, according to the report.

The move to push The Beatles' music onto a new stage via video games could occur within the coming weeks, the Financial Times reported. Such a move would mark a change in embracing technology for The Beatles' music, given that digital-use licenses for Beatles recordings not yet available.

The Beatles representatives, as well as the game publishers, declined to confirm whether a deal is on the horizon.

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June 16, 2008  EMI's New Boss Sees Cracks In Music World

By TIM ARANGO  The New York Times

One evening last autumn a group of about 10 artist managers, including representatives for the pop stars Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams as well as an executive who oversees the Beatles catalog, clustered around a table in an executive dining room at the London headquarters of EMI. The purpose was to size up the new boss, Guy Hands, and discuss the future of the record business.

Mr. Hands, the private equity financier who had made a fortune sprucing up pubs in England and gas stations on the German autobahn, told the gathering that Rupert Murdoch had privately scoffed at his acquisition of EMI by saying, ''MySpace is going to be the future of music, not record labels.''

''I said I was going to prove him wrong,'' Mr. Hands recalled in a recent interview.

It has been almost 10 months since Mr. Hands, through his private equity firm Terra Firma, bought EMI for about $6.4 billion, and by several accounts, including Mr. Hands's own, it has been a chaotic time.

The company now wobbles under a huge debt load, a leadership vacuum -- it has no chief executive and most major decisions are made by Mr. Hands -- and low morale among many of its employees. Mr. Hands said about 80 percent of the $6.4 billion paid for EMI was for the music publishing unit, which owns copyrights and provides a steady flow of cash.

It is the other side of the business, recorded music, that he says he overpaid for, and could wind up selling if market conditions do not improve.

A large restructuring, announced in January, will soon lay off 1,500 to 2,000 of EMI's roughly 5,500 employees. Most recently, the company has been negotiating the exit of Jason Flom, the chairman of Capitol Music Group who oversees recorded music in the United States.

By contrast, when a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. bought the Warner Music Group in 2003 for $2.6 billion they moved quickly to restructure: the deal closed on a Monday, a restructuring plan was announced on a Tuesday and within a month $250 million in annualized costs were slashed.

In many ways, the pains suffered by EMI are typical for the music industry in the past few years. But for many culturally attuned Britons, EMI is a cherished institution.

EMI's corporate roots stretch back to a pioneer of recorded sound, a German-born American named Emile Berliner, who founded the Gramophone Company. As a result of a merger in the 1930s, it was renamed Electric and Musical Industries Limited.

It was 30 years later that a man named Brian Epstein walked through the doors with a tape from a new band called the Beatles. Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye have all called EMI home.

''EMI and the companies that formed it made London a center for musical culture in a way it never was,'' said Peter Martland, a professor at Cambridge University and author of ''EMI: The First 100 Years. ''There is a lot of history there.''

But the music business, even in good times, is not welcoming to outsiders. The sensibilities of a financier like Mr. Hands are usually starkly at odds with the folkways of a creative enterprise. Artists' egos need stroking, and the measurement of success is not the same in music as it would be in running service stations along the autobahn.

''You have to understand the artist's psyche to make it work,'' said Jazz Summers, who manages The Verve, a band signed to EMI, and was present at the dinner last autumn.

The story has even turned comical at times. After Mr. Hands discovered that some employees were laundering costs for things that were illegal (drugs and prostitutes, he said), by itemizing them on expense reports as ''fruit and flowers,'' he set a strict travel and entertainment policy that required receipts for every expense.

Artists, too, have clashed more openly with Mr. Hands: the band Radiohead has fled and the singer Joss Stone has asked to be let out of her contract. The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, have been talking with other record companies about a new label. (If the Stones left EMI, it would have little impact financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band's catalog).

''They hate him,'' said Hugh Hendry, a British hedge fund manager and former EMI shareholder who had publicly criticized past management, of artists' opinions about Mr. Hands. ''He's rude. He's abrasive. He wants to make money. He's the first to say to artists, 'We are not going to pay you too much money. Now get out of my office.' ''

A glance at Mr. Hands's resume is enough to suggest a clash of cultures. Mr. Hands, 49, is an Oxford-educated financier -- stints at Goldman Sachs and Nomura made him rich before he founded Terra Firma in 2002 -- and he and his wife own and run a chain of country house-style hotels. Mr. Hands was ranked No. 12 on the Times of London's list of 100 most influential figures in British business and has a reputation for being outspoken. (When cheap credit dried up, he called investment bankers ''whimpering dogs,'' The Times of London reported.)

Terra Firma's portfolio of 25 companies ranges across industries, from a landfill operator to a betting shop to a company that leases jet airplanes. Mr. Hands retained the earlier management in just one of the 25, William Hill, which runs sports betting outlets.

So when he took over at EMI he entered a culture that none of his earlier experience had prepared him for. ''It was like we had unlocked years of internal battles with a psychotherapy session,'' he said. ''It was extraordinary.''

At first managers gave Mr. Hands the benefit of the doubt -- they had seen their business decline and were desperate for a new approach.

''He said, this is what I do,'' said Mr. Summers. ''I took over failed pubs, and it worked. I took over failed service stations in Germany, and it worked. We put in new toilets. At first, I thought he was bright.''

But according to Mr. Hands, the company was doing worse than commonly thought. An analysis by McKinsey and KPMG found that EMI had lost $:750 million ($1.5 billion) from selling new music over the last five years.

''We didn't believe it at first,'' he said, explaining that the figures that EMI previously reported counted sales of re-releases of music from old acts like the Beatles as new music revenue.

''They were doing everything they could to hide the fact that they were losing huge amounts of money in new music,'' he said. ''The good news was they were making a fortune in catalog.''

So far this year EMI's market share in the United States has declined to 8.8 percent from 10.7 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the largest drop among the four major music companies. An album from its top-selling band Coldplay will be out Tuesday, and robust sales could polish EMI's image.

But even this would belie tension within the company, as Coldplay agreed to release the album only on the condition that EMI pay for the band's management to hire its own marketing and publicity team, rather than rely on EMI employees.

For EMI, the news became a little worse as the credit crisis grew. Last year Citigroup, which also advised EMI's previous board in the sale, lent Terra Firma nearly $5 billion to finance the deal. The timing couldn't have been worse for the investment bank. ''The loan was done at the very end of the credit boom,'' Mr. Hands said.

As a result, Citigroup has been unable to syndicate the debt, giving Citigroup leverage over EMI should the company start hemorrhaging money. If the debt were spread among numerous investors, EMI would have more breathing room.

In a recent letter to his investors, Mr. Hands wrote: ''Clearly, this is a time when all banks are under tremendous pressure, but this is not ideal for EMI. In all leveraged buyouts, your bank is your partner, and we have worked hard, and continue to work hard, to see if there are ways to help Citigroup syndicate or sell down this loan.''

From the beginning, Mr. Hands did little to ingratiate himself either to EMI's own employees or executives within the industry, a famously clubby business wary of outsiders. He acknowledged that he is not a music person, and has turned down invitations to visit the recording studio to watch artists' recording sessions.

EMI also instituted a ban on international travel without prior approval and barred employees from attending industry events ''unless these are specific profit delivering activities.''

Earlier this year Mr. Hands spoke at a private equity conference in Munich and was asked the difference between the work habits of the music and finance industries. ''I said Terra Firma people get in very early in the morning, work through the day, and go home,'' he said. ''In contrast, people in the music industry get in to work later, work later and then go out late to the clubs and look for bands.''

This, according to Mr. Hands, is what set off a storm of protest from artists and managers in the British press.

''He had this disastrous publicity campaign,'' Mr. Summers said. ''I thought it was terrible for the staff. And he was saying artists were all lazy.''

Mr. Hands's vision appears to be this: split the marketing function from the development of talent -- called ''A&R'' for ''artist and repertoire'' in the parlance of the music business; and sharply cut costs by reducing artist advances and paying less on marketing music.

In a confidential business plan showed to investors last year, Terra Firma said one way to reduce costs would be to use social networking sites to ''source new acts and as a means to test public reaction to individual acts.''

''Getting rid of management teams and starting afresh is something we've always done,'' Mr. Hands said. And some of the biggest new hires have come from outside the music industry. An executive from Google was hired to run the digital business, and the creator of Second Life, the Web-based virtual world, was recently hired to work on digital initiatives.

In that document, Terra Firma projected that EMI's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization would grow from $:167 million ($325 million) in 2007 to $:580 million ($1.1 billion) in 2010, growth that seems at odds with industry trends. (Merrill Lynch, for example, projects that the Ebitda of Warner Music will decline slightly over that time, from $461 million to $444 million.)

To keep costs down, Mr. Hands has clamped down on expenses while he has waited -- the company is still waiting -- for widespread layoffs. But despite those measures, the company will not meet a cash-flow target as part of its covenants with its lender Citigroup. So he negotiated a three-month extension.

''We both agreed that June was far too early,'' Mr. Hands said, noting that Terra Firma had a cash reserve of about $500 million raised from a Canadian pension fund. ''It looks like the company will be fine by September. If it's not fine, we have a cash reserve that will get us through to 2010.''

But the fate of EMI as an independent record company is unclear. Many within the industry expect the company to once again fall into a dance with Warner Music -- the two companies have attempted numerous mergers in recent years. There has been wide speculation that if EMI were to fail to meet its debt covenant in September, Citigroup would step in and force EMI to merge with Warner.

For now, Mr. Hands is trying to fix EMI's business so that its fate remains in his control rather than Citigroup's. ''It's going to take a lot less arrogance and a lot more honesty,'' he said. ''It's going to take a new direction, new management and change.''

But it's not clear that EMI's place in the music business -- or as a cherished English institution like the BBC -- will survive either way. ''I think the analogy to the BBC is very good,'' said Rupert Perry, a former senior executive who worked at EMI for more than 30 years. ''I wouldn't say it's that way today. In its time and history, it dominated the world.''

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June 8, 2008  Paul McCartney's next world tour will be his last

Exclusive

By Sean Hamilton Showbiz Editor 8/06/2008

Paul McCartney's next world tour will be his last - so he can spend more time wi th daughter Beatrice.

The former Beatle is about to announce plans for a colossal two-year tour. The huge string of dates, starting this autumn, will be one of the biggest rock tours of all time. Macca is expected to make £110million from the planned 100 gigs - more than £1m per show.

It will be his biggest tour since 1989-90 when he played 108 shows in Europe, the US, Japan and Brazil.

The tour will be in stages, taking in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia. The first dates will be announced in the next few weeks.

Beatrice, four, will join her dad - 66 this month - for sections of the tour.

Macca revealed his plan to close friends and family last weekend at his triumphant City Of Culture gig in his home town of Liverpool.

A source said: "Paul explained that this tour will be the last big one. He wants to settle down and enjoy Beatrice's childhood.

"The tour will be the last time he performs in many parts of the world. Beatrice and his family life are going to come first. He does not want to be away for months at a time."

The other woman in Macca's life - his new love, American socialite Nancy Shevell - will join him for much of the tour, aides have been told.

Nancy, 48, will see Paul play a free concert in Kiev, Ukraine, next Saturday.

Paul had long planned to make a final world tour but was waiting to get his divorce from Beatrice's mum Heather Mills out of the way. The two reached a £25million settlement in March.

Macca's last major tour, in 2002, netted him £63million for just 58 shows.

Paul will get more than £1million from each of the planned 100 per formances on one of the biggest rock tours ever.

Four-year-old Beatrice will fly out to join her dad for parts of the tour.

Go-ahead had to wait for end of divorce proceedings.

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May 26, 2008  Paul McCartney Plays Doctor

by Jovie Baclayon E! Online

Just call him Dr. Paul from now on.

Paul McCartney received an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Yale University today.

The band played "Hey Jude" as the former Beatle accepted the degree at the university's graduation ceremony. McCartney, 65, was hailed for awakening a generation with his fresh take on "rock, roll, rhythm and blues."

"Here, there and everywhere, you have pushed the boundaries of the familiar to create new classics," said Yale President Richard Levin. "We admire your musical genius and your generous support of worthy causes."

Despite the honor, something tells us McCartney will hold on to his other title. The legendary singer-songwriter became Sir Paul when he was knighted by the queen of England in 1996.

And, somewhere, Heather Mills is wondering how to profit off his newfound status.

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May 14, 2008  Paul McCartney's £20 autograph

by Michelle Fiddler, Liverpool Echo

SIR Paul McCartney signed a £20 note for a fan after she confused him with her mother’s neighbour.

The ECHO revealed last week how Sir Paul made a shopping trip to Lewis’s to pick up a couple of £11.99 ties ahead of his classical concert in the city.

Today it was revealed the former Beatle left his mark on a note more normally associated with the Queen.

Teaching assistant student Lyndsay Jordan told the ECHO of her joy at getting Macca’s signature, and said he held her young son and shared his chocolate buttons.

But the mother-of-three, of Prescot, did not recognise Sir Paul at first.

She said: “The shop floor in Lewis’s where we were wasn’t that busy and there was only us and this guy at the till.

“As we walked past he said hello to the baby and smiled at me. I thought at first he was a bloke who lived behind my mum’s house.

“But I kept thinking ‘what’s his name?’ Then as I walked away I realised it was Paul McCartney.

“I walked back over to him and asked if it was OK to get his autograph.”

It was then that Lyndsay, who was shopping with nephew Stephen Davies, 18, and 20-month-old son Vinnie, realised she had no notepaper.

“So I got a £20 note out and asked him to sign that. He laughed and told me I probably had more money than he did!”

She said: “He was really, really lovely and friendly. He picked Vinnie up and Vinnie even shared his white chocolate buttons with him.”

Lyndsay, who is also mother to six-year-old Abigail and four year-old JJ, added: “He stood there for ages just talking to us. He was great.”

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May 14, 2008  It was 40 years ago today that The Beatles launched Apple Records

Under the iconic Apple Records logo, The Beatles envisioned not only a record label, but also a place for any creative ideas to be produced.

All Things Considered, May 14, 2008 - As part of NPR's occasional series, Echoes of 1968, we look back at that year's long-term impact.

It was 40 years ago today that The Beatles launched Apple Records. The label's trademark green Apple logo appeared on albums by The Beatles and other artists the band helped discover. It didn't take the group long to show that it was better at making music than running a business, but Apple did hint at what was to come.

The Beatles introduced Apple Records at a press conference in New York City on May 14, 1968.

Avoiding the Tax Man

"It's a business concerning records, films and electronics," John Lennon said at the time. "We want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film about anything don't have to go on their knees in somebody's office. Probably yours."

Lennon described Apple Records and its parent company, Apple Corps, as a place where anybody with a good idea could get funding. If that sounds like a questionable business plan, keep in mind that The Beatles were making a lot of money in 1968.

One of Apple Records' biggest hits was Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days," a song based on a Russian folk tune.

"As far as I can tell, the idea behind Apple was a tax dodge," music journalist Douglas Wolk says. "The top tax rate in England at that time was enormous. And John Lennon said something to the effect of, 'We talked to our accountants. We realized we could either give the money to the government or we could put it into a business.'"

The band's advisers reportedly recommended Beatles greeting cards or investing in real estate. The Beatles rejected those ideas. Just three months after it launched, Apple Records released its first single, "Hey Jude."

From the beginning, The Beatles' members used Apple to put out records by other artists they liked, as Lennon and Paul McCartney explained in a 1968 television interview.

"We hope to make a thing that's free, where people can come and do and record," Lennon said.

"It'll be big, I think," McCartney added. "It's like a top. We're gonna set it going and hope for the best."

Apple put out three other singles on the same day it released "Hey Jude," including "Those Were the Days" by Welsh singer Mary Hopkin. That song also topped the charts.

The Daily Grind

Apple Records wasn't the first label founded by musicians, but like most things The Beatles did, it attracted a lot of attention. The Apple Corps offices in London's Saville Row became a magnet for assorted freaks.

B.P. Fallon was 21 when The Beatles' publicist hired him to write biographical notes about Apple recording artists, including a then-unknown singer the label had signed named James Taylor. Fallon says that wasn't all he did.

"One of my jobs at Apple was to make sure that Paul McCartney's grass was of sufficiently good quality," Fallon says. "Which meant that one had to dutifully test out the samples of all these eager-beaver hash dealers. He never once complained about my choice."

Fallon insists that work did get done at Apple, but despite a string of initial hits, the company was a financial disaster. The film, electronics and clothing divisions didn't work out. And after The Beatles broke up, Apple seemed to exist mostly to sue people. It took its distributors, EMI and Capitol Records, to court over unpaid royalties. It sued Apple Computer over trademark violations.

"Tired of being shopkeepers," The Beatles' members give away thousands of pounds worth of Apple stock.

Comparing Apples with Apples

According to Bruce Spizer — the author of The Beatles on Apple Records — it's Apple Computer and its ubiquitous iPod that seem closer today to what The Beatles were trying to do back in 1968.

"Everything that John had envisioned — this thing that was going to be records, films and electronics — and 40 years later, we've got music, videos and computer all tied together," Spizer says. "And one of the companies that's exploiting this is Apple. Although it's not The Beatles' Apple that's doing it now."

Arguably, the real influence of Apple Records is symbolic. Before Apple, Wolk says, most artist-run labels were just vanity projects.

"After Apple Records, there's this idea floating around that the musical genius' genius doesn't extend to their own work," Wolk says. "That they can spot genius in other people, that they can promote other people's work."

It's an idea that gained currency in the 1980s and '90s, as musicians showed that they could successfully run record labels, too. Today, artists are taking on even more of the responsibilities that used to fall on the suits at record labels.

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May 9, 2008  Front-row seat to history  Photographer Harry Benson has captured it all in photos

Harry Benson says his photo Beatles Pillow Fight, Hotel George V, Paris, 1964 takes him back to "happy times."

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May 7, 2008  John Lennon's 'Give Peace a Chance' lyrics to be auctioned in London

NEW YORK - John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance," written during the legendary 1969 Bed-in protest for peace, are being auctioned in London this summer but fans can see them at Christie's New York auction house through Saturday.  

The famous Beatles gave the sheet to 16-year-old Gail Renard during the eight-day Bed-in with Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Queens Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

Lennon penned the lyrics and recorded the song in the hotel room with about 50 guests, who included singer Petula Clark and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

The document is expected to bring $400,000 to $600,000 at the July 10 London auction.

Renard was raised in Montreal but now lives in London, where she is a comedy writer for British television.

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May 1, 2008  Ono in fight over copyright of rarely seen Lennon video

By DENISE LAVOIE, Associated Press Writer

BOSTON - They are rare, intimate images of John Lennon just before the breakup of the Beatles: He's hunched over a piano writing songs, smoking pot, joking about putting LSD in President Nixon's tea.

Almost four decades after the footage was shot at Lennon's estate in England, his widow is in court, fighting to keep the images private.

World Wide Video LLC, a Lawrence, Mass.-based company, claims it owns the 10 hours of raw footage, but Yoko Ono claims she is the rightful owner. World Wide Video has filed a federal lawsuit against Ono, claiming Ono's attempts to stop the company from publicly showing the footage is a copyright infringement.

At preliminary hearing in the case Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston, arguments on Ono's motion to dismiss were scheduled for May 21. Both sides also agreed not to show the film while the case is working through the courts.

The footage, which has never been shown publicly in its entirety, was shot Feb. 8-10, 1970, by Anthony Cox, Ono's husband before her marriage to Lennon in 1969.

It shows Lennon writing two songs that would later become hits — "Remember" and "Mind Games" — and shows him performing the song, "Instant Karma," according to a description in The Boston Globe, which was allowed to view the videotapes for a March 2007 story.

The footage also includes some tender moments, such as when Lennon blow-dries his wife's hair, and when Lennon and Ono play with Julian Lennon and Kyoko Cox, children from their previous marriages.

Lennon, who was 29 when the film was shot, also talks about the couple's drug use.

"We've resurrected hope in ourselves, and we're hoping to spread it around a bit — to tell people you can get off speed, you can get off H (heroin), you can get off pot. You know, because whatever they say, you do get hooked on it," Lennon says.

World Wide Video produced a two-hour documentary, "3 Days in the Life," using the footage, and planned to show it at a private school in Maine in 2007. The screening was scrapped after the company received a stop order from Ono's lawyers, claiming copyrighted ownership of the videotapes. The producers had previously shown excerpts from the film four times, including at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., and at entertainment and media conferences in New York and Connecticut.

Ray Thomas, executive producer of the documentary, said World Wide's principals are Beatles memorabilia collectors who hoped to show the film to high school and college students.

"We thought it would make a phenomenal educational and historic record for kids who didn't live in the '60s," Thomas said. "This is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and you're getting an intimate look at his life — from blow-drying his wife's hair to playing with the cat to performing `Instant Karma.'"

Ono's Boston lawyer, Jonathan Albano, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

In court documents, Ono said she had a "clear and absolute" agreement with Cox when he shot the footage that it would never be "commercially exhibited, commercially exploited or released."

And Ono said she purchased all rights to the videotapes for $300,000 in 2002 from a broker, Anthony Pagola.

But the principals of World Wide Video — John Fallon and Robert Grenier — say the sale to Ono was invalid, and that it owns the videos and copyright after buying them from Cox for $125,000 in 2000.

In its lawsuit, World Wide claims that shortly after its purchase, the tapes were stolen by a former employee, John Messina, whom World Wide later sued. World Wide claims in its suit that in a settlement agreement, Messina agreed to return copies of the tapes and to help them locate the original set of tapes.

Messina, who attended the court hearing Wednesday, vigorously denied stealing the tapes and said he believes Ono is the rightful owner.

"These are Yoko's private tapes," he said. "Why would a widow want to take pictures of private moments from a happier time and have them put out there for the public to see?"

Fallon and Grenier claim that in 2001, Pagola approached them and threatened to destroy the tapes unless World Wide agreed to let him be a broker who would find a buyer.

World Wide signed an agreement with Pagola, but said in its lawsuit that Pagola was to find a buyer "for the purpose of development and production of a full-length documentary motion picture."

Fallon and Grenier claim that Pagola sold the tapes and copyright to Ono without their permission and that he forged their signatures on the sale agreement.

Pagola, who is named as a defendant along with Ono in World Wide's lawsuit, could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.

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April 24, 2008  Linda McCartney's photos on display

A portrait of late photographer Linda McCartney, taken by her husband Paul McCartney, is included.

LONDON - An exhibition of Linda McCartney's photographs, hand-picked by her husband, will be put on display later this week at the James Hyman Gallery in west London.

The prints show the range of the late photographer's career, which was overshadowed by the fame of her husband, former Beatle Paul McCartney.

Featured photos include iconic portraits of John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. But the display also intends to show her range, with family photos of Paul McCartney and their children, as well as landscapes and interiors.

Linda McCartney was a professional photographer before she met Paul McCartney, but her career changed once she settled down, gallery owner James Hyman said during a preview on Tuesday.

"I'd say she was a very strong photographer, and part of what we've done here is we've tried to show the range of her work — that it's not just pictures of rock stars in the '60s, which she's most famous for," Hyman said.

One of the most poignant images exhibited is a self-portrait she took in painter Francis Bacon's studio when she was receiving chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. The photograph reflects death, showing an empty couch, a bust of British poet William Blake and McCartney's reflection in a broken mirror.

"We tried to be as true to what she wanted as possible," Hyman said. "That it's the paper that she liked, the platinum which she liked and the print studio that she used."

The display has taken three years to come together since Hyman approached Paul McCartney with the idea.

There are 25 prints of 28 photographs on sale. Prices start at $9,500 each.

The exhibition coincides with the 10th anniversary of McCartney's death in 1998 at the age of 56.

The McCartney family will hold a private opening Wednesday night at the gallery. The exhibition opens to the public on Friday.

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April 19, 2008  Wonder Pets! Save the Beetles

Don't miss this mopped-topped underwater event of the year! Tune in Monday, April 21 at 7 p.m on NickJr.  For more information and for fun on-line Beetles games, visit NickJr.com.

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April 19, 2008  McCartney Tour Planned in 2008!

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April 8, 2008  Ringo Starr's shrub sculpture gets the chop after Beatle 'insults' Liverpool

Source:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=557990&in_page_id=1770&ito=1490

Bandmates John, Paul and George were unharmed.  It is thought topiary experts will be called in to repair the work at Liverpool South Parkway train station in Garston.  Yesterday, there were whispers that an unfortunate comment from Ringo on Jonathan Ross's BBC chat show as long ago as January could be behind the attack.  Ringo, who appeared on the show a week after launching Liverpool's celebrations as the European Capital of Culture, told Ross he missed 'nothing' about the city.

Frank McKenna, of business network Downtown Liverpool, said the 67-year- old drummer had "shot himself in the foot".  People have long memories and one can only think that this attack on his figure is calculated to send a message of disapproval over what he said," he explained.  "There are those who would see it as a reply, in a direct and revolutionary manner, to Ringo's comments."  A station worker said it was the second time the Fab Four artwork had been damaged.  "Last time someone squashed Ringo's head but this time the head has been completely cut off. Whoever did it must have come armed with cutting equipment."  British Transport Police are investigating and extra security is being considered.

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April 8, 2008 Stella McCartney and Yoko Ono's tearful embrace at funeral of 'Fifth Beatle' - but Macca stays away

By RICHARD SIMPSON and LAURA ROBERTS

It was left to the women to pay the band's final respects to Neil Aspinall, the man who ran the group's business empire for 40 years and was known as the "fifth Beatle".

He died two weeks ago at 66 after a battle with lung cancer.

John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, 75, and Sir Paul McCartney's daughter, the fashion designer Stella McCartney, 36, were among 250 mourners at yesterday's funeral at St Mary the Virgin near Mr Aspinall's home in Twickenham, South-West London.

The pair were seen warmly embracing along with Beatles producer Sir George Martin, 82, outside the funeral at the Church of St Mary the Virgin near Aspinall's home in Twickenham, south west London.

Ringo Starr's wife Barbara Bach, 60, and original Beatles member Pete Best, 66, also attended, as did The Who's guitarist Pete Townshend who arrived with a guitar under his hand to perform at the ceremony.

Townshend, 62, played along to Mr Tambourine Man and then to late Beatle George Harrison's solo hit My Sweet Lord which marked the end of the service as Aspinall's coffin was taken from the church to be buried.

Former EastEnders actor John Altman, 56, who played Albert Square's resident bad boy Nick Cotton, gave a reading during the service.

He had become good friends with Mr Aspinall as they were neighbours in Twickenham.

Neither Paul McCartney nor Ringo Starr attended the ceremony. Best had been Aspinall's best friend.

Sir Paul managed to visit Aspinall in a New York hospital, days before he died from lung cancer two weeks ago. McCartney's spokesman said he was out of the country on a pre-arranged trip yesterday.

No hymns were sung during the service conducted by Rev Dr Kerry Samuel.

The 50 minute funeral service began just before 1pm after the coffin arrived in a black hearse with the word "Papa" in flowers inside the car.

The red brick church was surrounded by local residents keen to pay their respects after Aspinall's passing.

Verger John Evans said: "His friends and family sang along to the chorus including Mary and Stella it was very moving."

After the ceremony Mr Aspinall's family went on to Teddington Cemetery for a private burial before joining friends at a party to celebrate his life.

Mr Evans said: "'It was a lovely service with so many people in attendance. There were no Beatles songs, I suppose he must have been a Bob Dylan fan."

Aspinall died two weeks ago in New York after a battle with lung cancer.

He earned the much-used title of "fifth Beatle" perhaps better than any other.

He became guardian of the Beatles' shambolic business interests at Apple Corps in 1968, on the condition that he would do it "only until they found someone else". He quit the position only last year.

For some 20 years following the break-up of the group in 1970, Aspinall applied his astute business acumen to fighting lawsuits on their behalf and unravelling their tangled financial affairs.

His flair for figures helped to transform them into the wealthiest entertainers in the world, with a estimated combined fortune of £2 billion.

A notoriously reclusive accountant, Aspinall made a rare public appearance last year in the course of a lengthy legal dispute involving Apple Corps, the Beatles' business organisation.

But a matter of weeks after settling the row with the Apple computer firm over the use of a trademark, Aspinall abruptly resigned as chief executive, reportedly frustrated that the band's musical legacy was being compromised in the quest for profits.

One of his last tasks had had been to remaster the group's back catalogue for legal downloading on the internet.

Sir Paul's friend and former PR advisor to the Beatles, Geoff Baker, said: "Neil Aspinall was the man who was closer to all of The Beatles than anyone.

"Under his creative and caring direction, The Beatles business phenomenon and its trademark Apple transcended far beyond the Sixties.

"He was the Beatles' friend who became their roadie who became the chief of their empire and the unassuming, modernising mastermind behind the band's enduring appeal and influence for four generations.

"Although he would deny it, he was long considered to be 'the real Fifth Beatle' by the music and entertainment industries which for 40 years revered and respected him as one of the wisest men in the record business."

Baker said Aspinall became friends with McCartney and Harrison at the Liverpool Institute for Boys where they formed the "Mad Lad Gang" that John Lennon later joined.

The others formed the Beatles while Aspinall became an accountant, but he soon rejoined his friends.

Mr Baker added: "Neil remained at the centre of the gang that was to change the world.

"Always he was right at the Beatles side, captaining their flagship Apple for 40 years after beginning as their first road manager and driver of their old Commer van, doubling up as The Beatles' minder, spotlight operator, confidante, fixer, personal assistant and, moreover, their mate."

Aspinall's wife, Suzy, and his five children were at his side as he died.

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March 31, 2008 Heather Mills was Paul McCartney's fatal attraction

By Jo Piazza

Money didn't buy Paul McCartney love, but the nearly $49 million he's been ordered to pay ex-wife Heather Mills will hopefully give him closure from the woman a British judge Tuesday described as "an explosive and volatile character" and "her own worst enemy."

Justice Hugh Bennett's 58-page High Court ruling on the couple's divorce settlement - made public Tuesday, over Mills' fierce objections - confirmed that the settlement, at $48.6 million, is just one-fifth of the $250 million she sought.

The court document paints a behind-the-scenes portrait of a nightmare four-year marriage that turned into one of the ugliest, most vindictive court battles in living memory. Riveting in its detail, it also makes Mills look like the greatest "bunny boiler" since the phrase was coined to describe the psychotic behavior of Glenn Close's character in "Fatal Attraction."

In his ruling, the judge praised Sir Paul, 65, for his "consistent, accurate and honest" presentation of the facts in the case, while heaping scorn on Mills.

Bennett criticized her "exorbitant financial demands" and her testimony, which he branded as "not just inconsistent and inaccurate, but also less than candid. Overall she was a less than impressive witness."

In a biting piece of analysis, he wrote: "The wife must have felt rather swept off her feet by a man as famous as the husband. I think this may well have warped her perception, leading her to indulge in make-belief. The objective facts do not support her case."

He added that Mills "unreasonably" expected to live an A-list lifestyle after the marriage so spectacularly failed. "Although she strongly denied it, her case boils down to the syndrome of 'me too' or 'if he has it, I want it, too,'" the judge wrote.

Now Mills, who had claimed she needed $6.4 million a year for herself and her 4-year-old daughter Beatrice, will have to figure out how to make do on the $1.2 million a year she's been awarded - a reversal the former model did not take terribly well.

Monday afternoon, just after learning the amount of her award (which works out to $34,000 for each day of her marriage) a frustrated Mills - who, after firing her lawyers, represented herself during the trial - walked across the courtroom and tipped a jug of water over the head of Sir Paul's distinguished lawyer, Fiona Shackleton.

"She didn't throw it," reported a stunned witness. " It was cool, calm and collected. It trickled down Fiona's neck."

Watching the shocked reaction of her victim with one eye, Mills turned to the court and snorted: "I am not a loser."

News flash: Yes, Heather, you are.

She may already have been the most reviled woman in Britain (for her aggressive abuse of one of the country's icons), and the documents released Tuesday cement the notion of Mills as a self-obsessed, autocratic gold digger living in a world of fantasy.

Ironically, Bennett agreed with Mills on just one of her claims: that she was kind and loving toward her husband when she suggested he wear an acrylic faux nail to protect one of his delicate, guitar-strumming fingers.

But one such gesture, worth about $8, was never going to translate into the $250 million lifestyle craved by the 40-year-old woman who left home at 15 and supported herself with modeling jobs until she lost part of her leg in a motorcycle accident - a handicap that would play a big part in the sparks that flew when Heather met Sir Paul at a charity event in 1999. McCartney was taken by her altruistic desire to help others avoid a similar fate.

McCartney, then 57, had been a widower for less than a year and was dazzled by the 32-year-old blond who campaigned passionately against land mines.

Within days, the besotted couple was spending five nights a week together and jetting between London and New York.

But Mills, who has a reputation for tweaking facts to suit her situation, didn't bother to let her new beau in on certain details of her bio, including her stint as a "model" shooting material for a German sex manual, according to London's Daily Mail.

Prior to the couple's 2002 marriage, Sir Paul was apparently unaware of any issues that might have given him pause. He proposed to a beaming Heather with a sapphire-and-diamond ring in 2001.

According to court papers, he was "fairly old-fashioned" about their 11-month courtship and the wedding itself, which took place in the romantic environs of Castle Leslie in County Monaghan, Ireland.

The couple, the court heard, stopped using contraception on their wedding night, and despite an early miscarriage, Mills was soon pregnant with Beatrice. Paul was over the moon.

When reporters asked Mills, early in her married life, if she would assume the title of "Lady," she was charmingly unassuming.

"I'm not into all that pretense," she said.

Her lack of pretension didn't last long.

Mills quickly became accustomed to the kind of high living that could go with being the wife of a rock star: private jets, extravagant vacations, her pick of vacation homes around the globe.

She would frolic about McCartney's Beverly Hills mansion, calling it "Heather House," though McCartney says he never gave her any indication it was solely hers.

Soon, Paul's family and close friends were sensing serious trouble. They nicknamed her his "Yoko Ono," claiming she was trying to control everything about his life - from what he wore, to how his hair was cut, to what work he accepted and, worst of all, who he talked to.

Mills, who never got along with her three stepdaughters, publicly sparred with one of them, fashion designer Stella, who let loose with her thoughts when she said she wanted to "kill" Mills.

After months of intense media speculation, in 2006, the couple announced they were separating. Paul filed for the divorce, citing unreasonable behavior on the part of his wife.

It didn't take long for Heather to react. She started by filing court papers alleging that Sir Paul used to beat her - exactly the same way Mills claimed (without evidence) he beat his first wife, Linda.

Over the next few months, Mills continued a shrill campaign to smear Sir Paul's reputation. Last November, she hit the talk-show circuit, frequently melting down, accusing McCartney of wanting her "gagged" and painting herself as a victim - much like the late Princess Diana - alleging that she had received worse press than a "murderer or pedophile."

In his ruling, Bennett wrote about how "I find the wife's behavior distinctly distasteful." She was, he says, "engaging in make-belief."

Her claims that she had considerable assets before the pair were married were not true. "I find that the wife's case as to her wealth in 1999 to be wholly exaggerated," Bennett wrote, pointing out that she overstated the worth of the London apartment she occupied before moving in with Paul by more than $200,000.

Regarding Mills' claim that she went into the marriage with personal assets of $5 million, the judge noted that her tax receipts fail to back her up.

As for Mills' contention that she acted a "psychologist," counseling McCartney in his dark hours after the death of his Linda, the judge wrote: "The wife's evidence that in some way she was the husband's 'psychologist,' even allowing for hyperbole, is typical of her make-belief."

Mills' overblown sense of entitlement, however, is illustrated best by her financial demands.

She wanted between $16 million and $25 million for a home in London, another $6 million to buy a pad in New York and $1.5 million for an office.

In addition to her property requirements, Mills said she needed at least $6.5 million a year for her and Beatrice to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed. That sum included private jets and helicopters, a $300,000 clothing allowance, $60,000 for equestrian activities (she must have forgotten she no longer rides horses) and $78,000 for a wine allowance (ditto that she doesn't drink).

Beyond saving Sir Paul's fingernail, Bennett dryly noted in his ruling, Mills' contribution to her ex-husband's career was negligible. She certainly wasn't, he wrote, the "full-time wife, mother, lover, confidante and business partner" she claimed to be.

Those who have watched Mills operate over the last few years doubt she will be felled by her smackdown in court this week. The buzz that she will turn her back on the country that so openly reviles her got louder Tuesday, when Mills hired Hollywood legal eagle Gloria Allred to represent her interests in the United States.

Rumors that Mills will pursue a career in American TV gained traction Tuesday night when it was announced that she will be a judge at the Miss USA Pageant, scheduled for April 11 in Las Vegas.

Note to wealthy, lonely bachelors: Consider yourselves warned.

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March 30, 2008 Fab form: Beatles lyrics on display
By LOUIS R. CARLOZO
Chicago Tribune

EVANSTON, Ill. -- Growing up in Liverpool, the Beatles took pieces of all the pop music they could find -- country, Motown, rhythm and blues, rockabilly -- and turned it into rock immortal.
But as for their lyric manuscripts, the scraps proved the stuff of everyday ephemera: used envelopes, torn note pads, folded sheets splattered with blue-ink doodles and pink psychedelic swirls.
No one knows how many Beatles drafts went the way of the wastebasket.
But seven handwritten specimens from the group's creative peak survive, thanks to John Lennon's second wife, Yoko Ono (who gathered them in the late 1960s), and composer/musician John Cage (who donated Yoko's gift to Northwestern University, along with his collection of 400 music manuscripts).
Today they're part of Northwestern University's music library collection in Evanston, where images of the Beatle documents went on display March 23.
The collection includes one specimen any fab fan would consider a prize: Paul McCartney's draft of "For No One" scrawled on a manila envelope, containing two missing choruses known to but a few folks in academia.
One of them is head music librarian D.J. Hoek. Ask him how much any of the drafts might fetch on eBay, and he says, "I won't speculate. They're exceptional."
"For No One's" manuscript especially shines: It gives an intimate glimpse into McCartney's chamber-pop jewel on 1966's "Revolver." The draft reveals he first called the song "Why Did It Die?" He also finished a pair of choruses that went unused. The first reads:
Why did it die?
You'd like to know.
Cry -- and blame her
And the second:
Why let it die
I'd like to know
Try -- to save it.
The document suggests McCartney spent some time tinkering with these choruses before abandoning them. He wrote the middle lines to both in black ink that appear nowhere else on the paper. (He scribbled the verses, most of which made the final cut, in pencil.)
So why, indeed, did this idea die?
"I would assume it just didn't fit the music," says Stuart Shea, author of "Fab Four FAQ" (Hal Leonard). "The meter of the lyrics doesn't seem to fit the drawing-room tempo he'd set with the verses."
The Northwestern collection also contains a curiosity unlike any other Lennon-McCartney collaboration: a finished lyric sheet for "The Word" (from 1965's "Rubber Soul") in Lennon's handwriting.
For reasons unknown, McCartney took the draft and gave it a backwash of pink ink. He then made it a work of mini pop art by adding a tree, abstract shapes and highlighting, all done with colored markers.
Viewers making the trek to Northwestern will see high-resolution scans that capture every detail down to the smallest tea stain -- but alas, not the originals. Hoek keeps those under lock and key.
"Only in extraordinary cases do we bring them out," he says, "and it's because of their value."

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March 30, 2008  What year were the Beatles tops?

Associated Press Entertainment highlights during the week of March 30-April 5:

1964: The Beatles held the top five positions on Billboard's Hot 100. "Can't Buy Me Love" was No. 1, followed by "Twist and Shout," "She Loves You," "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "Please Please Me."

1971: Ringo Starr's first solo single, "It Don't Come Easy," was released. It became a Top Five hit.

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BY ELLEN S. WILKOWE
DAILY RECORD
Friday, March 28, 2008

For George Walsh, this weekend marks an annual reunion of sorts. Acoustic guitar in hand, he will most likely be found in a Secaucus hotel lobby jamming Beatles tunes with his fellow Beatles fans.  A member of the New York City Beatles Meetup Group, Walsh and thousands of other fans will descend on the Crowne Plaza Meadowlands Hotel for a weekend of non-stop Beatles tributes at the 34th annual Fest for Beatles Fans.  The gathering kicks off March 28at 5 p.m. with a big Beatles welcome, followed by a showing of "A Hard Day's Night."  "We enjoy stories from guest musicians who've worked with The Fab Four, but mostly we enjoy the camaraderie, charisma and friendship of fans of all ages who join the all-night sing-along," Walsh, of Hicksville, N.Y., wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Record.  The brainchild of Mark and Carol Lapidos of Westwood, the Fest for Beatles Fans allows fans a chance to meet some of the accomplished musicians and performers from the times of the Fab Four, as well as a variety of other guests and performers.  This year's lineup includes five stars from the film "Across the Universe." Evan Rachel Wood, Dana Fuchs, Martin Luther, T.V. Carpio and Timothy Mitchum will perform Beatle songs from the movie.  Pattie Boyd, ex-wife of George Harrison (and Eric Clapton), will appear to sign copies of her memoir "Wonderful Tonight -- George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me." She also will set up a special photo and fashion exhibit.  A Vogue model in the '60s, Boyd married Harrison two years after the pair met on the set of "A Hard Day's Night." When she left him for Clapton, her new man wrote the song "Wonderful Tonight" in her honor.  "We are very privileged to have her with us," Lapidos said. "She tells her story in a very warm way. There's nothing salacious about it."  The festival, originally known as Beatlefest, gained steam after an encounter Lapidos had with John Lennon.  "It was April 28, 1974, and John Lennon and Harry Nilsson were playing live at Central Park for a March of Dimes benefit," Lapidos said. "I was able to track down where he was staying (and) knocked on the door. Harry Nilsson answered and invited me in. I told John about Beatlefest and he said, 'I'm all for it. I'm a Beatles fan too.'"  While Paul McCartney has yet make a Fest appearance, two members of his former band Wings, Laurence Juber and Denny Seiwell, will pay homage to the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' White Album.

"That's all I'm saying," Lapidos said.  No stranger to Wings, Donna Coulson of Red Bank has met Juber and hailed him as a "delightful speaker and performer."  Having attended Fest for the past six years, Coulson has also encountered Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers and Gordon Waller of Peter and Gordon. She also can boast of having seen the Fab Four live at Shea Stadium in 1966.  "The Beatlefest is a chance to meet some of the accomplished musicians and performers from the times of the Fab Four," she wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Record. "... Some of the personalities look the same and bring back nice memories."  For Jeff Goldberg of Passaic, the Fest is much more than the Beatles, "it's also about Beatles-related artists like Julian Lennon, Sean Lennon and the Ruttles," he wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Record.  "The solo material is a large part of the festival," he wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Record. "There is over 35 years of solo material. All the groups keep releasing new material and re-releasing original material. ... There is a lot of merchandise to buy and some of it is very expensive. But it's not about merchandise. It's about the music, the people who made it and their loyal fans."  A member of the Beatles cover band Yesterday and Today, Michael Naimoli of Queens places high priority on the Battle of the Bands, but strictly as a spectator.

"Beatle Fest, for me, is an opportunity to hang out with fellow fans and musicians that share in the passion for everything Beatles," he wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Record. "It's all about peace, love, friends and music. With the way the world is today, it's a welcome relief."

The Beatles tribute band Liverpool will return for its 29th appearance. The lineup includes two original members, Drew Hill (as Lennon) and Chris Camilleri (as Ringo Starr), plus John Merjave (as Harrison) and a late-comer, New Jersey's own Glen Burtnik (as McCartney). Solo rocker Burtnik also served as a latter-day member of Styx.

"We don't dress up or anything," Hill said. "But we strive for accuracy in our music and take it very seriously. Because we don't play out as much, there's a lot of love that goes into it."

Fest fans range in age from 6 to 70 and represent a cross section from diehard fans to curiosity seekers, Hill said.

"Music is surviving the generations," he said. "Parents feel it's safe to play Beatles music. It's relatively innocent and covers the gamut."

This from a father of 4- and 8-year-olds who will see Daddy perform at least one of the three days.

While he has yet to meet a surviving Beatle, Hill has been privileged to work with "guys from the '60s and the '70s likes Donovan, Harry Nilsson and even Yoko Ono."

Deemed the Fest's house band, Liverpool has evolved into a backup band for the guests, Hill said.

"There was Norman 'Hurricane' Smith, who has regrettably passed on, but he got up and sang with us at one of the Fests, and at the end he just had this grin on his face," Hill said.

(Smith was the recording engineer on nearly 200 of the Beatles' songs and also produced several early albums for Pink Floyd. No stranger to hit songs, he owned the No. 1 spot with "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" in 1972.)

Fans can carouse about a giant Beatles marketplace and museum (no bootlegs allowed), participate in trivia, karaoke and puppet shows, take in a celebrity art exhibit and bid for memorabilia at an auction.

Auction proceeds go to charity, Lapidos said. The Fest has raised in excess of half a million dollars for The Spirit Foundation and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

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MIAMI -- Lawyers for the Beatles sued Friday to prevent the distribution of unreleased recordings purportedly made during Ringo Starr's first performance with the group in 1962.

The dispute between Apple Corps Ltd., the London company formed by the Beatles that helps guard their legacy, and Fuego Entertainment Inc. of Miami Lakes stems from recordings the Fab Four apparently made during a performance at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany.Eight unreleased tracks are said to be among the recordings, including Paul McCartney singing Hank Williams' "Lovesick Blues" and McCartney and John Lennon singing "Ask Me Why."

Apple Corps claims that the songs were taped without the consent of the band and that Fuego and sister companies Echo-Fuego Music Group LLC and Echo-Vista Inc. have no right to distribute them.

"This appears to us to be a garden-variety bootleg recording," said Paul LiCalsi, an attorney for Apple Corps.

But Fuego Entertainment says the recordings were legally made. "Don't claim that these were just bootlegged," said Fuego president Hugo Cancio. "It's not like today, that you just go in with a phone or a blackberry and you record."

The lawsuit contends that the recordings are of poor quality and that circulating them "dilutes and tarnishes the extraordinarily valuable image associated with the Beatles."

Cancio said that he had not been served with a copy of the lawsuit, but that the filing demanding at least $15 million in damages was not expected.

"I'm surprised because up to a few weeks ago, we were in good-faith conversations with Apple," he said.

Also named in the lawsuit is Jeffrey Collins, a partner of Cancio who obtained the recordings. It's unclear how Collins obtained the recordings.

Cancio intended to release the songs as "Jammin' with The Beatles and Friends, Star Club, Hamburg, 1962."

"It's unfair to millions of Beatles fans not to allow this recording to be put out. The world deserves to hear these tracks," he said. "The fact is that we have it; they don't, and that is what's bothering them."

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March 24, 2008  Neil Aspinall, Beatles Aide, Dies at 66

By Allen Kozinn, New York Times

Neil Aspinall, who left an accounting job to become the Beatles’ road manager when the group was still a local dance band and who went on to manage the band’s production and management company, Apple, died Sunday night in Manhattan. He was 66 and lived in Twickenham, England.

Geoff Baker, a spokesman for the family, said the cause was lung cancer. Mr. Aspinall had been undergoing treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He retired from Apple last year.

Of all the people in the Beatles’ orbit, Mr. Aspinall had the most durable relationship with the group; in fact, he had already been a crucial member of the Beatles' entourage for about 18 months when Ringo Starr became the Beatles' drummer. When the Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, George Harrison made a point of saying that Mr. Aspinall should be considered the fifth Beatle.

In November 1967, when the Beatles formed Apple to oversee their creative and business interests, they asked Mr. Aspinall, by then a trusted assistant of longstanding, to manage it. He never took a formal title, but he ran a company that, in its first years, included a record label, a film production company and electronics, publishing and retailing divisions. He also quickly put the Beatles’ own complicated contractual commitments in order.

Nevertheless, expenses at Apple spun out of control as the open kitchen and bar at the company’s Savile Row office began feeding and watering a parade of journalists, would-be Apple artists and hangers-on. When the American manager Allen Klein was brought in to sort out the Beatles’ finances, Mr. Klein fired much of the staff but was told by John Lennon, “Don’t touch Neil and Mal, they’re ours,” referring to Mr. Aspinall and his assistant, Mal Evans, who had also been with the group since its Liverpool days.

During the first 25 years at the head of Apple, Mr. Aspinall oversaw a succession of lawsuits. In one, not settled until 1974, Paul McCartney sued the other Beatles to dissolve their partnership. At the same time, the Beatles as a group sued EMI Records in a royalties dispute that took 20 years to settle. Apple also sued the Broadway show “Beatlemania” for unauthorized use of the Beatles’ name and logo, and it fought several court battles against Apple Computer for trademark infringement. The last was settled in 2006, in favor of the computer company.

Mr. Aspinall was often blamed for the slow pace at which Beatles archival projects were released as several projects have languished on Apple's shelves for years, including a home-video production of the Beatles' 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, remastered versions of the film "Let It Be" and digital download versions of all the Beatles' studio recordings.

What the complaints did not take into account is that Mr. Aspinall could release only what Apple’s principals — Mr. McCartney, Mr. Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono (the widows of George Harrison and John Lennon) — unanimously agree should be released. And the interpersonal politics at Apple are such that unanimity is hard to come by.

Even so, Mr. Aspinall did oversee several important releases since 1993. These include “Live at the BBC,” a two-disc compilation of the group’s radio performances; “Yellow Submarine Songtrack,” a remixed version of the music from the “Yellow Submarine” animated film, which Apple also restored and reissued; “1,” a single-disc hits compilation; “Let It Be ... Naked,” a remixed and reconfigured version of “Let It Be,” without the string and choral overdubs that fans have long complained about; two installments of “The Capitol Albums,” which brought together mono and stereo versions of eight Beatles albums in their American (rather than British) configurations; and “Love,” a multi-media collaboration with Cirque du Soleil (and a matching recording).

His biggest achievement was “The Beatles Anthology.” The idea was to use performance film and interview clips to let the Beatles tell their own story. Originally meant to be a theatrical film, the project was begun in 1970 but shelved until the final EMI lawsuits were settled in 1989. By then, Mr. Aspinall had proposed that instead of making a film, the Beatles should contribute new interviews (with archival interviews with John Lennon, who was murdered in 1980) to a six-hour television series and a nearly 13-hour home video edition.

When the Beatles agreed, he assembled an extraordinary archive of television and concert film, photograph collections and other materials, for use both in “The Beatles Anthology” and other potential Apple projects. He was one of the few non-Beatles interviewed in “The Beatles Anthology” and credited as executive producer. He retired from Apple in 2007.

Mr. Aspinall’s history with the Beatles reached back to their earliest days as a band, when he hung flyers around Liverpool advertising their performances. In February 1961, with the group’s popularity in Liverpool soaring, Mr. Aspinall gave up his job as an apprentice accountant and began driving the group from job to job, often three performances a day.

On international tours, Mr. Aspinall left the business of equipment setup to Mr. Evans and became the Beatles’ principal aide. One of Mr. Aspinall’s later jobs was to round up the pictures of the celebrities and other influential crowd members for the cover of the 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” He also accompanied Lennon and Mr. McCartney to New York in May 1968 for a series of interviews announcing Apple.

On occasion, he was drafted as a performer. He was among the singers in the celebratory chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” and he played tambura (an Indian drone instrument) on “Within You Without You,” harmonica on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and percussion on “Magical Mystery Tour.”

Mr. Aspinall was born in Prestatyn, Wales, on Oct. 13, 1941, and grew up in Liverpool, where he attended the Liverpool Institute with Mr. McCartney and Mr. Harrison. He became friendly with the Beatles through Pete Best, their drummer from 1960 to 1962.

Mr. Aspinall, originally a boarder in Mr. Best’s house, had started a romantic relationship with Mona Best, Mr. Best’s mother. Their son, Roag Best, was born in 1962.

Mr. Aspinall accompanied Pete Best to the meeting with the Beatles manager Brian Epstein at which the drummer was fired. Mr. Aspinall decided to continue working for the group and also maintained his relationship with Mrs. Best for several years. He eventually had an opportunity to help Mr. Best make up for his missed fortune as a member of the Beatles: because several of the group’s previously unissued recordings with Mr. Best were used on “The Beatles Anthology,” Mr. Aspinall negotiated a generous royalty arrangement for the drummer.

In 1968, Mr. Aspinall married Suzy Ornstein, whose father, George “Bud” Ornstein, was head of European production for United Artists, the company for which the Beatles made the films “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!” and “Let It Be.” She survives him, as do their daughters Gayla, Dhara and Mandy; their son Julian, and Mr. Aspinall’s first son, Roag Best.

Mr. Aspinall made several films for the Beatles individually and collectively during his years as their principal aide. One accompanied the group’s 1969 single “Something” for which Mr. Aspinall filmed the Beatles and their wives walking placidly through an English garden (or, in Mr. McCartney’s case, the grounds of his farm in Scotland). What Mr. Aspinall’s idyllic film avoided showing was that the Beatles were at that point barely on speaking terms. In the film, no two Beatles are seen together.

During they group’s heyday, Mr. Aspinall wrote articles about their recording sessions for “The Beatles Monthly Book,” an officially sanctioned fan magazine. Virtually alone among Beatles insiders, he resisted the temptation to publish his memoirs, but joked that if he did write them, he would arrange to have them published only after his death. He is not known to have undertaken the project.

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March 24, 2008  Beatles' friend Neil Aspinall dies at 66

By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, AP Music Writer

NEW YORK - Neil Aspinall, a longtime friend of the Beatles who managed their business enterprises and helped make the group a moneymaking phenomenon decades after they split up, has died. He was 66.

Aspinall's death was announced Monday in a statement from surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, and the band's Apple Corps Ltd. company.

Aspinall died Sunday night at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he had been receiving treatment for lung cancer, according to Geoff Baker, who formerly represented both Aspinall and Apple Corps.

Aspinall's wife and five children were by his side; McCartney visited him before his death.

He was a childhood friend of McCartney and Harrison in Liverpool, England. While he didn't contribute musically, he played several key roles in support of the Beatles, most notably as the head of their Apple Corps business, which oversaw the commercial concerns of the group, including licensing.

"I've known Neil many years and he was a good friend. We were blessed to have him in our lives and he will be missed," Starr said in a statement Monday.

Harrison's widow Olivia and the couple's son Dhani said: "Neil takes with him the love and history of his extended family. He was our constant and avuncular caretaker for so many years; there is no way to measure how much he will be missed."

Aspinall and the late Mal Evans were the Beatles' roadies. Aspinall would drive them to gigs in his van before they became famous, and never left the band's tight-knit circle. He took over the management of Apple Corps in 1968, and continued to oversee the group's business affairs in the decades after they broke up in 1970.

As head of Apple Corps, Aspinall was executive producer of the hugely successful "Beatles Anthology" album and was behind other successes, including the "Beatles One" album and the recent Cirque du Soleil production "Love," which has been a hit in Las Vegas.

"As a loyal friend, confidant and chief executive, Neil's trusting stewardship and guidance has left a far-reaching legacy for generations to come," the band's statement said.

Aspinall stepped down from Apple Corps last year.

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March 17, 2008  McCartney's ex-wife awarded almost $50 million

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Heather Mills, the estranged wife of Paul McCartney, was granted nearly £25 million ($50 million) in her divorce proceedings with the former Beatle, she said Monday.  Mills said she will not appeal the award, but she will appeal the publication of the hearing transcript, which she said McCartney has asked for.  In an 11-minute statement to reporters outside the High Court after the verdict, Mills said she was pleased that the bitter divorce hearings had ended.  "I'm so glad it's over and it was an incredible result, in the end, to secure my and my daughter's future, and that of all the charities that I obviously plan on helping," said Mills, dressed in a khaki, green and blue suit with a bright red shirt.  Mills has established a career as a campaigner and charity worker since losing a leg in a road accident in 1993. 

Watch Mills react to the decision »

Judge Hugh Bennett awarded Mills, who represented herself, £24.3 million ($48.6 million), according to the court's release.  She had sought an award of nearly £125 million ($251 million), the court said. McCartney had proposed £15.8 million ($31.6 million), it said. 

Read the court's statement

The judgment included £35,000 ($70,000) a year for the couple's 4-year-old daughter, Beatrice. Mills said she was unhappy with that amount because it isn't enough for school tuition, private security, or first-class airfare.  "He likes her to fly five times a year on holiday," Mills said of McCartney. "It's £17,000 for two people return (round-trip) first class, so that's obviously not meant to happen for her anymore. It's very sad."  According to the court's release, the award includes £600,000 ($1.2 million) a year for Mills and £2.5 million ($5 million) for her to purchase property in London.  Mills said she would appeal to stop the publication of the entire judgment because it contains private details about Beatrice and she doesn't want them released. The judge has granted permission for the litigants to speak publicly, she said.  McCartney did not speak to reporters after the verdict.  Mills said that as a "litigant in person," or a litigant representing herself, the system worked against her at every turn.  "These people are in a club," she said. "It's like they want to stay together and they don't want to see a litigant in person doing well."  She said the judge did not agree with her on important details, including how long the couple lived together or even McCartney's personal wealth, which she estimated at £800 million ($1.6 billion). She said the judge estimated it to be half of that.  "I won't go into all the horrific details of what happened because I'm just glad it's over," Mills said. "I really hope now that me and my daughter can have a life and not be followed every single day, and that is why I've come out -- to give it closure."  McCartney and Mills failed to agree on a settlement ending their four-year marriage in divorce hearings last month, leaving the judge to decide the terms.  McCartney and Mills married in 2002 after meeting at a charity event.  At the time of their split in 2006, they described it as amicable, despite widespread reports of a tempestuous relationship between McCartney and the former model.  Mills has since lashed out at news media coverage of the divorce, which she said has been unfair to her and driven her to the brink of suicide.  In a television interview last year, Mills said she had endured "18 months of abuse, worse than a murderer or pedophile."  Monday's divorce settlement fell short of the previous record for a litigated divorce settlement in Britain. An award of £48 million ($96 million) was handed down last year, according to British divorce lawyer Julian Lipson.

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March 12, 2008  The talent scout who turned down the Beatles: music industry's biggest gaffe?

The talent scout who turned down the Beatles has long been credited with committing the music industry's biggest gaffe.

But Dick Rowe's billion-dollar boo-boo has been beaten to the top spot on Blender magazine's list of the "20 biggest record company screw-ups of all time" by the failure of record companies to capitalize on the Internet.

The major labels took top dishonors for driving file-sharing service Napster out of business in 2001, instead of figuring out a way to make money from its tens of millions of users. The downloaders merely scattered to hundreds of other sites, and the industry has been in a tailspin ever since.

"The labels' campaign to stop their music from being acquired for free across the Internet has been like trying to cork a hurricane -- upward of a billion files are swapped every month on peer-to-peer networks," Blender said in the report, which appears in its newly published April issue.

Rowe came in at No. 2 for politely passing on the Beatles after the unpolished combo performed a disastrous audition in 1962. Beatles manager Brian Epstein later claimed the Decca Records executive had told him that "groups with guitars are on their way out," a comment that Rowe denied making. He went on to sign the Rolling Stones.

Motown Records founder Berry Gordy was No. 3, because he sold the money-losing home of the Supremes and Marvin Gaye for about $60 million in 1988. The sum was dwarfed the following year when A&M Records sold for about $500 million. And in 1990, David Geffen got about $700 million for Geffen Records. (Gordy did retain ownership of the lucrative Motown copyrights.)

Geffen Records grabbed two spots on the list: No. 11 for suing Neil Young in the 1980s because it did not like his uncommercial musical direction; and No. 12, for pumping a reported $13 million into a Guns N' Roses album that still has not seen the light of day after more than a decade of work.

Other hall of shamers included Columbia Records at No. 10, for dumping Alicia Keys and rapper 50 Cent before they became famous; and Warner Bros. Records at No. 13 for signing rock band R.E.M. to a money-losing $80 million contract in 1996.

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March 11, 2008  Idol style - Beatles tunes kick off another round of competition tonight

By JOEY GUERRA
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

American Idol has sifted through the so-so talent, weathered the requisite controversy and (as always) cut loose a few of the wrong singers.

Tonight, the stage — a new, bigger one, we're told — is set for the final dozen to shine or stumble. And they'll do it singing tunes by the Beatles for the first time in the show's history.

Mistakes will be made. Tears will be shed. Dreams will be crushed. And that's just during Paula Abdul's sure-to-be-kooky commentary.

This season's 12 finalists are, if nothing else, a diverse bunch. Rockers and pretty boys and aspiring country queens are all hoping to be the next Kelly Clarkson, Chris Daughtry or Carrie Underwood. (And praying they won't be the next Taylor Hicks.)

Ryan Seacrest keeps insisting that this is the "most talented" group ever. We'll be the judge of that.

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March 10, 2008  McCartney Reportedly Inks Deal with Apple

By Jeff Smykil  

Multiple UK news outlets are reporting today that Sir Paul McCartney has reached a deal with Apple to offer the Beatles catalog on the iTunes Store. The deal, reportedly worth $400 million, comes after months and months of speculation and relentless torrents of rumors. As best as we can tell, this is the real deal, and will lead to the most popular band of all time finally finding its way onto an online marketplace.

While McCartney will be keeping much of the money, several other parties stand to benefit from the deal. It is being reported that portions of the sum will be going to families of the deceased members of the Beatles, Ringo Starr, Sony, EMI, and the former owner of the catalog, Michael Jackson.

As of today there is no time frame as to when the catalog will appear online, but it seems to just be a matter of time.  McCartney himself even said in November that the catalog would be making its way onto the the store some time in 2008 While we have heard this sort of thing time and time again, this might just be the real deal. Prepare yourself—Beatlemania is coming to iTunes.

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March 9, 2008 Jagger vs Lennon: London's riots of 1968 provided the backdrop to a rock'n'roll battle royale

By Leo Burley
Source:  www.independent.co.uk

Jagger: "Not at all, not at all, you won't do anything. If we really want to be anything we MUST try and bypass the police. And if we want to demonstrate we have to meet them on their own ground. If they want to use horses, we'll have 10,000 people on horses. And that's what I thought when I was there. That's what it should have been!" says Jagger, in so doing dismissing the aims of Ali and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign that had organised the demonstration and suggesting that what one of the bloodiest civil disturbances since the war lacked was a cavalry charge by the protesters.

"That's what it should have been! That's our way out. Cause we love it! And it's our excuse, see? We can't be guerillas. We're so violent, we're violently frustrated. We haven't got enough violence, we've no opportunity... There's no guerillas, there's no... well, there's Welsh nationalists. You can go and join them, but what a joke! I mean, there's nothing in this country..."

"He didn't have a political reading of it," recalls Miles today, "he had a much more artistic reading. This was something that got his adrenalin going, that enabled him to create and, in fact, in the same interview, he was saying how he could never really create when he was happy or peaceful, he could write much more easily if he was up against a deadline or he was in the middle of an argument or there was some kind of really weird scene going on, then it would come pouring out of him. So to him, it was just perfect, it was a shot of adrenalin and the subject matter for a song.

After the battle, Jagger discarded a weak lyric entitled "Has Everyone Paid Their Dues" about a tribal chief and his squaws and wrote this:

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy

Cause summers here and the time is right

for fighting in the street, boy

But what can a poor boy do?

Except to sing for a rock'n'roll band

Cause in sleepy London town

There's just no place for a street fighting man

Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution

But where I live the game to play is compromise solution

Well then what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock'n'roll band

Cause in sleepy London town

There's no place for a street fighting man, no

Both a call to arms and an admission that in London, at least, fighting was pointless, the song echoes Jagger's confusion in the interview he gave Miles: "There's no doubt that there's a cyclic change, a vast cyclic change on top of a lot of smaller ones. I can imagine America becoming just ablaze, just being ruined..." says Jagger. "But this country's so weird, you know, it always does things slightly differently, always more moderately, and always very boringly, most of it, the changes are so suppressed. The people suppress them."

Miles defends Jagger staunchly, reminding us that he never made any claim to be a politician or a revolutionary: "I think 'Street Fighting Man' was simply posing the question of whether or not this was a valid response to the situation and he doesn't indicate whether he thinks it is or not. He hedges his bets but he recognises that there's the desire there to get out and fight, that things are not all cosy and British as they should be, that things need to change. How to change them is the question and he's simply posing that question."

Hey! Said my name is called disturbance

I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king,

I'll rail at all his servants

Well, what can a poor boy do

Except to sing for a rock'n'roll band

Cause in sleepy London town

There's no place for a street fighting man, no

Tariq Ali had a different take on it as did many on the far left who adopted Jagger and the Stones as comrades: "Well, I thought they [the lyrics] were very ultra-left actually, when we heard the song and tried to sing it we thought, 'God, it's a bit far out even for us.' But it reflected the mood. This is a sleepy town, why aren't we doing anything!"

By the time "Street Fighting Man" was released at the end of August 1968, student revolts had spread across Europe and America and the BBC declined to play the record for fear of inciting more violence. Despite his dismissal of Ali's tactics at Grosvenor Square, Jagger sent the handwritten lyrics to Ali's radical Black Dwarf newspaper where they appeared in the November 1968 issue.

"We photographed the sheet of paper and I threw the original into the wastepaper basket. No one in the office thought this sacrilegious," recalls Ali. "The cult of the individual is always the substitute for collective action. Jagger sang well and he was being helpful. That was all."

Whatever the party line, it's clear that Ali was much more impressed with Jagger's commitment to the "revolution" than Lennon's in 1968: "We'd heard rumours that some of the Beatles were quite anti-war, but attempts to contact them failed and they never came on the demonstration [in March 1968] and later, after John had split from the Beatles, he said to me, 'One of the things I regret the most is that I didn't come on that march, I was desperate to come.' I said, 'Well why the hell didn't you come?' He said, 'Brian Epstein told us that if we went on that march we would not be allowed into the United States and we had a big tour lined up.' So I said, 'You caved in.' And he said, 'I'm regretting it now but Epstein scared us and, in retrospect, I wished we had been there.'"

In May 1968 the student rebellion in Paris made Grosvenor Square look like a teddy bears' picnic, and for a few weeks it seemed that a real revolution was taking place just across the Channel. Like millions of others, Lennon watched the violent scenes on television and responded with the Beatles' first overtly political song:

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction

Don't you know that you can count me out/in

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

Musically, the record was unlike anything the Beatles had created before. But it was Lennon's ambivalent lyric which excited the most attention. As Lennon and the Beatles laid down the first version of "Revolution" – for what would come to be known as "The White Album" at Abbey Road – Jagger and the Stones were across town at Olympic Studios recording "Sympathy for the Devil", for many the high point of Beggars Banquet. Both albums were widely considered to be the best of an extraordinary year for rock music.

Jean-Luc Godard, the rebel star of French cinema's new wave, had been offered access to film both bands through a chance meeting with the agent Mim Scala in Paris. "All over Europe there was this student turmoil going on," recalls Scala, a key member of the London scene in the late 1960s. "France had it, we had a mini riot in Grosvenor Square which was just sort of token really. But in the middle of that, there was this wonderful 1960s hedonistic creative lunacy who couldn't give a shit about that, let's get with making stuff. So, my generation of London creative person made the music and the other stuff that fuelled the revolution and I thought that was great."

"I went over to Paris for a weekend," Scala adds, "went to dinner, and there was Godard. I'd just seen Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou, these are great movies, you know. And I found myself in conversation and I was amazed that he really appeared to be unaware of what was happening in London. When I got back to London, Jimmy Miller, a friend of mine who was producing the Stones, had this demo of "Sympathy" which I sent to Godard along with some Beatles albums. I got a letter from his producer saying Jean-Luc would love to make a movie in England with the Beatles or the Stones. And I thought, 'Great, have you got a script?' And then I got the letter with the iconic: 'My film will have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.' I took it to Lennon to see if he wanted to work with Godard, he said, 'Yeah, it'd be cool...' Then I took it to Sandy Levinson, the Stones' agent, and he passed it on to Mick and the boys who were, 'Let's do it!' Before we knew what was happening, both wanted to work with Godard."

In a snub for Lennon, Godard, an avid supporter of the student uprising in Paris, chose the Stones. Scala says he took it well enough, though later, following an attack by the Frenchman on the Beatles' lack of radicalism, Lennon claimed it was they who had turned down Godard. It may been have a lucky escape as Jagger's encounter with a real revolutionary artist proved a difficult one.

"We had the Stones for a limited number of days, obviously," says Scalas, "cos they were expensive and we didn't have a big budget and it was very important that we'd got them while they were making their recording at the Olympic Studios. When I went to the hotel to get Godard, he'd gone ' – with the crew and everything. They'd disappeared. They were in Paris. So I thought, 'Oh God, we're gonna lose a fortune here...' I wasn't completely aware of the significance of what was happening in Paris cos it wasn't our thing, you know, so I flew out there and he was filming the riots."

Scala managed to persuade Godard to come back to begin filming with the Stones. The footage he shot at Olympic shows Jagger at his best, shaping and honing "Sympathy" tirelessly with the band to produce perhaps the most evocative and timely song of that violent year. At one point, Jagger changes the lyric "Who killed Kennedy?" to a plural in acknowledgement of Bobby Kennedy's assassination on 5 June 1968. It was the rest of Godard's film which didn't work; an unintelligible story involving, among several other revolutionary themes, a group of real Black Panthers running guns and killing white women in a south London junkyard. It went some way towards justifying Lennon's famous assertion "that avant garde is French for bullshit".

"Godard never really understood who the star of this film was," says Scala. "And the star was the song – an extraordinarily iconic piece of rock'n'roll – and it was so obvious to us. So we had to encourage him to do more with the Stones and less with the Panthers and less with his... political ramblings."

The film's producers, Michael Pearson and Ian Quarrier, were as unimpressed as Jagger with Godard's final cut and insisted on re-editing to include a finished version of "Sympathy for the Devil" and renamed the film after the song; Godard had wanted it to be called One Plus One. When it was finally screened at the National Film Theatre on 29 November 1968, Godard punched Quarrier and then turned on the audience accusing them of being "fascists", demanding that they be reimbursed their ticket costs.

As Godard had been filming the Beggars Banquet sessions, Lennon was hedging his bets on "Revolution". During the first recording session – between 30 May and 4 June 1968, when the fighting in Paris was still at its height – he sang: "When you talk about destruction/ Don't you know that you can count me out" and then quickly added "in" as an alternative, revealing his own uncertainty over the justification for violent political insurrection. Eventually, three versions of the song were recorded but Lennon's ambivalence had been noted.

"He was an iconoclastic figure, somebody we looked up to and admired a great deal," recalls John Hoyland, then a contributor to Black Dwarf and a veteran of the Grosvenor Square riot. Each new Beatles record was innovative and fascinating and somehow kind of captured the spirit of the times. And then the May events in Paris happened, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had happened and his response was to put out a record called 'Revolution' which, in fact, as far as we could see, was putting it all down."

"He talked about minds that hate," Hoyland adds. "He said, 'If you go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow' and so forth. And above all, he said, 'You talk about institutions, why don't you change your mind instead'. For us, that was the wrong path and we felt that he was stuck in the mind-expanding, trippy, very creative times of the previous year, but things had moved on and he wasn't with it anymore. That's what we felt and I felt it very much."

Hoyland felt it so strongly that when Lennon was arrested for possession of drugs in October 1968 he took the opportunity to launch an all-out attack on Lennon's politics in an open letter to the Beatle in Black Dwarf: "Now do you see what's wrong with your record 'Revolution'? That record was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale's Diary. In order to change the world we've got to understand what's wrong with the world and then destroy it ruthlessly... There is no such thing as a polite revolution. That doesn't mean that violence is always the right way, or even that you should turn up on the next demonstration. (There are other ways of challenging the system.) In an unjust and corrupt society there is no dishonour in being arrested and certainly none of us on the left are going to think any the worse of you for it. But learn from it, John. Look at the society we're living in, and ask yourself: why? And then – come and join us."

"The thing that that made me write the letter," Hoyland says now, "was that when he was arrested for a dope offence and his philosophy of 'you can just be free and it's all wonderful' ran up against a brick wall, I went in quite strong and I have to admit when I read the letter now it makes me cringe because, as he pointed out, it really was a bit patronising."

Lennon's response – in a "very open letter" that he demanded Tariq Ali publish in Black Dwarf – was immediate and furious: "Dear John, your letter didn't just sound patronising... it was. Who do you think you are? What do you think you know? I don't remember saying 'Revolution' was revolutionary – fuck Mrs Dale. Listen to all three versions then try again. Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones – think a little bigger – look at the world we're living in and ask yourself: why? And then come and join us. Love John Lennon. PS – You smash it – and I'll build around it."

Lennon's reference to the Stones stems from Hoyland's added insult in his letter: "Recently your music has lost its bite. At a time when the music of the Stones has been getting stronger and stronger... The Stones have understood that the life and authenticity of their music – quite apart from their personal integrity – demanded that they take part in this drama – that they refuse to accept the system that's fucking up our lives."

While that may seem a ludicrous proposition today, in 1968 there was a feeling on the far left and in the media that the Stones, thanks in part to Jagger's appearance at Grosvenor Square and songs such as "Street Fighting Man" and "Sympathy", were at the vanguard of the struggle against an archaic political system while Lennon and the Beatles, with their OBEs, now belonged to and spoke for the Establishment. '

"I don't think I specifically mentioned 'Street Fighting Man'," says Hoyland, who shudders at the memory of this exchange. "But what I said was that the Stones' music had got better and had got more bite to it in as much as they had associated themselves more with the current that was going on at the time, whereas his music had gone off a bit. Of course, he was absolutely maddened by that. That I considered the ideas in 'Revolution' to be wishy-washy and musically inferior, absolutely infuriated him. To be sort of attacked ideologically, as it were, was one thing, but to be attacked as an artist for his music, he really didn't like that at all."

The 'Black Dwarf' letters were syndicated all over the world and for many represented the disagreement between the two emerging wings of the counterculture; on one side was the cultural, drug-taking hippie rebellion and on the other was the far left and its belief in changing the structures of society. For Lennon, however, it became clear that being ranked as less revolutionary than the Stones was the most galling accusation. In this long-forgotten interview from December 1968 – conducted by Daniel Wiles and Maurice Windle, two students from Keele University – Lennon is still angry and bitter about the comparison, both claiming the Stones as friends and stressing his own group's pre-eminence.

"This guy [Hoyland] is one of those, you know... 'the Stones are changing it and you're not.' The Stones and I are great mates, you know, but they did pull back their album cover so tell him that!" raged Lennon, in reference to the Stones bowing to pressure from their record company to change the cover of Beggars Banquet from a grafittied toilet wall to a less confrontational plain cover less than a month after the Beatles had released their own white-covered album. Inside the cover, Jagger and the band were depicted enjoying a decadent medieval banquet, a far cry from the student revolts of 1968.

"It's not against Mick... It's against him [Hoyland]. I'm sick of this petty thing... The Stones do that, you do this... and now it's down to the revolutionary thing. The Stones and I are close and where's he? If these people start the revolution, me and the Stones will be the first ones they shoot, I mean that," said Lennon. "If it wasn't for us, the Stones and the Who would never have been allowed out. These people are so bitter... and they are holding the whole thing back. They are showing with what they write and how they say it, how they can never run a new scene... before we have even done anything they are quibbling about who's doing what. Let them go and talk to the Stones, the Who, Dylan, me, Yoko, Andy Warhol... anybody who is doing anything doesn't think like this. And that is what none of them understand... Before anything has even moved forward half an inch there's fools like this trying to get it into another bag... before we've even broken the old bag!"

"Hoyland's criticisms of Lennon, I think, came from much too opinionated a position on the relatively far-left," says Miles, who knew Lennon better than most at this time. "Lennon had only recently become politically aware at all – in many ways he discovered politics for the first time in 1968."

"In 'Revolution', he was exploring a new area, a new source of inspiration and political ideas – he was sucking up stuff like a sponge at that point, which is why he did a number of different versions. His problem with Hoyland was that he felt that he was being made to join whatever the political position of Black Dwarf was and his period of taking a lot of LSD had changed him, tremendously – so I think finding all these people advocating political violence and fighting in the street brought out something in him that was a very deep problem. In many ways he was confronting his own violent tendencies and it was bringing up many issues for him which he never resolved. I mean the song remains unresolved, just as Jagger's was."

On 28 November 1968, Lennon appeared at Marylebone Magistrates Court to be fined £150 plus £21 costs for possession of cannabis resin. Charges of obstructing the police against him and Yoko Ono were dropped, but the judge told Lennon that he was not considering a prison sentence because it was his first offence. A huge crowd gathered to see what ITN Reuters described as a "falling star of the British scene".

On 11 December 1968, Lennon accepted Jagger's invitation to join him at "The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus", an all-star extravaganza featuring Eric Clapton, the Who, Marianne Faithfull and Jethro Tull that Jagger had conceived with director Michael Lyndsay-Hogg. Since the "All You Need is Love" broadcast a year before, the positions of the two stars had been reversed with Lennon now one of many at the court of King Mick. Jagger withheld the BBC's intended broadcast due to the poverty of his band's performance. It was notable only for the last public appearance of Brian Jones before his death the following year and for this affectionate exchange in faux American talk-show accents between Jagger and Lennon, their last recorded words in that turbulent year.

"Winston, welcome to the show," says Jagger, calling him by his middle name.

"Michael, it's a pleasure to be here," replies Lennon, using the name Jagger's best friends call him.

"It's really nice to have you, John, as you know I've admired your work for so long... Haven't been able to get together as much as I'd want."

"It's not been my fault," replies Lennon.

"Are you really experienced?" quips Jagger later.

"You've been reading my file," replies Lennon before offering his empty dinner plate to Jagger. "I'd like to give you this on behalf of the British public."

"You're a blues, John," says Jagger as Lennon walks off, paying him the highest compliment in the Stone's lexicon by comparing him to the music which inspired them.

Jagger went on to become the archetypal rock star of the century, surviving the disaster of Altamont in 1969 and enjoying a less than proletarian wedding to Bianca in St Tropez in 1971. Despite his embodiment of the decadent, drugged-up sex-god throughout the 1970s and his slow metamorphosis into the brains behind the billion-dollar business that is the Rolling Stones today, he has never quite lost the revolutionary image that he built himself in 1968 of a street- fighting rock star. But if you look carefully at Michael Cooper's photograph of Jagger on the approach to Grosvenor Square (see page 15), you see an observer rather than a protester, a man of wealth and taste who is sucking up the atmosphere for his own dark reasons. In Peter Doggett's book Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of the Sixties he quotes Jagger 12 years on in 1980: "You've always got to have good tunes if you're marching. But the tunes don't make the march. Basically, rock'n'roll isn't protest. And never was. It's not political."

Doggert also uncovers a haunting quote from Lennon that same year, just before his death. Having returned his OBE in 1969, the Beatle quit London for New York and for a few years became the most politically radical artist of his generation. But his support for a host of contentious left-wing causes – from Irish nationalism to the Yippie movement of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman – brought him into conflict with Nixon's corrupt administration. And, by the mid 1970s, with the authorities attempting to deport him, he'd become disillusioned with the "revolution" and the empty rhetoric of those who still preached it: "I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

'Revolution: The Art of 1968', 'The South Bank Show', produced and directed by Leo Burley, 10.45pm, Sunday 16 March, ITV1

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March 7, 2008   Norman Smith: Engineer for The Beatles, producer for Pink Floyd and, briefly, a pop star

  1964 image of Norman Smith behind the sound board at EMI Studios

Source:  www.independent.co.uk

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