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September 2009

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September 30, 2009 -- PM.com

PAUL McCARTNEY "GOOD EVENING NEW YORK CITY"

Multi-Disc CD/DVD Special Package Features Dazzling Performances of Beatles, Wings and Solo Classics From Citi Field, Formerly Shea Stadium, Historic Site of The Beatles' Landmark 1965 Concert

US Release ­ 17th November
FROM HEAR MUSIC/CONCORD MUSIC GROUP

UK Release ­ 23rd November
Mercury Records

"It was three great nights for the band and for me personally it was very exciting to be back opening a new stadium on the site of the old Shea Stadium where we had played 44 years previously. Even more exciting because this time round you could hear us!"

Paul McCartney's historic three-night musical christening of New York's Citi Field, witnessed by 120,000-plus attendees and universally hailed as a concert experience for the ages, will be immortalized November 17 when Hear Music/Concord Music Group releases "Good Evening New York City". This momentous musical experience will be available in two formats: a 3-disc (2 CD + 1 DVD) standard edition and a 4-disc (2 CD + 2 DVD) deluxe version featuring expanded packaging and a bonus DVD including McCartney's traffic-stopping, headline-making July 15 performance on the Ed Sullivan Theater marquee (including bonus numbers not aired on the Late Show with David Letterman broadcast). The set will also be made available in high quality vinyl. In any configuration, the 30+ songs and nearly 3 hours of music comprising "Good Evening New York City" are a must-have for attendees wishing to relive the July 17, 18 & 21 shows, those who couldn't get tickets and/or anyone interested in an audiovisual document of a living legend. "Good Evening New York City" marks McCartney's 2nd release for Hear Music. The first was 2007's highly acclaimed Memory Almost Full. The standard version of "Good Evening New York City" will be available at participating Starbucks company-operated locations in the U.S. and Canada and wherever music is sold.

As the inaugural musical event at Citi Field, the site of the former Shea Stadium, the July 2009 shows held special significance not only for McCartney but for generations of his fans. The shows were performed on the same hallowed ground that The Beatles, in 1965, played the 34-minute show that would set the precedent for the modern day stadium rock show--and where in 2008 McCartney joined Billy Joel for the final rock show before the original stadium's demolition. As documented on "Good Evening New York City", "I'm Down" from the 1965 set list was revived for the Citi Field shows, albeit this time played through a PA that was not overpowered by screaming fans (though there were still several thousand who tried). Other highlights of "Good Evening New York City" include faithful takes on Beatles classics "Drive My Car," "Got To Get You Into My Life," "The Long And Winding Road," "Blackbird," "Eleanor Rigby," "Back In The USSR," "Paperback Writer," "Let It Be," "Hey Jude," "Helter Skelter" and more, plus "Something" rendered on ukulele gifted to Paul by George Harrison, and a tribute to John Lennon in the form of a medley of "A Day In The Life" and "Give Peace A Chance." Wings era chestnuts include "Band On The Run," "My Love," "Let Me Roll It" and the pyrotechnic tour de force of "Live And Let Die," while timeless McCartney solo material ranges from "Here Today" to the upbeat "Flaming Pie" and "Dance Tonight" to a pair of numbers from Electric Arguments, the 2008 album released under the alias of The Fireman.

The concert footage featured on "Good Evening New York City" standard edition features concert footage directed by Paul Becher, who has overseen live visuals for McCartney for some 200 performances and counting. The 33-song 2 hour 40 minute performances were shot in High Definition using 15 cameras and digital footage incorporated from 75 Flipcams handed out to fans over the course of the three night stand. The audio mix, in both stereo and 5.1, was handled by longtime McCartney engineer Paul Hicks, whose credits include the recent Beatles remasters, The Beatles Anthology, Let It Be... Naked, and two Grammy awards for his mixing work on the Beatles' Love album.

The deluxe edition bonus DVD will feature footage of McCartney's July 15 performance on the outdoor marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater, previously available only as a webcast on the Late Show with David Letterman website. The marquee set, which marked McCartney's return to the site of The Beatles U.S. television debut, generated front page headlines and literally stopped traffic as word of mouth generated a crowd that packed Broadway from Columbus Circle to Times Square.

Paul McCartney's July 17-21 Citi Field stand has already been unanimously hailed by critics and audiences alike as the concert experience of a lifetime. On November 17, "Good Evening New York City" will document it for the ages.

Photo credit: © 2009 MPL Communications Ltd.
Photographer: Bill Bernstein

The ten-year-old boy singing in this video is Jeffrey Miller. Jeffrey was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. He attends Riverside Public School in Huntsville, Ontario, Canada where he lives with his dad, step-mother, older brother and two step-sisters.

Jeffrey loves music which seems to help elevate his mood. His idol is Paul McCartney. He knows most of Paul's songs which include his favorites: "All My Loving", "Waterfalls", "Band On The Run" and "Take It Away".

Jeffrey has been greatly influenced by his dad when it comes to Paul. His dad was a huge Wings fan back in the 1970's and has been to fifteen Paul concerts since 1989 at Sky Dome in Toronto to the concert just recently performed in Las Vegas last April at The Joint.

In a typical day, Jeffrey will ask his dad the following questions:

I wonder what Paul is doing today?

Why does Paul like to sing?

What color is Paul's guitar?

Does Paul have big hair or little hair? (long hair or short hair)

Why does the monkey drink the coffee with Paul and Jim? ("Give My Regards to Broadstreet" movie)

Jeffrey plays Paul's DVD's on the television and on his own DVD player. He listens to Paul CD's in the car and sometimes he sings Paul songs on his own. He has never been to a Paul McCartney concert however one day dad is going to take him. Who knows..maybe one day he will get to meet his idol.

Jeffrey performs "All My Loving" for 500 students at Riverside Public School. CLICK

-- Bob Miller (Dad)

To learn more about autism go to: http://www.autismspeaks.org/

A new National Trust inspired edition was launched yesterday, with 20 Forthlin Road (Pay £60/$95) one of the squares on the board, alongside a variety of stately homes and country estates.

The Allerton property unfortunately doesn't make it on to the more salubrious parts of the board, occupying instead the brown section of the game where Old Kent Road dwells in the classic original.

Spokesperson for the National Trust, Debbie Peers, said: "This new version of Monopoly features four Trust properties located here in the North West: Forthlin Road, Allerton, Liverpool plus Lyme Park, Little Moreton Hall and Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire.

"Both the size and character of houses on the board have been matched wherever possible with Trust properties that reflect them.

"Hence, Forthlin Road represents the smaller, terraced houses to be found in the Old Kent Road, while the palatial Lyme Park is Mayfair."

The McCartneys lived in the three-bedroomed council house on Forthlin Road between 1955 and 1964.

The National Trust bought the property in 1995.

Tours of the house, where Sir Paul and John Lennon worked on many of The Beatles' early hits, began in 1998.

The house was the first property taken over by the National Trust because of its significance to 20th-century popular culture.

Even the Community Chest and Chance cards in the new game have a conservation and heritage flavour, with scenarios including "Coastal path repairs. Pay £100 ($160)," and "Health and safety inspection. Pay £50 ($80)", or on a more positive note, "Fundraising appeal does well. Collect £150 ($239)".

Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust, said: "It's fantastic to see so many of the trust's amazing places on the famous Monopoly board.

"Sales of the game go directly to helping us look after the real versions of the special places on the board. So, even the most ruthless Monopoly property developer will still be doing their bit for conservation."

The launch of the game makes the National Trust the first charity to have a version of Monopoly, which has been mass- produced since the 1930s.

An industrial theme occupies the spots on the board formerly occupied by London sites Angel, Euston Road and Pentonville Road, with Quarry Bank Mill, in Styal, Cheshire, the Cornish Tin Mines and the Workhouse, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, taking their place.

Churchill's home at Chartwell and Sissinghurst in Kent, Stourhead in Wiltshire and Blickling Hall, Norfolk, are among the estates which have made it onto the board.

And London's top-class shopping streets, Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street, have been usurped by some of the country's most dramatic landscapes ­ Snowdonia, the Giant's Causeway and the High Peak Estate in Derbyshire.

Macca sighting in Tuscon AZ

Bartender at Casa Molina talks about Paul

Has anything interesting happened while you were working?

"Paul McCartney was here (a few) weeks ago. Paul McCartney used to come every month for years when he and Linda McCartney owned a ranch here. He used to come here with the kids, back in the '70s. This is McCartney's favorite bar."

Did you talk to him?

"I didn't get a chance to meet him, but everyone here did. I had already left that night. But everyone was saying that he was so nice. He went to the kitchen and said hi to everybody."

Jim Kerr ex-hubby of Chrisse Hydne talks about his daughter and Linda McCartney

He is more likely to be spotted behind the wheel of a Smart car or riding a scooter around the narrow streets of Sicily... but Jim Kerr looked right at home amid the glamour of Formula 1.

The Simple Minds ("Don't You Forget About Me") frontman and his band were one of the highlights of the star-studded F1 Rocks, the new festival accompanying the Singapore Grand Prix, playing a set packed with their hits as well as a taste of their new music.

And Jim, 50, who now lives in Taormina in Sicily, where he runs a hotel called Villa Angela, managed to find a little bit of home in the Far East.

On Friday, the band shared the stage at Singapore's Fort Canning Park with rock legends ZZ Top, N*E*R*D and No Doubt.

His daughter,Yasmin, 24, from his first marriage to Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, is also doing well.

"When Yasmin was wee, Chrissie and Linda McCartney were the best of friends and Yasmin would go to Linda's house and ride ponies.

"When she was seven, she called me and said, 'I'm at Linda's, the one that's married to the guy Paul. The one that wrote The Frog Song.' That made me laugh and I still tease her about it.

"Paul would sing it for her because he loves kids. She is a huge Beatles fan now and is working with a company that manages bands and events.

ON THIS DAY IN SHOW BIZ: HEY JUDE BREAKS RECORDS

On this day in 1968, The Beatles' single "Hey Jude" hits the top of the charts. The song had debuted two weeks earlier at No. 10, the highest spot ever achieved by a new release up to that time. Over seven minutes long, it was the longest song ever to hit No. 1, a record it holds to this day.

Paul McCartney wrote the song about the same time that John Lennon was divorcing his wife Cynthia. McCartney once claimed the song started out as "Hey, Jules," and was meant to console John and Cynthia's son, Julian. Some listeners hear the song as a prophetic lament for the approaching end of the Beatles themselves, who split up in early 1970.

Lennon and McCartney began playing music together in 1956 and by 1960 had formed the Beatles with George Harrison. The band toured German beerhouses in 1961 and debuted later that year at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they gave more than 300 performances during the next two years. Drummer Ringo Starr joined the group in 1962. They scored several U.K. hits in 1963, launching the Beatlemania frenzy that hit the United States in 1964. In a little more than 10 years, the group transformed rock and roll, scoring 20 No. 1 hits on the Billboard pop charts, more than any group in history. The group's records spent a total of 59 weeks topping the charts between 1964 and 1970.

Lennon divorced his first wife and married artist Yoko Ono in 1969. With Ono, he released the album Two Virgins in 1968. He became more involved in progressive political causes and in pursuing projects with Ono and decided to leave the Beatles. In 1970, McCartney announced that the Beatles had broken up. Lennon released his first solo album, Imagine, in 1971, and the album rose to No. 1 on the charts. Harrison, Starr, and McCartney all later released their own solo albums. McCartney's next band, Wings, released numerous successful albums in the 1970s.

In 1980, Lennon was murdered in New York City by a deranged fan. He was 40 years old. George Harrison died of lung cancer, at the age of 58, in 2001.

Beatle's essay found 50 years on

An essay written by Sir Paul McCartney as a 10-year-old has been found after lying undiscovered in Liverpool's Central Library for more than 50 years.

Years before the Beatles received their MBEs, he beat hundreds of other school children to win a prize for his 1953 essay marking the Queen's coronation.

In neat handwriting, he refers to "the lovely young Queen Elizabeth".

In 2013, the library will display the essay - found in a scrapbook - to mark the 60th anniversary of the coronation.

Thought to be one of the earliest surviving written works by Sir Paul, the essay gave him an early taste of appearing in public.

Liverpool's Lord Mayor presented him with the prize - despite the work having been marked down for grammatical errors.

McCartney's neat writing has the same curly ends on capital letters which he used later on the "B" of "Beatles" on the group's drum skin.

The schoolboy compares the happy scenes expected outside Buckingham Palace with the coronation of William the Conqueror nine centuries earlier, when a massacre of Saxons took place.

He declares that Britain's "present day royalty rules with affection rather than force".

The essay also mentions a coronation cup with Elizabeth II on the front and Elizabeth I on the back, and he concludes it by saying: "After all this bother, many people will agree with me that it was well worth it."

Some 16 years later, with the Beatles nearing their break-up, McCartney was still writing about the monarch.

His song Her Majesty, featuring the lyrics "Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, some day I'm going to make her mine", was recorded for the Abbey Road LP.

The Queen knighted him in 1997.

READ ESSAY

Hello and happy weekend!

This past week has just flown...perhaps because I've been floating on air all week due to my encounter with Paul McCartney at Bemelmans Bar last Sunday evening (September 20th) !! Yes, that's right, THE Paul McCartney, who happened to drop by Bemelmans to catch one of Tony DeSare's sets! Now, both Tony and Sir Paul have headlined past articles of mine, so I think it's only appropriate that I got to see them both in the same room at the same time! Especially fun was the fact that Sir Paul (who was sitting right next to me!!), was making up little improvised lines along with Tony's songs, so every now and then, I'd hear that famous voice going, "Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh" right next to me. It was all I could do to keep from staring, but I don't think I was very successful at keeping the huge smile off of my face! I give Tony and his fellow band members (Steve Doyle on bass and Ed Decker on guitar) all the credit in the world for keeping their cool and showing themselves off beautifully!

Tony did a few of his original tunes ("How I Will Say I Love You" and "Let's Just Stay In"), and also did his amazing solo piano version of "Autumn Leaves," which never fails to blow me away. Sir Paul responded enthusiastically, bopping and humming along, and I even heard him exclaim "Nice tune!" at the end of "How I Will Say I Love You!" After the set, he spoke with Tony and even took a CD with him! It was a truly remarkable night - it would have been great to start with, between the fantastic music and the wonderful atmosphere at Bemelmans, but it really turned into something special that I'll remember for the rest of my life!

The following night, I'd planned to go to Cast Party, but I found myself seriously crashing after the high of the "Paul McCartney Experience" and it was all I could do to get home and stagger to bed early that night!

"Spectacle: Elvis Costello with..." will be hosted by its namesake and produced in conjunction with Sir Elton John's Rocket Pictures. Elton John will be one of the program's Executive Producers.

The series will air beginning later this year, on CTV in Canada, Channel 4 in the UK and Sundance Channel in the US. FremantleMedia Enterprises, will handle sales of the show to the rest of the world.

Conceived to provide a forum for in-depth discussion and performance with the most interesting and influential artists and personalities of our time, the show fuses the best of talk and music television.

"Spectacle: Elvis Costello with..." promises to be an unpredictable and unprecedented television experience. The series of 13 one-hour programs will feature everything from intimate one-on-ones with legendary performers and notable newcomers to thematic panel discussions, with a variety of performance elements including unique collaborations, acoustic and impromptu "illustrative" demonstrations of the creative process, and some original interpretations of others' songs by Costell.

The Day Danielle and Her Mom Met Paul McCartney

We know as New Yorkers we are supposed to be cool when interacting with celebrities. But occasionally we lose it. Earlier today we asked for your stories of awkward celebrity encounters, starstruck moments, and gross misidentifications, and after seeing your comments and our in-box, we now know for sure: We're not the only ones who spaz out every once and a while. (Also, we now know that apparently a lot of people tell Sarah Jessica Parker that she looks like a prettier version of the girl from Sex and the City " -- ouch.) But our favorite story of a celebrity interaction gone awry came from Danielle Kantor, a sales assistant in our own office. Her story is after the jump.

The Weekend My Mom and I Met Paul McCartney
By Danielle Kantor

So. I was staying with my mom in the Hamptons many summers back (I was about 15), and we stopped in a store East Hampton to pick up a scented candle (to cover the musty smell of our crappy hotel room), and standing in the store, buying wrapping paper, was Sir Paul McCartney. He looked adorable, wearing a red baseball cap, a button-down, cargo shorts, and Birkenstocks --" a very hippie-looking Paul.

So we edged farther into the store to get a good look. My mom, who grew up in South Africa and never had the chance to see the Beatles perform, was ecstatic. I was thrilled, too, but at a loss for what to say. For some reason I still don't know, I was wearing a Superman T-shirt, and as were are standing, watching Paul check out with his wrapping paper, he turned to me and said: "Oh, so you're Superwoman, I've always wanted to meet you."

He stuck out his hand, which thank God I remembered meant I should shake his. My only response was to nod like an idiot.

And with that Paul left the store.

Of course, this dominated our conversation for the rest of the day, and my mom came up with what she thought was the cleverest line to respond to Paul: "If she's superwoman, then you're a superstar."

I was only too pleased she had missed the opportunity.

That was until the next day, when at the Amagansett farmers' market she once again spotted Paul McCartney.

Old friends that they were, she screamed, "PAUL!" to which he turned around, quite alarmed. She rushed over and said: "Thank you so much for saying hello to my daughter yesterday; she'll always remember that."

Paul, puzzled, politely asked: "Who?"

My mom: "Superwoman!"

Paul: "Oh, of course! Not a problem."

My mom: "You know, Paul, after you left, I came up with the perfect response."

Paul: "Yeah?"

My mom: "If she's Superwoman, then you're a superstar."

Paul: (After a silent pause) "Don't you hate when that happens; you get the perfect line after the moment has passed."

Moral: Paul McCartney is a gracious man. My mom is embarrassing.

This album will be a "live summary" of the concerts given by the ex-Beatle in July, while he played for the very first time at the Citi Field Stadium in New-York City for three memorable nights, on July 17th,18th and 21st 2009.

This CD album is likely to be sold in a box set containing not only a live album but also the DVD of the concert.

(WEBMASTER'S NOTE: This album has not been officially confirmed by Paul McCartney. However there is a link to buy it at Tower Records for $60.95)

Sir Paul McCartney has said that the Beatles were planning to reunite before John Lennon was shot dead in 1980.

The singer admitted that though they were set to receive huge offers yet they believed it wouldn't be as big as the 60's.

"We talked about it a lot. And we always said that, if we did, it might not be great, whereas the Beatles career had been," the Daily Express quoted him as saying.

"And even though the offers were huge, and there were sort of people going, 'I'll pay you this to do it,' we talked about it and we sort of said, 'Nah, this is it. There is something not right about it' ," he added.

McCartney believes they were an amazing band.

He added: "Looking back, you know, I'm a big Beatles fan. I think we were one hot band. And Ringo and I, whenever we get together, we look at each other and just go, 'We were a damn good group. Great band'."

McCartney was present with Ringo Starr, John's widow Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia at the launch of The Beatles: Rock Band computer game and the new digitally remastered catalogue of albums.

He spoke about the game: "I think it's really good. They have done really well in capturing our characters, which is one of the things we were careful about.

"We were very careful. We'd say, 'Well, George wouldn't move like that, Ringo didn't drum like that, I would have had the guitar that way'

"The guys who made it started saying, 'Well, we can do this and we can take you through your career, and we can start at The Cavern, then we do this and we get into the psychedelic period'."

Since the release of their digitally remastered CDs on 9/9/09, the Beatles have broken multiple chart records around the world. Consumers purchased more than 2.25 million copies of the Beatles' remastered albums individually and in two multiple-CD boxed sets in stereo and in mono during the first five days of release (excluding non-traditional retail outlets whose sales are not tracked by the chart compilers) in North America, Japan and the UK, EMI reported Tuesday. The albums were crafted for re-release by a team of engineers at Abbey Road Studios over a four-year period.

In the U.S., consumers purchased more than one million copies of re-mastered Beatles titles, and the individual CD and boxed sets debuted strongly across multiple Billboard charts during the first five days of release.

The Beatles set a new record for the most simultaneous titles by a single artist (18), including five of the top 10 and nine of the top 20 on Billboard's Comprehensive Albums chart, which lists the most popular album releases in the U.S., including current and catalogue titles. And on the Pop Catalog chart, the Beatles set another new Billboard chart first for the most simultaneous titles in the top 50 (16), besting a record they themselves set in December, 1965, with 12 titles. "The Beatles in Stereo" boxed set debuted at number 15, and "The Beatles in Mono" limited edition boxed set debuted at number 40 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.

The Beatles have nine of the chart's top 10 titles and all 14 re-mastered CDs in the top 20, led by "Abbey Road" at number one and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at number two.

In the UK, the Beatles had four titles in the top 10, seven in the top 40 and 16 in the top 75 in last week's chart, including both the stereo and mono boxes, as well as the "Beatles 1" compilation. This set a new record for the most simultaneous albums in the UK charts, according to the UK Official Charts Company. In this week's UK chart, the Beatles have 13 albums in the top 75. A further 84,000 CDs were sold last week, bringing their total sales of the remasters to more than 354,000 in 11 days and their total UK sales this decade to 6,755,000, according to EMI.

More international sales reports:

Japan: All 14 re-mastered titles and boxed sets debuted in the top 25 of the international chart, including seven of the top 10, led by the stereo boxed set at number two, the mono boxed set at number three, "Abbey Road" at four and "Let It Be" at six. More than 840,000 Beatles albums -- individual and box sets -- were purchased by consumers in Japan in the first three days of sales.

Canada: The Beatles hold the top 11 spots and 15 of the top 20 catalogue titles. The stereo boxed set, which debuted at number four, is the highest debut for a boxed set in Canada since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking sales. Cumulative sales for all titles were just under 160,000 over the counter, reports EMI.

France: All 14 of the re-mastered titles and boxed sets entered the latest album chart, including three in the top 10, led by "Abbey Road" at number four. This set a new record for the most original studio albums in the French album chart in one week.

Italy: The Beatles have 17 titles in the current chart, including all 14 re-mastered titles, the two boxed sets plus the 'Beatles 1' compilation, setting a record for the most simultaneous entries in the album chart.

Belgium: Chart compiler Ultrapop reports the Beatles set a new record for the most simultaneous albums in the Belgian charts with 17 entries in the current chart, again the 14 re-mastered titles, two boxed sets and the 'Beatles 1' compilation.

Sweden: IFPI reports the Beatles set a Swedish chart record with 16 titles simultaneously in the top 60, topped by "Abbey Road" at number six.

Argentina: The Beatles' remasters hold seven of the current top 10 album chart positions, led by "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at number two, "Abbey Road" at number three and "The Beatles" (The White Album) at number four. EMI reports all 14 remastered CDs are in the top 20, with the box sets at #73 and #74 in the chart.

Spain: Thirteen Beatles albums plus both boxed sets debuted in the latest chart, which set a record for a single artist. The combined sales of the boxed sets places them at number four in the chart, EMI says.

Poland: All 14 remastered albums and two boxed sets are in the current top 100, topped by "Abbey Road" at #6. This sets a record for the highest number of simultaneous entries in the Polish chart.

Switzerland: Fourteen Beatles titles, including the stereo boxed set, debuted in the most recent album chart, another record for the most simultaneous titles in the album chart.

Denmark: Fourteen remastered Beatles titles, plus the 'Beatles 1' compilation, are on the charts there. Four are in the top 20.

Australia: The Beatles have 14 titles in the current chart, including the "Beatles 1" compilation.

Germany: The Beatles ranked third highest best seller thanks to the combined sales of the stereo and mono boxed sets (with each boxed set counting as one unit sold).

Austria: The current top 75 contains 12 re-mastered titles and the stereo boxed set.

Portugal: Remastered titles hold 11 places in the current top 30 album chart, including three of the top 10.

Norway: The stereo and mono boxed sets debut in a combined listing at number three. Twelve more remastered titles are in the top 100.

Colombia: The Beatles remastered CDs occupy half of the current top 10 charted albums.

Korea: The Beatles occupied 16 of the top 17 spots in Korea's Hottracks album chart during the first week of sales.

Parliament has invited Sir Paul McCartney to speak at a hearing ahead of December's UN summit on climate change.

The ex-Beatle has been asked to speak at a parliamentary hearing in Brussels a week before the start of the much-awaited global summit in Copenhagen on 7 December.

The decision to invite McCartney was taken by the assembly's bureau, consisting of parliament president Jerzy Buzek and the parliament's vice presidents.

UK deputy Edward McMillan-Scott, a vice president, said, "There was unanimity among everyone to invite McCartney.

"He has campaigned on climate change issues and it was thought he would be a suitable high-profile speaker at this particular event. It will be great if he comes."

McCartney, who is yet to respond to the invitation, has followed in the footsteps of climate scientists by calling on people to go meat-free one day a week and cut carbon emissions.

In June, he launched his Meat Free Monday campaign asking households to cut out meat on Mondays and slow global warming.

"I think many of us feel helpless in the face of environmental challenges, and it can be hard to know how to sort through the advice about what we can do to make a meaningful contribution to a cleaner, more sustainable, healthier world," said McCartney at the time.

"Having one designated meat free day a week is actually a meaningful change that everyone can make, that goes to the heart of several important political, environmental and ethical issues all at once."

The links between meat and climate change have been know for years and a UN study three years ago showed that the livestock industry was responsible for 18 per cent of man's global greenhouse gas emissions, partly because of deforestation in the Amazon.

Reducing meat consumption didn't just slow climate change, he said, but would help to fight global hunger and improve the welfare of animals.

From 7 December, environment ministers and officials will meet in Copenhagen for the UN climate conference to thrash out a successor to the Kyoto protocol.

The conference will run for two weeks and the talks are the latest in an annual series of UN meetings that trace their origins to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which aimed at coordinating international action against climate change.

Meanwhile, commuters, workers, tourists, youths, families, and shoppers from all over Europe will this week have the chance to sign a UN petition urging governments to "seal an ambitious, effective and fair deal" in December to combat climate change globally.

People in Geneva, Brussels, Moscow, Vienna and Rome can "make a difference" by visiting the UN climate stand being held in train stations or city centres on 22, 23 and 24 September.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is leading the call for communities, businesses and individuals around the world to add their voices to the "Seal the Deal!" campaign during Global Climate Week from 21-25 September by signing the climate petition at interactive plasma stations.

"Time is running out. Scientists warn that climate impacts are accelerating. Now more than ever, we need political leadership at the highest level to ensure we protect people and the planet, and to catalyze the green growth that can power the 21st century economy," the UN Secretary-General stressed.

He added, "At a time of financial, social and environmental crisis, leaders need to put forward innovative solutions to re-boost our economies. As Sir [Nicholas] Stern pointed out if we don't act on climate change now, it could risk global GDP being up to 20 per cent lower than it otherwise might be.

"On the contrary, if we do invest one per cent of the same global GDP, we will get important return on investments in terms of jobs creation and economic wealth - it is for instance a fact now that renewable energy creates more jobs than fossil fuels. The UN climate change summit in Copenhagen is an opportunity that governments can not miss, not only to protect our planet and our health but also to seize the benefits of sustainable societies."

McCARTNEY CAME UP WITH HARRELSON'S ZOMBIE RUSE

Sir Paul McCartney turned spin doctor for pal Woody Harrelson when the actor hit the headlines for attacking paparazzi in New York in April - the Beatles star was the one who suggested the actor told reporters he thought the snapper was a zombie.

The movie star was reported to police after flying into a rage at La Guardia airport when a paparazzi cameraman refused to leave him and his daughter alone.

Harrelson was caught on camera attacking the unnamed man and smashing his equipment.

Shortly after the incident, the actor released a statement, in which he explained he was confused after spending days shooting new film Zombieland - and thought the cameraman was a member of the undead: "I flew to New York, still very much in character... I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie."

Harrelson now explains the ruse was dreamed up by McCartney.

He tells Playboy magazine, "That was Paul's idea... I was feeling awful about it (attack), and I ran into Sir Paul McCartney. We've been friends for a long time through our shared passion for veganism and many other issues. He's got such a great capacity for happiness.

"I told him what happened and also that I'd just finished this movie called Zombieland, and Paul said, 'That's it, man. Just tell the press you thought the cameraman was a zombie.' So that's what we went with."

On March 28, 2010, Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas sets sail from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale to fulfill the dreams of many Beatles fans. Onboard with be Britbeat, a Beatles tribute band who looks and sounds remarkably authentic.

Also along though are other special guests including:

* Jorie Gracen, renowed rock photographer and author of "Paul McCartney; I Saw Him Standing There"
* Nancy Lee Andrews, professional photographer and former girlfriend/fiance of Ringo Starr, author of "A Dose of Rock and Roll"
* Mary Pang, author/photographer and former girlfriend of John Lennon
* Paul Saltzman, photographer of "The Beatles In India"
* Shannon, the worlds greatest Beatles artist

Promoter Woody Lifton tells me they have over 80 cabins booked so far and are anticipating between 300 and 400 guests on board for the tribute cruise. "The best part will be the chance for Beatles Tribute Cruisers to get a chance to know and spend time with these celebrities" Lifton noted. Apparently this cruise presents significant advantages for Beatles followers allowing 6 days of contact time with the celebrities on board as opposed to 6 minutes at a land-based gathering.

Perhaps money can't buy you love, but it can sure buy you a cruise down memory lane.

For more information contact Woody Lifton via his website, www.BeatlesTributeCruise.com (and mention The Macca Report)

The 16-year-old performer caught up with DoSomething.org on the red carpet to chat about the importance of music education and spilled that she learned to play left-handed guitar with Paul McCartney.

Miley shared, "My dad [Billy Ray Cyrus] was one time hanging out with Paul McCartney and he's left-handed too. The only way you're going to learn left-handed guitar is from Paul McCartney. I learned right handed (too) so I could borrow guitars."

Paul McCartney voted Americans' favorite Beatle

Paul McCartney topped a poll of Americans' favorite Beatles, but nearly a quarter of those surveyed said they didn't like the British rock group.

And 3 percent of the 4,837 American adults questioned in the survey said they didn't know the Fab Four's music well enough to make a decision.

Nearly 30 percent of Americans questioned in the poll selected McCartney, compared to 16 percent who chose John Lennon, 10 percent for George Harrison and 9 percent for Ringo Starr.

"Americans over 30 and those over 65 love Paul," said John Zogby, the CEO of Zogby International which conducted the survey.

"It must be the crazy love songs and 'Yesterday'. Interestingly, John is the main answer for people who never go to church," he added.

The Beatles, arguably the most successful band ever, are enjoying a resurgence in sales as fans scramble for the group's reissues.

The Beatles sold 626,000 albums during the week ended Sept. 13, according to tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan, nearly as much as as their total. until last week, for this year.

"Abbey Road" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" were among the best sellers.

The Walt Disney Co has also said it would remake the band's 1968 animated movie "Yellow Submarine" in 3-D.

Zogby attributed McCartney's popularity to his looks, his longevity and the fact that he is still making music.

The 22 percent of people who said they didn't like the Beatles' music could be "group that would say no to everything," he added.

Most of those who were not familiar with the Fab Four's music were 70 or older.

When Beatlemania was first at its height, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr often said they had no idea whether their popularity would last for another six months or even as much as a year or two.

"It's not worth missin' your sleep for, is it?" Harrison said in 1963. Added McCartney: "We just hope we're gonna have quite a run."

This week, almost 40 years after the band split up, Beatles titles dominate the latest rankings of the nation's bestselling albums, signaling a new, if less hysteria-driven, wave of popularity for the Fab Four. The spike in popularity owes, of course, to the release last week of sonically upgraded CDs of all of the group's studio recordings and the arrival of .

The new and improved Beatles CDs sold 235,000 copies during their first two days in stores, and total first-week sales of the individual CDs and two box sets of the group's recordings were projected to be 500,000 to 600,000 copies, possibly higher.

That's welcome news for a beleaguered music industry, whose last significant uptick in sales came in the wake of Michael Jackson's death in June.

Beatles titles occupy nine spots in the Top 10 of Billboard's Pop Catalog Albums chart, which encompasses albums originally released more than 18 months ago (Jackson's "Number Ones," at No. 6, kept the Fab Four from a clean sweep of the Top 10); of the Top 20, 15 are Beatles albums.

When the tally of current albums is announced today, Jay-Z's "The Blueprint 3" and Miley Cyrus' "The Time of Our Lives" are expected to hold the No. 1 and 2 slots on Billboard's Top 200, with Beatles CDs taking four or five spots on the Top Comprehensive Albums rankings that combine current and catalog releases.

Many experts attribute the group's extraordinary longevity to one thing: the music.

"I would say first and foremost you have to credit the two main guys as songwriters," said "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell, one of today's leading arbiters of what flies and what doesn't in pop music. "That's really where it all stands up. This music has crossed every single generation, and doesn't sound like somebody that was locked in a certain decade. It still feels relevant."

"American Idol" has saluted the Beatles in past seasons, challenging contestants' interpretive abilities with songs that also have become fodder for serious academic exploration.

"Both John and Paul, and George for that matter, were extraordinary students of songwriting," said Chris Sampson, director of USC Thornton School of Music's new baccalaureate degree program in popular music. "You can tell in their writing they understood song form and songwriting craft from the Tin Pan Alley days, as well as early rock 'n' roll. They created music that drew from these traditions, but was capable of transcending them."

Few pop entertainers have maintained vibrant careers for much more than a decade. Yet the Beatles are expected to generate tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars in revenue from the CD reissues and the video game.

Their record in business matters has been far from perfect: When the group created Apple Corps in 1967 as a combination record label, film production company and merchandising operation, its retail store in London went out of business within a year, at a substantial financial loss.

Despite writing many of the most enduring songs of the 20th century, Lennon and McCartney discovered too late that publishing rights to most of the music they'd created had been sold out from under them. They were sold again in the 1980s to Jackson, whose estate still holds half interest in Sony/ATV Music Publishing. Annually, Beatles songs generate millions of dollars in publishing royalties.

There've been other missed opportunities: There was no 40th anniversary commemoration of the landmark "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album, and many believe the remastered CDs should have come out well before the format became an endangered species.

"I would have digitized the catalog years ago," said Jack Oliver, Apple Records president from 1969-71. "They could have made a billion bucks by now, couldn't they?"

Still, enough smart decisions were made by and for the Beatles that the four working-class lads from Liverpool became, and remain nearly half a century later, one of the most respected and profitable entities in entertainment history.

Savvy strategizing is evident from the group's beginnings. Early on, their manager Brian Epstein demanded a provision in their record contract requiring renegotiation of the terms whenever a new form of music playback technology emerged. Epstein also insisted that EMI Records, parent company of the label that first signed the Beatles, never sell their recordings at discount. Epstein had run a record shop before signing on as the Beatles' manager, and "he hated budget records," said Tony Bramwell, a key Beatles' associate for the length of their career. "He only stocked proper full-price releases, so that his customers would get their money's worth."

Consequently, "No Beatles release was ever sold at mid-price," noted Martin Lewis, who worked on publicity and marketing campaigns for the "Live at the BBC" and "Anthology" projects and the 2002 DVD reissue of "A Hard Day's Night." "He held out on that one thing, and he's proven to have been right. When Beatles material has been reissued, it has never seemed like it was cheap product."

The Beatles' entry into the digital world came relatively late, in 1987-88, but the release of the back catalog on CD effectively introduced the band to a younger generation of music consumers and resulted in a flurry of sales similar to what's happening with the remastering program. Since that time, various reissues have kept the band's legacy alive and commercially vibrant among longtime fans and new listeners.

Three double-CD "Anthology" sets returned the Beatles to the No. 1 position on Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart in 1995 and 1996. "After 'Anthology 1' came out," Lewis said, "they did a quick survey of the people who had purchased it, and much to the label's astonishment, something like 40% had gone to people under 40. They expected 10% to 15% tops."

Many younger fans have been introduced to the Beatles by their parents, or even their grandparents, but others discovered for themselves what Lewis calls the "exuberant optimism" in their music.

"In a world where most of the entertainment -- movies, TV shows, music -- is pretty soulless and created for the sole purpose of making a buck," Lewis said, "the Beatles offer something joyous, something exuberant and, at its heart, noble, and kids are savvy enough to sense that and say 'This is real.' "

In 2000, a new Beatles hits collection, "1," became one of the biggest sellers of the year and has since sold 11.5 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"They've shown tremendous business insight," said USC's Sampson. "Whether they labeled it as such, they knew that they could build a brand, and sustain it. They've been nurturing this brand extremely effectively for 40 years now."

The Beatles-based Cirque du Soleil show "Love" in Las Vegas, for instance, has drawn just under 3 million people since it opened in 2006, putting the quartet's life story, images and songs before significant numbers of people who weren't previously committed fans.

Likewise, licensing their music for The Beatles: Rock Band puts the band in step with the latest in entertainment technology and its predominantly young audience, while also giving older Beatles fans motivation to try their hands at video gaming.

"Over the last several weeks we've had the demo for Rock Band available in over 800 Best Buy locations," spokeswoman Erin Bix said, "and parents and their children are experiencing the game together. Rock Band is introducing the Beatles to a new generation of fans."

"They were very smart to combine the Rock Band with the CDs," said Chris Carter, host of the long-running radio show "Breakfast With the Beatles" that airs Sunday mornings on KLOS-FM (95.5), along with another version now on Sirius XM satellite radio. "You're hitting both generations and blending them together."

Bruce Spizer, author of several highly regarded Beatles chronologies, said, "If you look back at the Beatles' career, there's always a great synergy between Beatles and whatever was happening in the culture.

"The Beatles didn't invent drug culture," Spizer said. "The Beatles didn't invent the peace movement, but the Beatles gained things from that and then put back things into it. Here again, the Beatles aren't going to save the gaming industry, but they are giving it a nice shot in the arm. The record industry too: Once again, they're doing a lot to help keep it alive."

Huntsmen 'filmed on McCartney deer sanctuary'

Anti-hunt activists claimed today that they filmed huntsmen trespassing on Sir Paul McCartney's deer sanctuary.

The footage was taken by the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS), which members claim shows the Quantock Staghounds on Sir Paul's estate in St John's Wood, near Bampton in Somerset.

The hunters appear to chase a herd of deer across land owned by LACS, and then use two hounds to flush a stag out of St John's Wood (WEBMASTER NOTE: They were not in St. John's Wood, London... Somerset is southwest England).

Sir Paul bought the 87-acre pine wood with his late wife, Linda McCartney, in 1991 with the purpose of protecting the wild deer by providing an area where the staghounds could not enter.

Paul Tillsley and Graham Hyde, monitors for LACS, witnessed and recorded the alleged incident.

Mr Tillsley told the Western Daily Press: "From our point of view it was clear that the hunt was pursuing the stag.

"But more clear cut was the trespass that occurred in St John's Wood."

Avon and Somerset Police said they had not received any reports of illegal activity following the alleged incident last Thursday.

LACS plans to post the footage of the hunt on the video sharing website YouTube so the public could view it.

A LACS spokesman added: "The Quantock Staghound Hunt need to realise that more than three quarters of the public support the ban on hunting and have no appetite for it being repealed.

"It is time they took up something more healthy than chasing animals across the countryside in some perverse sense of fun."

Nothing is Real: The Reanimation of the Beatles
Will the avatars become the new icons?

It's not the Beatles, but an incredible simulation.

In "Love," the Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas spectacular based on The Beatles' music, there's a brief scene as odd as it is affecting: a shadow-play "conversation" between the group members, pieced together from snippets of recording studio banter.

Though the moment is fleeting, it's clear from the shadow projections which Beatle is which ­ a sign of just how ingrained the images of John, Paul, George and Ringo are in many of us. While touching ­ it's the Beatles' "cameo" in the show they inspired ­ there's a certain eeriness and sadness attached even as the audience wants the illusion to go on.

Last week's release of The Beatles: Rock Band and news that "Yellow Submarine" is set to be remade by Disney using 3-D performance capture technology, mark two giant steps in not only the continuing revival of the group, but its reanimation.

But for generations that didn't grow up steeped in Fab Four lore, will the Beatle avatars become the new icons?

Even when the group was together, there were attempts to capture the magic in other forms, such as in the goofily fun 1960s Saturday-morning cartoon, and, of course, in the trippy 1968 animated feature "Yellow Submarine." The 1970s Broadway show "Beatlemania," which featured lookalikes playing the group's songs, promised "an incredible simulation."

Some three decades later, technology is providing the means to make good on the "incredible simulation" pledge. Rock Band, whatever one thinks of video games, does as good a job as can be expected in capturing the group members at different point in their journey as a band.

The "Yellow Submarine" reboot is being directed by Robert Zemeckis, who first used the performance capture technique in the at times exhilarating "Polar Express" (let's hope they techies since have made strides toward putting a little life in the characters' eerie eyes). Zemeckis has an obvious kinship to the Beatles: he used what's now ancient screen wizardry to insert John Lennon into 1994's "Forest Gump," and he directed the charming 1978 comedy "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Other than providing the music (no small contribution, of course), the Beatles had little to do with the original "Yellow Submarine," other than mugging for the camera in a short live-action coda. It's unclear whether Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will lend their bodies or voices to the remake, though the prospect seems unlikely.

But if recent patterns hold, the duo ­ and the families of Lennon and George Harrison ­ no doubt will be intimately involved in overseeing the project, as they were in the creation of Rock Band.

More than money, the tight control exerted over the Beatles' property is about protecting and extending their legacy. Even with the release last week of the remastered Beatles CDs, the music promotion game has changed. McCartney recently said his motivation for allowing Rock Band to go forward was making sure "our music is getting played."

McCartney just wrapped an incredible U.S. tour. Starr most recently hit the road last year. Both are still making music, but are pushing 70. They clearly realize new platforms are needed to keep the Beatles' music alive without them.

If Rock Band seems like a natural way to reach teens, the "Yellow Submarine" remake appears aimed at attracting younger kids ­ much like the original film, which hooked many of us too young to remember the Beatles as a group.

The images these and future generations retain of the band, whether as animated videogame figures, CGI-like movie characters or as flesh-and-blood humans who revolutionized music, remains to be seen. As Harrison liked to say, in a quote featured on the poster for the original "Yellow Submarine": "It's all in the mind, y'know."

Or as Lennon told us in "Strawberry Fields Forever": "Nothing is real."

Still, in whatever form it's delivered, we'll always have the music ­ which is a lot more satisfying and lasting than grasping at shadows.

Connection between Beatles, Cheap Trick is deep

The connection between The Beatles and Cheap Trick is deep.
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On the day one of his sons was born, Cheap Trick guitarist and songwriter Rick Nielsen was working with John Lennon on his final album.

"We smoked Cuban cigars and toasted my son," Nielsen explained.

The left-handed 1960 Les Paul that Paul McCartney plays to this day? Nielsen sold it to McCartney years ago.

"It was one of only three made," he said.

Need more?

When Cheap Trick went into the studio to record "Ain't That A Shame," legendary Beatles' producer, Sir George Martin, was in the producer's seat with longtime Beatles' engineer Geoff Emerick at the soundboard.

Oh, yeah, let's not forget Cheap Trick's often Beatlesque, ringing harmonies, or Nielsen's ability to write a pop song that stands the test of time well - "Surrender," "I Want You To Want me" or "The Flame," for example.

Now, Nielsen and his bandmates are preparing for an extraordinary nine-gig stay at the Hilton in Las Vegas - Sept. 13 to 15, 17 to 19, and 21 to 23 - where they will do something The Beatles were never able to do - perform "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" live.

"The Beatles said that was one of the reasons they split up, this stuff was next to impossible to do live," Nielsen said. "Throw in four guys from the Midwest (Cheap Trick hails from Rockford, IL) who don't know any better ..." and the show becomes a reality.

This isn't the first time the band has performed the album from opening track to the closing, crashing final E-major chord, struck by all four Beatles simultaneously. The band performed it at the Hollywood Bowl on the 40th anniversary of the album's release, then again at a fundraiser for prostate cancer research.

Nielsen followed all propriety before accepting the date at the Hollywood Bowl.

"I asked for George's (Martin's) blessing," he said. "I went to his house for lunch. He cooked chicken."

He acknowledges the impact that album had on a generation of music fans and musicians.

"If it weren't for some of that music, a lot of us wouldn't be playing," he said.

During the shows at the Hilton, Cheap Trick will be joined on stage by five backup singers - including Ian Ball from the band Gomez and Joan Osborn - as well as an orchestra conducted by Edward Outwater, plus a host of Indian musicians, who will assist on George Harrison's insightful "Within You, Without You."

"Unlike some musicians who attempt stuff like this, we didn't develop English accents on the way to Las Vegas and won't wear Manuel satin suits," Nielsen said.

He said the simplest way to approach a project like this is to simply play a role reversal game, asking himself, "How would George Harrison play my part on Cheap Trick Trick songs?"

He said it was the same when he and Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos worked with Lennon on his final album.

"When I worked with John Lennon it wasn't like 'Mr. Lennon,' it was 'Hey, John,' musician talking to musician," he said. "He said, 'Hey, I wish you'd played on 'Cold Turkey' instead of (Eric) Clapton. He choked.' So, you don't want to go out there and play some blues solo in front of something millions and millions of people have heard.

"Let's put it into some perspective. I worked with Lennon. Bun E. worked with Lennon and knows Ringo (Starr) and Ringo knows Bun E. They're both Ludwig (drum) endorsers. It's not like we're on some different planet."

Cheap Trick has always had the reputation of being a good, solid, hard-working band.

I remember doing a piece on Kiss many years ago. Gene Simmons introduced me to Nielsen and Robin Zander, lead vocalist for the band, backstage before a concert in Portland.

"These guys are good and they work their asses off every night," Simmons, who is known for a fairly strong work ethic himself, said at the time.

The show will also include some pieces from The Beatles' epic "Abbey Road."

As he talks about it, Nielsen gets animated, singing bits of "Carry That Weight" while alternating between a sound-poem of sorts as he mimics the final guitar duel of the album's climax, "The End."

When asked if he would be dueling himself on the guitar leads in that song he said, "No."

"We also have Bill Lloyd from (the band) Foster-Lloyd) who has been a rhythm/lead guitar player, is the curator of the Country Music Hall of Fame and knows every song played by every band in every key," Nielsen said. "He's like Paul Shaffer, only on guitar and better-looking.

"Because I sold McCartney that guitar, I'll do his stuff, Lloyd does George and Robin does Lennon."

Pepperland will never be the same.

The Beatles' remasters top the charts here, there and everywhere

Beatlemania has conquered the world once again with the Fab Four's remastered albums set to reach No 1 from Liverpool to Tokyo

It's 1964 all over again ­ Beatlemania 2.0 is making its effects felt at cash registers over the world. From Liverpool to Tokyo, buyers are snatching up the Beatles' remastered albums ­ and even the £170 ($283.00) box sets.

In the UK, the Beatles will dominate this week's album charts based on only one day of sales (plus pre-orders). According to the Official Charts Company, Liverpool's finest will have five albums in the top 20 ­ and 15 in the top 75 ­ led by Abbey Road and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In their first day on the market, retailers sold more than 6,000 copies of the Beatles stereo box set ­ helping the expensive package into the UK top 20.

"[The Beatles] are likely to dominate the album charts over the next few weeks and set a new record ... for the most albums in the charts by the same artist at any one time," a HMV spokesperson told Billboard.

In Germany the box set is the top seller for both Amazon.de and internet retailer JPC. German shops are unable to keep up with demand ­ and EMI is reportedly back-ordered for weeks. "I suspect that EMI did not expect such a boom in Germany and is now having trouble keeping up with demand," a spokesperson for Hamburg's Hanse-CD told Billboard.

It's a similar story in France, where the stereo box set is at No 1 on Amazon, in Canada, where the Beatles occupy the top 15 spots on HMV's charts, and in Japan, where the imported stereo set is HMV Shibuya's biggest seller. "Japan has been hit hard by Beatlemania," said a spokesperson for HMV Japan.

The only sign of weakness is in the much-hyped The Beatles: Rock Band video game, which has not even broken into the top 10 on Amazon.co.uk. Rock Band and other deluxe video games have suffered over the last year due to their high price.

We know it's an idea we explored before but with the avalanche of material arriving ­ what better time to go back and update our list of favorite Beatles riffs and licks?

With the staggering new box set of remasters, limited-edition mono collection and the opportunity to play along with John, Paul, George and Ringo on "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game ­ maybe even the long-awaited arrival of the band's back catalog on iTunes ­ it's like we're going through Beatlemania all over again. Not bad for a band that broke up 40 years ago.

And with 13 original studio albums and no less than 206 songs to traverse through, it's not a job we took lightly. The Beatles had a long relationship with Gibson guitars and it wasn't easy picking just a few standout moments when the two icons came together.

This is hardly a definitive list ­- just think about it as the opening round of a conversation we hope readers will continue in the comments section below.

"Day Tripper"

There's a reason why this Lennon-McCartney is one of the first riffs most aspiring players pick up ­ with its light blues touch and heavy melodic punch courtesy of George Harrison's ES-345 it's the ultimate Beatles guitar tune. It's probably the only one that has been covered by everyone from The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Otis Redding to Nancy Sinatra and "American Idol" champ David Cook.

"Come Together"

Paul McCartney's sinister bass riff pulls you into this swampy rock classic but it isn't until one of the group's three matching sunburst Epiphone Casinos, reportedly bought on John Mayall's advice, kicks in midway through that song really bursts to life. Fittingly, it was the last song the quartet cut together.

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

George Harrison wrote it but invited his good friend Eric Clapton to take the lead after the Beatles' version failed to take off. Using Harrison's red Les Paul, "Lucy," Clapton puts in the solo of his career with a eye-popping tone and cascading blues fills.

"Paperback Writer"

As The Beatles splashed stretched out their creative ambitions, Harrison took the opportunity to flex his guitar muscle via his cherry red 1964 Gibson SG Standard. The volume and distortion adds a nice counterbalance to McCartney's sticky-sweet melody and the backing vocals that consisted and Paul and John reciting the children's rhyme, "Frère Jacques."

"Rain"

Originally designated as a b-side, this raucous tunes has proven to be one of the Beatles most timeless recordings. A good deal of the credit can be given to Harrison's tough but tender lead guitar work using his 1962 Gibson Les Paul SG Standard. The six-strings even sound good during that flashback-inducing backwards bit at the end.

"Something"

Another classic Harrison composition, this time featuring his own masterful fret work. It took 52 takes to get it to sound just right but the lush guitar solo played on his 1966 Gibson Les Paul Standard SG easily makes the whole thing worth it.

"Revolution"

One of the Beatles' most primal moments on record ­ a rarity for a band that rarely let go by 1968 ­ this zeitgeist-capturing track features Harrison fuzzing-out a 1957 Gibson Les Paul Standard over Lennon's 1965 Epiphone Casino. Without this track, Black Sabbath might have sounded like Anne Murray.

Sir Paul McCartney still can't believe he and his fellow Beatles survived the swinging sixties - because they took so many drugs and often couldn't even think straight.

The Yesterday singer admits the Fab Four overused narcotics during their heyday and often fell asleep recording musical masterpieces they composed while high.

In an exclusive interview with U.S. news show Entertainment Tonight, he says, "(We were) overdoing substances and really getting crazy, as we all were... (We'd be) falling asleep - the kinda thing when you can hardly get your head off the pillow. You go, 'Woah, I'd better get my head off this pillow.'"

But one drug-induced state inspired McCartney to write Beatles classic Let It Be.

He adds, "I had a dream, where my mother, who had been dead, by then, 10 years came to me in the dream and was very sort of helpful and very calming, and it was lovely just to see her... and she said, 'Don't worry about it... Let it be.'

"I went, 'OK', and I felt so good... and I woke up and wrote Let It Be. I thought, 'That's a good idea for a song.'"

Since their break-up, almost 40 years ago, they have become more than just a pop group, they have become a British institution, become part of our cultural fabric along with Diana, Princess of Wales, Big Ben, warm beer and cricket on the village green. Digitally remastered versions of all the Beatles' albums were released this week, replacing the anemic CDs currently available. That same day brought the release of the video game The Beatles: Rock Band, which will undoubtedly create yet another generation of fans.

With a few exceptions, such as the Marx Brothers, it is rare for groups to enter cultural history, but artistically the Beatles represent Britain as much as Shakespeare and Dickens. Like them, they wrote for a popular audience and like them they conquered the world. The Americans embraced the Beatles even more fully than the British, but they added them to the pantheon of Hollywood stars; they made them into inaccessible, remote gods; a blank canvas on which to play out teenage dreams and fantasies. In Britain the Beatles always had a deeper cultural meaning. In Britain they were real people.

Their cheeky humour ­ John Lennon telling the audience at a Royal Command Performance that the people in the expensive seats should rattle their jewellery ­ was immediately recognisable from The Goon Show, ITMA and the Carry On films. Their lyrics, which were in no way modified for a foreign audience, name-checked British politicians ­ Mr Wilson, Mr Heath ­ and grumbled about the high taxes the group were paying. They had the British love of double-entendre beginning in August 1960, when they changed their name from the Silver Beetles to the Beatles. They called one LP Rubber Soul, which was also on a shoe, and named its follow up, Revolver. "Do you get it?" asked Paul McCartney to a group of us gathered in Ringo Starr's flat. We didn't. "People will think it's a gun, but its more obvious than that. It's something that revolves: a record!" We all groaned, but McCartney just laughed.

The Beatles jump-started the Sixties and everything from Mary Quant and Twiggy, James Bond movies, the Mini and the mini-skirt seems, in the public mind, to have started with Beatlemania so that now they symbolise the entire decade: black and white newsreel footage of the Fab Four bounding down the steps of a BEA jet whose livery has been changed by the addition of TLES to its name; the four mop-tops on stage doing the deep Beatle bow; Dezo Hoffman's jumping Beatles; the Beatles with the Queen, with the Prime Minister. The decade peaks in 1967 with the Beatles as psychedelic princes in their Sgt. Pepper finery, or singing All You Need is Love on the first global satellite television link-up to an international audience of 500 million viewers. Old-age Beatles in their long hair and beards complete the decade with John and Yoko staging bizarre events to promote world peace.

Tourists who have seen Dickens only on TV, and have never read a line of Shakespeare, dutifully visit their shrines. The Beatles, too, have religious sights. The zebra crossing on Abbey Road and the Cavern Club in Liverpool are a solid part of the general tourist itinerary. In Liverpool, Paul McCartney's, and John Lennon's family houses are now owned by the National Trust, restored as they were in the early Sixties.

The musical development of the Beatles was astonishing, moving from the jolly romp of Please Please Me to the abstract mysteries of Revolution 9 in only six years. Each album was a musical advance, but as well as breaking new ground, they made sure they brought their fans along with them. They were a formidable presence, a roadblock that no other group could ignore. No sooner had George Harrison used a sitar on a record than the Rolling Stones had one too. The Beatles used feedback: heavy metal was invented. They used backwards tapes and across London psychedelic bands puzzled over how to copy them.

McCartney's tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows stumped everyone. They had reached the limits of EMI's antiquated technology. It was a track that can never be remixed because it was mixed as it happened. I was one of the people scattered across EMI in studios and cutting rooms, keeping a small tape loop taut against a tape recorder playback head by spooling the other end around a jam jar. The information was patched into the mixing desk of the producer, George Martin, and he faded in and out, superimposing and overlapping the sounds of speeded-up guitars that McCartney had created in his bedroom on a pair of tape recorders. Three days after the release of Sgt Pepper, Jimi Hendrix had learnt the title track and played it at the Saville Theatre. (McCartney, sitting in the audience, said he had never been so flattered in his life.)

Do they deserve this fame? It was exceptional in the early Sixties for anyone in a group to be a songwriter, so for a group to have three was astonishing: George Harrison's Something is one of the world's greatest love songs; McCartney's Yesterday has been recorded by more than 3,000 other artists. Their range of subject matter goes from Lennon's existential classic Nowhere Man to McCartney's mini-operas such as Eleanor Rigby, or She's Leaving Home, exploring themes of loneliness and isolation in a three-minute pop song. The latter tune so moved Martin that he burst into tears when he first heard it.

The Beatles knew they were making something special. I remember walking down the corridor in Abbey Road and George Harrison ran up to me: "You should have been here last night. We recorded the story of this girl leaving home. It tells it really how it is, it'll make them understand!"

Most art forms began as popular entertainment: opera, photography, the cinema. The Beatles will last because they were the ones to take rock'n'roll and make it into art.

-- Barry Miles

September 10, 2009 -- Halifax News

McCartney banners going to the highest bidder - Profits will be donated to charity

The Paul McCartney street banners and bus boards are such hot commodities the promoter is giving them up for a charity auction.

Greg Cox of Power Promotions says people were calling from as far away as Missouri and California looking to buy them for as much as $500 each. Some even scaled 20-foot lampposts along Brunswick Street to get their hands on about 10 of them.

"That's when the light bulb went off and I said 'Maybe we should sell these suckers,'" Cox said. "Normally, street banners and bus boards end up in the trash. We recognized early, based on demand, that these had value. Donating them to charity was the obvious choice."

Never before have people been so hot after concert posters, he says, adding that he thinks it's because McCartney is so iconic.

"If you could compare him to any other performer, it would be the likes of Michael Jackson and perhaps U2," Cox said.

One fan told Cox at the concert he was keeping a $6 concessions ticket that said Paul McCartney on it as a souvenir. "Like anything with McCartney on it is of value to some of these people who enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he said.

Cox said Audrey McCombs was one of the people who bought a banner for a few hundred dollars. McCombs is the 19-year-old from California who made headlines and YouTube when McCartney called her up on the stage in the Halifax Common to sign her arm so that she could get it tattooed.

"She said 'I'm going to college. I've got this tattoo and I'd love to have one in memory of the night,'" Cox said.

The banners and bus boards were donated to The Arthritis Society. Heather Hanson, manager of development for The Arthritis Society, is excited about the donation.

"I went to the concert. Being there, I can appreciate how well the city (and concert goers) embraced Paul McCartney," she said. "I'm really thrilled."

With September being Canada's Arthritis Awareness Month, Hanson said the generous donation is also great timing and a fun and unique way to raise money for the organization. "Any time that you have a potential fundraiser like this, you also want to raise some awareness for your cause," she added.

The dates for the upcoming auction haven't been settled, but to check for updates, visit www.arthritis.ca.

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09.09.09 -- The Telegraph (UK)

Sir Paul McCartney admits 'We thought The Beatles would last couple of years'

Sir Paul said he was proud the band was "inter-generational".

On the day that the new Beatles computer game, The Beatles: Rock Band, is released, Sir Paul writes of his pride at the enduring popularity of the band.

Admitting he thought they would only be briefly popular, he said the band was proud that they were "inter-generational".

"Once upon a time there were these four boys who were born in Liverpool and were in a band together. In the 1960s they started making their own records and started making records and started writing their own songs," he wrote.

"They played concerts in Britain, Germany, and eventually America, where they had huge success. The records became so well known they were sung all over the world.

"More than four years on they are still sung all over the world. Those four lads are, of course, The Beatles."

He continued: "If you had told me that story when I was a kid in Liverpool writing that music, I simply would not have believed you.

"We thought, at best, The Beatles, would last a couple of years.

"When we got really successful we thought, if we were lucky, we might last for 10 years. And then things just got out of hand. Not it feels like The Beatles will go on forever."

He said it never ceased to be amazed at what happened with the band.

Paying tribute to the game, he said it was a "great thing and one way of getting the music out there in a new way".

"It's the modern age, it's something that's happening everywhere and I happen to like it," he wrote in The Sun.

"I like to embrace new things. The video game phenomenon is there, we had the option to take it on or turn our backs on it.

"We took a lot of convincing, but we went for it.

"And you know what? I'm really pleased with it."

Pandora: Get back: McCartney reunites with PR guru

Sir Paul McCartney is to reunite with former publicist, Stuart Bell

Following his split from Heather Mills, Sir Paul McCartney accomplished that celebrity rare feat: coming out of a divorce smelling of roses.

At the time the coup was widely credited to McCartney's astute publicist, the Outside Organisation's Stuart Bell.

So it was with some surprise that observers greeted news this summer that Bell was to take "gardening leave" from Outside, leaving Sir Paul in the capable but unfamiliar hands of the company's music director.

Now, however, it seems that the pair are to be reunited, with McCartney taking the bold step of shifting from Outside to Bell's new agency, DawBell, founded alongside Polydor Records' head of publicity Richard Dawes. Indeed, it is thought that McCartney approached the pair about the move, preferring as he does to work with a tried-and-trusted colleague. Bell is reluctant to be drawn on his high-profile new client, but confirms that he is once again working with the former Beatle. Billed as providing a more exclusive service, the DawBell promises to offer "a modern approach" that tackles all media forms.

"It's a bit more boutique," explains Bell. "People can work just with us, rather than using two or three agencies for different media."

How the Beatles got ready to conquer the world - again

With the release of music game The Beatles: Rock Band, the world's biggest group are going to find a whole new audience. Here, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono tell why they agreed to allow The Beatles to become interactive.

There are many ways you can get to see the youthful Paul McCartney these days ­ YouTube, BBC documentaries, the short films that come with the Beatles' newly remastered CDs ­ but the best way is the Paul McCartney Soundcheck Package.

McCartney demonstrated this a few weeks ago at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. It was 4pm, and there were about 80 people in the stadium. A few of these were lighting and sound engineers, but most were competition winners from local radio stations and fans who had paid extra for a VIP experience. McCartney smiled a lot as he played songs from Hamburg (Matchbox, Honey Don't), songs from the Cavern (All My Loving), songs from Top of the Pops (C Moon, Let 'Em In) and songs from his schooldays (Leaning on a Lamppost). The years fell away, and his performance was staggeringly good. A woman in our tiny gathering unfurled a multicoloured sign which read, "Please can you sign my Hofner?", but McCartney was far too busy having fun. Before he sang Leaning on a Lamppost, he explained that George Harrison had given him his ukulele, and before he left the stage he said: "This is a new one" as he began singing Yesterday.

When it was over he had a little chat with his band and security men, and wandered around. Catering staff said: "How ya doin', Sir Paul?" as he passed, and he said: "Good." He posed for a photograph with a young fan in a Beatles T-shirt. He came up to me and said: "I saw you were taking notes," and I said I had been. One of my notes read: "Two TV monitors, one by microphone at front stage, other further back by piano stool. Autocues scrolling lyrics. The words I saw: He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the lights had changed."

McCartney invited me to his trailer behind the stage. His girlfriend, Nancy Shevell, was preparing iced tea in a large wine glass, and McCartney was sitting with his feet curled under him on a sofa. His dyed brown hair was not as unnerving in reality as it can appear in photographs. The trailer looked like a Middle Eastern souk ­ rugs on the walls, rich embroidery, sweet candles burning on low tables. I told him how much I had enjoyed the previous evening's show (the first of two nights at the same venue), and he said that he was aware he had found his groove again.

McCartney is 67, and his creativity and thumbs-up enthusiasm continue to surpass all reasonable expectations, but he learned long ago to face universal truths. Last night's concert had been a mixture of very popular music from half a century, but it was clear that the one thing his fans loved above everything else was songs by the Beatles. They whooped during a few Wings numbers (especially for the synchronised fireworks at the loud bits on Live and Let Die), but nothing approached the delight they showed for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Hey Jude, Get Back, Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road.

Above all, his fans went nuts for Yesterday, and they will go nuts for Yesterday forever. McCartney is happy playing the old stuff. As he explained to the Boston Globe that week, "It's like a comedian. You can tell any joke you want, but the ones that they laugh at are probably the ones you should keep in the act."

There may be several predictable reasons for McCartney's newly energised enthusiasms ­ the fresh girlfriend, the great reception for his tour ­ but there is also an unconventional one. His old band, the most important in the history of music, is about to be reborn through what was once the most reviled of art forms and the sad province of adolescent dead-enders ­ the videogame.

The Beatles: Rock Band is released this week amid expectation comparable to the release of The White Album. There isn't any new music, but there is a new way of experiencing it, and a new audience ready to receive it. Now a player may not only hear the youthful McCartney, but become him. And when he or she becomes bored with Paul, there's always John, George or Ringo. In this way, the adventure of pop music is being reinvented.

"We've made the Beatles music," says McCartney as he sips his tea. "It's a body of work. That's it for us ­ it's done. But then what happens is that somebody will come up with a suggestion"

The suggestion for a videogame came from George Harrison's son Dhani in the winter of 2006, when he met the head of MTV on holiday in the Caribbean. MTV had just bought Harmonix, the leading music videogames company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"So we go, 'What is it? Why?'" McCartney continues. "Because one thing we don't want to do is just do naff ideas." McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono (known collectively and disconcertingly as "the Shareholders") began to meet people from Harmonix the following year, and McCartney remembers a meeting at Abbey Road in the spring of 2007 in which Harmonix staff demonstrated what they had done for veteran rockers Metallica.

There were "a couple of grown-ups standing looking very foolish with these little plastic guitars playing to a screen", he says. "And we're going, 'Yeah, all right It just looks like a really bad band.' They said: 'We really can do a great one with the Beatles, and we'll show you.' So Ringo and I got a bit intrigued. They said: 'Look, the thing is, if we get it right, these things are very, very popular.' And we go, 'Yeah, well, we know, because our kids and the young people we know do it.'"

McCartney's scepticism gently lifted. "The scepticism is in order not to make a terrible mistake," he explained. "We go, 'no, no,' and we're really down on it, and they've really got to prove themselves. We won't go, 'Oh, that's nice go on boys, you just do it.' We guard the flame a bit. But then they did come back one day and they had something. They were playing our songs, they had some visuals that were half-working, and the penny dropped. We went, 'You know what? This could be pretty cool.'"

The Beatles: Rock Band works on the same principles as other interactive music games. You insert a disc into a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or Wii console, you strap on a replica guitar or sit at plastic drums, and you play along to a popular song on the television screen. The song is programmed to respond to your performance: the more tunefully you sing, or the more accurately you press the buttons on the fretboard and hit the drums, the more points you get. The screen displays not only the lyrics, but a long sequence of cues to tell you when to hit or strum, with the coloured notes on the screen corresponding to buttons on your guitar. It is the digital version of the pub or campfire singalong, the 21st-century upgrade of the Victorian family parlour concert. If you play well, you get mellifluous music that sounds like your heroes. If you sing out of tune, your friends may walk out on you.

The Beatles: Rock Band takes things further. There are 45 songs to choose from, soon to be augmented by downloadable albums (in the following months you can get complete versions of Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper's and Rubber Soul). There are vocal harmonies, a complex innovation. There is very lovely animation that plays before the music begins and in the background after you start playing. There are six venues at which the songs are played (Cavern Club, Ed Sullivan Theatre, Shea Stadium, Budokan, Abbey Road and the Apple Corps Savile Row Rooftop). There is an elaborate system of gathering points to unlock rare audio and visual material from the Apple archives. And then there is the significant fact that the Beatles have never involved themselves in anything like this before. "They've done it very respectfully, and so they should," McCartney tells me. "Not just because you should respect the Beatles, but mainly because there are a lot of people out there who are going to notice if you don't."

I ask McCartney whether he's played it yet.

"I haven't, actually. I'm kind of, you know, looking forward to playing it. My excuse is, I play guitar. I was on the real record. So the idea of pushing buttons and things in time is kind of slightly intriguing for me, but it's actually more interesting to do a show like this" He motions to the stage beyond his trailer, where his support band MGMT are playing to a swelling audience.

I wonder what John and George would have made of The Beatles: Rock Band. "I think they would have been amused," McCartney says. "I think they would have seen the point of it. For us, let's remember that the central thing is our music is getting played. That's the bottom line. I'm sure John and George would have thought, 'Hey, what a clever idea.'"

Two miles from McCartney's show, the people who made the game are talking it up with pride and amazement. Harmonix is on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, just down the road from Harvard. The office sits between a pharmacy and a Get in Shape For Women studio, a series of rooms that resembles something closer to a student dorm than a company valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. (MTV bought Harmonix in 2006 for $175m, but has since paid almost $500m in additional bonuses.)

In one of the rooms, decorated with a large framed poster of the Beatles, Alex Rigopulos, the co-founder, and Paul DeGooyer, senior vice president of MTV's games division, are discussing their hopes for what may be their most lucrative game to date. "Everyone knows of the Beatles," Rigopulos says, "but there's this whole generation for whom the music isn't personal, it isn't close to them. And for that younger audience we're delivering this incredible music in the most impactful way imaginable. In a way, it's a relaunch." Rigopulos and DeGooyer are aware of their coup: now that the biggest band of all have entered the arena, it has not only created a whole new series of marketing possibilities, but has legitimised their industry. It marks the precise point at which music videogames come of age.

Harmonix began in 1995 as a concept at MIT's Media Lab. Its first clients were theme parks, and it entered the domestic market with a computer mouse that could also serve as a musical instrument on primitive games. Rock Band was only launched at the end of 2007, but already its retail sales in north America have exceeded $1bn, and gamers have downloaded more than 40 million songs for $1.99 each. As the company's co-founder Eran Egozy said recently, the delivery of rock music has just entered a new phase. There was vinyl, the cassette, the CD, digital downloads and now there is the downloadable digital interactive computer track. "It's a launching point for how we see the future of music evolving."

Harmonix has competition. Guitar Hero, made by Activision but originally developed by Harmonix, was launched in 2005 and has since sold more than 25 million copies, making it the market leader. But with the Beatles in its stable, Harmonix believes it has pulled off the ultimate coup.

Songs by the Rolling Stones and the Who were already on Rock Band, but neither of those bands were controlled by the byzantine structure that is Apple Corps Ltd, the company that has handled all of the Beatles' creative activity since 1968. But Apple has always had a canny eye for the innovative and the lucrative, and a neat way of relaunching the Beatles for each new generation (the last time it was the exhaustive Anthology project in 1995). The main problem was not the concept but the technicalities. "Apple said to us, 'We don't even want to talk about this any more unless you come up with a solution to separating out some of the earlier songs,'" DeGooyer remembers.

Rock Band requires each of the main instruments to be played in isolation, but on the Beatles early hits the drums and guitars would often be recorded on the same piece of tape. Dhani Harrison believed that the CIA would have some sort of technology to separate them, but in the end a solution was proffered by a company in Cambridge, England, called Cedar. There was also the problem of security. Apple would not permit the Beatles' master recordings to leave the studio vaults, much less travel to Boston, so once the tracks had been separated out they then had to be encrypted.

In the summer of 2007, Harmonix received five songs to play with: I Want to Hold Your Hand, Helter Skelter, Taxman, Revolution and Here Comes the Sun. The plan was for Harmonix to show how the game might work, and to conceive a rough idea of how an animated Beatles might look on screen. The songs came with instructions. "Apple gave us some guidelines to stick to," says Josh Randall, Harmonix's creative director. "They said it needs to feel analogue, it needs to feel British, and even though it's a videogame, it shouldn't feel computery. But we should also try to make something new ­ not just go back and rehash the old stuff."

In the end, the visual team produced a presentation based around Day Tripper, which was the first the Beatles saw of the game when they gathered at Abbey Road in summer 2008. "From each of them there were just tons and tons of ideas," says Rigopulos. "They said: 'Oh, you could do this, you could do that, you could do this'"

"We did get very hands-on," McCartney says. "We said: 'Show us everything ­ how does it work?' They said: 'If you attain a degree of efficiency you'll then get points, and your prize will be trivia facts about the Beatles.' I said: 'Oh great ­ show us them.' So they showed me one and I went, 'Oh, that's wrong.' It was the first one up.

"Some things you just do 'em: somebody's doing a book or something ­ we'll help them, but it's not our responsibility. But this is going to go out in our name, so we really have to be careful."

According to Rigopulos, McCartney asked a lot of pointed questions. "He wasn't aloof at all. He really did care about accuracy. There were some ideas we had about mixing and matching times and places that intentionally disregarded historical accuracy, and he put his stake in the ground. We said: 'Maybe the rooftop concert can have songs performed that actually you guys didn't perform on the rooftop.' And he said: 'No. There are some things we can play with, but some aspects of the design we should be true to.'"

In the game, the Beatles are animated in imaginative ways. Given the band's history with Yellow Submarine, this will not be unfamiliar territory for the older player, but it caused a lot of heartache at Harmonix. McCartney is a keen fan of modern animation, not least because he watches films with his grandchildren and the five-year-old daughter he shares with Heather Mills. He felt that the early work was not hugely impressive.

"We said: 'Look, the eyes don't work.' They said: 'No, eyes are very hard to do.' Then: 'Wait a minute, John's too wooden' I started to say, 'Look, Shrek's good. There's this great thing, Arthur and the Invisibles, the Luc Besson film.' So I started to give them things to aim at."

Josh Randall says that all the Beatles and their wives were heavily involved. Talking on the phone from Henley-on-Thames, Olivia Harrison will tell me later that she thought there was a problem with the proportions in early drawings of George's face. "I started to look at photos to see where they went wrong. I thought they could capture those eyes, and get that little bit of a crooked smile." She had played the game with Dhani in LA and was eager to have another go in private. "It makes you appreciate music a little deeper. We don't have a band, but the music exists, and I don't see any harm in letting people have another way of experiencing it."

It was Yoko Ono who apparently caused the most problems with the game's designers. Alex Rigopulos remembers one visit to their office during which Ono reminded them how windy the rooftop concert was, necessitating changes to the band's hair. There were other corrections: "She would tell our animation guys how John would approach the mic, how heavy his eyes would be, giving them quite a hard time. But at the end she said to them, 'It's OK ­ I'm an artist too.'"

From Tokyo, by email, Yoko later responds to my questions. "We, especially Olivia and I, were very caring about how the images of the Beatles were represented, as well as the music," she says. "The Harmonix people were keen to involve us. I think they were really happy that we wanted to integrate ourselves so much into the project."

She hasn't had time to play the game, but promises to "explore it properly" when she finishes promoting her new album. "As a parent myself, I am very aware of the highly educational aspect of this game," she says. "It will inspire and encourage the young generation to be intimately involved in music making. You can't ask for more. It will be another musical revolution created by the Beatles to make our planet a planet of music."

The last key figure in the making of the game was Giles Martin, the son of George Martin. His remixing of the Beatles hits for the Love project (the Beatles collaboration with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas) had earned him the trust of the band, and he acted as the middleman between Apple and Harmonix, helping to select tracks for the game and create new precise endings for songs that had previously faded out. He too was initially suspicious of the idea. "I was thinking, 'Am I making a Beatles Zippo lighter or a Beatles plastic tray?' I was snooty about it at first ­ 'Oh God, we're just making a game.' There's part of me, being a musician, that wants to say, 'Why don't you go and play a proper guitar and not play a plastic one?' But what I do like about it is that it makes us listen to the music again and again, in the way that we used to when we bought albums. As opposed to having 3,000 songs on your iPod which you flick through with obsessive button pressing. These days we do hear a lot of music, but we don't actually listen to it very often."

Giles Martin told me he was surprised, when he tried to play I Want to Hold Your Hand, at just how complex the bass line was. I knew what he meant. At the end of my first day at Harmonix, I entered the company's Star Chamber, where the games are tested. It is also the room where staff come to relax after a hard day's struggle with Ringo's cymbal crashes and George's eyelids.

Shortly before I was joined by publicity and other staff for a "concert", I picked up a replica of McCartney's Hofner bass propped up on a leather sofa. This had been designed on a slightly reduced scale by Matthew Reineck, who also makes real guitars. The Hofner and the scaled-down models of Lennon's Rickenbacker, Harrison's Gretsch and Ringo's Ludwig drums were plastic, but they felt OK in the hand. Reineck explained that McCartney's bass had been made with great attention to detail (Hofner had supplied a special sample of the wood grain), but there were also variations. Unlike the original, the guitar was designed for a right-handed player, and it came with a "whammy bar" to enable nice sustain effects and ensure "backwards compatibility" with other Rock Band games. "McCartney reviewed it halfway through the design process," Reineck said, "and he didn't have an issue with it." The Hofner will come bundled in a big box with Ringo's drums and a microphone with stand, and will retail for £180. The Rickenbacker and the Gretsch will each cost £90, while the game just on its own (requiring the use of older Rock Band instruments) will cost either £40 or £50 depending on the console.

As Reineck was talking, various people arrived in the room and strapped on their wireless guitars. One of them inserted a disk in the machine, and apologised for a slight technical glitch: the Rickenbacker had run out of batteries, a dilemma the Fab Four had rarely encountered. I was surprised how much visual information is displayed on the screen all at once ­ it was like a musical satnav. It helps if you have a big TV; in fact, it is hard to see how the game could have existed before we all went mad for massive flat screens. I was asked what song I fancied and I plumped for Sgt Pepper's, but as a singer. One man took pity on me and set the difficulty level to Easy. (The game has five levels: Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert and No Fail, the latter a sort of training-wheels option to ensure the cloth-eared are not discouraged.) The music began, that familiar chugging. I began singing ­ that familiar awful sound. But I was keen, and it was less fraught than regular karaoke (you don't have to be drunk for a start), and I became a part of the act I'd known for all these years.

I appeared to get the right words at the right time, and when the song ended (this took a while, as of course it segued into With a Little Help From My Friends) the screen showed I had scored 99 out of 100. Vaguely preposterous, but I had made my small contribution to unlocking a rare photograph of the Beatles in the studio with information about the first time they all sported moustaches, and once I had enough of these I would unlock some rare audio of the Beatles goading each other about messing up an intro.

Glowing with success, I had a shot at Get Back. Not so good; only 97%; the rare photograph of George Harrison playing sitar on Magical Mystery Tour would have to wait. Overall, I wasn't so sure this was a good hobby for a grown man. The future of music? Others seemed to think so.

I asked Olivia Harrison what George would have made of it. "I hate to say, but I know I'm his biggest fan and biggest critic, and I'm happy with it. I think they did a great job, and if I didn't like it I would feel very uncomfortable."

Yoko told me: "People are always asking me what John would have thought of our new technology ­ email being our standard way of communication now etc. He would have loved it all. He was always for new ideas to give inspiration and encouragement to the world. He would have been excited about the Rock Band concept, and very happy with how the music and the visuals of the Beatles were represented."

Given the likely success of Rock Band and the remastered catalogue, Marty Bandier, the chief executive of Sony/ATV publishing, said: "The fourth quarter will belong to the Beatles."

Backstage at Fenway Park, Paul McCartney is 90 minutes away from another night on stage. He is explaining how the Beatles got their look.

"When I was a kid, I went with my parents and my brother to Butlins Holiday Camp at Pwllheli. I had a vision what do you call it? An epiphany. I was by the swimming pool, and we were such a funny family, a little bit Alan Bennett. From a door in one of the buildings, I see four guys walk out in a line. They were all dressed the same. They all had grey crew-neck sweaters, tartan twat hats (as we used to call them, like the Kangols everyone wears now), tartan shorts, and a rolled white towel under their arm. They just walked, and I thought, 'Holy shit!' They were in the talent show. Then I went to see them in the talent show, and they wore grey zoot suits, and they were from Gateshead, and they won. And I totally remember that. So when we came to be the Beatles, I said: 'You know what?' and I told everyone about this epiphany. And so we ended up in suits and we all wore the same."

This was an unfamiliar yarn, and I was aware that McCartney had a reputation for reinterpreting history. Or perhaps his memory had become sharper as he aged. I said that I had always thought the look was Brian Epstein's idea. He said: "I don't think it was." He explained that the suits may have been Epstein's thing, as it was the only way they could get the better-paid gigs, but McCartney thought the idea of all looking the same was probably his own. "When we showed up at a gig, we would come in like this [regular street clothes], and then we'd get the boots and the suits, and suddenly we were the four-headed monster, and it was a very exciting feeling. We'd look at each other ­ wow! And we'd become more than the sum of the parts. We'd become the Beatles."

The show that night was terrific. Thirty-five thousand people had an epiphany of their own. The concert also marked another Beatles milestone, for as McCartney sang Got to Get You Into My Life, from 1966, the vast screen behind him showed an animated film of the Beatles from 2009. "The pictures you saw there are from this new Beatles Rock Band thing," he said. His fans clapped and whooped, because they had been presented with a new opportunity, the ability to recreate tonight's event at home. Batteries required, unsurpassed creative genius optional.
Yesterday's sound today

"The idea is to make the Beatles sound as good as they can," says Allan Rouse, talking at Abbey Road. He is the co-ordinator in charge of the digital remastering of the Beatles' back catalogue. This means that the Fabs' 12 albums, plus Magical Mystery Tour, which became part of the core catalogue when the first Beatles CDs were released in 1987, now boast a brighter, fuller sound. Some bad edits, dropouts and vocal pops are gone; but the odd cough, John muttering "fucking hell" during Hey Jude - this sort of thing remains. "De-noising" - removing analogue tape hiss - has only been applied to five of a total of 525 minutes worth of music. The release of the remastered CDs coincides with the arrival of Rock Band - "because," says Rouse, "the Beatles are for everyone, not just for people in the past."

It's one of the great unanswered questions of pop: why no Beatles on iTunes?

"We've been keen to do this for a while," Paul McCartney told OMM. "I met Guy Hands on a plane once. His crew bought EMI. I refer to them as Terracotta but I believe it's Terra Firma. I said: 'What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it.' And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, 'Now you recompense us for that.' And they're scared of that."

There may be other reasons. George Harrison's son Dhani said recently that there is a disagreement over the pricing of Beatles songs; there are hints too that the band have considered setting up their own download store. The official response from EMI is: "We would love to see the Beatles' music on sale in digital stores."

The Beatles: Rock Band and the Beatles' remastered albums are out on September 9.

The Beatles Original Catalog - Digitally Remastered (Apple/Capitol/EMI). 5 stars.

Somewhere John Lennon has got to be getting a kick out of this 9-9-09 stuff.

The late Beatle, who famously loved the No. 9, is being showcased along with his Liverpool mates on a date that could not have been more perfectly selected.

On the same day as a new generation of Beatles' fans gets a heavy dose of what the Fab Four were all about through "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game, the group is also releasing - at long, long last - digitally remastered versions of all its studio albums originally issued on vinyl in the U.K. between 1962 and 1970.

For reasons that mere mortals may never quite understand the catalog of the world's most famous band had sounded mostly like rubbish since 1987, when the Beatles' works were officially released on CD. The sound was abysmal compared with the original vinyl masterpieces (especially those luxurious Japanese vinyl pressings) and it took them so long to finally fix the problem that it was worth wondering whether the CD age itself would be over before the job got done.

Mercifully, thanks to a team of engineers working at London's Abbey Road Studios for the past four years, the long wait is over. The results are brilliant. How to compare? Let's put it this way: If you've been listening to just CD versions of the Beatles' music during the past two decades and you suddenly hear these remasters, you'll probably feel like you've wasted years with your head under a pillow deep under water while trying to decipher the greatest music of the 20th Century. It's that big a difference.

Now, voices no longer sound shrill, but alive and exuberant. Just check out the splendor of those Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison three-part harmonies in songs like "This Boy," "And Your Bird Can Sing," or "Because." Strings in tracks like "I Am The Walrus" and acoustic guitars in ballads such as "And I Love Her," sound like they're being played live inside your head. Horns jump out of "Savoy Truffle" turning even mediocre songs into essential listening. Electric guitar parts that always seemed muffled in songs like "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey," are suddenly blasting forth with joyous jolts of clarity and power. If all that's not enough, the bass guitar parts in particular are no longer rumbling and grey but deep and resonant and befitting the intricate, melodic bass lines that McCartney brought to the band's music. Coupled with Ringo Starr's drumming they form a rhythm section that played a hugely underrated part in the Beatles' dynamic combination of grace 'n' fury.

The reissues are being presented in several different formats. For the record, the one being reviewed here is that comprising the individual 14 albums, featuring all 12 the Fab Four released in the U.K. between "Please Please Me" in 1963 and "Let it Be" in 1970. Trivia buffs are aware that while "Let it Be" was the last original album the band released, it was actually primarily recorded in early 1969, and "Abbey Road," recorded later that summer and released in late 1969 was the final album the Beatles ever recorded.

In other words, all of the music found on these extraordinary albums was recorded in just a shade more than seven years. Compare that with the recording frequency of most modern-day artists.

For financial reasons that have been well documented elsewhere, most of the early Beatles' albums in England featured more songs than their U.S. counterparts, which allowed Capitol Records in the States to release more Beatles' albums for several years.

So the 13th album in this set is "Magical Mystery Tour," which was originally released as a double E.P., in England but as a full album in America. Songs not found on the original British releases have been included here under the 14th title "Past Masters," a two CD set featuring plenty of classics like "Hey Jude" and "Day Tripper," as well as rarities like the German language versions of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You."

In addition to being released individually, the albums are also being packaged into a stereo box set, which also includes a DVD. The DVD features all the mini-documentaries concerning the albums which can be found for a limited time on the individual CDs. On the CDs they are playable only on a computer, so that partially explains the appeal of the DVD. Still, they are quite brief, just a few minutes for each album and while pleasant, they are hardly worth going overboard for.

Lastly there is also a mono box set for the more serious collector. That includes the unique mono mixes of the Beatles' first 10 albums (they stopped releasing albums in mono after "The Beatles" the 1968 set also known as "The White Album"). The mono box also includes "Mono Masters," which is similar in scope to "Past Masters." There are some bonuses with that box as well, notably 1965 stereo mixes for "Help!" and "Rubber Soul," just to make life a little more complicated.

But there can be little complication about judging the merits of the music.

The Beatles' debut "Please Please Me," was primarily recorded during a single day in February, 1963 and was essentially a chronicle of the group's stage show at the time. The Lennon and McCartney-penned title track was the band's first No. 1 record in England, but it would be another year before they hit it big in America with "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Their output was staggering, particularly thanks to the prodigious songwriting of Lennon and McCartney and the slow but steady growth of Harrison. The latter showed early promise in songs like "I Need You," off of 1965's "Help!" and the politically-charged "Taxman" from what was arguably the band's greatest album, 1966's "Revolver." By the time of "The White Album," and "Abbey Road," he was a major force with which to be reckoned, contributing songs that included "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," with Eric Clapton on lead guitar; the love song "Something;" and "Here Comes the Sun," which was one of the first pop songs to utilize the newest instrument of the era, the Moog synthesizer.

Not everything here is flawless. The Beatles' slipped slightly in the middle of their career, bogged down from the pressures to maintain a ridiculous touring, movie-making and recording pace, and the result was album filler like lackluster covers of "Mr. Moonlight" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzy." Nearing the breakup of the band they were torn and frazzled and while "Let it Be" has some sparkling segments from their last live appearance on the Apple rooftop in January, 1969, it's also an uneven album.

But they always rebounded. Even when things were on the verge of total collapse in the summer of '69, they recorded their finale, "Abbey Road," which is also typically ranked extremely high among their finest works.

While it's refreshing to hear the band's first four albums sounding this wondrous in stereo - the Beatles and producer George Martin had resisted releasing those four on CD in stereo for ages, insisting that they were meant to be played in mono - audiophiles are likely to find latter-day works like 1967's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," transcendent in the remastered format. After they quit touring in 1966, the Beatles were artistically and creatively stimulated by studio life, and hearing "A Day in the Life," complete with those ending bits of gibberish from the British LP, or "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Penny Lane," is like a musical equivalent of that transformation from black and white to color in "The Wizard of Oz."

Looking back, they were utilizing primitive recording techniques, which are described - a bit too frequently to be honest - in the otherwise delightful liner notes booklets that accompany each album. It wasn't until "Abbey Road" that they finally worked with eight-track recording machines, but the sounds they had gotten on simpler equipment in the earlier years by "bouncing down" tracks from one deck to another is an endless testament to the wisdom of the band, their engineers but especially Martin.

Lennon and Harrison are gone now, but McCartney and Starr remain. Martin is 83, retired and partially deaf, but the Beatles work and the contributions of their producer can once again be celebrated thanks to these magnificent sounding recordings. Play them again and again and again and make things even better by playing them on a good sound system. It's the next best thing to being right there in the studio, all those years ago.

All you need is love, and Paul . . . and Yoko.

Despite the bitter feud that led the demise of the Beatles, John Lennon admitted that band-mate Paul McCartney was the most important person in the world to him besides his wife, according to a series of never-before-heard interviews.

"I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner," he said, according to the Times of London.

"One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. Paul and me were the Beatles."

But the lovefest didn't last forever with Lennon, who admits he broke up the group, telling Paul, "I want a divorce."

The comments appeared in a series of tapes recorded by rock journalist Ray Connelly that provide nuggets of new information about one of the most popular rock bands in history.

In one segment, Lennon admitted he and McCartney would give the "lousy" songs to George Harrison and Ringo Starr to sing.

Lennon also eerily spoke of an early death, saying he had wanted to stop "[wasting] my life as I have been.

"I have to learn to do that because I don't want to die at 40."

He was shot to death at that age in 1980.

Adding more history to the occasion, the three sold-out shows were preceded by a surprise free performance on top of the marquee outside the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway--also known as the home to The Late Show with David Letterman. While the Beatle appeared on the talk show that night, the venue was particularly fitting as it was there--back when it was called CBS-TV Studio 50--that the Beatles were first introduced to U.S. audiences 45 years ago on Sullivan's program.

According to The New York Times, it was McCartney himself who decided to perform outdoors; while Letterman apparently asked the Beatle sing on the same stage that he had in 1964, Macca reportedly said he would only perform if it could be an event--and it was. Usually gigs like these are the worst-kept secrets in showbiz, but to be fair, even we at Pro Sound News didn't know about it until we looked out our office windows and saw them setting up across the street, 27 floors down. We go to a lot of concerts to bring you the news, but this time, the concert came to us.

The Letterman gig came on the heels of a massive show in Halifax--the first of a meandering set of McCartney gigs around North America during the summer. With some time between the Canadian show and CitiField, the original plan was to rehearse for a few days to tighten up the band. "Then we heard rehearsals were cancelled and we're gonna do Letterman and by the way, it's going to be on the roof of the front-entrance awning, and 'Yeah, Pab, you'll be mixing on Broadway on the sidewalk; we'll put in a bit of PA for you!'"

Within no time, McCartney's tour sound provider, Clair (Lititz, PA), was involved, sending out a team led by Mike Wolf, that included tour vet Ed Dracoules as well as techs Rachel Atkins and Paul Swan. The PA fielded was ground-stacked, with Clair's proprietary i3 boxes supplemented by Prism series subs, with P2 cabinets for fills.

As might be expected, the house (or street, as the case may be) mix position and monitorworld consisted of the touring control gear already out on the road with McCartney, so Boothroyd was stationed across the Great White Way from the marquee on his Digidesign Venue Profile console, while John "Grubby" Callis had his two Midas Heritage desks beneath the gig on the sidewalk, sending sound up to SRM wedges and R4 sidefills. "He had a little monitor screen so he could see up there," said Boothroyd, "but once it kicked off, you go with it."

And since Broadway is a major thoroughfare in one of the busiest cities in the world, there really was no other choice. "We went to do the soundcheck, and we're talking about middle of the afternoon here, traffic going past; the word had just got out so the street was full of people causing problems with traffic, photographers and all that. They put black drapes up atop the awning so the band could knock a few numbers out. Paul puts his head out the curtains and goes 'Hello, New York!' and immediately, as soon as I put that through the PA, I had the commissioner, the police and all sorts of people running over, shouting 'Turn it off! Turn it off!' "So 'Hello New York!' was my soundcheck for the whole thing! I did the rest on cans and when it came to the show, I just went for it."

Putting PA up on the marquee was an impossibility, likely as much for space considerations as for weight (notably, temporary steel support beams were placed beneath the awning during the event--having it collapse beneath a Beatle would likely make for great TV but terrible lawsuits). As a result, the loudspeakers had to be groundstacked in the street--they couldn't even be on the sidewalk, causing the production to lose an additional half-foot.

Boothroyd recalled after the fact, "The funny thing was, every time a truck or bus came through, I lost the PA! The street wasn't closed off, so they'd drive in front of the ground stack, and I'd say 'Whoa! What happened?' I'd look over and see a bus going by in front of the PA. They go past, that side comes back, then they go by the other stack and the other side would disappear. And Grubby goes, 'Bloody hell, Pab! Every time a truck goes by, I get blasted with high-end from your ground stack!'"

After a brief interview with Letterman inside the theater, McCartney joined his band outside to knock out the Beatles' "Get Back" and the more recent "Sing The Changes," taken from his last album, Electric Arguments, released under the long-running pseudonym, The Fireman. Once the TV show taping concluded, however, the group kept going, running through additional tunes including "Band on the Run," "Back in the U.S.S.R.," "Let Me Roll It," "Coming Up" and "Helter Skelter." In between, there was banter with the crowd, as McCartney queried, "Shouldn't you all be at work?"--and everyone (even our bosses) yelled back "No!"

"It went on for another 20 minutes," said Boothroyd, "before the police said, 'You know, we love you Paul but that's enough. Broadway is Broadway and it's causing havoc.'" The additional songs were taped and appeared on Letterman and McCartney's respective websites; hearing the gig played back afterwards provided a touch of relief for the FOH engineer, as it turned out.

Boothroyd explained, "You go from being in the street and hearing your ground stacks disappear, to going downstairs in the building, listening to it and going 'Cool, the guys were rocking.' Me and Harvey [Goldberg], the sound engineer from the Letterman show, got together, he remixed the broadcast and as you do, you touch it up for broadcast. I have to say the band played great, it sounded wonderful and everybody was knocked out; Harvey's a great engineer and he has a great team, so thanks to him as well--it was a great result."

That evening's episode of The Late Show with David Letterman handily beat the talk show competition, getting viewed by 4.4 million people, but for the estimated 4,000 who crammed on to the sidewalks around 53rd and 54th Streets, the free show was a grand time all on its own. Even with the PA being hassled by trucks, Boothroyd himself was pleased: "It sounded good and went down pretty well--people rocked out in the street!"

Look for more with Pab Boothroyd on the CitiField shows in September's issue of Pro Sound News.

However, Paul's grandchildren, 10-year-old Arthur and Elliott, seven - the children of his daughter Mary - jumped at the chance to play the game.

Creative Producer Giles Martin - the son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin - told Britain's The Sun newspaper: "Paul watched the guys from developers Harmonix play the game."

"Then he held the instrument and was asked if he wanted to play. He said, 'To be honest I was in the band the first time round.'"

"I was at Abbey Road studios the other day and Paul was there."

"He was with his daughters Beatrice and Mary, who had her boys with her and I said to the boys, 'Do you want to play the game pretending to be your grandfather?' They loved it."

McCARTNEY GLAD BEATLES DIDN'T CLIMB EVEREST

Paul McCartney is relieved The Beatles decided against naming their final album after a studio engineer's favourite cigarette brand.

The group initially agreed on the title Everest after spotting one of Geoff Emerick's cigarette packets during a brainstorming session - but McCartney still thinks that would have been a terrible idea.

He tells Mojo magazine, "It wasn't that great a title. His ciggies (cigarettes) were just lying on the control room desk, and we went, 'What about that? Everest! Big mountain on the front - that'd be good'.

"But then we went off the idea and I just said, 'You know what? We could call it Abbey Road. And it'd be really easy to step outside onto the crossing (for the cover picture)."

The recording of Abbey Road took place at London's iconic Abbey Road studios 40 years ago

"The Beatles: On Record" a new BBC documentary aired previously-unheard audio footage of The Beatles at their recording sessions at Abbey Road Studios.

The film charted The Beatles' extraordinary journey from Please Please Me to Abbey Road and reflected how they developed as musicians, matured as songwriters and created a body of work that sounds as fresh now as the time it was recorded.

This is an exclusive first look at some of that documentary. (VIDEO)

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