Beatles fans will soon be able to walk through re-creations of the band’s history using sets and props from Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-film biopic series. Apple Corps has announced plans for a 100,000-square-foot Beatles experience in Liverpool, bringing the group’s story home in a new attraction more than four times the size of the existing The Beatles Story museum.

“I can’t wait for people to be able to step into our story and share the experience,” Paul McCartney said in a statement announcing the project on October 20.

The new attraction will take visitors from the Beatles’ childhoods in postwar Liverpool through their formative years in Hamburg, the Cavern Club, Beatlemania and beyond. Recreated settings will include Abbey Road, Shea Stadium and the group’s Savile Row headquarters, with immersive technology and original artifacts helping bring the band’s journey to life. Some of the locations will incorporate sets and props from Mendes’s The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event, scheduled for worldwide release by Sony Pictures in April 2028.

“Filming recently in Liverpool for our four Beatles movies brought home just how extraordinary the band’s legacy in the city is,” Mendes said. “Their imprint can be felt everywhere. It’s particularly fitting that this new Beatles experience will be helping to support the next generation of talent coming from this extraordinary city.”

The attraction will relocate The Beatles Story from its current home at Albert Dock to the former St Johns Market at St Johns Shopping Centre, in the heart of Liverpool. Apple Corps will take over operation of the existing attraction in 2027, ahead of the move the following year.

The project will also extend into the city skyline. Apple Corps plans to take over the 400-foot St Johns Beacon tower for a Beatles-themed Yellow Submarine experience, featuring panoramic 360-degree views of Liverpool.

“I find it incredible and humbling that people are still interested in our story, and it’s very exciting to me that The Beatles Story and the Beacon are being transformed in such an exciting way in the heart of Liverpool city,” McCartney said. “The extraordinary plans the Apple Corps team have shown me for The Beatles Story take me right back to that journey, from Liverpool to the world and back home again. It couldn’t have happened without Liverpool.”

Ticket proceeds will contribute to the Apple Corps Liverpool Trust, a charitable initiative intended to support local artists and cultural projects.

The Liverpool attraction will be only the second permanent Beatles experience operated by Apple Corps, following a planned attraction at 3 Savile Row in London, due to open at the end of 2027. The Savile Row building was the original home of Apple Corps and was the site of the Beatles’ final live rooftop performance on January 30, 1969.

Mendes’s four films will each tell the Beatles’ story from the perspective of a different member. Paul Mescal will play McCartney, Joseph Quinn will portray George Harrison, Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr and Harris Dickinson will portray John Lennon.

George Harrison was known as the Quiet Beatle, the reserved, spiritual guitarist who preferred to stay out of the spotlight. But that familiar image captures only part of who he was, says Klaus Voormann, a close friend who knew Harrison long before the Beatles became global superstars.

Voormann met the Beatles in October 1960, when they were playing at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller club, with Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe on bass. He introduced them to his friend Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who took their first professional-quality photos and helped establish their distinctive mop-top hairstyles.

An artist and bass player, Voormann went on to design the covers of Revolver and the Beatles’ Anthology albums. He also played in groups like Manfred Mann, performed sessions with Carly Simon and Lou Reed, and recorded on solo works by Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon.

But in a new interview in the December 2026 issue of Uncut, Voormann says Harrison never wanted to be a solo artist or a frontman.

“I don’t think he really ever wanted to be a solo artist,” he revelas. “He wanted to write songs and be part of the Beatles.”

Of the Beatles, Voormann says only Paul McCartney was a natural frontman.

“If you think back to the ’60s and seeing the Beatles onstage, Paul was the one who really had contact with the audience,” he says. “John didn’t have it, George didn’t have it and Pete Best didn’t have it at all...

“But George just wanted to play guitar and sing. He was fantastic, but he did not want to entertain an audience.”

Voormann also played on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, where he saw how the guitarist brought musicians together. Harrison, he recalls, created a warm, welcoming atmosphere in the studio.

“All the musicians loved George. They knew he was a very spiritual person, and he created a nice atmosphere in the studio. In contrast to John, he was always trying to make everything lovely. The lights were dimmed and he’d put joss sticks up on a little altar at the front, with a little figure. […] There was always something very melodic about George’s songs, very few hard edges.”

But Voormann says Harrison’s spiritual outlook coexisted with deep personal insecurity. The guitarist was more complicated than his serene public image suggested.

“One thing which I think is very important for people to know is that he was a very insecure, very complicated person. He was always searching for something, which was the religious part of him. You could even say he was a split personality.”

Voormann recalls that Harrison was in particularly bad shape in 1970, around the time of the Beatles’ breakup and the making of All Things Must Pass. Harrison was also spending time with Delaney & Bonnie and Eric Clapton.

“He would be coking like mad, he fucked his voice, he was in bad spirits. So he always seemed kind of conflicted. In one way he had the urge to be spiritual and very much down to earth, and wrote those songs where he's longing for that. But then suddenly — click — he's back and on the wrong side again.”

That complexity extended to Harrison’s relationships with other people. Although Voormann describes him as a caring and thoughtful friend, he says Harrison could also be sarcastic and cutting.

“That whole ‘quiet Beatle’ thing is nonsense. That was not a part of him.”

Harrison’s sharp tongue was on display when he encountered Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, a fan of the sport himself, at a party.

“He said, ‘Michael, you’re a fantastic driver. You’re so fast, it’s ridiculous. And you’ve won so many prizes, but you’re still an arsehole.’ That was typical of George.”

Harrison’s sense of humor also extended to practical jokes. Phil Collins has recalled how the guitarist once tricked him over his contribution to All Things Must Pass. Collins had played congas during the sessions but always wondered why his parts didn’t make the album.

Years later, Harrison sent him a tape he claimed contained an outtake from the sessions. On it, Collins’s conga playing was terribly out of time. Horrified by what he heard, Collins left the listening session feeling “angry, depressed and sad,” convinced he’d finally discovered why his contribution had been left off the record.

Only afterward did Harrison reveal that the tape was fake and the whole thing was a prank.

Collins eventually saw the funny side. “We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he said.

“And yeah, I swore at a Beatle.”

Producer Andrew Watt has discussed how he aims to get the best out of musicians when an album is under production, comparing the wildly different approaches of The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Michael Stipe.

The five-time Grammy winner and Oscar nominee started out as a pop producer before moving over to rock, with his most notable productions including Ozzy Osbourne’s Ordinary Man and Patient Number 9 plus the Stones’ Hackney Diamonds and Foreign Tongues.

Watt tells Rolling Stone that work on John’s next album has changed dramatically from the past, after the 79-year-old lost most of his eyesight. “Elton writes songs by reading a lyric,” the producer explains. “He’s going through life in a completely different way, [but] my God, the spirit of this man is unlike anything else.

“He’s one of the great melody writers ever. We could throw on some drums for him that made him feel a certain type of way, and he could just play to the drums and come up with melodies first.”

He adds that lyricist Bernie Taupin had adjusted too: “He was able to then listen to that, hear a basic rough little melody of Elton and come up with ideas. And then Elton is the master of putting Bernie’s lyrics down to the song. Once Bernie came up with the lyric, we’d put it on a huge screen. Elton would scan through it; he’d go little by little, and it was perfect.”

Watt praises R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe’s approach to his long-awaited solo album. “He’s extremely hard on himself. He kinda beats himself up, I think, in a healthy way. I’ve seen him write lyrics, throw them out, write them again.

“He’s wanting to make sure that he’s gonna say exactly what he wants to say, and make a sound that’s exactly how he wants it to sound. He’s working with a bunch of different people, and then finding his way around them. He’s one of the all-time greats, great songwriter, great lyricist, great melodist. And really fun to be around.”

The producer describes working with McCartney as a college education. “He’s fearless. He was kind of teaching me the way he works – you can write a song out of anything, and then sometimes you switch it up and go to a weird thing, which changes form a million different times.“

He continues: “It was kind of like, ‘Let me show you how we can use the studio.’ He loves playing characters… his imagination is unlike anyone else’s. Like Mozart, you know? … Bouncing around the studio and playing every different instrument. He’s incredible at coming up with the perfect part on every different instrument and not making you feel like he played any instrument worse than the other. I mean, it just sounds like someone who’s a master on each instrument.”

Watt recalls sitting among the Stones in the live room while working up songs. “I would be in that circle so I could watch how they’re interplaying with each other,” he says. “You don’t want it to ever be an arduous process with a band like that. They’re magic.

“My job would be to have a mic and call sections – ‘B section! Okay, let’s go back to the A section! Take it out on that!’ They’re playing the tune they made, and I’m arranging it kind of as it’s happening, in the moment.”

Asked if another Stones album is under discussion, Watt says: “I don’t know. I didn’t know if there was gonna be another one after [our] first one. If they call, I’m there. It’s the greatest honor of my life being around that band.”

Paul McCartney would like to work with Bob Dylan but accepts it’s unlikely to happen, he said a wide-ranging conversation on Good Hang with Amy Poehler. The Beatles and Dylan famously met in New York in 1964, when the American introduced the English quartet to marijuana and influenced their musical direction – but there was never an actual collaboration.

Asked by Poehler if there was anyone he’d like to write with but hadn’t, McCartney said: “I get asked this question and I always think ‘Bob Dylan.’ But I’m too nervous to ring him up.” He mimicked the idea of how the conversation might go: “‘Bob? It’s Paul. Em…’” He went on to agree with Poehler that Dylan probably didn’t use phones, and was likely holed up “somewhere in a bush, in a sleeping bag,” finding inspiration of his own.

Turning to another celebrity interaction, McCartney said he’d always enjoyed meeting the late Queen Elizabeth II. “And that’s an autograph you’re not going to get!” he joked. “She was great. She was crowned when I was 11 – and she was a babe! She was like 23 or something. We all used to think, ‘Wow!’ We kinda liked her in ways we shouldn’t have liked her…”

He continued: “So meeting her was special. My wife said, ‘She fancied you!’ Now, there’s no knowing if there’s any truth to that [but] I like to think it’s true.”

Thinking back to the Beatles’ early days, McCartney reflected on how they made decisions based on their teenage experiences. “When we couldn’t figure out the answer we’d say, ‘What would we have thought when we were 17? What would that guy have said?’’” he explained. “‘We’re not doing it because that guy would’t have let us do it.’

“And as we grow up we kinda go, ‘Oh, okay, we’ll do it.’ But it was better to listen to the 17-year-old – he was more sensible and less jaded by the world.”

One example of being less jaded was when he made the decision to leave his factory job as a coil-winder and pursue success with the Beatles. “The idea was they were going to take me through all the [factory] things and I was going to be manager,” he said. “One day John and George showed up and they said, ‘We’ve got a gig – we’ve got a gig at the Cavern.’ I said, ‘I don’t know; let me think about it.’

“I looked at the coils, I looked at the pay packet – seven pounds 15 a week [£7.75 or about £18] – gosh! I can’t believe I actually questioned it, but I did! I [told them], ‘I’ll get back to you!’ And I did. I gave up a career in coil-winding management.”

In addition he admitted to feeling an amount of embarrassment over recent documentary movie Man on the Run, exploring the years following the Beatles’ split. “I didn’t realise the farm we lived on was so run-down,” he said. “It was a tip! We were in love and we had a new baby; it was all great and I was like, ‘I can fix it up! I’ll make a table!’

“But when you see it in the film it’s like, ‘You lived there?’ And you had some money? You chose to live in that?’ So that was a little bit embarrassing.”

Paul McCartney is fully behind Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopics project, but he says he warned the director against one specific detail in his depiction of the band.

The four films are slated for simultaneous release in April 2028, with each telling the Beatles’ story from a different member’s perspective. The cast includes Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

But in a recent interview with Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast, McCartney revealed that he was alarmed when he saw the actors recreating the iconic Abbey Road album cover, striding across the famous zebra crossing.

“Guess what? [Mescal looks] smaller than the guy who plays John!” McCartney said. He insisted that all four Beatles were roughly the same height.

“I don’t know how Sam’s going to deal with it… but he sent me a still from the filming they’re doing, crossing the Abbey Road crossing, and the Paul character is markedly smaller.”

McCartney texted Mendes to express his concern. “Don’t do this!” he told the director.

Mendes reassured him that the apparent difference in height was down to “the stride pattern” — the way the actors were walking when the photo was taken. McCartney said the director then sent him another picture of the cast “where they were equal” in height.

McCartney had a similar issue with the 2009 drama Nowhere Boy, in which Thomas Brodie-Sangster played McCartney opposite Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Lennon. Brodie-Sangster also appeared smaller than his on-screen bandmate.

In related news, McCartney’s former fiancée Jane Asher, who dated him from 1963 to 1968, says she has no plans to watch the films. Meanwhile, George Harrison’s ex-wife Pattie Boyd said nobody involved in the project had contacted her about her portrayal. “I could have really told them great stories,” she said.

Just shy of 60 years after its original release, the Beatles’ sixth album, Rubber Soul, is heading back to the top of the U.K. charts. The album marked a major turning point for the band, both musically and creatively — and even its iconic cover came about through a happy accident, according to Paul McCartney.

Rubber Soul found the Fab Four pushing the boundaries of the recording studio, while also exploring new sounds and approaches to songwriting. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” drew on Bob Dylan’s influence, while the song’s use of sitar introduced a sound that had never been heard in rock music before.

As the new Rubber Soul reissue climbs the charts once more, McCartney has recalled how a mistake during the album’s cover shoot produced one of the Beatles’ most recognizable images.

“Our friendship with the photographer Robert Freeman, who had lived in the same block of flats as John, meant that he was an obvious choice to take the cover photograph,” McCartney tells NME. “We did the session with Robert, and he showed us the results. The method he used in those days was to project the images he had taken on to a white piece of cardboard the shape and size of an album cover.”

The process was a long way from the digital image manipulation we take for granted today. Freeman projected the photographs onto a piece of cardboard so the band could see how they would look as an album cover. Then, while the Beatles were choosing an image, the cardboard slipped.

“While we were choosing a suitable shot, the piece of cardboard slipped backwards, giving the image an elongated shape,” McCartney remembers. “When things like this happened with the Beatles, instead of just thinking it was a mistake, we grabbed hold of the idea and said, ‘That’s perfect. If you print it with this stretched shape it will echo the title of “Rubber Soul.”’

“Robert liked the idea,” he says. “And that is what we did.”

The result was the distinctive, slightly distorted cover we know today, with the band’s elongated faces filling the frame and the Rubber Soul lettering sitting in the open space above them. It was an accident, but one that perfectly suited the album’s title.

The new reissue was first teased with a previously unheard version of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” offering a glimpse at how dramatically the song evolved during the sessions at London’s EMI Studios. The finished recording would also become one of the Beatles’ most significant experiments with the sitar, helping establish the Indian instrument as a new sound in rock music.

George Harrison would go on to make the sitar a major part of his musical identity, with David Crosby taking credit for introducing Harrison to Ravi Shankar. Harrison’s fascination with the instrument would ultimately have a profound effect on his guitar playing, helping cement his reputation as a guitar legend.

Nearly six decades on, Rubber Soul remains a record full of moments when the Beatles tried something new — sometimes deliberately, and sometimes because something simply went wrong.

Phil Collins says he was surprised to discover that a reference to him in The Beatles Anthology had been removed — and he suspects Paul McCartney may have been behind the change.

Collins made the comments during a London Q&A with Steven Wilson celebrating the 45th anniversary of his 1981 solo debut, Face Value. He was discussing his cover of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which appears on the album, when he recalled seeing a reference to the recording in the original 1995 version of The Beatles Anthology.

Collins said the moment featured George Harrison discussing his version of the song, and that he was thrilled to hear the Beatles mention him.

“The one feather in my cap, which I’ll never forget, was with The Beatles Anthology.... The three got the tapes out of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ And they were playing it on the multi-track,” he said, via The Mirror.

“I thought, ‘The Beatles mentioned my name,’” Collins continued. “I went back to watch it recently and they’d taken it out. It’s not there anymore.... I don’t know, maybe McCartney didn’t like it.”

Collins did not provide evidence that McCartney had anything to do with the edit, and it is not clear why the reference was removed from the updated version of the documentary. McCartney has not publicly responded to the claim.

The suggestion is notable because Collins and McCartney have a history that dates back more than two decades. Collins described their falling-out in 2016, recounting an encounter with McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills at Buckingham Palace in 2002.

Collins said he approached McCartney with a first edition of The Beatles by Hunter Davies and asked him to sign it.

“I said, ‘Hey Paul, do you mind signing this for me?’ And he said, ‘Oh Heather, our little Phil’s a bit of a Beatles fan,’” Collins recalled. “And I thought, ‘You fuck. You fuck.’ Never forgot it.”

Collins went on to describe what he perceived as a condescending attitude from McCartney, saying the former Beatle made him feel as though it was difficult for him to have a conversation with someone of McCartney’s stature.

McCartney subsequently contacted Collins about the incident. Collins later told NME, “He’s been in touch about it because he was upset. I certainly didn’t get any flowers from him; I got more of a ‘Let’s just get on with our lives.’”

The two musicians eventually put the dispute behind them. Earlier this year Collins said he wished he had never spoken publicly about the feud, noting that they had since “made up.”

Collins’ connection to the Beatles goes beyond his brief reference in the original Antholog release. He was among the musicians who did session work on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass solo album in 1970, playing congas, but his contribution never made it onto the completed album. Years later, Harrison pranked the drummer into thinking his playing was so bad that it had to be cut.

“We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” Collins said.

The 1995 Beatles Anthology documentary was the first major project in which McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr participated in telling the story of the band themselves, with John Lennon represented posthumously through archival recordings and footage. The original Anthology series also accompanied the release of two new Beatles singles, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” both built around Lennon recordings completed by the surviving Beatles.

For its 30th anniversary, The Beatles Anthology was restored and expanded with a ninth episode, directed by Oliver Murray, while the accompanying music collection was expanded with Anthology 4, overseen by Giles Martin, son of the late Beatles producer George Martin. The updated project includes new mixes of “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” as well as “Now and Then,” which was released in 2023 and described as The Beatles’ final single.

Paul McCartney once said he felt that a part of him died when the Beatles broke up. So when his former songwriting partner, John Lennon, publicly panned Ram, one of McCartney’s first post-Beatles albums, their once formidable relationship turned sour.

Lennon called the 1971 album “awful” in a barbed attack. “I don’t like all this dribblin’ pop-opera jazz,” he added. “I like pop records that are pop records.”

Speaking to Judd Apatow at the LA screening of his new Man on the Run documentary, McCartney was asked what might have prompted the criticism and whether there was a wider narrative at play. He didn’t shy away from the question.

“I think maybe he expected more from me,” McCartney admits (via People). “He expected something different from me, and I wasn’t doing that. I was just doing ‘madcap.’”

For George Harrison, newfound freedom after the Beatles was a chance to show what the band — and more specifically the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership — had been missing. McCartney, meanwhile, was eager to explore territory beyond what he had covered during his time in the Fab Four.

“It is just one of those things,” he goes on. “I loved John and love him to this day; always will. It didn’t matter what he said or did, because I’d known him since I was 15, and so he was like this mad guy I knew, and I really looked up to him.”

“I always thought John was very cool, and I still do. But he could be a complete idiot over some things.”

Together and individually, the pair wrote some of the most iconic pop and rock songs ever committed to tape. But they didn’t always see eye to eye, and their post-Beatles careers made those differences increasingly apparent. Lennon’s annoyance with Ram, for example, may have been directed in part at “Too Many People,” which appeared to contain veiled digs at him. It didn’t take long for Lennon to begin piecing together the chords and lyrics of his rebuttal, which arrived that same year.

Things looked rocky between them in 1971. But speaking now, McCartney also feels there was a reason behind some of Lennon’s more difficult behavior.

“A lot of bad things happened to him,” he argues. “His father ran away from home when he was three or something. He never knew his dad until we got famous, and his dad came back and was working at the pub down the road near where John lived.”

“John’s mom, who we idolized, was a beautiful lady called Julia. He wrote a song called ‘Julia,’ a fantastic song. She got run over and killed outside the house… So he’s had to deal with all of that…. He had a lot of anguish.”

That history helps explain some of the light and shade in their relationship. Lennon’s lyrics often tackled politics and grittier subject matter, with his music reflecting those themes. McCartney, meanwhile, considers himself “lucky” by comparison. His songs were often brighter, more upbeat and, in his own words, “madcap.”

“I grew up pretty secure with [extended family], and I didn’t have any of the kind of troubles that John had until my mom died when I was about 14,” McCartney notes.

Elsewhere, Rubber Soul and the Lennon-McCartney partnership at its best are back in the spotlight after rare demo tapes from the era were released.

And Alex Lifeson has revealed how Sir Paul was influential in reuniting Rush. He was in no mood to argue with a Beatle.

When Brian Ray joined Paul McCartney’s band in 2002, he was tasked with learning more than 40 songs — in one week.

“Fortunately, I listened to the Beatles nonstop throughout my life, so I already knew most of them,” he says. “Of course, it’s much different when you’re playing in a band that, oh yeah, is led by Paul McCartney himself. Needless to say, I immersed myself in the material.”

But Ray quickly discovered that there’s a difference between how the Beatles recorded the songs and how they need to be played onstage,

“It’s one thing to listen to these songs and appreciate them as a fan, as we’ve all done,” he says. “But when you start digging into them and analyzing them, you’re just astounded by the creativity and depth. Even stuff that sounds simple isn’t simple at all. I’m constantly amazed at the brilliance in these songs, and that feeling grows stronger all the time.”

Given his rarified position, Ray has some unique insights for guitar (and bass) players looking to incorporate Fab Four material into their repertoire.

“It’s important to have respect for the Beatles’ records,” he says. “On the other hand, you don’t want to sound like karaoke. And if you’re like me and you grew up on these records, they’re part of your DNA. You’ve memorized every upstroke and downstroke.

“Given all that, I think it’s important to remember that these records were made by real humans in a room. The Beatles played what they felt, and they responded to one another. Some of their recordings were done in one take, but others required multiple takes, and each one varied from the previous recording.

“When I play with Paul, he isn't trying to play every single note on piano, guitar or bass like he did on the record. He doesn’t sing the songs like he did on record. Nobody is trying to duplicate the recordings. And that’s the advice I have for anybody who wants to play Beatles’ songs: Play them the way you feel. Use the records as a framework, and then go for it.”

However, Ray believes guitarists should attempt to approximate the Beatles’ guitar tones.

“I think this is a crucial part of putting the songs over live,” he says. “If you want to play the material in the spirit of the originals, it helps to stay true to them tonally.

“For example, when I play older Beatles songs, I’ll use a big hollowbody Gretsch along the lines of what George used at the time. I’ll dial up some EQ on my pedalboard to get them a little more trebly. When I play the rockabilly-type solo on ‘All My Loving,’ I’ll add a quick slap delay — that seems to work just fine. On later Beatles songs, I’ll veer off into SGs and Les Pauls, both of which George played.

If that sounds daunting, take heart: You don’t need a massive guitar collection to do the job. “If you’ve got a Fender and a P90 guitar, like an SG, you should be able to handle the sound of most any Beatles song,” Ray says. “Just choose the one that gets you pretty close to what you’re hearing. You can amp and EQ each guitar to get clean or dirty sounds, maybe add a bit of compression, and you’ll be fine. You don’t need to use a lot of effects.”

Because Ray also handles bass duties in the group when McCartney is playing guitar or piano, he has some unique insights to playing McCartney’s bass lines as well. Though you’ll never find the job as daunting as he did.

“For the first six months, I barely looked up because I just wanted to play the parts right, and I didn't want to get distracted by the fact that Paul McCartney was 15 feet away from me,” he says. “I would have lost my mind.”

Besides, he admits it would be impossible to replicate Macca's bass lines with the same supple touch and tone. “His touch on the fretboard was so deliberate, but at the same time so light. On some of those records, it sounds like he’s playing a fretless bass; you can hear him just gliding on those flatwound strings. His playing is idiosyncratic. Maybe it’s because he started out as a guitarist who switched to bass. Like me, it wasn’t his first instrument.

“I don’t think it’s important to use the same bass as he did. I don’t use a Hofner or a Rickenbacker. I play a 1963 Fender P Bass that looks like it’s been dragged from behind a motorcycle. It’s totally beat up, but it sounds just wonderful.

“And remember that certain parts are really hard to nail. For instance, on ‘Getting Better,’ on the first chorus he plays a wonderful walking quarter-note bass line, but on the other two choruses he mixes in sustained half notes. I want to honor that when I play it live. But one time in rehearsal I made a mistake in the chorus, and Paul asked, ‘Why don’t you just play it the same way each time?’ I said, ‘Because it’s so cool how you did it on the record.’

“I say all this with the knowledge that nobody can ever play these songs the way Paul did, but as always, what matters is that you play with spirit and love.”

As a final rule, Ray says that to most successfully perform the Beatles’ material, it's essential that you nail the solos exactly. Those, he says, “demand to be played as accurately as possible.

“Take John Lennon’s solo on ‘Get Back.’ He was mirroring Paul’s vocals. I think John had a very reverent approach to that solo because he was a songwriter. I do my best to play that solo the way John did — both solos, actually. At the end, Paul has encouraged me to stretch out a bit, so I’ll do an extra four bars or something. I’ll throw in a little B.B. King or Clapton feel — something that feels appropriate. But I wouldn’t do that without first nailing the solo that everybody knows. I couldn’t imagine playing it any other way.”

Jane Asher has spent decades declining to revisit her relationship with Paul McCartney, even though their time together helped inspire some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs. Now, as that relationship is set to be dramatized on the big screen, she has no intention of watching.

Asher, who dated the Beatle bass guitarist for five years and became engaged to him in 1967, is being portrayed by Lucy Boynton in Sam Mendes’ upcoming four-part Beatles film series. The actor says the filmmakers did reach out to her, but she gave them the same response she has given to inquiries about her relationship with McCartney for years.

“They approached me about it, of course, but I said my usual,” Asher told The Telegraph.

Asher and McCartney met in 1963, when she interviewed the Beatles at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Their relationship quickly became serious, with McCartney eventually moving into the Asher family home. The years they spent together coincided with one of the Beatles’ most creatively fertile periods, and Asher has been connected to several McCartney compositions from the era.

The years they spent together coincided with one of the Beatles’ most creatively fertile periods, and Asher was a direct influence on several of McCartney’s songs. “And I Love Her” (from 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night),“I’m Looking Through You” (from 1965’s Rubber Soul) and “For No One” (from 1966’s Revolver) have all been associated with their relationship.

Their engagement ended in 1968, with Asher making the announcement during a BBC television appearance. McCartney married Linda McCartney the following year.

Asher, now 80, has made clear that she considers the relationship a closed chapter. She said she has turned down offers of money to talk about McCartney and has no interest in reopening the subject for the new films.

“People would offer me money to talk about it, all sorts of things,” she said. “But I won’t discuss it. It was so long ago.”

That extends to Boynton’s portrayal of her. Asked about the casting, Asher acknowledged that her onscreen counterpart is “beautiful,” but said she won’t see the finished films.

“Well, of course, Lucy is beautiful. But I won’t watch the films, otherwise everyone will ask me what I thought.”

Mendes’ The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event will tell the band’s story four times, with each movie centered on a different Beatle. Paul Mescal plays McCartney, with Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

The ensemble also includes Saoirse Ronan as Linda McCartney, Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono, Aimee Lou Wood as Pattie Boyd and Mia McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey.

The project has the participation of Apple Corps and the surviving Beatles, giving Mendes access to the group’s music rights as well as their approval for the films. The four movies are scheduled to open in theaters simultaneously in April 2028.

Asher isn’t the only Beatles partner whose connection to the project has attracted attention. Boyd said earlier this year that she had not been contacted by the production about her portrayal, adding, “I could have really told them great stories.”

The Liverpool Cavern Club was famous as the spot where the Beatles found local fame in the early 1960s. It was there that Brian Epstein first saw the group on Thursday, February 9, 1961, and got the idea to manage the band, which led to their signing with George Martin’s Parlophone label the following year.

The club was such an important part of Beatles history and so beloved by the locals that in 1973, Liverpool officials allowed the Cavern to be purchased by the Merseyrail underground railway to create a ventilation shaft. When that proved unnecessary or infeasible, the property was turned into a parking lot. (Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?)

A new Cavern Club was built across the street, and it was there, on December 14, 1999, that original Beatle Paul McCartney made an appearance to promote his new album, Run Devil Run. For the occasion, he brought with him not one but two fellow legends: former Deep Purple drummer and founder Ian Paice, and guitar legend David Gilmour.

Paice and Gilmour had good reason to be on hand. Both had participated in the recording of Run Devil Run, an album that saw McCartney cover a dozen rock and roll classics and three originals. The album’s creation followed a year of mourning for McCartney’s wife and Wings partner, Linda.

McCartney wanted to cut the album quickly, just as the Beatles’ first albums had been made. To that end, he enlisted Chris Thomas — who had helped engineer the Beatles’ 1968 White Album and played keyboards on four of its cuts — to produce the album in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, where much of the Beatles catalog was tracked.

Gilmour, who played electric guitar and lap steel on the album, was certainly no stranger to McCartney, having played guitar solos on tracks from his albums Give My Regards to Broad Street, from 1984, and Flowers in the Dirt, from 1989. Even before then, Gilmour had been among the many guitarists — including Pete Townshend, Hank Marvin, Laurence Juber and Denny Laine — who performed on McCartney and Wings’ star-studded “Rockestra Theme,” from that group’s final album, 1979’s Back to the Egg.

The guitarist’s work on Run Devil Run occurred during a quiet period in his career. Pink Floyd had put out their 14th studio album, The Division Bell, in 1994, and would not release another until their final record, 2014’s The Endless River. All was likewise quiet on Gilmour’s solo career front.

In fact, two public performances were the main activities in Gilmour’s career following The Division Bell: They comprised McCartney’s 1999 Run Devil Run promotion and an appearance with the Who at their 1996 concert in London’s Hyde Park, a celebration of the group’s return to the stage after a seven-year hiatus. Gilmour performed on a pair of tunes from Quadrophenia, singing "The Dirty Jobs" and playing guitar on "Love Reign O'er Me.”

The guitarist’s performance with McCartney — during which he played a rather well-worn blonde Fender Telecaster — came close to satisfying a desire he’d had for years to play with the Beatles.

“I really wish I had been in the Beatles,” Gilmour told Mojo in 2016. “[They] taught me how to play guitar; I learnt everything. The bass parts, the lead, the rhythm, everything. They were fantastic.”

Recalling his participation in Run Devil Run, Gilmour told the magazine the experiencing brought him back to his childhood.

“I’m a kid, really,” he said. “You get into Studio Two at Abbey Road, you’re sitting there with Paul McCartney, and your guitar is plugged in. You think that’s an ordinary day’s work, but of course, it isn’t; it’s magical!”

And as Gilmour revealed in that same interview, it was he who convinced McCartney to perform a Beatles song at the Run Devil Run promotion at the Cavern: “I Saw Her Standing There,” the first song on the the first Beatles album, 1963’s Please Please Me.

“Managing to persuade him to sing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ at the Cavern, with me doing the John Lennon parts, was absolutely fantastic,” he said.

“I’ve been in the Who, I’ve been in the Beatles, and I’ve been in Pink Floyd,” Gilmour concluded. “Top that, motherfucker!”

The performance was released as a DVD, Live at the Cavern Club, in 1999.

When Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr recorded “Let It Be” for her 2023 album, Rockstar, it marked a historic meeting of English and Nashville music royalty.

“I just sent them a love note through their managers, and I just said what I was doing,” the late country icon told NPR in 2023. “And I said, ‘I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d love to have you sing with me on my rock album. And if you’re interested, call me at this number.’”

Dolly had already recorded “Let It Be” when she got the idea to contact Paul McCartney. “And so I contacted him. He was so gracious.

“And then I thought, Well, we got to have Ringo, because that’s the last of the Beatles. So I asked Ringo if he would do it. Same thing: ‘I’d be glad to do it.’”

The recording was another milestone in the career of Parton, the hit-making singer-songwriter and acoustic guitarist, who turns 80 on January 19.

But it turns out she had already met both Beatles years earlier, in the 1970s. What’s more, each occasion had been memorable for reasons that had nothing to do with the Beatles.

Dolly met McCartney and his first wife, Linda, on June 16, 1974, backstage at Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee. Paul and Linda were in town with their family for a six-week stay, during which time they recorded a quartet of non-album singles with their group Wings, including the number three hit “Junior’s Farm.”

During their time in Nashville, the McCartneys decided to attend the Grand Masters Fiddling Contest taking place at Opryland. When intermission came, they were invited backstage, where they met Dolly and country star Porter Wagoner and were photographed by Jack Corn for a story in The Tennessean.

Coincidentally, the event was special for another reason: It marked the last appearance Dolly and Wagoner made together in the 1970s. They had teamed up as a duo in 1967, a few years after Dolly left behind her family and first Martin guitar and set off on a music career. She and Wagoner had performed their final concert as a duo one week before meeting the McCartneys, on June 9. (Their split was the impetus for her to write her hit “I Will Always Love You” as thanks to Wagoner for all he had done for her career.)

A few years and a cross-country journey later, Dolly met Ringo Starr courtesy of Ken Mansfield, the former U.S. manager of the Beatles’ Apple Records, as well as a Grammy Award–winning producer. The time was the late 1970s, and the place was Los Angeles, where Mansfield was luring Nashville stars in an attempt to break the rock-and-roll stronghold on clubs along the Sunset Strip. Waylon Jennings and Dolly were among the country artists who picked up their acoustic guitars and made the move west.

Several years before then, Starr had settled in Los Angeles, where he remained close with Mansfield. As a lifelong country music fan, the former Beatle was thrilled with the Nashville expatriates and spent one memorable evening watching Waylon Jennings perform and hanging out with him afterward.

It turned out Starr was eager to meet Dolly.

“He was very intrigued by Dolly’s career,” Mansfield wrote in his entertaining 2007 memoir, The White Book. Dolly was, he writes, “a giant Beatles fan and, knowing that I had worked with them, had jokingly mentioned that someday she would like to meet them, Ringo in particular.”

In short order, Mansfield arranged dinner at his home for a small group, including Dolly and Ringo. Neither knew the other would be there.

“Both invitees were thrilled at the surprise,” Mansfield wrote, “and the intimacy of the evening really made the whole thing very special.”

Special — but not eventful. That is, not until Mansfield’s friend Stewart Levine crashed the party. Levine was a producer of note, with clients who included Simply Red, B.B. King, Lionel Richie, Sly Stone, Patti LaBelle and Joe Cocker. He was also a huge Dolly Parton fan and was dying to meet her. Unfortunately, Mansfield insisted the guest list should be small, “to keep the focus on just Ringo and Dolly spending time together.”

Levine didn’t care. Shortly after dinner, he rang Mansfield’s doorbell. When the host answered the door, the producer muscled his way in, leading to a noisy confrontation.

As the men argued in the hallway, Dolly suddenly appeared. Seeing Levine, she stopped in her tracks and stared at him wide-eyed.

“After a very pregnant pause, Dolly began to speak and in a stuttering, shaky voice asked Stewart if he was Stewart Levine, the famous producer,” Mansfield wrote.

Struggling to comprehend what was happening, Levine mumbled “yes” as Dolly gazed lovingly at him.

“She continued to explain that in her lifetime she never expected that she would ever get the chance to be in the same room with Stewart Levine, let alone have the privilege of meeting him,” Mansfield wrote. “She went on further saying that she was a giant fan of his and had absolutely adored him from afar for quite a long time.

“She then delivered the fatal blow by announcing that she was going to have to leave the room for fear that she would no longer be able to contain herself and might jump his bones right in front of everyone,” Mansfield recalled.

“She made an abrupt about-face, as if fearful of being unable to control her emotions, and returned to the living room.”

The men stood speechless for a long while. Eventually they made their way to the living room where Dolly and the others were waiting. As they appeared, everyone burst into laughter.

It had all been a joke. Hearing the commotion after Levine forced his way in, Mansfield’s wife explained to Dolly that the producer was infatuated with her, and Dolly decided to have a little fun at his expense.

“I think Stewart was so stunned by what had gone down that he wasn't even the least bit disappointed that Dolly didn’t really have the hots for him,” Mansfield wrote.

Although Dolly had met her second Beatle that evening, she managed to make the night memorable for an entirely different reason.

Alex Lifeson has revealed how Paul McCartney helped convince him and Geddy Lee to get Rush back on the road, following an encounter between the three musicians after the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert at London’s O2 Arena in 2022.

Lifeson recalled that McCartney was surprisingly adamant that the members of Rush should keep performing. At the time, Lifeson was still unsure about returning to the road following the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart in 2020.

Speaking to Radio Futuro in a recent interview, Lifeson explained that he and Lee were having drinks with members of Foo Fighters and other guests after the tribute when McCartney stopped by. The former Beatle told them he had enjoyed their performance and asked whether they were touring.

“Geddy said, ‘Well, no, we're not on tour. We recently lost our drummer, and Alex is not really interested in going back on the road.’”

That brought an emphatic response from McCartney.

“And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no! You must! This is what we do. This is who we are. Ringo says, “That's in our blood. It's in our DNA. We must get out and do it.” And he said, “Look at me. I'm in my 80s now, and I'm still touring and still working because that's what I do, and that's what you must do.”’”

Lifeson then tried to turn the conversation into a joke, telling the former Beatle that he would consider returning to the road if the Beatle managed Rush. McCartney didn’t miss a beat.

“And I said, ‘Well, okay. I'll consider it if you manage us.’ And he laughed and said, ‘Okay, I'll manage you.’ And then I said, ‘Okay, and also, you have to be our caterer.’ He said, ‘Okay, I'll be your caterer.’ I regretted it immediately because he's a vegan, so we all laughed about it, and it stuck with us.”

Even so, Lifeson took McCartney’s advice to heart.

“You know, you can't argue with a Beatle if they tell you you should go back on the road. You better get ready to go back on the road.”

The conversation was one small moment in what would become a much longer journey back to the stage. Rush’s eventual Fifty Something reunion tour was hardly a foregone conclusion.

Lifeson and Lee spent years wrestling with whether they should continue as Rush at all. There was the question of whether it felt right to carry on without Peart, as well as the seemingly impossible task of finding a drummer who could help them recreate the chemistry of the classic lineup. Eventually, they found that drummer in Anika Nilles.

Lifeson’s comments in 2023 and 2024 only added to the uncertainty — and, as Lee recently admitted, sometimes got on the bass guitarist’s nerves. But the two musicians had already begun thinking seriously about doing something together again after their appearance at the Taylor Hawkins tribute.

McCartney’s intervention, Lifeson’s account suggests, gave them another nudge in that direction. And now, more than three years after that conversation at the O2, Lifeson and Lee have finally hoisted the Rush banner again.

Guests on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast have brought up some fascinating anecdotes in recent months. Gene Simmons told how Ace Frehley lifted a guitar solo from the Doors for a Kiss track. Zakk Wylde revealed how a chance to work with Guns N’ Roses sidelined his career with Ozzy Osbourne.

But few have delivered a history-changing story quite like Elliot Mintz. A friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Mintz has challenged the long-held belief that Lennon and Paul McCartney last met on April 25, 1976. According to that rather sad tale, McCartney turned up unannounced at Lennon’s New York apartment at the Dakota and was turned away by Lennon, who was busy with his son, Sean. Supposedly, the two former musical partners never met again.

Mintz, however, says the two men crossed paths two years later, during the Christmas holiday. And he knows, he says, because John and Yoko invited him over.

“They invite me to Dakota to spend one of the Christmas days with them,” Mintz tells Corgan. “And I go up to the Dakota, and I notice in the living room, there’s a vase with a single branch of a tree. That’s their Christmas decoration.

“I sat down on the white couch in the white living room, and we’re just making small talk,” he goes on. “Then there’s a knock on the door after the intercom. [Lennon] opens it, and Paul and Linda McCartney walk in.”

Mintz, who had been a radio DJ in the 1960s and went on to become a TV personality, had become friendly with Lennon over the years. But he says this was his first meeting with the other half of the iconic Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership.

“We sat and we talked for a while. It wasn’t overly jubilant. It wasn’t icy. It was just correct,” he says.

The McCartneys then suggested they go to Manhattan celebrity hotspot Elaine’s.

“Elaine’s had a reputation,” Mintz states. “I mean, you walk in and there’s Woody Allen, Gore Vidal, and there’s Tom Wolf and all those people. But the food was miserable, and everybody knew it.”

Leafing through the menu did little to inspire. Then an idea struck.

“Linda said, ‘You know, there’s a great pizza place not far from here. Really thin-crusted pizza. Do you think you could get a pizza delivered here?’ And she said it directly to me. Who else was she going to suggest it to? ‘Yoko, would you drop the dime?’”

Knowing that Elaine’s could be “problematic,” they arranged to have the pizza “delivered through the back door. It was taken out of the cardboard box,” Mintz explains, “put on Elaine’s beautiful plates, and brought out so a casual observer would think it’s a dish that they hadn’t seen yet.”

With the sun setting, the group retreated to Lennon’s white living room, and soon it was just the two Beatles and Mintz.

“John and Paul kind of wandered over to this very, very tall window that looked down upon the west side of Manhattan,” Mintz says. As he was still on the couch, he could hear only “spasms” of their conversation.

“It was small talk,” he says. “Nothing of substance. But I do recall Paul asking John, ‘So, are you making any music these days?’, and John replying, ‘No. My time is with my baby,’” he said, referring to Sean, who was born in 1975. “‘What about you?’

“And Paul says, ‘I’m always making music. I make music every day of my life. I can’t stop making music.’”

McCartney was always writing, sometimes solo, sometimes with Linda and, by the 1980s, with guests that included Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Elvis Costello.

Mintz believes that if Lennon had taken the bait, the pair could have “sat in the living room and changed the face of contemporary music one more time.” But that didn’t happen. The McCartneys were gone within the hour.

Corgan’s interviewee admits that this final-ever meeting of two of music’s greatest minds was “anticlimactic,” and yet it perhaps still represents a more touching final moment for their partnership than the alternative that has been passed down through history.

During the Beatles’ early hit-making years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney took most of the plaudits for their songwriting. George Harrison was slower to find his voice as a writer, and when he wrote his first solo composition for the Beatles, he was sick in bed. Even then, he wasn’t convinced what he had written could even be considered a song.

By the time the Beatles landed in Bournemouth, on England’s south coast, for a six-show residency at the Gaumont in August 1963, their debut album, Please Please Me, was already fueling the first ripples of Beatlemania. Harrison had come away from those sessions without a songwriting credit, despite handling lead vocals on “Chains” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.”

Harrison had already co-written songs with fellow Beatles, including “In Spite of All the Danger” with Paul McCartney and “Cry for a Shadow” with John Lennon, but “Don’t Bother Me” was different. This was his first Beatles song written entirely by himself.

Harrison wrote it while he was sick in bed in Bournemouth. It would appear on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, released in November 1963. But its creator wasn’t exactly impressed with his first solo effort.

“I don’t think it’s a particularly good song,” he once confessed in his autobiography, I Me Mine. “It mightn’t be a song at all.”

That assessment is striking in hindsight. Harrison would go on to write some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs, including “Here Comes the Sun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which featured an uncredited lead-guitar contribution from Eric Clapton. But in 1963, he was still trying to establish himself as a songwriter within a group whose creative partnership was already dominated by Lennon and McCartney.

Paul McCartney remembered that Harrison’s growing desire to write for the band had become an issue.

“A lot of the girls were mad on him, so we always wanted to give him at least one track,” he said in the Anthology box set. “Then George started to catch on, [asking] ‘Why should you write my songs?’ And then he started writing his own.

“It was an option to include George in the songwriting team. I remember walking up past Woolton Church with John one morning and going over the question: ‘Without wanting to be too mean to George, would the three of us write, or would it be better to keep it simple?’ We decided we’d just keep the two of us.”

Harrison nevertheless kept writing. And getting a song into the Beatles’ repertoire wasn’t easy for him. In 1969, he admitted that he felt uncomfortable even telling his bandmates that he had written something for an album.

“I used to have a hang-up about telling John, Paul and Ringo I had a song for an album,” he said in 1969. “I felt mentally, at that time, as if I was trying to compete. And in a way, the standard of the songs had to be good, because they were very good. I don’t want the Beatles to be recording some rubbish for my sake just because I wrote it.”

“Don’t Bother Me” did make the cut, despite Harrison’s reservations. And the Beatles took the song seriously enough to experiment with its sound. John Lennon tried to give his rhythm-guitar part — played on his 1958 Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar — a harsher, more aggressive character by using a Maestro Fuzz Tone pedal, one of the earliest commercially available fuzz units. Producer George Martin rejected the effect, however, feeling that the primitive fuzz created too much distortion and noise.

Instead, Lennon used the built-in tremolo on his Vox AC30, switching the effect on and off with a foot-switch. During overdubs, the group added percussion, including an Arabian bongo played by Ringo Starr, giving the song an unusual exotic sound. These are small details, but they show that “Don’t Bother Me” was more than a token Harrison composition: the Beatles regarded it as deserving the same creative support they gave Lennon and McCartney’s.

Harrison himself saw the experience as a starting point rather than a triumph.

“At least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good,” he wrote in I Me Mine.

He was right. “Don’t Bother Me” may not have been a classic, but it was a watershed moment: for the first time, Harrison had put a song of his own alongside the work of Lennon and McCartney. He would soon prove he belonged there.

And Harrison wasn’t the only Beatle to have doubts about the quality of his own material. John Lennon later dismissed “Run for Your Life” as a throwaway macho number and said he loathed the song. The Beatles were never entirely unanimous about their songs or their sound.

For Harrison, though, “Don’t Bother Me” represented something more important than a hit. It was the moment he stopped waiting for Lennon and McCartney to give him a song and began insisting that he had songs of his own.

Filming for Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Beatles biopics is well underway, and the on-screen Fab Four have been spotted in London re-creating the band’s iconic Abbey Road album cover.

Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan are set to play John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, respectively, in a four-film project directed by Mendes. Each film will focus on the backstory of a specific Beatle, making it one of the most ambitious music biopic projects ever to hit the big screen.

But the shoot to re-create the Abbey Road album cover this past weekend was getting all the attention.

Since the record’s release in 1969, the image of the four Beatles walking in line on the zebra crossing in front of Abbey Road — the historic studio where they made nearly all of their recordings — has become one of the most recognizable album sleeves ever produced.

Famous as the image is, the idea behind it was actually quite simple. The Beatles were struggling to come up with a suitable design for the record cover, and Paul McCartney suggested photographing the group crossing the street outside the studio.

On the morning of August 8, the late photographer Iain Macmillan was brought in to make the idea a reality. Beginning at 11:35, Macmillan was allowed 10 minutes to shoot the photo while a policeman held up traffic.

In the days leading up to the shoot, the photographer had used stand-ins to meticulously plan the shot. Still, he couldn’t predict the issues on the day. He managed to get just six shots. One was ruined by a car pulling out from behind the studio; another was marred by too much spacing between Starr and Lennon.

The fifth shot proved to be the perfect choice. Selected by McCartney, it was chosen partly because it was the only one that featured all four members mid-stride.

As former Apple Records creative director John Kosh told Forbes in 2019, he had just days to work on the design for the completed album jacket.

“I suddenly found myself [thinking], ‘By God, I’ve got to do this and get it out on Wednesday?’” he remembers.

Kosh had assumed the photo had been taken for publicity. He was already busy working on the cover for what he assumed would be the group’s next album, Get Back, recorded the previous January (and ultimately released as Let It Be in May 1970).

“But in the middle of all of this,” Kosh says, “they put that on hold, and Abbey Road came in.”

It was trial by fire, but Kosh stuck to his vision for the cover. He was against having any type on the front of it, insisting no one would have any doubt as to who the four musicians were.

“I thought, ‘Here are the four Beatles walking across the street. If you do not know who they are, you have definitely been in a cave somewhere.’”

His decision outraged Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, Apple Records’ parent company. He called Kosh in the middle of the night to complain that he was ruining the Beatles’ career.

When Kosh showed up at Apple headquarters the next morning, he ran into George Harrison and told him what had happened.

“George looked at me and said, ‘Oh fuck it. We’re the Beatles.’

“So that was the end of that. George was such a sweet man. All the Beatles were fun to work with.”

In the end, Kosh got the cover he wanted — and one that went down in history.

“This was my first album cover, not really knowing what I was doing,” he confessed. “The fact that it’s turned into an icon, and possibly the most parodied album cover of all time, is really thrilling to me.”

But the cover not only birthed an icon — it drew untold numbers of visitors to re-create the crossing themselves. Artists copied it as well, including Booker T. & the MGs (1970’s McLemore Avenue), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (1988’s The Abbey Road E.P.) and even McCartney, who repeated the crossing with his sheepdog for the cover of his 1993 album, Paul Is Live.

Unfortunately, the original photo fueled the late-1960s rumor that McCartney had died and been replaced by a look-alike. Sleuths pointed to the fact that he was the only Beatle walking barefoot as a hint that the bass guitarist was dead.

“Back in the Sixties, the wild rumor was that I was dead because of certain alleged ‘clues’ on the Abbey Road sleeve,” he wrote in the press notes accompanying the Paul Is Live album sampler. “Because I was barefoot, it being a scorching summer’s day, it was taken as a bizarre Mafia sign of death.”

The Volkswagen parked on the side of the road in the photo provided another clue. Its license plate read 28IF. “It meant I, being 27 at the time, would have been 28 if I’d lived,” McCartney wrote.

More than half a century later, the image is still being copied. This time, it’s the actors playing the Beatles in Mendes’ films who have taken the famous walk, giving a new generation of Fab Four a chance to step into one of the most recognizable photographs in music history.

While Beatles fans dreamed of the group reuniting in the 1970s, David Bowie once revealed that he nearly managed to get John Lennon and Paul McCartney back together in 1974 to form a supergroup with him.

It was the year Bowie moved to New York City, just three years after Lennon himself had emigrated there. Shortly after Bowie’s arrival, he met Lennon at a party hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. Of all the Beatles, Lennon was his favorite.

“He was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.

Although he was nervous when the two met privately, they quickly formed a bond that led to Lennon visiting Bowie one night, with McCartney in tow.

As Bowie explained to Marc Riley on BBC Radio 6 Music, he was lodging at the time at the Pierre Hotel.

“I’d taken over a suite virtually for months and months,” he said. “I was kind of living there.”

Bowie explained that he was obsessed with the newly released Sony video recorder and would spend hours making his own films. “Fortunately, I was doing cocaine so I could stay up most of the night and complete these things,” he said, tongue in cheek.

It was on one of these late-night creative sprees that he was surprised by a pair of visitors.

“About three in the morning, there's a knock on the door. And John was there and he had got Paul with him. It was the two of them been out on the town for the evening.”

Lennon was in the midst of his Lost Weekend, the period from roughly late 1973 to mid 1975 when he and his wife Yoko Ono separated. He was dividing his time between New York City and Los Angeles, and spent much of his time on a bender. It was also during this time that he began recording his album of rock classic covers, Rock ’n’ Roll.

Lennon, whose previous meeting with Bowie had lasted until nearly dawn, knew the singer would be up at that hour.

“He said, Can we come in?’” Bowie recalled. “He said, ‘You won't believe what I've got here!’

“And I said, ‘I thought you two…’, and he said, ‘No. All that's gonna change.’”

Bowie believed it was possibly the first time the two had been back together since the Beatles.

“It was great. We spent the evening just like rapping and talking. There was kind of a strange thing between them. There was a little bit of distance every now and again, but that must have been the first time they'd been back together for, you know, since the big bust up, you know.”

In the course of talking, the three music icons hit on the idea of working together.

“They actually asked me if I'd kind of join the two of them and become a trio with them, and we’d change the name to something else: David Bowie and the Beatles. They liked the idea there’d be two — like, DBB. I think they wanted to call it DBB.”

Sadly, it was all a long night's pipe dream.

“The next morning, it just never came to anything,” Bowie concluded.

Soon after, however, Bowie and Lennon did go on to work together by recording a cover of the former Beatles’ 1968 song “Across the Universe” and co-writing “Fame.” Both songs would be included on Bowie’s 1975 album Young Americans, with “Fame” becoming the singer’s first number one song in America after it was released as that album’s second single.

Bowie wasn’t the only musician Lennon collaborated with at this time. He, along with Yoko Ono, performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers at the Fillmore East. However, the couple ran afoul of the electric guitar virtuoso when they remixed their performance of Zappa’s song “King Kong,” released it under the name “Jamrag” on their 1972 album Some Time in New York City and claimed it as their own composition.

And in 1974, shortly before his sessions with Bowie, Lennon had piano rocker Elton John guest on his hit song "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night."

Considering all that, it’s not surprising Lennon would be open to a new collaboration with McCartney, his original writing partner. Unfortunately, it never happened.

Johnny Marr was devastated when the Smiths acrimoniously collapsed in 1987, five years after he’d co-founded the cult independent rock band.

The guitarist read in the music press that his group were poised to fire him. Suspecting the story had been planted by lead singer Morrissey — as part of their increasingly angry communication breakdown — Marr decided to jump rather than be pushed, and found himself in a personal hell.

Around the same time, he also found himself spending “one long, incredible day with Paul McCartney and his late wife Linda, which provided him with the emotional energy he needed to carry on.

“Linda was so generous as a person,” Marr told Mojo. “She was asking me all about my life. And [Paul] was sat there, so I just told him about the breakup of the band. I looked to him and waited, and he just said, ‘That’s bands for you.’”

It wasn’t just the words; it was who they’d come from — McCartney had endured the same kind of hell when the Beatles had disintegrated in 1970, but he’d had time learn to live with it and move on.

“It’s such a brilliant answer coming from him,” Marr said. “Over the years I’ve been asked to give advice. There is just a time to say, ‘That’s bands for you.’”

Marr picked up his electric guitar and began to accept invitations to play sessions, where found “sanctuary.”

“I just have to give credit to the people I was working with,” he said. “Matt Johnson [The The] is one of my closest friends to this day. Bernard Sumner and Chrissie Hynde — that collection of people. I get very tight with people.”

He added, “If you’re looking at it like a CV, it seems to be flitting around a lot, but I know when I’ve got a good job — [like] playing with Bryan Ferry and turning up on his records. There’s a time to not look too deeply at stuff.”

Few guitarists have enjoyed a front-row seat to as much music history as Carlos Alomar. Beyond his decades with David Bowie, the guitarist worked closely with John Lennon during the former Beatle's most creatively fertile post-Beatles years, shared unforgettable moments with Paul McCartney and even found himself onstage with rock ’n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry.

Last year, Alomar returned to the road after a nine-year hiatus, reuniting with drummer Dennis Davis and bass guitarist George Murray as the D.A.M. Trio. Together, the three musicians formed the powerhouse rhythm section that helped Bowie reshape his sound on a landmark run of albums, including Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, “Heroes” and Lodger.

When Alomar spoke with Guitar Player, he reflected on those experiences with the perspective of someone who knows such moments can't be recreated. “It’s fortuitous that it happened, but it never happened the same way every time,” he says. “So I cherish the moments that we have, because those little moments in time should be cherished and shared, but never really repeated.”

Chuck Berry

“I got this phone call to do a job at the Rye Playland [in Rye, New York, north of New York City]. It was an amusement park, but they had entertainment there under the giant tent and everything. I get there and in walks Chuck Berry with his electric guitar. He walks right up to us and says, ‘When I do like this’ — and he takes his headstock and moves it sideways — ‘you stop.’

“‘And when I do like this’ — and he moves his headstock up and down — ‘you play.’ That was it.

“He turns around to walk out, and I said, ‘Come on…’ I was maybe in my early 20s and naive. I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Berry, are we gonna rehearse?’

“That man turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Boy, I ain’t gonna rehearse rock and roll.’

“He turned around, walked out.

“We hit that stage in true form. And every time that headstock went up, every time that headstock went sideways — bam! I mean, it was amazing, and to this day, I still kind of conduct the same way that Chuck Berry did. [laughs]

“To me, the biggest lesson was you don’t rehearse rock and roll. You either know it, or you don’t.

“But I also learned that you did not talk to Chuck — Chuck talked to you. And how do I remember him? As a mean drunk. [laughs] You only remember your last experience with someone.

“It’s like a song: You can do a whole song, but if you mess up the ending, all you remember is the messed-up ending. Chuck Berry is like that song. It was great. But at the end, he came and stunk that up real good.”

David Bowie

“I was a session musician for RCA Studios when I got called to work on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album. I was in a session, and in comes this thin, 98-pound, translucent dude with white skin, orange hair, fedora — everything. I was like, ‘Whoa, dude, you look like crap. You need to come to my house and get a home-cooked meal.’ [laughs]

“Little did I know he would take me up on it. We got on really, really well. I took him to the Apollo Theater, and he met [comedian] Richard Pryor, of all people, who was opening for [soul group] the Main Ingredient, which I was playing with. And then, I took him to the Latin clubs to hear some Latin music. We just hung out. There was no work.

“His intelligence was really amazing. I started talking to him about the chitlin circuit and James Brown — man, I found out at that moment how much the Brits studied Black music. Not only was I impressed with his intellect and his knowledge, but I was also impressed with his accent. You gotta remember, I was a kid from the Bronx, and I’m speaking to a Brit with that weird accent. So I was very curious.

“Eventually, he told me he was doing his Diamond Dogs album, but there was no money. There was no way I was gonna drop my gig with the Main Ingredient for this gig with no-paying David Bowie. [laughs]

“So I turned him down. Then later, after the Diamond Dogs album and tour, I got another phone call, and I turned him down again. He was very disappointed. I told him, ‘I’m married. I can’t take a pay cut like this.’ David said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’

“And that was it. He took care of it. So from there we formed the band that relaunched his career with Young Americans.

“The last time I talked to David was at a birthday party. I didn’t realize that he was under the grip of his own demise. Although we had a good time, I didn’t realize that was our goodbye. That was it. Later on, I found out what was happening, and then of course, it affected me deeply. It was a pretty brutal year.”

John Lennon

“One day, I was in the studio, and in walked David Bowie with John Lennon and May Pang [Lennon’s girlfriend during his separation from Yoko Ono]. At the time, I didn’t really know who David Bowie was. But hell, I knew who John Lennon was. And John Lennon was a character who understood who he was.

“We had the groove down for ‘Fame’ [Alomar wrote the song’s underlying funk riff], but that was all we had at the time — not even the words. John came in with just an acoustic guitar, and they said, ‘Would you like to play?’ and he said, ‘Sure.’ And every time he would play, he would sigh the word ‘fame.’

“They left to go to dinner and invited me, but I decided to stay and put some parts down. But I kept hearing that sound that John had been making. So we isolated his track, and we could hear him playing the guitar and saying ‘fame.’

“And that’s how the song became ‘Fame.’ It was my first number one hit. I was young and sandwiched between David Bowie and John Lennon on the song.”

Paul McCartney

“I had just finished writing with Mick Jagger when I was invite to work with Paul on his next album [1986’s Press to Play] at his studio, Hogg Hill Mill, in England.

“He was just the most endearing individual, very self-effacing, and his family was just so inviting and friendly. We walked upstairs to a studio filled with equipment. There were the Vox amplifier, the Höfner bass, the Mellotrons… I was drooling, man. [laughs]

“As I’m taking all that in, the man proceeded to roll the biggest spliff I’ve ever seen in my life. [laughs] I thought I was back in Jamaica! We talked about all kinds of music, and the Black experience. Again, I was reminded of the way the British studied R&B music and their curiosity, and, with all due respect, the way they always give proper respect to the African-American experience, the blues, and all the music we’ve done. They really hold it in high esteem, and rightfully so, you know?

“So he played me his first track, and I said, ‘Oh, sorry, Paul, I like what I hear, but I don’t hear myself in that.’ Same with the second track. I said, ‘Respectfully, I think it’s just great, so that I wouldn’t touch that one.’

“When we got to the third song, I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I hear something in that!’ So I’m just practicing, you know, putting little things out there. Little did I know that Paul was recording all of that. The minute I got the record home, I listened to it, and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I thought I was just practicing!’ So it was just a wonderful experience.”

Much – some would say too much – has been written about Taylor Swift’s marriage to NFL star Travis Kelce, but away from all the gossip-waffle there was a surprise Beatles-themed sub-plot.

Paul McCartney was among the litany of celebrities in attendance for the pair’s big day, and he dusted off a Fab Four classic at the ceremony to mark the occasion. Sources (via People) say the 84-year-old, of whom Swift is a long-term admirer, performed the early Beatles track “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at the wedding reception, 62 years after he last played it.

McCartney had co-written the song in 1963 with his inimitable hitmaking partner, John Lennon, and it was the first song the group ever recorded on a four-track. It would go on to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for the band and kickstart a run of 20 record-breaking chart-topping singles in the States.

“These four youngsters have created an international stir with ‘Beatlemania,’ and have hit our shores with unprecedented impact,” Billboard wrote at the time, with their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show right around the corner.

The song would go on to close out that show, which Jimi Hendrix had watched with the Isley Brothers. Still, after making the set list for a show at New York’s Paramount Theatre on September 20, 1964, it was never played again, either by the Beatles, Paul McCartney, or John Lennon as solo acts.

It’s perhaps quite fitting that the song would eventually rear its head again before a modern-day pop star who has enjoyed a fandom arguably as fierce and passionate as Beatlemania. Swift has also gone on to break a score of the Beatles’ long-standing chart records, including the most weeks in the US Billboard Top 200 and the fastest trio of number-one albums in the UK.

However, it was British pop act Robbie Williams who finally toppled the Beatles’ record of 15 number one albums back in March. And he did it with a record that featured Tony Iommi, no less.

Swift has often spoken in reverence about the Beatles, and when she got the chance to sit down with McCartney for a chat in November 2020 for Rolling Stone, it was his ability to play all the instruments on a solo record that stood out to her.

“To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, 'I can do all this on my own if I have to,” she had said.

The ever-humble McCartney, however, played it down, citing his first solo album in particular as a necessity rather than a statement of individualism.

“With [1970’s] McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself,” he noted.

By the mid-1960s, the Beatles had left behind their matching suits and clean-cut image in favor of something far more bohemian. Rubber Soul was famously dubbed the band’s “pot album” by John Lennon, while increasingly mind-altering substances helped shape the psychedelic sounds of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It was a period of constant experimentation, both musically and chemically. As Paul McCartney later told Howard Stern, “Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict.”

Stern asked McCartney about one of the best-known stories from the making of Sgt. Pepper: the claim that Lennon was tripping on LSD while recording the album’s fourth track, “Getting Better.”

“It was crazy, because he had a little pillbox,” McCartney recalled. “He’d have his little uppers and his little downers, and he thought he was taking a little upper, and we could get on with the session.

“[Then] he comes over to me and whispers, ‘I took the wrong pill.’

“‘What did you take?’

“‘Acid.’”

A bandmate unexpectedly taking LSD isn’t the ideal recipe for a productive recording session, but McCartney remained remarkably unfazed.

“Okay,” he remembered thinking, “let’s work around that, then.”

The bigger challenge was keeping producer George Martin in the dark.

“At one point, George Martin comes in, who knew nothing about anything,” McCartney said. “He said, ‘John doesn’t look too well.’

“‘No, he’s not feeling a little under the weather,’ because we had to hide it all from George. He was a grown-up.”

Martin’s innocence wouldn’t last forever. George Harrison later revealed that he and the other Beatles once spiked the producer’s tea with LSD during a late-’60s recording session to keep the vibe going, and Martin didn’t learn what had happened until decades later.

On this occasion, though, Martin simply tried to help. Concerned for Lennon’s wellbeing, he took him up to the roof of EMI Studios for some fresh air before leaving him up there alone.

Knowing exactly what was happening, McCartney and Harrison rushed upstairs to retrieve their bandmate before he wandered off the roof's edge and plummeted to the ground.

When Stern asked whether incidents like that were debilitating or simply part of the Beatles’ creative process, McCartney suggested it was a bit of both.

“Things happened in the studio that you couldn’t always predict, and a lot of it was very good,” he said. “So we rolled with the punches. We were pretty good at rolling with the punches; that one was quite a punch to roll with, but we did it, and we finished the track.”

It was an approach that served the Beatles well. Whether it was recording reverse electric guitar parts for “Tomorrow Never Knows” or devising Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) to spare Lennon the chore of double-tracking his vocals, the band consistently turned unexpected situations into innovations. Finishing “Getting Better” despite Lennon’s accidental acid trip was just another example of how they kept the session — and the music — moving forward.

Today is Global Beatles Day.

As Paul McCartney’s longtime guitarist and occasional bass player, Brian Ray has gained unique insights into the former Beatle’s songwriting process. Over his 24 years with McCartney, Ray says he learned just how prolific — and instinctive — the songwriting partnership between McCartney and John Lennon really was.

“I asked Paul if he wrote to a title or a little melody, or a riff or something, and he said, ‘No. It was always lyrics, music, melody and guitars all at once,’” Ray told Guitar Player in 2005.

As a result, Lennon and McCartney worked quickly — and had to. “You have to remember that the Beatles did a record every six months,” said Ray, a veteran electric guitar player known for favoring a 1957 Les Paul Goldtop.

For all their productivity, however, McCartney told Ray there was one occasion when the pair hit a creative roadblock.

“Paul said that in the more than 300 songs he and John wrote, he could only remember one time where they got stuck, and that was when they were writing ‘Drive My Car.’ They thought the title wasn’t working, but they liked the song. So they took a break, had some tea, and changed it.”

What exactly changed during that tea break? Ray wasn’t saying.

“I won’t tell you the lyric they tossed, because that’s Paul’s right to do that. I don’t want to be the guy who tells everybody what ‘Drive My Car’ was originally written as. And, you know, even with the rewrite they still finished the song at the end of the day.”

As some Beatles fans know, the discarded lyric centered on “golden rings.” McCartney had mined similar imagery before with the phrase “diamond rings,” notably in “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “If You’ve Got Trouble,” a Help!-era outtake later released on Anthology 2. Lennon had also referenced them in “I Feel Fine.”

As McCartney explained to Barry Miles in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, “‘Drive My Car’” was “one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session.”

“The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal,” he said.

When McCartney presented the song to Lennon, neither could come up with a satisfactory replacement. “So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became ‘drive my car’ instead of ‘golden rings,’” he recalled.

Which means Ray was faithfully protecting a secret that McCartney himself had revealed years earlier.

Paul McCartney says he often found himself consulting an old songwriting partner while writing his latest solo album, The Boys from Dungeon Lane.

The record is an ode to the Liverpool streets, landmarks and memories that shaped McCartney's youth — territory he famously explored decades earlier alongside John Lennon in some of the Beatles' most celebrated songs.

“My collaborator was probably one of the best writers of the century,” McCartney tells The Guardian. “So, yeah, you're going to miss him.”

As the Beatles' principal songwriters, McCartney and Lennon spent years in constant creative dialogue, challenging and inspiring one another both in conversation and through song. Their shared memories of Liverpool often became fertile ground for that exchange.

When the pair turned their attention to childhood memories in late 1966, Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever,” inspired by the grounds of a Salvation Army children's home near where he grew up. McCartney answered with “Penny Lane,” a vivid portrait of the Liverpool street and surrounding neighborhood where he, Lennon and George Harrison spent time as teenagers.

Nearly 60 years later, McCartney found himself revisiting the same landscape while writing The Boys from Dungeon Lane. Even without Lennon by his side, he says the conversation continued.

“I kind of know he would've known it,” McCartney says. “I can gauge his reaction: ‘That's good, stick that in.'”

The imagined exchanges were a reminder of a partnership that helped define popular music — and of the loss that came when Lennon was murdered in 1980.

“But that's life,” McCartney says. “You lose people.”

The subject of loss is one McCartney has thought about increasingly as he has grown older. He recalls Beatles producer George Martin, who was older than the band members, warning him that aging inevitably means watching friends and colleagues pass away.

“Now I'm probably at that age,” McCartney says, “and I'm very conscious of that, having lost John and George — two big touchstones for anything we're talking about.

“So, yeah, you do miss them,” he continues. “I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.' It's not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it's life, and it's what we've got.'”

McCartney and Lennon grew up together and learned to write songs together, face to face, with acoustic guitars in hand. While one half of the partnership has been gone for more than four decades, McCartney's comments suggest that, in some ways, the conversation never really ended.

When the British rock scene exploded in the 1960s, the media were quick to manufacture rivalries — and few sold papers better than the supposed feud between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

But according to Paul McCartney, the reality was very different. Far from being enemies, the bands were part of a close-knit musical community that regularly crossed paths in London.

Speaking with Vernon Kay on BBC Radio 2 about the songs that shaped his life, McCartney reflected on the camaraderie shared by the era’s biggest acts while discussing “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks.

“It was a lot of fun,” McCartney recalled. “The thing I liked about it was that it was a community. Even though we’d all come from different parts of the U.K., we were all now in London, and so there was great camaraderie.

“I think the newspapers really played it up like there were terrible rivalries and we hated each other. It wasn’t true.”

McCartney then shared a story that illustrated the bond between the bands.

“John and I were down in Charing Cross Road, where our music publisher was, and we were looking enviously into the windows of all the guitar shops,” he said. “At some point, we heard, ‘Oi!’ and we looked out in the street. There’s a London taxi going along, and there’s Mick and Keith hanging out.”

The pair — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — invited them into the cab, where the conversation soon turned to the Stones’ need for a new single.

“‘Well, we haven’t got a single,’” McCartney recalled Jagger saying. “‘We need a new single.’”

McCartney immediately thought of a song the Beatles had recorded but didn’t plan to release as a standalone single.

“Me being entrepreneurial or pushy, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got one that Ringo’s done on the album, and we’re not going to release it as a single,’” he said. “‘You guys would do it great, because it’s Bo Diddley style.’”

That song was “I Wanna to Be Your Man,” which the Rolling Stones released in November 1963. It became the band’s first U.K. Top 20 hit, reaching number 12.

“That just shows the camaraderie,” McCartney then says. “We gave them a song instead of jealously guarding it, not wanting them to do it.”

The Beatles would later release the song on their second album, making it the only song shared across their discographies.

The two groups continued to cross paths over the years, including in the studio. Brian Jones sang backing vocals on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and played saxophone on the 1970 B-side “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” while Jagger sang background vocals on their 1967 recording “Baby You’re a Rich Man.”

Lennon and McCartney sang on the Stones’ 1967 single “We Love You,” and Lennon performed with Keith Richards in the group the Dirty Mac for The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus event in December 1968.

Decades later, in 2023, McCartney joined the Rolling Stones on record again when he played bass on the Hackney Diamonds track “Bite My Head Off” and “Covered in You,” the latter of which is on the group’s new album, Foreign Tongues.

“I showed up as a session player,” McCartney said. “It was a really good feeling, because I wasn’t a star, I was just the bass player.

“I’m standing there playing, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones!’ I should be blasé and say, ‘I’ve known them for years,’ but it was special.

“You better believe when I got home that evening, I said, ‘I’ve just played with the Stones. I loved it!’”

Paul McCartney has spent more than six decades moving forward as one of rock’s most prolific artists. But lately, the past keeps pulling him back.

At a listening event at Abbey Road Studios, the former Beatles songwriter previewed his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and explained why memories — of childhood, lost friends and family — have become the driving force behind his latest music.

“Why am I doing all these songs about memories?” McCartney asked himself at the event, as reported by The i. “Well, it’s where your big bank of information is. Quite a few of the songs on this album go back in time.”

The legendary bass player will release the record May 27. Its title references Speke, Liverpool, where McCartney grew up — and several of the songs revisit moments from those early years.

The album’s opener recalls a teenage crush on a neighbor named Jasmine that never quite blossomed. “She did knock on the door once, but I was on the toilet,” McCartney laughs.

But some memories cut deeper — particularly those involving his former bandmates.

Lead single “Days We Left Behind” looks back on McCartney’s early adventures with John Lennon and George Harrison, long before the three would change popular music forever.

“I still get a little bit emotional talking about John and George,” McCartney admits.

One memory behind the song involves a youthful hitchhiking trip he took with Harrison. At one point the pair caught a ride on a battery-powered milk delivery truck as they headed “down south.”

“There was the driver’s seat, a battery, and a passenger seat. George got the battery,” McCartney recalled (via The Guardian). “He had jeans with a zip on the back, and they connected with the battery. Later, at a B&B, he showed me the big zip burn!”

When McCartney later told the story to Olivia Harrison, she remembered hearing a similar version from her husband — though with a different culprit.

“She said, ‘Yeah, George told me that story about you getting your zip stuck in the battery,’” McCartney said. “I maintain it was him.”

The past isn’t only present in memories on the album. It also surfaces in the music itself.

The record features a duet between McCartney and fellow Beatle Ringo Starr — the first collaboration between the two surviving members of the band on one of McCartney’s solo releases.

McCartney has paid tribute to his former bandmates before, including performing at the 2002 Concert for George at Royal Albert Hall. And Beatles history has continued to echo into the present through projects such as the band’s AI-assisted 2023 single, “Now and Then.’

Memories of McCartney’s family also play a role on the album. His mother died while he was still a boy, leaving him and his brother, Mike McCartney, to be raised by their father.

“I’ve never written about my mum and dad before,” McCartney explains. Reflecting on the turmoil of today’s world led him to think about his parents’ experiences during World War II — his father a firefighter, his mother a nurse.

“Imagine any minute now you’re expecting bombs to fall,” he says. “I wondered what that would do to you.”

Even the album’s creation began with a moment that felt almost accidental. It’s McCartney’s first record with producer Andrew Watt, known for his work with Ozzy Osbourne and the Rolling Stones. Their collaboration began five years ago over a cup of tea, when McCartney — casually strumming an acoustic guitar — stumbled upon a mystery chord that sparked the opening track, “As You Lie There.”

The album sessions were completed between legs of McCartney’s Got Back Tour.

During that tour, another piece of McCartney’s past resurfaced: his iconic Höfner bass, which had been missing for more than 50 years before recently returning to the stage.

For McCartney, it seems the past isn’t something easily left behind. Instead, it’s the well he keeps returning to — for stories, for songs, and for the memories that still shape his music.

Paul McCartney has collaborated with scores of artists over the decades, from Elvis Costello to Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Johnny Cash.

But he has never recorded a proper duet with his former Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr — until now.

Titled “Home to Us,” the track is a featured moment on McCartney’s upcoming solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, due May 29. The record was produced by Andrew Watt, whose recent credits include Dark Matter by Pearl Jam and Hackney Diamonds by the Rolling Stones.

The collaboration, however, didn’t come together entirely smoothly, as McCartney and Starr reveal in separate conversations.

Speaking on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Starr explains that the song began life two years ago as a jam between him and Watt, who lives down the street from him.

“I went down, and there was a kit in his studio,” Ringo says, “and he played guitar and we jammed.”

When Starr began working on his new album, Long Long Road, he thought the track might be right for it.

“I said, Andrew, send me that bit we did of the jamming. He never did,” he deadpans.

As McCartney revealed at a listening party for The Boys of Dungeon Lane, he heard their jam and began crafting it into a song. When Watt called Starr to ask him to add more drums to it, Ringo was, McCartney says, “a bit pissed.”

Nevertheless, McCartney pressed on with the track, writing lyrics about growing up in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool. It was there that he first joined forces with John Lennon and George Harrison — and where he and Lennon began crafting their earliest songs together on acoustic guitars.

“Even though where we lived was a little rough, it was home to us,” McCartney says.

Confusion continued to reign over their track, even after McCartney sent the demo to Starr to add vocals. Rather than sing the entire song, Starr recorded only the chorus, leading McCartney to assume that the drummer didn’t like the track.

After the two former Beatles talked it through, however, everything fell into place. Starr returned to the studio to record additional drums, and the song ultimately evolved into a true collaboration.

In all likelihood, the misunderstanding came down to Starr’s lack of experience, McCartney joked, noting with a laugh: “Ringo’s never done a duet with one of the Beatles.”

According to Billboard, the finished track has a distinctly Beatles-esque feel, featuring tempo shifts, key changes and layered harmonies. Among the voices joining McCartney and Starr are Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas.

It’s been a busy period for McCartney. In addition to preparing the new album, he’s been celebrating the release of the documentary McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass, which chronicles the search for his long-missing Höfner 500/1 violin bass. The instrument disappeared in 1972 and was finally recovered in 2024 after the Lost Bass Project launched a global hunt for the legendary guitar.

Ian Horne can vividly recall the moment he realized he had lost Paul McCartney’s Höfner 500/1 violin bass.

“It felt like the worst moment of my life,” Horne tells RadioTimes of the morning in October 1972 when he discovered the instrument missing. “I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank.”

This was no ordinary bass. It was the instrument with which the Beatles became famous in 1962 and ’63, heard on early hits like “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.” McCartney was just 18 when he purchased it for £30 in Hamburg in April 1961 during the band’s residency on the Reeperbahn.

Within two years, the bass had been worn down from constant use, prompting McCartney to purchase a second Höfner as a replacement. The original instrument was largely retired, surfacing only occasionally, most notably during the filming of Let It Be.

By 1972, the Beatles had been broken up for two years, and McCartney and his wife, Linda, were recording and performing with their new band, Wings. Horne had joined them the previous year as their sound engineer. At the time, Wings were bouncing between London studios while recording tracks for their second album, Red Rose Speedway.

At the end of one long studio session, Horne loaded the band’s equipment into their truck.

“It was a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the back,” he recalls.

Afterward, he drove Wings crew member Trevor Jones to his flat in Notting Hill, in West London. It was late, and Jones suggested Horne stay the night. In what would turn out to be the worst decision of his career, Horne agreed. He parked the truck nearby on Cambridge Gardens, in what he describes as a rough neighborhood of drug dealers and artists.

“There were lots of nice people in the hippie culture,” he says. “But there were some dodgy people about as well.”

The next morning, Horne returned to the truck and immediately saw something was wrong. The padlock that secured the roller shutter was lying on the ground.

“When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straight away that it was gone,” he says. “The bass wasn’t there.”

Jones led Horne to several nearby houses where he suspected the instrument might have ended up. Armed with tools from the truck, the two men knocked on doors and confronted a few residents.

“We went to two or three places in a sort of threatening manner,” Horne recalls. “But we didn’t find it.”

There was nothing left to do but report the theft to the police — and then deliver the news to McCartney himself.

“I realized I had to go and tell Paul in person.”

At the time, McCartney was living near Abbey Road Studios. Horne, clearly shaken, went to see him and broke the news directly.

“I just came out with it: ‘I’ve got some bad news, Paul. Our truck was broken into and the bass was stolen.’”

Horne braced for the worst.

“I expected him to go ballistic,” he says. “But Paul was lovely about it. He said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got another one.’”

In fact, McCartney was so concerned about Horne’s reputation that he chose not to publicize the loss, fearing it might damage the engineer’s career. The decision had an unintended consequence: with little attention drawn to the theft, the bass quietly disappeared into obscurity.

Which helps explain why it took decades for the search to begin in earnest. In 2023, the Lost Bass Project launched a global search to find the Höfner. Within weeks, a woman discovered the instrument was among the guitars her husband left behind when he died during the COVID outbreak. That search is the subject of the new documentary Paul McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass.

So why did McCartney finally decide to look for it in 2023?

“I think anything that’s nicked, you want back — especially if it has sentimental value,” he said. “It just went off into the universe, and it left us thinking, ‘Where did it go?’ There must be an answer.”

When the Lost Bass Project launched a search for Paul McCartney’s missing Höfner bass in September 2023, it quickly became a global event.

What no one realized was that, around the same time, a woman entirely unaware of the search had already found the instrument. It was upstairs in the attic of her home — roughly 12 miles from where McCartney lives.

The story was revealed in The Times on March 28, just ahead of a new BBC documentary about the instrument — McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass — that debuts in England this week.

McCartney’s 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass is the stuff of legend. The instrument, which he purchased at age 18 during the Beatles’ second trip to Hamburg, was played at the band’s early shows and on their early recordings, including their debut album.

By October 1963 the Höfner needed repair, prompting McCartney to purchase an almost identical 500/1 while the original was serviced. He rarely played the 1961 bass afterward, although it did make a brief appearance during the band’s sessions for Let It Be.

In 1972, while McCartney and his band Wings were recording Red Rose Speedway at studios around London, the 1961 Höfner was among several instruments stolen from an equipment van parked in the city’s Notting Hill neighborhood.

According to the story that later emerged, George Glenister stole the bass in an act of petty thievery, believing he could sell it “for a few quid.” Once he realized what he had, Glenister knew the instrument was far too recognizable to sell. Instead, he gave it to Ron Guest, proprietor of the Admiral Blake pub in Ladbroke Grove, in exchange for a few pints of beer.

When Guest died in 1992, the bass passed to his son, Haydn Guest. Haydn married Cathy, and they moved to Hastings in East Sussex. When Haydn died during the COVID-19 pandemic, his guitars — including the Höfner — went to her.

“I inherited about 15 guitars,” she told David Collins. “I knew there were a few in the attic but hadn’t been up there for years as it was inaccessible.”

She discovered the bass in September 2023, around the time the Lost Bass Project announced its search. Cathy said she was unaware of the effort and only realized what she had after uploading a photo of the instrument to Google Images.

“The results immediately came up with Paul McCartney,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it, but I knew he only lived about 12 miles away, so I thought I would just drive there.”

“There” was McCartney’s farm in East Sussex. He was in Los Angeles at the time, so Cathy instead spoke with his security team and sent photos of the bass for verification.

“I slept with it that night because I was worried,” she said.

After McCartney confirmed it was his Höfner, the bass was returned to him on September 21, 2023, and was later restored.

McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass captures the moment he was reunited with the instrument. Holding it for the first time in more than 50 years, he murmurs: “Welcome home, honey.”

August may have heralded news of a brand-new Beatles Anthology release and an expanded companion documentary — following some not-so-cryptic teasing from Paul McCartney — but February has delivered even more Fab Four content.

McCartney has just released the new documentary Man on the Run, which focuses on his life after the end of the Beatles. The film, available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, charts his transition from one half of the band’s storied songwriting partnership to forming Wings with his wife, Linda McCartney.

“The Beatles had broken up and I was thinking, ‘What do I do now?’” the bass guitarist explains in the film. “How can I ever do anything that’s anywhere near as good as the Beatles? I was on my own for the first time, so I had to look inside myself.”

McCartney arguably had the most complicated adjustment to life after the band. George Harrison, long frustrated by his peripheral role in the group, came flying out of the gates with All Things Must Pass. John Lennon and Ringo Starr each carved out distinct solo identities as well, while McCartney’s early post-Beatles years were comparatively uneven.

That’s ironic, considering he was the one who closed the door on John Lennon’s plans to keep the Beatles going into the 1970. Man on the Run explores how he navigated those uncharted waters and rebuilt his confidence from the ground up.

As McCartney notes in the documentary, he was the only member of the quartet to “put a band together,” leaning back into collaboration while the others embraced solo autonomy.

“I thought we should start from square one,” he says. “It was a puzzle I had to unravel.”

According to Amazon MGM, “The film chronicles the arc of McCartney’s solo career as he faces down a myriad of challenges while creating new music to define a new decade,” offering “unprecedented access to previously unseen footage and rare archival materials,” with the story told “through a uniquely vulnerable lens.”

The documentary captures key moments from McCartney’s post-Beatles career, including footage from his 1973 TV special, which proved a pivotal turning point in his solo trajectory. It also addresses the deterioration of his friendship with Lennon — documented in the pointed songs they wrote about one another — as well as its eventual reconciliation.

More significantly, the project is not a one-off. It kickstarts a new working relationship between McCartney, Universal Music Group, and Amazon, encompassing exclusive music and merchandise initiatives.

“Right now, I have 25 songs that I’m finishing in the next few months — new songs that are interesting,” McCartney revealed in an interview with Vulture. “Often, a constant thread through my writing is nostalgia, the memories of things past. I don’t question too much how it happens. I’m just thrilled it does.”

Elsewhere, super-producer Mark Ronson has offered fresh insight into what it was like to work with McCartney, noting that his penchant for “weird” sounds has always been part of the creative equation.

Meanwhile, Guitar Player has unearthed its historic 1990 interview with McCartney from the archives, in which he makes some surprising revelations about his favorite guitar.

Carl Perkins was a rockabilly pioneer who sang with Elvis Presley, hung out and toured with Johnny Cash and wrote classic rock and roll tunes like “Blue Suede Shoes,” the first recording to top the pop, country and R&B charts simultaneously.

The country-inflected guitar licks he coaxed from his 1953 Les Paul Goldtop inspired George Harrison’s early electric leads and solos with the Beatles. The group’s admiration ran deep: They covered at least seven Perkins songs onstage and in the studio, including “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” “Matchbox” and “Honey Don’t.” As Paul McCartney declared, “If there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles.”

But in less time than it takes a metal fan blade to spin, Perkins nearly lost his career. And his life.

It happened one night in 1962 at the end of a live set in Tennessee as he stepped forward to take a bow.

“We were playing on a trailer in a courthouse yard. Somebody put a big window fan on the side. It had no frame on it. I was taking the guitar off, taking a bow, when I stuck my hand in there,” he told Musician magazine’s Bill Flanagan.

“Wiped the whole hand out. The end of this thumb was off. The fingers were just danglin’, hangin’ off.”

The nearest hospital was 60 miles away. Perkins wrapped his mangled right hand in a towel and climbed into the back of a ’62 Buick for the impossibly long ride. The fan blade had severed the main arteries of his picking hand, and blood pulsed out with every heartbeat.

He recalled how “blood filled the floorboards and was running out the back doors.”

As his life literally drained away, Perkins felt himself crossing over. The car seat fell away beneath him and he saw a gray tunnel, beyond which shone a sky the colors of blue and orchid.

“I went through that passing from life,” he said. “I was just floatin’ like a feather through those beautiful colors.”

He held on long enough to reach the hospital. The surgeon on duty recommended amputating the damaged fingers, saying they would only get in Perkins’ way — if he survived. His wife begged the doctor to save them, and he reluctantly agreed to try.

Perkins woke the next afternoon in a hospital bed, his hand in a cast and his wife and the surgeon at his side. Against the odds, his hand had been saved.

“I was happy to have a thumb left — anything!” he said. “I tuned my guitar in open E, laid it across my lap and picked with the end of my thumb with that big cast on. I was gonna play!”

Over time, Perkins regained the use of his thumb and first two fingers. He never recovered full use of his pinkie, which had been essential to his intricate Chet Atkins–inspired picking style. It didn’t matter. He was grateful simply to play again.

“People have told me, ‘Carl, you play better than you ever did.’”

Over the next 36 years, until his death in 1998, he carried on playing bars, cutting dozens of albums and sharing stages with artists who revered him, including Eric Clapton, John Fogerty, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh and his old admirers Harrison, McCartney and Ringo Starr. He appreciated that his music had the power to inspire other guitarists to excel at their craft.

“Rockabilly’s simple music, but it’s not that easy to play,” he told Musician. “Rockabilly music gets under the skin, gets inside the ear and stays. You are part of that song. If it’s real, it’ll move you some way or another. If you ain’t tappin’ your foot, you’re missin’ the boat. Might as well go on to the next club.”

In an illustrious career spanning more than 50 years, session guitar ace Dean Parks has clocked up more than 3,000 song credits. But he cautions us, “I don’t think films, TV and commercials are covered in that number.”

Parks’ guitar playing career began in 1969 when he teamed up with the 1960s pop duo Sonny & Cher. “I’d taken a road gig with them,” he explains. ”They were in their second phase as artists, with an aim on becoming a Las Vegas act.

“Then they got this weekly TV show and Sonny insisted that everybody in the rhythm section get a tryout to be on the show — a kind of a wall-to-wall hour-of-music show. We had to do pre-recordings for all of that in just three hours, so we had to work quick, and there was no room for error.”

Among the musicians was another guitarist, Larry Carlton, with whom Parks developed an immediate rapport. Carlton would later become pivotal in Parks’ entry into the tight-knit L.A. studio session scene.

“I met Larry on the first show. They had called him in to be guitar one, and I was allocated to be guitar two,” Parks says. “What I didn’t know was that they were planning to make me guitar one.”

Carlton’s busy session schedule meant he wouldn’t be available all the time. ”He was really there to scout me and tell them whether I could carry the ball or not,” Parks explains.

Parks soon showed he could handle the job on his own.

”Larry gave them the thumbs up for me,” he says. ”That was a good proving ground for my later session work, as it kind of had all the skill sets that you needed in a session gig, where you have to work quick, be in tune and in time, have good ideas and be able to read and cooperate.”

Carlton was so impressed with Parks that he began recommending him for the jobs he was too busy to take.

“Larry was so in demand at that point that he could no longer do song demos for people — he would just do master sessions. So he began throwing all of his song demo stuff my way. And anytime someone said, ‘Larry, we’d like you to play guitar but we want two guitars,’ he would recommend me to play second guitar to him.”

Parks eventually went on to become a mainstay on the Los Angeles studio circuit, cutting sessions for Steely Dan, Johnny Rivers, the Partridge Family, Dolly Parton and hundreds of other artists who would make use of his guitar services. Through his work, Parks bore witness to some of music’s greatest artists at work, including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, and B.B. King. Here he shares stories behind some of those classic sessions.

Stevie Wonder

One of Parks‘ earliest important sessions was on Stevie Wonder’s landmark 1973 album, Innervisions. Wonder cut much of the album alone, working with assistance from Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, of the pioneering electronic music duo Tonto's Expanding Head Band. The two men — who worked with Wonder from 1972’s Music of My Mind through 1974’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale — assisted not only with production but also helped Wonder achieve his breakthrough sounds on synthesizers .

“The first time I worked with Stevie was when I was overdubbing an acoustic guitar on the song ‘Visions,’” Parks explains. “But when I got to the studio, he wasn’t ready for me to work; he actually made me wait until he was ready. I didn’t know how long that was going to be, so I just stayed in the control room. He had block-booked Studio A at the Record Plant, so all of his stuff was set up.

“He had a big synthesizer that was used for bass, a Fender Rhodes, drums, piano, a Clavinet… Everything was mic’d up and ready to go. The recording console had all the input modules on the left side ready to record, while the right side had our listening playback levels set.

“Stevie would call a tune, like ‘Living for the City,’ and Malcolm would go out and get Stevie situated on the instrument he was going to play and put the headphones on him. Meanwhile, Robert would be scurrying around and getting the tape ready to roll.

“Stevie would blow through the song once. Then he might say, ‘I want to do the Rhodes on “Higher Ground” now,’ so they’d scurry around again and get things ready to roll for that track.

“I watched Stevie do that for two hours and he only did one take on each piece. But it never felt like it was the first time he’d been through the piece on that particular instrument. I think he just kept recycling takes because it was fun to play and it was like jamming with himself. And he knew that as he put more instruments on, there was more to play to. I’m guessing he did that until he had good takes.”

When it finally came time for Parks to do his acoustic guitar overdub on “Visions,” he quickly dialed in a sound he was happy with, sat down with the chord chart and prepared for the tape to begin rolling.

“I hadn’t really heard the song, and he didn’t give me any direction at all,” he explains. “They just started playing it and I started playing along to it on the first run-through. At the end Stevie said, ‘That’s great. You hear anything else?’ And I said, ‘Well, I brought a nylon-string. Maybe you want to hear it on a nylon?’ And he said, ‘Sure!’

“And so they started again, and I expected they would mute the original guitar, the steel-string acoustic I had played, but they kept the steel-string acoustic in. So I played a nylon-string part that would kind of fit in with it.

“There was one little section where I had played a flurry of notes, so I did the same on the nylon-string and finished it all in one take. Stevie said, ‘Great! Thank you!’ I was curious to see whether they were going to use it, as it seemed like they weren’t taking what I had done seriously. But both takes are there on the record — one on the left and one on the right.”

Parks was also in attendance for tracks on Wonder’s 1976 magnum opus, Songs in the Key of Life.

“A similar thing happened on my acoustic overdub for Stevie’s tune ‘As’ from Songs in the Key of Life, where I just did it once, too. Stevie likes first takes. I’ve wondered if that’s part of the charm of the Innervisions album. His own performances on that album are like spontaneous first takes, although he had played through them all on other days.”

Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney

Parks recalls a late-night session in 1982 for Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, where he overdubbed guitar on “The Girl Is Mine.” The recording proved memorable, not only because of Jackson but also because of his partner on the song.

“I got the call to come in and do an overdub on a Michael Jackson record, but no other details were given to me,” he says. “When I arrived at the studio, it was revealed I would be playing on a track that Michael and Paul McCartney had written, and they would be singing as a duet.

“In the studio with me was just [producer] Quincy Jones and Michael, who was sitting in the corner, observing and available to contribute if he wanted to. The track was already done, with Steve Lukather’s little guitar rhythm part on it. I pulled out my Fender Princeton amp and plugged my ES-335 into it.

”Since I now knew who I was playing for, I thought, McCartney likes double guitar lines, like a George Harrison kind of thing. So I just came up with a little line at the end of the choruses and doubled it with a slightly cranked sound. And I was thinking compositionally too, which is sort of what I considered my job to be — an arranger with a guitar in my hand.”

B.B. King

In 1979, B.B. recruited Parks to contribute guitar to his album Take It Home. King’s rhythm section included members of the jazz-fusion group the Crusaders, whose ranks previously featured Parks’ friend Larry Carlton. The sessions gave Parks a rare glimpse into King’s captivating and economical approach to guitar solos.

“Working with B.B. was a great lesson in how to hold an audience during a solo,” Parks reveals. “He was set up in the booth with a guitar and a separate feed, and he was singing as we went along, playing all of his solos live. We got to hear him go through these tracks three or four times each, but what was remarkable was that he’d play a different solo each time, but kind of with the same three notes.

“You were on the edge of your seat waiting to hear the next thing he would play because it was such a solid idea. What he was playing was the statement. You’d wonder, How was he going to follow it up? And when is he going to follow it up? He didn’t blast you in the face and nail you to the wall. None of that stuff works very well. What does work is to think of it like fishing: you send out your bait and the audience will follow.

King called on Parks’ service two decades later for his star-studded 1997 album, Deuces Wild. B.B.’s no-frills style remained unchanged.

“B.B. always got a different sound every time I’ve ever heard him on a record,” Parks states. “On Deuces Wild, I had a Fender Tweed Deluxe combo, and I asked him if he would mind if he would try to play through that amp and let me get his sound, because I could kind of tell that he didn’t fool with amps and sounds. He’d just plug in and play, and whatever sound he was getting was the sound. I don’t think he thought about it.”

It’s often been rumored that Jimi Hendrix wanted to form a supergroup with Paul McCartney once the Beatles' breakup became imminent. Rock's two most-famous lefties teaming up sounds like a match made in heaven. But was there any truth in it?

Supposedly, a cablegram — a now outdated form of telegram — was sent to the Beatle in October 1969, on the same day that the “Paul McCartney is dead” rumor began to circulate. The offer is said to have come from producer Alan Douglas, who had put together Hendrix’s second outfit, the Band of Gypsys.

The rumored group would have consisted of Hendrix, Miles Davis and his go-to drummer, Tony Williams, with McCartney supposedly the missing piece of the puzzle.

The unofficial fan site The Paul McCartney Project says the former Beatle was invited to a recording session with the rest of the artists in New York, on October 22, 1969, the same day that he was traveling to Scotland to spend time with his family at his farm near Campbeltown.

The notion may sound tempting, but McCartney told Howard Stern in 2018 he has no evidence of a cablegram or any invitation being sent. .

“I never received one,” he said, adding, “There are lots of ‘what ifs.’"

As McCartney went on to explain, he was a Hendrix fan.

"I certainly love Jimi. I was one of the first people to see him in London,” he said, “and it was mind blowing.

“I was in a club late at night called the Bag of Nails, which is actually where I met Linda [Eastman, whom he'd later marry], and it was empty. I heard this sort of clunking noise — the sound of a jack plug going into a big amp — and it was Jimi, Noel [Redding, bass], and Mitch [Mitchell, drums]. It was the Jimi Hendrix Experience on the stage in the corner, and they played their whole act to virtually no one.”

Asked at what moment during the set he knew this mystery guitarist’s talents were extraordinary, he replies, “probably the first minute. The first second that he started playing guitar.

“That was a Friday night, it was just me and some friends,” he adds. “By Tuesday night, the word had got out. Now the club was steaming and packed for this new god in town.”

McCartney’s potential Jimi Hendrix link-up was not the only time a member of the Fab Four was involved in a would-be supergroup. In 1971, John Lennon tried to pull Eric Clapton out of his darkness by forming a band with him that could “bring the balls back to rock n’ roll.”

Both, tragically, never came to pass, and less than a year after the supposed offer was made, Jimi Hendrix was dead, all too soon.

As for McCartney, the 1970s proved to be a hit-and-miss decade, from his solo work to his second group, Wings. Discussing the rumors of his death in his new book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, he said that “in so many ways, I was dead… a 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle.” The chance to work with a jazz legend and arguably the greatest guitar player to have ever lived would surely have filled the void left by the Beatles' demise.

The Beatles’ Anthology doc-series is back on screens this week, and as the first installment reveals, Paul McCartney and John Lennon spent a lot of time playing face to face as they learned to play guitar and write songs.

As a lefty, Paul McCartney had an extra complication. Left-handed guitarists have never had it easy, especially in the early years of the instrument's U.S. popularity. Reportedly, Jimi Hendrix’s father forced him to play right-handed when he was a youngster out of belief that left-handedness was a sign of the devil. Jimi accommodated his dad when he was around and then flipped the guitar for left-handed playing when he was gone.

Paul McCartney had it somewhat easier. A southpaw, his dad didn't force him to play right handed, but like other lefty guitarists he had to tweak his Zenith acoustic guitar by switching the string order and making homemade fixes to the nut. Even so, over time he managed to learn how to play guitar right-handed given that much of the time he was among right-handed guitarists with no suitable instrument in sight.

“I can play right-handed guitar a bit, just enough for at parties,” he confirmed to Guitar Player in 1990. “Hopefully, by that point everyone is drunk when I pick it up, because otherwise they're going to catch me. But I could do that."

He explained that it would have made little sense to ask if he could re-string someone's guitar. "And at a party, you only want to play it for 15 or 30 minutes or so, and by the time you've goofed up their guitar and you hand it back to them, they've got to string it back again, and it's silly. So I had to learn upside down.”

John Lennon found McCartney’s left-handedness useful for when the two were practicing. Lennon, whose early musical skills consisted of playing banjo chords on guitar strung with five strings, picked up much of his chord knowledge from McCartney, who would position himself opposite Lennon, providing him with a mirror image of how to fret a chord. Some of that left-handed knowledge undoubtedly seeped into his brain. As McCartney revealed, Lennon had no difficulty playing McCartney’s left-strung guitar.

“It's funny: John learned upside down too, because of me — because mine was the only other guitar around for him, if he broke a string or he didn't have his,” McCartney said. “That's more unusual; left-handed guys can nearly always play a straight guitar.”

McCartney’s recollection offers an interesting insight into Lennon’s guitar talents. As he told Guitar Player in that same interview, Lennon was also the only Beatle who learned how to properly fingerpick, a skill he learned from folksinger Donovan while they were in India studying with the Maharishi.

McCartney recalled that he was playing a Rosetti Lucky 7 electric guitar by the time the Beatles began performing in Hamburg in 1960. The guitar didn’t last long,

“When I went to Hamburg, I had a thing called the Rosetti Lucky 7, which is a really terrible British guitar with terrible action,” he said. “It just fell apart on me — you know, just the heat in the club and the sweat made it fall apart. Eventually I sort of busted it — early rumblings of the Who! — in a drunken moment. It was busted somewhere, and it had to go. So I ended up with my back to the audience, playing piano, which was then the only thing I could do unless I could get a new guitar.”

It soon wouldn't matter. When bassist Stuart Sutcliffe quit the group in July 1961, it fell to McCartney to take on bass guitar duties. Lennon didn't have the skill for it, and Harrison was too valuable as a lead guitarist. While McCartney at first resented his new position, he came to embrace it.

But he said it wasn’t until 1965, during the making of Rubber Soul’s “Michelle,” that he discovered the instrument’s power to create harmonic tension and release.

“I did pretty much get lumbered into playing bass. I didn't really want to do it, but then I started to see some interesting things in it,” he said. “One of the very earliest was in ‘Michelle.’ There's that descending chord thing that goes, [sings bass notes] ‘do do do do, words I know, do do do do do, my Michelle’ — you know, the little descending minor thing.

“And I found that if I played a C, and then went to a G, and then to C, it really turned that phrase around. It gave it a musicality that the descending chords just hadn't got. It was lovely.”

It’s a transformational power acknowledged by players like Sting, and one that Neal Schon discussed when he spoke with us about creating the Journey hit recording of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

“And it was one of my first sort of awakenings,” McCartney continued. “’Ooh, ooh, bass can really change a track!’ You know, if you put the bass on the root note, you've got a kind of straight track.

“But later I learned how to make other notes work for me, as Brian Wilson was to prove on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, a big, influential album for me. If you're in C, and you put it on G — something that's not the root note — it creates a little tension. It's great. It just [takes a long, expectant, gasping breath] holds the track, and so by the time you go to C, it's like, ‘Oh, thank God he went to C!’

“And you can create tension with it. I didn't know that's what I was doing; it just sounded nice. And that started to get me much more interested in bass. It was no longer a matter of just being this low note in the back of it.”

The Beatles Anthology continues streaming with Episodes 4–6 on Thursday, November 27 and Episodes 7–9 on Friday, November 28.

As the Beatles Anthology returns to screens this week with a new Episode 9, fans will be able to relive the group’s birth and rise from Liverpool to the global stage.

The key moment in the Beatles’ creation is July 6, 1957, when Paul McCartney and John Lennon met. Lennon was 16, and McCartney 15, but the younger musician had more skill on guitar. It was that ability that earned him Lennon’s respect and a spot in his skiffle group, the Quarrymen.

And, as McCartney reveals in a 1999 interview, it was all due to one song.

Their fateful meeting took place at St Peter's Church Hall fête in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. McCartney only attended the event because of his mate Ivan Vaughan, who was a friend of Lennon’s.

“He used to be in one of the little skiffle groups that John was in,” McCartney told British TV host Michael Parkinson in a 1999 interview for his BBC talk show, Parkinson. “So he said you should come along to this thing. You know this group's playing, and my mate John's in it.”

The Quarrymen were a rough-and-tumble skiffle act consisting of Lennon and a group of musical friends from the Quarry Bank High School. McCartney and Vaughan arrived in time to catch the band's afternoon set and see Lennon sing “Come Go With Me,” by the Del Vikings. Lennon didn’t know the words and improvised them, which McCartney found both amusing and impressive.

“John just looked like he had something,” he told Parkinson. “What happened was, they did their first set and then they had a break, and then they were due to do the evening set. So the break was an opportunity for the band to get drunk, really.”

By the time Vaughan took McCartney around to meet the band, Lennon had had a few beers, he recalls. When Vaughan explained that McCartney played guitar, Lennon asked him to play.

“One of them lent me his guitar and I had to turn it right, because I'm left-handed,” he said. “They wouldn't let me change the strings. But because I had a mate who had a right-handed guitar, I'd learned to play upside down. So that was a little bit impressive.

“But I also knew the words to this song that they all loved,” he continues. “And they didn't know the words. That was enough to get me in.”

The song was Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock.” Cochran and his band had performed the tune in the 1956 U.S. musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, which also featured standout performances by McCartney favorites Fats Domino, Little Richard and Gene Vincent (who would also prove to be a big influence on Jimmy Page). But it was Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” that had captured the hearts of young guitarists with its insistent riff and Cochran’s twanging, heavily vibratoed voice.

Despite the song's popularity, there was a good reason Lennon and his group didn't know the lyrics: The tune hadn’t been released yet, not even in America. Cochran recorded it for release after the movie, in May and August 1957, but it still wasn’t issued until the following November. And it wasn’t even released as a single in the U.K.

The absence of a record didn't matter at all to the song's popularity. The Girl Can’t Help It and the musicians it showcased made a huge impact on Liverpool teens, who were enthralled by the performances. Thanks to the film, Little Richard began selling more records in Liverpool than Elvis Presley. It is undoubtedly the reason Richard began touring England, where he found he could play bigger and better venues than in the U.S., where he was usually relegated to dingy clubs.

As for McCartney, upon seeing the movie he headed out to his local record store to order Cochran's record, only to learn it wasn’t available. So how did he know the lyrics? He was a huge fan of The Girl Can’t Help It and had apparently seen it several times during its seven-week run at the Scala Cinema on Liverpool’s Lime Street.

“We idolized these people, and we always thought they were given crummy treatment — until The Girl Can't Help It," he said in the Beatles’ Anthology book. The film was so important to him that the Beatles took a break from recording "Birthday" for the White Album on September 18, 1968 so they could so go to McCartney's house to watch the film's British TV premiere.

Cochran, in particular, was appealing to musically inclined teens. He was just 19 at the time — not much older than Lennon or McCartney — and played a Gretsch 6120 hollowbody electric guitar. And, as McCartney explains to Parkinson’s audience, it was his “Twenty Flight Rock” that would bring him and John Lennon together, setting the stage for the creation of the Beatles.

“So I'll just do a little bit of it,” McCartney said to Parkinson’s audience. “Show you what got me in the Beatles.”

The Beatles Anthology begins streaming with Episodes 1–3 on Wednesday, November 26 on Disney+, followed by Episodes 4–6 on Thursday, November 27 and Episodes 7–9 on Friday, November 28.

The Beatles’ Anthology 4 dropped on November 21, adding another volume of outtakes and rarities to the three Anthology albums released in the 1990s. Now, as the Anthology docu-series returns to screens this week — along with a revealing new Episode 9 — it’s worth remembering that the group churned out a core catalog of 213 songs between 1962 and 1970.

That’s a lot of tracks in just eight years. And, as you might imagine, the Beatles themselves weren’t fans of everything they produced.

That goes double for John Lennon. In the latter years of his career, the most critical Beatle took a particularly dim view of many songs in the group’s catalog, including his own.

His most withering condemnations were saved for the songs he stamped out in cookie-cutter form or peeled off as nonsensical filler. "It's Only Love" is an example of the former, a Help! track he called “abysmal”, while the latter includes Abbey Road's "Mean Mr. Mustard," a bit of light-hearted fluff he denounced as “a piece of garbage.”

And then there's the song Lennon called his “least favorite.” It appeared on the group's 1965 album Rubber Soul, which may seem odd, given that record's status as the group's first conceptual work, in which every song received its own well-considered musical arrangement.

Released on December 3 of that year, it was the Beatles' sixth album and the second to come out in 1965, following Help! As long-players go, it was something of a rush job, with 13 of its 14 songs written and recorded in two month's time following the Fab Four's U.S. tour. (Another two original songs — "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper" — were also created for a single release during this time, such was the Beatles' remarkable creative output.)

Even so, the band took care in the studio to give the songs exactly what they required, experimenting with folkier sounds and new instruments, including George Harrison's sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and Paul McCartney's fuzz bass on Harrison's "Think for Yourself."

As for that 14th song? It was "Wait," a leftover from the Help! sessions. It was revived and added to Rubber Soul's lineup when no one could muster the strength to write and record one more song to meet the long-player's requisite 14-track quota.

And John Lennon's least favorite song? It's the very first song recorded for Rubber Soul and the last one featured on the album: "Run for Your Life."

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off," he explained to Rolling Stone in 1970. "It was inspired from [Elvis Presley’s] ‘Baby, Let’s Play House.’"

Released in April 1955, "Baby, Let's Play House" was Presley's fourth single for Sun Records. It was written Arthur Gunter, who cut and issued his own version of it in late 1954. Lennon was particularly enamored of its line "I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man." He took it for the opening phrase of "Run for Your LIfe," and drove the point home in the chorus refrain: "Catch you with another man, that's the end, little girl."

"So I wrote it around that," he told Rolling Stone, "but I didn’t think it was that important.”

Important or not, Lennon's song, and it lyrical appropriation, said a lot about his insecurities at that time in his life. He could be extremely possessive in his relationships. And as Paul McCartney explained in his memoir, Many Years From Now, Lennon was also unhappily married at the time.

“John was always on the run, running for his life," McCartney wrote. "He was married; whereas none of my songs would have 'catch you with another man.' It was never a concern of mine, at all, because I had a girlfriend and I would go with other girls....

"I wasn't as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song."

Regardless of Lennon's disregard for it, "Run for Your Life" had little chance of being cut. With Christmas around the corner, the rush was on to have a new Beatles disc in shops in time for the holidays.

The album's final session — a marathon that began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and ended at 7 a.m. the next morning — saw the group record two songs — McCartney's "You Won't See Me" and Lennons' "Girl" — as well as add overdubs to "Wait." There was simply no time left for anything more.

Although Lennon might have wished that "Run for Your Life." had been excised from Rubber Soul's track listing — calling it his “least favorite Beatles song” and one he “always hated” — there was one Beatle who loved it: George Harrison.

“[It was] sort of throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of, but it was always a favorite of George’s,” Lennon told author David Sheff in 1980. Most likely Harrison loved the chance it offered to play the twanging rockabilly riffs that punctuate its solo interludes, giving it an upbeat motif that stands in stark contrast to Lennon's dark threats.

In related news, John Lennon's 12-string Framus that was featured on "Help!" has been reissued following its landmark sale last year, while McCartney has explained how his left-handed playing forced himself and Lennon to become ambidextrous.

That follows the auction of a letter Lennon had written to Eric Clapton in 1971 when he made an ill-fated attempt to start a supergroup with him.

For Paul McCartney, life began to come apart in the fall of 1969. John Lennon quit the Beatles that September. The following month, rumors that he’d died in a 1966 car crash and been secretly replaced by a lookalike began to circulate, fueled by a Detroit DJ and a caller who offered clues to his death, hidden in the cover art and songs of the group’s albums.

In an excerpt from his new oral history book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, out today, the 83-year-old rocker opens up about the struggles he faced during the transition between his time as a Beatle and his new life as a solo artist, husband and father.

Remarkably, “Paul is dead,” the urban legend of his death, seemed to have a bit of truth to it.

“We had heard it long before, but suddenly, in that autumn of 1969, stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all its own, so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone,” McCartney writes.

“At one point, I turned to my new wife and asked, ‘Linda, how can I possibly be dead?’”

Now, however, he says, “I’m beginning to think that the rumors were more accurate than one might have thought at the time. In so many ways, I was dead … A 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle.”

As he relates in the book, “The breakup hit like the atom bomb,” shattering the friendships and routines he had built his life around for the past decade.

To complicate matters, the group’s breakup created a legal morass — as well as personal problems between him, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — that were draining his energy.

He successfully sued his bandmates in 1970 to dissolve their partnership and keep manager Allen Klein — the choice of the other three Beatles — from overseeing their financial affairs. In 2020, he told British GQ it was “the only way for me to save the Beatles and Apple,” the company they formed in 1968 to oversee their creative endeavors.

But he was left with doubt about his future: “Would I ever be able to move on from what had been an amazing decade, I thought. Would I be able to surmount the crises that seemed to be exploding daily?”

Against all odds, he says, he continued to hope the Beatles weren’t finished.

"I hung on, wondering if the Beatles would ever come back together again, and hoping that John might come around and say, ‘All right, lads, I’m ready to go back to work.’

“In the meantime, I began to look for something to do. Sit me down with a guitar and let me go. That’s my job.”

After releasing a pair of solo albums — on which he played everything from electric and acoustic guitars to keyboards, bass and drums — McCartney and Linda focused on building a new band, Wings, to lift them from the ruins of McCartney's former life.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run was created from hours of interviews with McCartney and other members of the band, tracing their difficult journey, from their arrival in 1971 to their dissolution in 1981. The band’s tumultuous ride was a mix of chart hits and bombs, lineups swaps and changes of fortune both good and bad.

In one of his lowest moments, McCartney agreed to create a TV special to settle a dispute with his publisher over Linda McCartney’s writing credits, which the publisher claimed were invalid because she was not a professional composer.

The resulting program, titled James Paul McCartney, was a disaster, savaged by critics and ignored by a public that had once adored him. Magically, its timing couldn’t have been better, bringing him publicity just as Wings released their first chart-topping U.S. hit, “My Love,” in March, and scored another smash with the theme song to the James Bond movie Live and Let Die just three months later.

Ultimately, the pressures of raising a family — and a famous pot bust in Japan — convinced him it was time to put Wings to rest and return to his solo career.

McCartney’s new book is just one of many Beatles-related projects coming out soon. He’s releasing Wings, a compilation album of that band’s tracks — available in two- and single-disc versions — on November 7. The documentary Man on the Run comes out February 25, 2026, and charts his transition from one half of the Beatles’ songwriting partnership to the leader of Wings.

In between, the Beatles 1995 Anthology series will get a reboot with a new, ninth episode in its documentary series, a new fourth volume in its music collection and a 25th Anniversary Edition of the Beatles Anthology book, featuring the group's story told by all four Beatles and their associates.

The now nine-part Anthology documentary will stream exclusively on Disney+ beginning November 26. The new episode includes unseen behind-the-scenes footage of McCartney, Harrison and Starr reuniting between 1994 and 1995 to work on Anthology and reflecting on their lives in the Beatles.

August may have heralded news of a brand-new Beatles Anthology release and an expanded companion documentary — after some not-so-cryptic teasing from Paul McCartney — but October brings news of even more Beatles content. McCartney has just announced a new documentary focusing on his life after the end of the Fab Four.

The doc, entitled Man on the Run, will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video from February 25, 2026. It charts his transition from one half of the band’s prestigious songwriting partnership to forming the Wings with his wife, Linda.

“The Beatles had broken up and I was thinking, 'What do I do now?'” he says in a newly released trailer. “How can I ever do anything that's anywhere near as good as the Beatles? I was on my own for the first time, so I had to look inside myself.”

McCartney arguably had the toughest time leaving the band behind of any of the Fab Four. George Harrison, who’d grown frustrated by his peripheral presence in the group, had come flying out of the traps with “All Things Must Pass.” Lennon recognized how Harrison and Ringo Starr flourished as solo men, but McCartney’s post-Beatles era was a little more shaky.

It’s ironic, considering that he was the one to quash Lennon’s plans to keep the Beatles going into the 1970s, and Harrison had featured heavily in that. This documentary will explore how he navigated those uncharted waters.

As McCartney says in the trailer, McCartney was the only one of the quartet to “put a band together,” leaning into collaboration while the rest flew the nest.

“I thought we should start from square one,” he says. “It was a puzzle I had to unravel.”

“The film chronicles the arc of McCartney's solo career as he faces down a myriad of challenges while creating new music to define a new decade,” says Amazon MGM. The film offers “unprecedented access to previously unseen footage and rare archival materials” with the story told “through a uniquely vulnerable lens.”

It's likely to take in McCartney's 1973 TV Special, which proved a pivotal turning point in McCartney's at-that-point middling solo career. Sadly, though, his idea to walk onstage dressed as Diana Ross was shut down.

It might also tackle the disintegration of the Lennon-McCartney friendship, which saw the pair write diss tracks about one another across the decade, putting many fans on the hunt for hidden meanings in their lyrics.

More interestingly, this isn’t a one-off project. It kickstarts a new working relationship between McCartney, Universal Music Group, and Amazon, with exclusive music and merch being mooted. McCartney will also release his new book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, on November 4.

While promoting that book in an interview with Vulture, the acclaimed musician also shared an update on what will be his 19th solo album — his first since 2020.

“Right now, I have 25 songs that I'm finishing in the next few months, new songs that are interesting,” he says. “Often, a constant thread through my writing is nostalgia, the memories of things past. I don't question too much how it happens. I'm just thrilled it does.”

Elsewhere, super producer Mark Ronson has given a fresh look into what it was like to work on an album with Paul McCartney, and how his penchant for “weird” sounds was always present.

Guitar Player has also pulled its historic 1990 interview with McCartney from its archives, in which he makes some surprising revelations about his favorite guitar.

The Beatles’ breakup brought about a years-long hiatus in the friendship of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. With their hit-making songwriting partnership legally dissolved — each had been writing on his own for years, despite the Lennon-McCartney credit attached to their Beatles’ output — there was no longer any doubt about who was the main writer behind their songs.

As their simmering feud went on display in media interviews — similar to the ongoing animosity between Pink Floyd alumni David Gilmour and Roger Waters — it was only a matter of time before it played out in their solo songs.

McCartney delivered the first salvo with “Too Many People.” Co-written with his wife, Linda, for 1971’s Ram, the song was a veiled slap at Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, for their political and social activism.

“He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit,” McCartney told Playboy in 1984. “I wrote [in the song], ‘Too many people preaching practices.’ I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn’t need to be told what to do.

“The whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, to each his own. Freedom. Suddenly, it was ‘You should do this.’ It was just a bit of the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it.”

Ram came out on May 17. Lennon clearly got the message. Almost immediately, he began composing his retort in the form of “How Do You Sleep?," from his 1971 album, Imagine. “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead,” he sang in one of its most famous verses, a not-at-all-veiled reference to the conspiracy theory that the real Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike.

The fact that the track featured George Harrison peeling off a blistering electric guitar solo — performed with a slide — was surely salt in the wound. Lennon had, after all, been vocal in the Beatles’ final months about how poorly they had treated Harrison, and had even pitched a proposal to give him a more equitable share of songwriting on future albums, to McCartney’s displeasure. The thought of his old mates teaming up against him on a recording caused him pain.

“You see the atmosphere of 'Let’s get Paul. Let’s nail him in a song,’” he told British GQ in 2020. “And those things were pretty hurtful.”

Roughly three years on, however, both men were eager to put their feud behind them.

In 1974, while Lennon was separated from Ono and in the midst of his infamous Lost Weekend period, he and McCartney reunited in Los Angeles. Soon after, they were traipsing around together in New York City, where they spent a late night with David Bowie.

But McCartney apparently couldn’t resist one last — albeit much softer — dig at his old friend.

For years, critics had been complaining about his soppy love songs, which grew in frequency once he became a family man and formed Wings with Linda. Lennon had been leading the chorus against McCartney’s lighter fare for years. He infamously derided Macca’s old-timey music hall–inspired fare — “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Your Mother Should Know” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the like — which he reportedly referred to as “Paul’s Granny tunes.”

As McCartney revealed in his 2023 book, The Lyrics, Lennon had given him some guff about his “silly love songs” as well.

“There were accusations in the mid-1970s, including one from John, that I was just writing ‘silly love songs,’” McCartney wrote. “I suppose the idea was that I should be a bit tougher, a bit more worldly.”

He intended to compose a song rebutting that claim, until he thought it made more sense to plant his flag on that ground.

“I suddenly realized, that’s exactly what love is. It’s worldly. ‘Some people want to fill the world/With silly love songs.’ I’d been given that reputation, and I had to stand up for it.”

Released in 1976, “Silly Love Songs” was a poppy, disco-tinged retort to his critics that simply asked what was wrong with writing songs about love. The world apparently agreed with him and promptly sent it to the number one spot on the U.S. charts, making it McCartney’s 27th trip there in his career.

Did Lennon understand that McCartney was talking to him with the song? That’s up for debate.

Back in 2010, a member of the Steve Hoffman forum said Lennon’s friend, the New York City photographer Bob Gruen, told him John thought the song’s refrain, “I love you,” was a message to him: “John took the song quite personally,” the writer claims, “and saw it as Paul sending a message to him.”

The message has been repeated many times online. It’s a nice thought, but is it accurate?

Reached for comment, Gruen told Guitar Player he couldn’t remember Lennon making that remark.

“I do remember that I said that I thought it was Paul’s answer to John’s ‘How Do You Sleep,’” he says, “and that the ‘I love you’ was directed to John, but I don’t remember John saying it.”

By then, of course, it hardly mattered. The two friends had long ago made up. McCartney was a frequent visitor to Lennon and Ono’s home in the Dakotas, and they had even flirted about making an impromptu visit to Saturday Night Live that never materialized.

They would meet at least one more time, according to Lennon’s friend Elliot Mintz, in 1978. By then, the days of talking to each other through their songs seems to have been long passed.

Before he was known as a writer, producer and one of the world’s foremost fingerstyle guitarists, Laurence Juber spent three years, from 1978 to 1981, as a member of Wings. Prior to that, he had established himself as an in-demand London session guitarist. An invitation to jam with Wings guitarist-bassist Denny Laine soon changed into a life-changing event when Paul and Linda McCartney joined in.

After playing a few blues and reggae tunes, Paul turned to Juber and asked, “What are you doing for the next few years?”

“It was in that nanosecond that everything flashes in front of you,” Juber says. “I had spent my entire teenage years and beyond becoming a studio musician, and then there's Paul McCartney offering me a gig.

“On the one hand, you think, What am I giving up? On the other hand, I was in a place in my life where, if there was going to be a big change, the universe was kind of leading me to it. How could I say no?”

Juber contributed guitar parts to the 1979 Wings album, Back to the Egg — his fire-spitting solo on the punk-rockabilly number “Spin It On” is a particular standout — and he played with Wings on their 19-date U.K. tour that year.

Much more gigging was planned for 1980, but McCartney’s infamous pot bust on January 16, 1980, at the start of the band’s Japan tour, proved to be deciding factor in scrapping future tours.

Of the 32 tracks featured on the upcoming “best of” compilation, simply titled WINGS, Juber is featured on the pop-rock hit “Getting Closer.”

“That’s me, Denny and Paul on that song,” he says. “It’s always interesting when you’re playing with other guitarists and you need to come up with something. You approach it within the whole context of the song and reading what everybody else is doing.”

Of his Ennio Morricone-like end solo on the cut, Juber says, “I spent a whole weekend coming up with all kinds of angles for that solo, and it just coalesced into that riff. Paul isn’t big on extended solos, but that was one spot where I could take the spotlight and do something that sounded nice.”

You went from being Mr. Studio Guy to playing arenas with Wings. Did it take you a while to adjust to big stages?

It was a little scary at first, not because I hadn't played in front of fairly large audiences before, but to be in the spotlight as opposed to being kind of in the background was something I had to get used to. Playing-wise, I had a lot on my plate.

For “Getting Closer,” I was running through a Mesa/Boogie and a Roland rack, which allowed me to double my guitar lines with a synth sound and an octave lower. I had a vocoder for “Goodnight Tonight.”

I don't think I played any acoustic for that show. It was strictly electric and a little bit of keyboards. I had a lot to do, and the focus was on getting the job done.

Was there any talk of going to the States?

Yeah. If Paul hadn’t been busted, it was possible. “Coming Up” was number one in July of 1980, so we could have been the touring the States with a number one single.

Where were you when Paul was busted? Did you actually see what happened?

I was standing next to him. I flew with Paul and his family from London to New York. We spent the weekend there and then flew on to Tokyo. That’s how I ended up standing next to him going through customs at Narita. The customs guy opened the very last suitcase, patted a jacket inside, felt something underneath it, then lifted the jacket up, and there was a bag of weed.

Even after that, we had to go kind of in the bowels of NTA airport to be searched. While I was in New York, I acquired a 1957 Les Paul goldtop on 48th Street. I was hand carrying that as we went through customs They came into the room with a screwdriver and pointed to my Les Paul. I had to unscrew the truss-rod cover and on the back just to show there was nothing stashed in there.

We were really hopeful that they would still let the tour go on. It wasn’t uncommon for the reggae bands that would tour Japan. They would get busted at the airport, and then the custom people would take the weed away and the tour could continue.

Which didn’t happen. Paul was put in jail.

Yeah, for 10 days.

What did you do during that time?

We were basically in a holding pattern wondering what was going to happen. Once Paul got out, he went back to England and got in the studio with Geoff Emerick and Chris Thomas to work on mixes of the last Glasgow concert. The work ethic didn't get waylaid by the experience. It's not like Paul came out of jail and said, “Okay, we're going to go spend a week in the Caribbean.”

There were periods during that year when there were rehearsals of his new material. He asked me to go with him and Linda to France to work with Ringo on what became Ringo's Stop and Smell the Roses album. I was in London realizing that there wasn't a lot of studio work around. I was getting into record production, and I started to compose.

So the bust certainly screwed up the Japan tour, but —

It wasn’t the end of Wings.

By the end of 1980, John Lennon was murdered. Do you think the two things had a cumulative impact on Paul to end Wings?

I'm quite sure that they did, but there were other things going on. Paul and Linda and the kids had moved out of London to Peasmarch. They would drive in to London for work and then drive back. One of the locations for the Back to the Egg album, Lympne Castle, was about 20 minutes from where they had moved to. It was very convenient for them, but less convenient for assembling a recording studio castle. But we made it work.

Fact is, Linda had four kids to handle. They’d done the big world tour, and I think that my feeling was that she was just kind of getting tired. Paul had made a new deal with Columbia Records, so there were a number of factors that were playing into the fact that Wings was running its course. I think the Japanese bust was a significant factor, and once John was killed I think the idea of touring really was off the table for almost a decade.

As you said, you got into composing and production.

I did the music for an animated commercial for Paxo chicken stuffing, the “Rooster Booster.” I did a faux “Little Red Rooster” kind of groove for that. I was exploring, really – exploring what I’d learned from that intense period of working with Wings. I started to write some fingerstyle acoustic guitar pieces, which then eventually became my niche. Generally, I worked on self-improvement stuff while trying to become a better guitar player, which I'm always trying to do.

I wanted to ask you about one of your recent projects. You scored an upcoming documentary about Peter Asher.

It’s called Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher. It’s doing the film festivals right now. The reviews have been great. I really enjoyed scoring the picture – there’s parts where I played reverb-and-delay laden electric guitar, and there’s other places where I play acoustic guitar with a string quartet. On another section I play DADGAD to Lee Sklar’s bass, so I knew the bottom end was well represented. That freed me up to free form fingerstyle parts.

Being that Peter Asher is a legendary record producer, were you nervous at what he might think of your score?

We would have sessions where he would sit and listen and approve or make suggestions. Fortunately, he was quite pleased with everything. It’s a great film, and for me it was nice to get back to scoring. I haven’t done a lot of it over the years, and I’m hoping to do more. With today’s technology, it’s a lot easier than it used to be. Back in the day, I had to sync my 24-track console to a video machine. When I started production, I was using a PortaStudio. Things have changed considerably.

With the Byrds, Roger McGuinn gifted us chiming electric 12-string anthems like “Turn, Turn, Turn,” riff-laden cuts like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and proto-country-rock classics like Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Beyond that, there’s his appearance alongside Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue, wild LSD trips with John Lennon and George Harrison, and notable collaborations with Tom Petty, not to mention his profound influence over Petty and his partner in crime, Mike Campbell.

All of this is to say that McGuinn isn’t just an unassuming electric and acoustic guitar (and banjo) hero — he’s also lived one hell of an eventful life. It was with that in mind that McGuinn dialed in with Guitar Player to peel back the curtain on his relationships with his early mentor, the 1960s singer Bobby Darin, as well as David Crosby, Lennon and Harrison, Dylan, Petty and Campbell.

Bobby Darin 

“I first met him at the Crescendo Club, where he offered me a job. I took it because I was looking to, well, actually, Barry Maguire [“Eve of Destruction”] had invited me to be part of the New Christie Minstrels, and I got my picture taken with them on the cover of TV Guide with the band. But I told Bobby that, and he said, ‘Nah, that’s a bad idea. That’s too big a group. You’ll get buried in a group that size.’

“Bobby offered me twice as much, so I took the gig and stayed with him for about a year and a half. Then he quit performing for a while, moved to New York, and became a songwriter in the Brill Building.

“But he was a mentor to me. I followed him around, and I used to ask him questions about the music business, and I told him I’d like to get into the movies. He came up with a script from [American actor and director] Jackie Cooper at one point, and it turned out to be something I didn’t want to do. But I did move to New York, and I became a studio musician at that point.

“But the script from Jackie Cooper was about a banjo player. I said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ And then, I read the whole script, and it was about a banjo player. Bobby had remembered that I wanted to get into a movie, so he wrote this movie for me to be the lead in, but it was about a heroin addict. [laughs]

“I said, ‘Oh, Bobby, I don’t think I can do this,’ so I turned him down. I never did a movie with or for anybody. I didn’t work in Hollywood, but I’m still a banjo player.

“Bobby was a boss. It wasn’t like a friendly, ‘we’re buddies’ relationship. But he was kind and mentored me. He really cared about my growth as a musician and artist. I was with him the night he discovered Wayne Newton [the famed Las Vegas singer, known for his signature hit “Danke Schoen”].

“We were in Vegas, had a show in the main showroom, and were walking around the casino. Around the corner was the lounge where the acts who don’t play in the main room perform. And it was the Newton Brothers [Wayne and Jerry]. Bobby saw Wayne, and said, ‘Him. I’m gonna sign him.’ And he did.”

David Crosby

“He taught me how to drive. [laughs] I didn’t drive when I lived in Chicago — and this is 1960 — while I was working with [the folk group] the Limeliters. But after I left Chicago, David had this old Chevy convertible with four-inch seat belts that he got out of a DC-3. You know, he was really into safety.

“So he taught me how to drive in that. And with a good sense of humor, he took me to the corner of La Cienega and Sunset with a stick shift, and I wasn’t familiar with clutching and putting the thing in first gear and getting around the corner, but I did it.

“But in the Byrds, I think for the vocals, he was definitely important. And guitar-wise, he was a good rhythm player, but he didn’t play any lead, and I didn’t like his songwriting all that much. It was different from what we wanted to do. So I’d say his vocals were the main asset.

“And he and I were friends. I met him in 1960, and then, when we were getting the Byrds together, we were still friendly and having a good time. But tensions rose when people were getting songs on the record and other people weren’t.

“It became difficult. I think the final blow to me was when he said, ‘You guys are not good enough musicians to be playing with me.’ I didn’t think it was right, so Chris [Hillman] said, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of David.’ I agreed, and we went up and asked him to leave, and that was that. But we did him a big favor because he got into a ‘better’ band after that with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.”

John Lennon and George Harrison

“I first met them in London in late ’65 or ’66. They were all really friendly, and they just loved the Byrds. We were having a great time together, and so I maintained a friendly relationship with all of them. I don’t think there was a rivalry. We were all friends. I don’t remember being rivals with the Beatles, or anybody! And the Bible says to seek one’s own glory is not glory, so I don’t think like that.

“But they were inspirational. Everybody I ever ran into inspired me to do something. I did take acid with them in Laurel Canyon, but my first LSD experience was in San Francisco in 1960, when it was still legal. The acid came from the Sandos Labs. It was on a sugar cube wrapped in aluminum foil and cost $10. [laughs] I was living in a commune in Russian Hill. That was my first acid experience.

“But when we and the Beatles took it in Laurel Canyon, I don’t think it really helped anything musically. It just got you high. [laughs] For me, it was just recreational. But I quit doing it because I had a bad trip. It was iffy. You could have a really fun time or a really bad time.

“I remember, later on, when Paul McCartney was playing at the Forum in LA. It was sold out, and I called up the Forum, and somebody backstage picked up the phone. I said, ‘This is Roger McGuinn from the Byrds.’ He got Paul, and Paul said, ‘Oh, come on down. I’ll get you in!’ So we were friendly.

“And I remember back during John Lennon’s Lost Weekend in LA, with Harry Nilsson. I was at the Record Plant. They were in one of the studios, and I walked by, and they invited me in. I played with them. I said, ‘You know, I didn’t fill out a W-4 form…’ [laughs] I just did it for old times’ sake, just to be friendly. John said, ‘Well, you’re the only one…’ I think that was the last time I talked to John.

“And then George I saw quite often when he was hanging out with Tom [Petty] at his house. We talked about guitars and stuff, and George really got into the ukulele and gave one or two to Tom. They’d be playing it, and we all really had a good time. We were just all hanging out and being friends.”

Bob Dylan 

“Bob and I were neighbors in Malibu. He used to come over to my house, and he liked my house! I remember I was on the road, and I’d just bought this house in Malibu, and I got a call from my real estate agent, and she said, ‘I’ve got Bob Dylan here. He wants to talk to you.’

“Bob got on the line, and he said, ‘I want to buy your house.’

“I said, ‘Well, I just bought it, man. I wanna keep it. I love it.’ [laughs] He would come over to my house, and I don’t know if he wanted to see me or the house, you know? [laughs]

“But he’d come over, and we’d play pool. At one point he saw a basketball hoop out in the back, and he asked me if I had a basketball. I didn’t, but I got one the next day.

“So we we’re playing basketball in the back by the carport, and he said, ‘I want to do something different.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, man?’ He said, ‘I don’t know… like a circus.’

“And that’s what the Rolling Thunder Revue was. I got to New York, and I saw him again, and he invited me on the Rolling Thunder tour, and that was how that worked.

“If you’ve ever seen The Big Bang Theory, Bob is like Sheldon. [laughs] It’s like… he’s out there. He thinks in abstractions. And social graces are different. He doesn’t really have a conversation with you; he talks in abstractions a lot. I love the guy like a brother. But… he’s a little… challenging to have a friendship with.

“So he likes me at times. [laughs] He goes hot and cold. He liked me when we were hanging out together in Malibu. He liked me on the Rolling Thunder tour. He liked me when I did the 30th anniversary thing at Madison Square Garden with him. He was happy about my performance at that. I remember he told Tom Petty and George Harrison, ‘Wow, Roger really stole the show!’ He was very positive about that.

“So I know he’s liked me at times. I love the guy. And I loved performing with him. I loved singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ with him.”

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell 

“I met Tom in 1976, when I was getting ready to do an album for Columbia Records. I had most of the songs ready to go, but I needed a couple of extra songs to fill it out. And my manager was around the corner playing records and tapes, and I couldn’t see what he was putting on. And he put ‘American Girl.’

“I said, ‘When did I record that?’ [laughs] And he said, ‘It isn’t you!’ And I said, ‘I know. It’s a great song. Who is it?’

“And he said, ‘It’s this new guy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.’ I said, ‘I want to meet him.’

“So the next day they arranged a meeting, and I got to meet Tom. We became friends, and I invited them to come to New York to play at the Bottom Line with me. We remained really good friends until his death.

“And I was honored because when I read Mike Campbell’s book [the 2024 memoir Heartbreaker]: There was one point where he was talking about playing like Roger McGuinn. I thought that was fun, you know? Mike’s a good friend, too, and I congratulated him on a really fun book to read. It brought back a lot of good memories.

“But Tom was great. He was very gracious, very kind, and a friendly person. Some of my favorite memories are hanging out with him and George Harrison at his house in L.A. and just jamming. It was great working with him on [McGuinn’s 1991 album] Back From Rio. And the way that came about was a direct result of being on the Temples and Flames tour in Europe with Tom and Bob.

“We had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune, but I didn’t have any words for it. I showed the tune to Tom, and he liked it, and we sat there in the hotel room and wrote down ‘King of the Hill.’ And Mike Campbell had a four-track cassette recorder — a little kind of mini studio in a briefcase — so he came into the hotel room and recorded the demo of ‘King of the Hill.’

“That somehow got to Clive Davis, and they gave us a record deal, so it came out of that. Tom was a great songwriter. He described it as being from outer space. He didn’t want to investigate it too hard because he thought it might go away. I’ve had that, too. Some songwriters say that it comes from maybe from God, where you’re just getting the Holy Spirit telling you to write stuff.”

Despite all the bad feelings around the Beatles’ breakup in the final months of 1969, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were back on good terms as early as 1974. Lennon — newly separated from his wife, Yoko Ono — was in the throes of his drunken Lost Weekend. May Pang, his girlfriend, reunited the two former Beatles on March 28 of that year, in Los Angeles, where Lennon was producing Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats at Burbank Studios.

McCartney and his wife, Linda, dropped by, resulting in an impromptu jam session featuring both former Beatles, Nilsson, Stevie Wonder, Jesse Ed Davis on electric guitar, Ed Freeman on bass, and saxophonist Bobby Keys, as well as Pang and former Beatles roadie Mal Evans.

Although it was unproductive, the jam was enough to mend their broken relationship. Sometime later, back in New York City, Lennon and McCartney dropped in at the Pierre Hotel for a 3 a.m. visit to David Bowie. As Bowie recalled in an interview with Marc Riley, the three men discussed the possibility of working together, an idea that faded with the morning light.

As far as anyone knows, Lennon and McCartney never again considered re-teaming — except once, in 1976. And it was all thanks to Lorne Michaels, producer of Saturday Night Live.

The show was in its first season, delivering 90 minutes of sketch comedy and music “live from New York” beginning at 11:30 p.m. SNL had become an instant hit with its youthful cast, edgy humor and smart choice of musical guests.

Then, as now, part of the show’s appeal was its satirical take on topical issues. And in early 1976, one of the biggest stories in music was about attempts to reunite the Beatles.

Concert promoter Bill Sargent had offered the band $10 million in 1973 and upped his offer to $50 million in January 1976. According to an article in the April 5, 1976 issue of People magazine, a "top-level rock functionary" said he knew "for a fact that George, John and Ringo have talked among themselves about a reunion, and their attorneys say it is possible."

With perfect timing, Michaels made a tongue-in-cheek proposal to get the Beatles back together on SNL — for the humorously low price of $3,000. (He would sweeten the offer to $3,200 on the May 22 episode.)

Appearing onscreen, Michaels made his pitch on the April 24, 1976 episode.

“Please allow me, if I may, to address myself to four very special people: John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Beatles. Lately there have been a lot of rumors to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together.

“Now, we’ve heard and read a lot about personality and legal conflicts that might prevent you guys from reuniting,” he said. “That’s something which is none of my business. That’s a personal problem. You guys will have to handle that.

“But it’s also been said that no one has yet to come up with enough money to satisfy you. Well, if it’s money you want, there’s no problem here. The National Broadcasting Company has authorized me to offer you this check to be on our show. A certified check for $3,000.”

As the audience laughed, Michaels continued.

“All you have to do is sing three Beatles songs. ‘She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah’ — that’s $1,000 right there. You know the words. It’ll be easy.

“Like I said, this is made out to ‘the Beatles,’” he said, holding the check. “You divide it any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you. I’d rather not get involved.”

John Lennon, an avid fan of the show, was watching as the skit aired, and he loved it.

Although it’s often said Lennon and McCartney were both at Lennon’s house at the time, McCartney says he didn’t visit until the following Saturday.

“I was at John's place and Saturday Night Live was on. And John said to me, ‘Have you seen this?’ I said, ‘No’ — I’m living in England; he was living in America.”

Lennon told him about Lorne’s “offer.”

“And he said, ‘We should go down, just you and me. We should show up. There’s only two of us — take half the money.’

“And for a second, it was like —” McCartney said, indicating they gave it a thought.

What stopped them? Apparently it would have been too much effort, even though Lennon’s home was a five-minute cab ride from the NBC studios at 30 Rock.

“It would have been work,” McCartney said.

“We were having a night off. So we elected to not go and go to work.

“It was a nice idea. We nearly did it.”

They didn’t, but George Harrison did. On the November 20 episode later that year, he appeared in the cold open, complaining to Michaels that he had showed up to play and wanted his share of the money, only for Michaels to remind him that the pitch was for all four Beatles, not one.

As a consolation, Harrison got to announce the show, and then went on to perform with the night’s host and musical guest Paul Simon.

The lazy thinking goes that John Lennon was the thought-provoking rocker and Paul McCartney the happy-go-lucky pop-song writer.

Now super-producer Mark Ronson has weighed in with a well-informed point of view on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting tandem that puts McCartney in a new light.

Ronson certainly knows the pop music landscape. The British-American songwriter and producer has worked with pop royalty like Amy Winehouse, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars.

But he also know McCartney's diverse solo catalog and has first-hand experience working with the former bass-playing Beatle. As he revealed on a recent episode of the YouTube show Track Star, McCartney is considerably left-field when it comes to his musical interests.

Track Star challenges musicians to guess songs that are played to them while they're out on the streets. The show played Ronson the tune “Temporary Secretary,” from McCartney’s second solo album, 1980's McCartney II. It's an obscure, synth-propelled track, and a deep cut by any measure.

But Ronson got it straightaway. And he seized the moment to share his view of McCartney's diverse talents as a songwriter.

“There's a tendency to misremember him as, like, ‘John Lennon was a rock and roll badass and Paul was kind of like the happy poppy guy,’” Ronson says. “But Paul made the weirdest fucking music.”

In 2013, Ronson was one of four producers to work with McCartney on his 16th solo album, New. During the project, he got to see one of McCartney's lesser-known sides.

“I went to his studio one time and I got there early,” he recalls. “He was literally step sequencing a Moog keyboard to make the weirdest fucking sounds I've ever heard. ‘Ooh, I like a bit of that.’”

Ronson is a tech wizard who is always keen to embrace new technologies. McCartney, he says, is very much the same.

“He was the first person to use Moogs on a recording with ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ [from “Abbey Road],” he continues. “He was always pushing it forward.”

He is always on the hunt for new artists to be inspired by, too.

“When I was in the studio with him and we were working, I was like, ‘What have you been listening to lately?’ He played me ‘Climax’ by Usher [from 2012],” Ronson says. “I remember being shook. It’s a fucking great record.”

Demonstrating that drive for innovation, McCartney has revealed three guitar techniques that helped the band stand out from the rock and roll pack.

He's also shown it in his own solo career, as he shifted gears from one album to the next. Although he had a difficult time establishing his solo career — at one point undertaking a TV Special to promote his work, and working with Elvis Costello at another — he's continued to explore new tangents, from electronica to classical, making him one of modern music's most well-versed composers.

With a fourth Beatles Anthology on the way, a previously unseen interview with George Harrison discussing the creation of the first in the series from 1995 has surfaced online.

The so-called philosophical Beatle discussed the breadth of the comprehensive Anthology 1 release, which featured 60 tracks, including “Free as a Bird,” the first new song from the Fab Four in 25 years. The project saw surviving members Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr trolling the archives, right back to the group's formative days as the Quarrymen.

“Long before we came to Abbey Road, we recorded 'That'll be the Day' in a studio in Liverpool,” Harrison tells bass player Mo Foster in the clip. “It was just a place you go in and go straight onto disc, and we paid for it ourselves. We're going really from A to Z.”

The exhaustive collection, which includes outtakes and rarities from across the band's lifespan — including a live cover of Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven” — ensured the release represented every era of the band. But the further back in time the three musicians travelled, the more difficult their task became.

“We've sifted through the early tapes, but you see, a lot of the early tapes were done in mono,” he explains. “The only tapes remaining are the actual masters. All the outtakes were thrown away long before people thought we were any good.”

The band had pored through the tapes at Abbey Road, the London studio with many ties to the band. That included their audition tapes they tracked for Decca Records, when they were eying their first record deal.

“We got turned down, and they signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead,” Harrison laughs. “Somebody said to Brian Epstein, ‘Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein,’ and that was probably the biggest error in music history.”

There are also stark parallels with how the Struts' record label told the band not to have too many guitars on their new Brian May-powered reworking of their biggest song. They, too, were told that guitar music was on its deathbed.

“It's a great room,” Harrison says of the studio. “At the very first session we did here, which was before Ringo was in the band, in June 1962, we recorded ‘Love Me Do’ with Pete Best.”

The band then returned in October of that year to rerecord the song again with Starr behind the kit. “But George Martin didn't know about Ringo, and he'd hired a session drummer. That's the famous story,” says Harrison, again with a chuckle. “He put out the single without Ringo playing on it! So, we're going to put out the version with Pete Best on it, because it never did come out.”

The second Abbey Road session was also memorable for all the wrong reasons. Harrison had been in a fight with some Liverpool locals who were upset about Best being replaced by Starr. Harrison recalls: “I had a black eye because people were shouting, ‘Get Ringo out. Ringo never, Pete Best forever.’

“We did so many takes of ‘Love Me Do.’ In those days, we never had light gauge strings; we used to have to have a really high action and very heavy gauge strings. After take 20, it was pretty hard on the fingers.”

Two new songs featured on the Anthology releases, with both “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” coming from John Lennon demos handed to the group by his widow, Yoko Ono.. It was the first time the trio had worked on a song together since 1970, and McCartney believes that John Lennon’s spirit often made itself known during the sessions on several occasions.

For Beatles fans, new music a quarter of a century after the heartbreak of their breakup was headline news. For Harrison, the biggest takeaway from those sessions was that water was passing under the trio’s proverbial bridge.

“The thing that's the most pleasing is that we're all friendly again,” he says. “I mean, we had some turbulent years in the meantime. It's just fun to have your old friends back again.”

John Lennon, however, felt the individual members flourished after the band broke up, even if it took several attempts for McCartney to get his solo career off the ground.

During a whirlwind decade, the Beatles were transformed from a group of four fresh-faced Liverpudlians into the biggest band in the world. Across 12 studio albums, they built a legacy that, over half a century later, remains largely unchallenged.

But despite that, John Lennon believes the Fab Four “flowered” after the group’s demise in 1970. In particular, he says his lyric-writing talents grew “a millionfold,” and he singled another member out for the way he came into himself away from the band environment.

When it came to establishing themselves as solo artists, each of the Beatles — Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — moved quickly. In 1970, the same year they released their final album, Let It Be, each of the four released solo albums. Harrison, having grown frustrated by having his wings clipped in the Beatles, released his triple album, All Things Must Pass, a commercial success that saw him establish himself outside the shadow of the Lennon-McCartney tandem.

Although All Things Must Pass performed the best of the group's solo albums that year, Lennon got high marks for his John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, and quickly shot back with his second full-length, 1971's Imagine. The album was a huge success, selling double Platinum in the U.S. while its title track, "Imagine," became Lennon's signature tune and the song most associated with his solo years.

Starr, meanwhile, was having success as a solo artist with his hit song "It Don't Come Easy" and attempting to build a second career as a film actor in eccentric comedies, like his spaghetti-western film, Blindman.

“Imagine how we've flowered since then,” Lennon told Hit Parader in February 1972, a few months after the release of Imagine. “George is suddenly the biggest seller of all of us. I think my music's improved a millionfold lyric-wise, and Ringo's coming out and writing 'It Don't Come Easy,' and now he's going to write the title song for this cowboy thing he's in. It's really beautiful.”

Interestingly, Lennon had no praise for McCartney. At that point, the bass guitarist was having a rough time launching his solo career. His solo albums McCartney and Ram were critical and sales disappointments, and Wild Life, the debut album from his band Wings, fared even worse. Another year would pass before his well-timed TV special coincided with a turning point in his fortunes.

"The fact is, the Beatles have left school, and we have to get a job,” Lennon had told Hit Parader. “That's made us work — really work harder. I think we're much better than we ever were when we were together.

“Look at us today. I'd sooner have Ram, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, George's album, and Ringo's single and the movies than Let It Be or Abbey Road,” he said, referring to the group's final two albums.

Yoko Ono, sitting in the interview for her part in Imagine, added rather diplomatically, “If the four of them had gone on, then they would have suffocated each other.”

Talking to the magazine about Imagine, Lennon revealed that he had intended it to feature three-quarters of the Beatles.

“George is on half of my new album playing guitar. The only reason Ringo wasn't on it was because he was abroad, making his movie,” he had said. “So then the three of us would have been on, but then it wouldn't have been the Beatles. It would have been Plastic Ono because I would have had the final say.

“There would be no decision-making by George or Ringo, other than if I liked an idea I'd take it — which is what happened with the Beatles — but then it was more diplomatic.”

Of course, fans would have to wait until the 1990s for the release of any new material featuring the four Beatles. The Anthology series, issued in 1995 and 1996, brought with it two new singles — "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love" — created from Lennon's unfinished demos. Although he had been murdered in 1980, Lennon was present at those sessions like a ghost, according to McCartney.

More recently, Starr and McCartney labored to finish an old Lennon demo the guitarist had said would be “great” for the drummer.

Last month, a new, ninth chapter in the Beatles Anthology documentary, and a fourth album in the same series were announced. The release includes 13 previously unreleased demos, session recordings, and other rare recordings.

And in a new development, radio and TV personality Elliot Mintz has revealed what he believes to be the last meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, coming two years after what was, for years, thought to have been their last.

Legendary recording engineer Glyn Johns earned a place in Beatles history when he became the first producer after George Martin to work on a project with the group. He was hired in late 1968 to oversee the sessions for the project that resulted in the group's final album, Let It Be, and which were documented in the 2021 series The Beatles: Get Back.

But as he explains in a new interview with Rick Beato, he was surprised to get the call in the first place. Johns initially crossed paths with the Fab Four when he was still a fresh face on the scene and working as engineer on the Rolling Stones' 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request. The project saw him, coincidentally, manning the console alongside Jimi Hendrix's producer of choice, Eddie Kramer

“John and Paul came and sang backup on a Stones session, so I met them then,” he explains. “I was just the engineer. They barely acknowledged my existence.”

So Johns was shocked when, roughly a year later, McCartney hunted him down for an ambitious project to record the Beatles as they rehearsed for what would be their first public concert since the summer of 1966. What's more, the rehearsals themselves were to be filmed for a TV special that would include the live performance.

“The call from Paul to proceed with the idea he'd had was a complete shock. I thought it was Mick Jagger taking the piss,” Johns says with a laughs. “I was obviously, like the rest of the world, a fan of the Beatles.

“It was a very unusual project,” he continues. “Paul's idea was to do a live concert and perform new music. And so the film that became [the] Let It Be [album] was just a documentary of how we were going to prepare for that show. And then the live show was to be filmed, and that would be released as the piece.

“That didn't come about, as we all know. The rest of the band didn't really get the idea. It was a bit far-fetched, but it would have been really interesting.”

Although Johns was hired to engineer those sessions, which took place in London's Twickenham Studios, he found himself serving as producer in the absence of George Martin. He continued in that role after the sessions moved to the Beatles' studio at their Apple Corps headquarters in London's Savile Row.

“George Martin attended on the odd day for a little while and facilitated the equipment when we moved to the Beatles' office studio in Savile Row, " John says. "It became apparent as the sessions went on that I was required to play a little bit more of a role than just the engineer.”

Johns continued to work on the tapes from those sessions in the months that followed. He was even on hand to produce the late–February 1969 sessions at Trident Studios for the Abbey Road track "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." But by the time the group settled down to work on that album in earnest that summer, Johns was long gone.

“I started the Abbey Road sessions, and then I went off to America to do something,” he recalls. “They very sensibly decided to go back to George and Geoff Emerick, who finished [the album]. And thank God they did, because it ended up much better than when I left it. I can tell you.”

In related news, a brand-new Beatles Anthology box set has been announced, with McCartney suggesting that John Lennon’s spirit haunted the making of the first Anthology release in 1995.

When the surviving Beatles — Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — reunited in the studio in the mid ’90s, the band members felt they weren’t alone, as “strange goings-on” hinted at John Lennon’s supernatural presence.

The trio’s team-up, coming 25 years after the Fab Four disbanded, and a decade and a half after the death of John Lennon, represented the time they’d worked on new music together as they set about bringing the unreleased John Lennon song “Free as a Bird” to life.

It was one of two new songs, alongside “Real Love” — also born from John Lennon’s mind — to feature on 1995’s Anthology box set. As news of a fourth addition in the Anthology series broke last week, McCartney’s reflections on the unusual incidents that surrounded the recording of “Free as a Bird” have come to light.

“There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio — noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things,” McCartney once told OnHike.com (via The Mirror). “There was just an overall feeling that John was around.”

Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had given the rest of the band the two of his demos with the view of transforming them into finished songs. The unexplainable occurrences weren't exclusive to "Free as a Bird" either; the "Real Love" sessions were just as creepy.

“We put one of those spoof backward recordings on the end of the single for a laugh, to give all those Beatles nuts something to do,” McCartney said with a laugh. “I think it was the line of a George Formby song.” Formby was a popular entertainer when the Beatles were growing up and a favorite of the group's members, particularly Harrison.

“Then we were listening to the finished single in the studio one night, and it gets to the end, and it goes, ‘zzzwrk nggggwaaahhh jooohn lennnnnon qwwwrk.’ I swear to God.

“We were like, ‘It’s John. He likes it!’”

Lennon once told his son Julian if he ever needed to contact him from beyond the grave, he'd send a white feather. That wasn't lost on McCartney when the three musicians stepped outside the studio for an impromptu photo opportunity. At the last minute, a white peacock entered the frame.

“That’s John. Spooky, eh?” McCartney reflects. “It was like John was hanging around. We felt that all through the recording.”

Those kinds of instances might have given them the chills, but in truth, the band had welcomed Lennon's presence into the studio. Starr himself had said they kept hitting a wall when they pushed on as a trio, with Lennon’s absence a gaping hole.

“I invented a little scenario,” McCartney later said (via the HollyHobs YouTube channel). “He’s gone away on holiday, and he’s just rung us up and says, 'Just finish the track for us, will you? I’m sending the cassette, I trust you.'

“That was the key thing, 'I trust you, just do your stuff on it.'

“I told this to the other guys, and Ringo was particularly pleased. It was very nice, and it was very reverent toward John.”

Years later, after Harrison had also passed on, Starr would reunite with McCartney for his solo track "Grow Old With Me." As things stand, it is the only track from one of the four's solo releases to feature songwriting credits from the entirety of the Fab Four, with another old Lennon demo revitalized, and a touching tribute to Harrison woven into its music.

As hoped for, the band's latest Anthology release includes outtakes and rarities, and the band's now nine-part documentary has been expanded with another episode that charts the making of the first Anthology in 1994 and 1995. The ghost of JohnLennon will undoubtedly haunt that, too.

UPDATE: Anthology 4 and more confirmed for this fall!

A new social media post from Paul McCartney seems to hint that a brand-new Beatles Anthology release is on the horizon.

Granted, Macca’s Instagram post is cryptic, but the clues are promising. There’s no caption; it simply shows a quartet of images featuring white backgrounds, and the numbers one to four, colored by some of the band’s instantly recognizable artwork, including snippets of the Yellow Submarine and Sgt. Pepper's album covers.

Notably, the images featured in the post closely resemble collages that featured across the previous 1990s Anthology releases. Consequently, fans are convinced that it points toward another multimedia anthology project.

The Anthology series began 30 years ago, in 1995, as a retrospective project comprising a television documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book charting the Fab Four’s celebrated history.

For hardcore fans, the albums — titled Anthology 1, 2 and 3 — were the holy grail, containing live cuts, alternate takes of classic tracks, unreleased material, outtakes, interviews and images dating back to the group's early pre-fame days.

The fact that McCartney’s post features four images in its carousel isn’t lost on the Beatles fanbase.

If confirmed, it will be the most significant movement from the Beatles camp since the AI-powered single, “Now and Then,” which was released in 2023 and fixed a glitch in their back catalog in the process. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, had given the band’s surviving members the original “Now and Then” demo in 1994, but the band had opted not to include it in those mid-’90s releases.

Two new songs, “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird,” were featured in the original Anthology series, making those tunes the first new music to come from the band since the 1980 murder of John Lennon. Both songs were written and recorded by the guitarist in the late ‘70s, representing some of the final material he produced.

McCartney's post comes amid other interesting developments in Beatles folklore. Elliot Mintz’s recent appearance on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast has offered an alternative timeline to John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s final ever meeting, two years after they were believed to have last crossed paths.

Elsewhere, a recently unearthed George Harrison interview from 1981 finds him discussing the powers of comedy in adjusting to life after the Beatles, and Guitar Player has reflected on how an unreleased John Lennon demo saw three-quarters of the Beatles write a song together again for the first time since their split.

McCartney wrapped his mammoth Get Back tour last year with his recently rediscovered Höfner violin bass getting its first live appearance in 50 years, with a little help from Ronnie Wood.

When the Beatles came to an end in 1970, none of the Fab Four were content to rest on their laurels.

In the months before and after their final album, Let It Be, was released, solo efforts from each member — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — began to usher in the post-Beatles era.

Harrison and Lennon had the greatest success in those early years. Harrison's expansive and epic All Things Must Pass met with almost universal acclaim when it was released in 1970, while Lennon's sophomore solo release, 1971's Imagine, was a chart topper on both sides of the Atlantic and yielded one of his finest solo recordings with its title track.

McCartney had a tougher go at it. His earliest solo efforts — 1970's McCartney and 1971's Ram, credited to him and his wife, Linda— were panned by critics and fans, and the debut release from his group Wings — 1971's Wild Life — was dismissed as showcasing the nadir of McCartney's songwriting.

The following year, he upped his game by hiring guitarist Henry McCullough and taking Wings on the road to get them into shape for their next album, 1973's Red Rose Speedway. One month before that album's release, he helped promote it with a TV special that marked his first major TV appearance since the Beatles had split.

Titled simply James Paul McCartney, the program aired April 16, 1973 on Britain's ATV broadcast service and in the U.S. on ABC, with a mix of solo songs, Wings cuts, and Beatles classics that intermingled across a 22-song showcase.

The special was a chance both to get reacquainted with his fans and find his groove after spending years literally in the wilderness. Since the Beatles' breakup, McCartney had lived for much of the time at a Scottish farmhouse he purchased in 1966, a place he described as his “hideaway from the world.”

But equally, the show was a way to settle a dispute with his publisher, Lew Grade, who owned not only ATV but also the Beatles' Northern Songs catalog. Grade had objected to McCartney crediting Linda as a co-writer on his solo material. He complained that she lacked professional credentials, and he threatened to hold her portion of the royalties. Conveniently, McCartney's agreement to do the TV special for Grade's network put the problem to rest.

No doubt McCartney recognized the special had merits at this point in his career — certainly for his band and its new lineup — and he used it to demonstrate the range of his musical styles and creative talents. The songs performed included an upbeat and jangly take on Wings’ “Big Barn Bed,” their 1972 single "Mary Had a Little Lamb," their newly released single "My Love" and "Live and Let Die," his theme for the then-forthcoming 1973 James Bond movie of the same name.

Elsewhere in the show, McCartney donned an acoustic guitar for an abridged performance of his Beatles' era compositions "Blackbird" and "Michelle," as well as his solo cut "Heart of the Country," as Linda, a professional photographer, flitted around him taking photos.

While some portions of the show were an effort to show McCartney’s down-home side, he also went overboard attempting to show his wilder side. The skit titled “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance” was a parody of a Busby Berkley musical, but with a subversive bent: the dancers were dressed half in men’s clothes, half in women’s. The McCartneys planned to do a bit of gender swapping as well, but the U.S. sponsors weren’t having it.

“We wanted to do a drag sketch,” McCartney explained in a later interview. “I was going to come onstage dressed as Diana Ross and Linda was going to be dressed as a man. But they didn’t think that was a very good idea. It was a kind of Chevrolet show, and you couldn’t go too far or they wouldn’t show it.”

For the finale, the hour-long special featured McCartney with his Rickenbacker 4001 bass for the Wings' tune "The Mess," his 1970 solo hit "Maybe I’m Amazed" and the Little Richard rock-and-roller "Long Tall Sally," all performed before a feverish audience. It was followed by an intimate acoustic performance of his Beatles hit "Yesterday" as the credits rolled.

Unfortunately, McCartney's attempt to paint himself as an all-round entertainer fell flat. Critics almost universally savaged the show, and viewers largely ignored it.

Nevertheless, it put him back in the broader public arena for the first time in years. The release of Red Rose Speedway the following month, with the hit "My Love," was followed by the June release of Live and Let It Die and its chart-topping Paul McCartney and Wings title track.

By the following November, McCartney was back in his stride as he and a stripped-down Wings lineup — just McCartney, Linda and guitarist Denny Laine — released Band on the Run, his most successful post-Beatles album at that time.

McCartney's struggles with Wings would continue through the decade, and his 1980s return to solo work sputtered along as well. In 1986, he took an extended break from releasing albums — his first since the year-and-a-half pause after Wild Life — when he hunkered down to work on 1989's Flowers in the Dirt, turning to Elvis Costello for collaborative inspiration and perhaps a little help unleashing his inner darkness after yet another middling decade.

It hasn’t been hugely uncommon for Beatles members to collaborate together in the wake of the band’s demise in 1970 – that infamous rooftop concert was their final public appearance. They have, however, usually been a little limited in their scope.

Ringo Starr guested on George Harrison's third album, “All Things Must Pass”, soon after the group’s split and Ringo's solo career – which has yielded an exhaustive 21 studio albums since "Sentimental Journey" (1970) – has seen the drummer frequently join forces with the rest of the Fab Four.

But rarely did more than two Beatles get together for a song. Sure, many of Starr’s albums have featured contributions from Harrison, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon, but on separate tracks. Harrison’s 1981 single, "All Those Years Ago", reconfigured as a tribute to John Lennon after his murder the year before, featured Starr on drums and McCartney's backing vocals. But Starr's "Grow Old With Me" shattered that precedent in a remarkable way.

Released in 2019 as part of his 20th album, “What’s My Name”, the song started life in Lennon’s imagination. Little came of the demo until it serendipitously ended up in Starr's hands years after Lennon's passing.

“John wrote it,” he told TMS Global Entertainment during the record’s press tour. “And I like to mention this because Jack Douglas [the record’s producer], sent it to me out of the blue. That's why I love life. Things just arrive.

“Jack Douglas said, ‘Did you ever hear what John said on the Bermuda tapes?’”

As the name suggests, the Bermuda tapes relate to a series of demo recordings made by Lennon in Bermuda. Most songs would end up on his 1980 album “Double Fantasy” with Yoko Ono, the last record he released before his death. This idea, however, remained untouched nearly 40 years later.

“At the beginning of the cassette – I have to well up, I can’t help it. I’ve told this story nine times today – he says, “Oh, that would be good for Richard Starkey. This would be great for you, Ringo!’

“I thought, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ We’ll never know why he didn’t finish it, but we did a lot of the track. Paul was coming into town, and I said, ‘I’d love for you to play on this track.’ I thought he'd be just perfect because he's so melodic and he can only enhance the track. That's all he does when he plays, every time.”

And so, three-quarters of the Beatles featured on the track, with a touching guitar solo coming courtesy of Joe Walsh. But, with the memory of another fallen Beatle in mind, Douglas had one final touch in mind.

“Jack, who did the strings, does a George line. He plays a title of one of George's song in the with the strings, and if you listen to it carefully, you'll hear it.”

The melody in question – spoiler alert – is from Harrison’s resplendent Beatles hit, “Here Comes the Sun”. It's a delicate, heartfelt touch

“So it’s like George is on it, too,” Starr smiles, a look of disbelief visible despite his aviator shades covering much of his face.

In related news, Derek Shulman has revealed how his pre-Gentle Giant band secretly recorded an album with Beatles gear, and, following Ozzy Osbourne's passing, comments on how the Beatles saved his life have resurfaced. He compared crossing paths with Paul McCartney in 2001 to meeting Jesus.

There’s no denying that Manchester indie rock heavyweights Oasis draw great influence from the Beatles. However, Paul McCartney says he was surprised to find himself on the receiving end of criticism from the Gallagher brothers.

Formed in 1991 in Manchester, some 31 years after the Beatles, in a city 35 miles east of Liverpool, Oasis, like their heroes, shot to fame in double-quick time. Their debut album, "Definitely Maybe", bearing timeless singles like "Rock 'n' Roll Star", "Supersonic", and "Cigarettes & Alcohol", shot the Burnage boys to fame.

As the hype around the band reached fever pitch, fans and critics alike were quick to draw parallels between the two bands. Then McCartney soon found himself fielding questions about Manchester's hot new act.

“The trouble is, because they're so Beatle-y, people ask, ‘What do you think about Oasis?’” McCartney told Howard Stern in 2001. “I got fed up of being asked. I started off saying, ‘They're okay. Hey, I wish them good luck. They're young guys, it's difficult out there.’ I was trying to help.

“But then they started to badmouth us,” he adds. “They started to say, ‘We're much better, man.’”

The Gallagher brothers have never been known for their humility. By 1996, the success of their second album, "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?", had sent them into the Stratosphere. That only bolstered their egos.

The album, buoyed by ultra-successful singles, "Wonderwall" and "Champagne Supernova", sold a record-breaking 345,000 copies in the UK in its first week, and would stay at the top of the album charts for 10 consecutive weeks. The fame had perhaps gotten to Noel Gallagher's head. In conversation with MTV, he began firing shots at the Beatles like he wanted a war.

He had said that the public’s reaction to their first two albums meant that Oasis were bigger than the Beatles. Though Gallagher has since admitted to being high during the interview, and said his claim was “embarrassing,” the damage was done.

When pressed on Gallagher’s comments by the Irish Times a year later, McCartney returned fire.

“They're derivative, and they think too much of themselves,” he had said, adding a cutting final blow: “They mean nothing to me.”

George Harrison, meanwhile, once said that the band would be better off without their loud-mouthed lead singer, calling him “excess baggage.”

Of course, it would be easy to dismiss their very public falling out as nothing short of pantomime. Oasis’ PR schtick has thrived on controversy from day one; their whole act has hinged on bravado, and going after the biggest band in the world showed just how high the wave they were riding was at that time.

Two and a half decades later, when asked about his infamous dig at a preview screening of "The Beatles: Get Back", Gallagher retracted his statement. The Fab Four, he said, “mean everything to me”.

“They’ve definitely got the best tunes, hands down,” he said. “In my record collection, they’ve got the greatest tunes by far.”

Noel Gallagher, being on brand as ever, has since turned to other artists to badmouth, with Green Day his latest victim.

In lighter news, Pete Townshend has named the Oasis song that is so beautiful it brought him to tears.