There's a lot of great stories on this article. I'm sure many here will relate to some of them.

How a besotted Beatles superfan who made amateur bedroom recordings of the band's 1960s hits ended up with a personalised thank you on their hit BBC album three decades later 

By Margaret Ashworth
14 May 2022 , updated 00:20 BST 15 May 2022

[www.dailymail.co.uk]

Thanks for posting the article Cristiano, and thanks to Margaret Ashworth!

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Quote
Cristiano Radtke
There's a lot of great stories on this article. I'm sure many here will relate to some of them.

How a besotted Beatles superfan who made amateur bedroom recordings of the band's 1960s hits ended up with a personalised thank you on their hit BBC album three decades later 

By Margaret Ashworth
14 May 2022 , updated 00:20 BST 15 May 2022

[www.dailymail.co.uk]

I'll echo hairball's thanks.

Really interesting story worthy of the telling.

The bit at the end about her being (effectively) blocked from putting the recordings up on her web site is telling. Reads as if a Jobsworth in the BBC has stopped her. I'd bet serious money that if Lord McCartney said he had no objections, then it would happen!

--
Captain Corella
60 Years a Fan

My pleasure, guys!

On Margaret's website there's a slightly longer version of the Daily Mail article, including a list of her recordings, with some interesting bands/artists: [am-records.com]

Quote
Cristiano Radtke
My pleasure, guys!

On Margaret's website there's a slightly longer version of the Daily Mail article, including a list of her recordings, with some interesting bands/artists: [am-records.com]

Strangely I missed that when I checked out her web site yesterday. So, thanks again.

There's a bit at the end that intrigued me...

"I therefore contacted the BBC for permission to air the programmes. In my naivety I thought this would be a formality since it is 59 years since the programmes were made and I was not seeking to profit from the broadcast. However I was informed by a BBC person via email:

‘For the 11 items listed . . . we appear to have copies of these programmes in the BBC archive and it doesn’t look like you have anything that we are missing . "

...but but but.... Surely, as those were the 11 editions that she supplied, whoever replied to her clearly had forgotten that, or didn't know, that but for her Good Work, there would be NO copies of these darned programmes!

--
Captain Corella
60 Years a Fan

Quote
CaptainCorella

Quote
Cristiano Radtke
My pleasure, guys!

On Margaret's website there's a slightly longer version of the Daily Mail article, including a list of her recordings, with some interesting bands/artists: [am-records.com]

Strangely I missed that when I checked out her web site yesterday. So, thanks again.

There's a bit at the end that intrigued me...

"I therefore contacted the BBC for permission to air the programmes. In my naivety I thought this would be a formality since it is 59 years since the programmes were made and I was not seeking to profit from the broadcast. However I was informed by a BBC person via email:

‘For the 11 items listed . . . we appear to have copies of these programmes in the BBC archive and it doesn’t look like you have anything that we are missing . "

...but but but.... Surely, as those were the 11 editions that she supplied, whoever replied to her clearly had forgotten that, or didn't know, that but for her Good Work, there would be NO copies of these darned programmes!

Please tell me you aired the performances regardless.

DVD/BR new release date is now 12-Jul-2022 :



[TheBeatles.com] , [SuperDeluxeEdition.com]

4K-UltraHD version of 'A Hard Days Night' :



[www.Amazon.de] - 23-Jun-2022

Album #/ Beatles/ Stones/ (Winner)
1/ Please Please Me/ England's Newest Hitmakers/ (Beatles)
2/ With The Beatles/ 12 X 5/ (Stones)
3/ A Hard Day's Night/ Now/ (Stones)
4/ Beatles for Sale/ Out of Our Heads/ (Stones)
5/ Help!/ December's Children/ (Beatles)
6/ Rubber Soul/ Aftermath/ (Stones)
7/ Revolver/ Between The Buttons/ (Beatles)
8/ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band/ Their Satanic Majesties Request/ (Beatles)
9/ The Beatles (White Album)/ Beggars Banquet/ (Stones)
10/ Yellow Submarine/ Let it Bleed/ (Stones)
11/ Abbey Road/ Sticky Fingers/ (Stones)
12/ Let it Be/ Exile on Main St./ (Stones)
Beatles 4 Stones 8

Ringo is back on the road...amazing to think he'll be 82 next month!

"...the two-hour show ending With A Little Help From My Friends/Give Peace a Chance, which included him doing a set of jumping jacks".

From the Toronto Sun:
Ringo Starr gets by with a little help from his friends at Rama tour launch
Jane Stevenson
May 28, 2022

RINGO LIVE

RAMA, Ont., — Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band finally got back on the road.

After two and a half years of delays due to COVID-19, the 81-year-old Beatles drummer — joined by singer-guitarist Steve Lukather (Toto), multi-instrumentalists-singers Edgar Winter (The Edgar Winter Group) and Warren Ham, singer-guitarist Colin Hay (Men At Work) singer-bassist Hamish Stuart (Average White Band), and drummer Gregg Bissonette — launched the North American start of his latest trek at Casino Rama on Friday night with the first of show of a two-night stand. After kicking off with Carl Perkins’ Matchbox, Starr segued into his solo classic, It Don’t Come Easy, and The Beatles’ song What Goes On (which he pointed out he co-wrote with Paul McCartney and John Lennon.) But Starr really hit his stride behind his Ludwig drum kit on Boys before coming back out to the front to lead the crowd in The Beatles’ classic Yellow Submarine. Winter was the first All-Starr up with the rocker Free Ride and while he was the MVP in terms of number of instruments played like during crowd fave, Frankenstein (during which Starr left the stage for a 15-minute break), it was Hay who proved to be the strongest vocalist on such Men At Work hits as Down Under, Overkill and Who Can It Be Now. Stuart, meanwhile, brought the funk with Average White Band’s Pick Up The Pieces and Cut The Cake, and The Isley Brothers’ Work To Do. Starr excelled again during I Wanna Be Your Man, Octopus’ Garden, Photograph and the two-hour show ending With A Little Help From My Friends/Give Peace a Chance, which included him doing a set of jumping jacks.

It was the fifth time the Fab Four timekeeper had launched a tour at the casino after a week of rehearsals and he explained why at a Thursday press conference at Casino Rama. “It’s loose,” said Starr of the atmosphere. “For a week we live here and we just go to the same stage. It’s good being in the same vicinity as where we’re rehearsing.” During the COVID-19 downtime, of course, Peter Jackson released Get Back: The Beatles, which was a reworking of the 1970 Let It Be documentary that showed a much happier Fab Four working together than the original film. Starr was asked at the press conference if the new documentary meant new fans for his shows, which will hit eight more Canadian cities in the fall including a just-announced Toronto stop at Massey Hall on Sept. 28. “I’m sure it’ll show some interest but we all have our core fans, they’ll be coming,” said Starr, who rotates the All-Starr lineup. “What I’ve noticed with Ringo and the All-Starrs, when we first started (32 years ago), a lot of the audience was sort of my age and over the years it’s sort of gotten younger. The kids are coming in.” Starr was also asked about The Beatles breakup and if he wanted a few more years with his Liverpool pals. “We were lads when we started and as it went on we had wives and children and we stopped touring and made great records,” he said. “And we all played well together and we got on with each other and that’s just how it was. It came to a point eight years later — that blows me away, we did all that in eight years — it was time to leave.” And despite his advancing age, he said he’ll never retire. “I only ever wanted to be a drummer from 13. And it’s still there. I love to play. I’m a musician, I don’t have to retire. As long as I can pick up those sticks, I’ve got a gig.”

FRIDAY NIGHT SET LIST:
Matchbox
It Don’t Come Easy
What Goes On
Free Ride
Rosanna
Pick Up the Pieces
Down Under
Boys
I’m The Greatest
Yellow Submarine
Cut the Cake
Overkill
Africa
Work to Do
I Wanna Be Your Man
Johnny B. Goode
Who Can It Be Now
Hold the Line
Photograph
Act Naturally
With a Little Help From My Friends/Give Peace A Chance

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Today, June 6, 2022 is the 60th anniversary of the Beatles first recording session at Abbey Road.

Quote
jahisnotdead
Today, June 6, 2022 is the 60th anniversary of the Beatles first recording session at Abbey Road.

Wow...and the 59th anniversary of the release of "Come On".

Paul McCartney’s Brother Recalls the Beatles’ Early Years
The photographer reflects on 1962, a watershed year for his brother's band
By Jeff Slate

Beatles

On June 6, 1962, 60 years ago this week, the very nervous, almost-Fab foursome of John, Paul, George and Pete entered EMI’s studios on Abbey Road in the St. John’s neighborhood of London for their first recording session under the recording contract that the already legendary producer George Martin had offered their rather green manager, Brian Epstein, on the label he was then managing, Parlophone, when the pair had met the previous February. But the group — who were tearing up the pub and club circuit in the north of England after a long, grueling stint in Hamburg, Germany, where they’d played eight hours a day, six days a week, honing their craft and becoming one of the tightest and rawest bands in the country — nearly didn’t make the cut during that first session. Paul McCartney’s bass amp was found to be so inadequate that a replacement was cobbled together from speakers pilfered from the famed studio’s echo chamber, and John Lennon’s tiny Vox amplifier had to be held together with string to keep it from rattling, as the engineer Norman Smith recalled to me during an interview in 2007. Finally, Smith, who went on to produce the legendary recordings by the early, Syd Barrett-fronted Pink Floyd, was able to get a suitable sound on tape. Still, amplifiers were the least of the Beatles’ problems that day. As they ran through “Besame Mucho,” the 1940s hit written by Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velázquez, plus their originals “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why,” it became clear to all in attendance that, while it was far from a sure thing that guitar groups would be the next big thing, this group surely wouldn’t make the cut with their current drummer supplying the backbeat. “There Pete Best was coasting along, a good-looking lad in a great group, and that could’ve been it forever,” recalls Mike McCartney, the photographer, recording artist and, of course, Paul McCartney’s brother. “But for the decisions that were made, which were necessary, of course.” A couple of the tracks from the day were included on Volume 1 of the Beatles’ Anthology compilation, released in 1995, and the evidence is plain: Handsome fan-favorite or not, Best couldn’t keep a beat to save his life. “I always felt sad for Pete, until the Anthology,” McCartney says. “Then, for the first time, he saw some real money, which was important to me, because he was never looked after. And to lose that crew, and to lose out on fame too, that was awful.”

It’s all recounted in rich reminiscences and stark, candid photographs by the brother of one of the world’s most famous men in Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool, recently released by Genesis Publications in a gorgeous, limited-edition deluxe book. But McCartney recalls the time of Best’s firing, in the summer of 1962, particularly vividly. “Brian Epstein came along and thought, ‘Okay, I love you in your leathers, but this is a business, and if you want to make a million, then you’ve got to change your look,’” he says. “I remember John Lennon, particularly, but certainly heard, ‘if you want to make a million.’ They went to the tailor Dougie Millings and bought those first suits, and I remember my brother coming home with a box, and I opened the tissue paper and there was a mohair suit. I said, ‘What are you doing? We said we’d never go along that route.’ And he’d already worked it what to tell people. He said, ‘Look, ours have velvet collars.’ Oh, dear God. And so, there’s a photo in the book at the Tower Ballroom, and there’s Pete in his suit. And then, in the next photograph is Ringo, in the same suit the next week. Poor Pete had been let go. And he had to pay for the suit!” Of course, Martin heard something on those tapes, and he recalled to me during a conversation in the early ’90s that, while there was no sign of the songwriting prowess Lennon and McCartney possessed, he was, more than anything, enamored with the band’s quick wit and camaraderie. And so, just 90 days later, they were given a second chance. With a new drummer in tow and a fresh batch of songs — picked by Lennon and McCartney, rather than Epstein — with which to impress Martin, the rest, as they say, is history. As obvious as the band’s trajectory all seems now, in hindsight, Mike McCartney remembers 1962 as a fraught rollercoaster of a year, one that saw the Beatles nearly splinter apart more than once, if not for an enormous amount of tenacity and a large helping of Liverpudlian luck. “Fate could have been different,” he says. “They might’ve gone down to London, done the record with George Martin, and then what if nothing happened and it didn’t sell? Ringo would have gone back with [his pre-Beatles band] Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and the rest of the Beatles would have had to get jobs and maybe gone on doing music in their spare time or whatever.”

As McCartney sees it, whatever came before, 1962 was the true beginning of the Beatles, at least as popular culture now knows them. As he was learning his craft of photography in his spare time, his brother was making leaps and bounds as a musician and songwriter — the result, as he sees it, of doing nothing but learning to be a Beatle. It was a year that the band kept up a grueling live schedule, made the first of several hundred BBC radio appearances, signed that all-important record deal with George Martin (who would go on to become a crucial collaborator for the band) and ditched Best for the man who put the beat in the Beatles, Ringo Starr. But they also lost the man who McCartney recalls as the soul of the early Fabs. “Stu Sutcliffe was John’s mate,” he remembers. “I knew him because I wanted to go to art college, too, where he and John were studying. He had a style to him. And a real presence about him. He looked cool, and when they started the group, he was trying to play but he just couldn’t. My brother was trying to trying to teach him. But that’s hard, trying to learn an instrument like that. But John wanted him in, and so he had to learn. Then, when they went over to Hamburg he met Astrid [Kirchherr, the photographer] and fell in love. He told them, ‘Well, you get on with it. Paul can go on the bass. I’m staying here doing me art.’ But he was really important to the group up to that point.” Later, not long before he died in April 1962, Sutcliffe visited his former group in Liverpool, with Kirchherr on his arm. “He was looking thin and pale, and he must’ve been taking medication, because, like the letter from him reproduced in the book, which is very James Joyce-y and surreal, he was sometimes just floating, and then all of a sudden, he wasn’t,” McCartney recalls. “There’s a picture in the book of Astrid, with her very short, Mia Farrow-type hair, John and Stu outside the Cavern. Not long after that, we were all down there, in the Cavern, and I remember Stu and Astrid walking in, and Stu had this ordinary jacket, but without the collar. We all pissed ourselves laughing. He was not happy, because we didn’t get it, the style. But then, when he died, those famous Beatles collarless jackets, they’re in homage. They weren’t Beatles jackets. They were Stu’s jacket.” The Beatles took his death hard, says McCartney, most especially John Lennon, who he recalls had a unique bond with his former art school classmate. “He was a nice bloke, and very quiet,” he says. “Even onstage, he just stood there, in these very dark, beautiful shades. He couldn’t have seen a bloody thing. But he looked so good. And I always remember how cool he was to be around.”

It’s all there in Early Liverpool, from family photos and Teddy Boy poses from his teenage brother Paul, to run-ins with the actress Jane Asher when his brother brought her to Liverpool for the weekend in 1965, and much more — both mundane and astonishing, but all of it chronicling a time and place that now seems so magical because of its inhabitants. “All they were was my brother and me mates,” McCartney says with a laugh, as he flips through the photos he took all those years ago now reproduced in a massive book. “That’s all they were. It was just me learning photography, and my brother doing the same thing in music. Really, that’s all it was.”

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-08 03:01 by Hairball.

Ringo has postponed the remaining 12 dates of his current tour after a second member of the All Starr Band contracted COVID.

[www.ringostarr.com]

Quote
bye bye johnny
Ringo has postponed the remaining 12 dates of his current tour after a second member of the All Starr Band contracted COVID.

[www.ringostarr.com]

Damn..............

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Really cool that "I Wanna Be Your Man" was played in Liverpool.

They should have also played "I'm Waiting For My Man".......

Quote
Elmo Lewis
Really cool that "I Wanna Be Your Man" was played in Liverpool.

They should have also played "I'm Waiting For My Man".......

In Amsterdam that would have been apt. Get well soon Mick!

The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones: a rock music rivalry that refuses to die

Next Saturday, as Macca headlines Glastonbury, Mick and co will play Hyde Park. James Hall has a powerful sense of deja vu

By James Hall
19 June 2022


Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger share a train carriage in 1967 Credit: Getty

The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones is the most famous battle of the bands in music history. They’re pop-cultural icons who have divided fans since the early 1960s – and six decades on, they’re still locking horns for our attention. Next Saturday, the Stones will play to 65,000 people in London’s Hyde Park, while Paul McCartney headlines the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival some 120 miles to the south-west. It’s the rock ’n’ roll rivalry that refuses to go away.

The narrative goes something like this. The Beatles were the wholesome boys next door while the Stones were the edgy bad boys. The Beatles were pop, the Stones were rock. The former were wholesome mop-tops, the latter were dangerous rebels. John Lennon famously said that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”, while the Stones had Sympathy for the Devil.

The Beatles had 16 UK number one albums, and the Stones had 13. This rivalry was felt between the bands too, a mutual animosity borne of a disrespect for the other’s music. Which camp were you in? Because in the broiling swirl of Sixties counterculture (and beyond), you couldn’t – still can’t – be in both.

It all makes for a cracking, headline-grabbing juxtaposition. But to what extent is it actually true? Did the groups really dislike each other? Or was theirs a battle that was cooked up to create headlines as the pop market exploded in the 1960s? The answer is a mixture of the two: The Beatles vs The Stones is 80 per cent marketing construct and 20 per cent truth.

The bands were almost exact contemporaries. The Beatles released their debut single Love Me Do in October 1962, while the Stones released theirs, Come On, in June 1963. (The “almost” is crucial here – there was always an element of a younger brother looking up to his older sibling in their relationship.) The bands’ early rivalry was genuine – and it was a shadow play of the real-life drama playing out between their managers.

The Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham had worked with The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein. Together, they’d helped shape the Liverpudlians’ image, but Epstein had fired Oldham after an argument. “We were the instrument of [Oldham’s] revenge on Epstein,” wrote Keith Richards in his autobiography Life.

Oldham didn’t get it right immediately. He tried to beat The Beatles at their own game by putting the Stones in suits similar to the Fab Four’s. But the band hated them, so he took the opposite tack: be the anti-Beatles. The credo, Richards said, was to “do everything wrong, at least from a showbiz, Fleet Street point of view”. As the guitarist said about The Stones’ own image, “You’ve got The Beatles, mums love them and dads love them, but would you let your daughter marry this?” The Stones cultivated a raggedy look, never smiling in photos, never dressing the same and never getting matching haircuts.

Then, there was the music itself. In a 2015 interview with Esquire magazine, Richards called the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album “a mishmash of rubbish” and argued that there was “not a lot of roots” in the band’s music, which he and his bandmates saw as more vaudevillian. In 2021 – in an indication of how the rivalry is still playing out – McCartney dubbed the Stones “a blues covers band”. He told The New Yorker that “our net was cast a bit wider than theirs” when it came to music.

The Beatles also regularly complained that the Stones copied them. Being slightly behind on the career curve meant that the Stones could observe and then mimic The Beatles’ success, went the argument. In a 1970 Rolling Stone interview, a clearly riled John Lennon accused Jagger and the boys of regularly doing what The Beatles had just done. He was particularly scathing about the Stones’ psychedelic 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, which was released shortly after Sgt Pepper.

“I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every f------ album. Every f------ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same – he imitates us… Satanic Majesties is Pepper,” Lennon said. He added that the Stones were “not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise” as The Beatles. In the Let it Be track Dig A Pony, Lennon appears to reference this. “I roll a stoney / Well, you can imitate everyone you know,” he sang.

For his part, Jagger once complained that The Beatles were too willing to give their fans a running commentary on their career. When the band were experiencing money problems in their Apple business in 1969, Jagger told Village Voice journalist Howard Smith that they over-shared. “They publicise everything they do,” Jagger said. “They always have – that’s their big hang-up.” The Stones singer also lambasted his rivals for the nastiness that characterised their break-up. Asked if the Stones would ever split, Jagger said, “Nah. But if we did, we wouldn’t be so bitchy about it.”

So the battle-lines between The Beatles and the Stones appear to be pretty well-drawn. But despite all this, there is a similar mountain of evidence that points to the bands being fellow travellers and friends. George Harrison is said to have recommended the Stones to Decca (the record label that famously turned down The Beatles in 1962). Further, Lennon and McCartney wrote the Stones’ second single, I Wanna Be Your Man. It was to be the Stones’ first Top 20 hit (although Lennon, pointedly, later said that the pair knocked the song out in minutes, adding, “Well, we weren’t gonna give them anything great, right?”).

This aside, band members continued to collaborate through the years. Lennon and McCartney sang on the Stones’ 1967 song We Love You, and Jagger and Richards both took part in the live TV satellite broadcast of All You Need Is Love in the same year. Meanwhile, Lennon and Yoko Ono appeared in the Stones’ 1968 concert show, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.

Today, the bands share the same producer for the legacy reissues of old albums. Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George, who has worked on an array of Beatles box-sets, also recently worked on the re-release of the Stones’ Goats Head Soup.

The fact is that The Beatles and The Stones moved (and still move) in a similar orbit, and it’s an orbit that’s fairly sparsely populated. They are and always have been members of rock ’n’ roll’s one per cent club: then as hip young things, and now as multimillionaire elder statesmen. They needed each other to bounce off, to compete against, and to set each other new challenges. Jagger summed up the bands’ relationship in the speech he gave at the 1988 Hall of Fame induction ceremony. “We went through some pretty strange times,” he said of The Beatles. “We had a sort of a lot of rivalry in those early years, and a little bit of friction, but we always ended up friends.”

Both camps are, of course, sadly depleted. Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last year, and McCartney is one of only two surviving Beatles. McCartney is 80 as of yesterday, and Jagger and Richards are both 78. In an era when many of their contemporaries have retired or died – and at a time when the younger Abba are turning to computer-generated versions of themselves to entertain audiences – we should make the most of them. Next Saturday, whether you’re planning to Paint It Black in Hyde Park or Let It Be in Somerset, I’d really just cheer the fact that these icons of music are still going at all.

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

The Rolling Stones, Liverpool, june 9th :
[www.youtube.com]

McCartney (+ guest), last show of the tour, MetLife Stadium, june 16th :
[www.youtube.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-06-19 19:01 by Massimo68.

Unheard recording of The Beatles reveals what John Lennon really thought of Fab Four

Extraordinary tape of John Lennon, recorded at height of Beatlemania, unearthed in Hull and will go under hammer at Yorkshire auction house



Hull Art College student John Hill, right, recording John Lennon at a press conference in Hull in 1964, ahead of a Beatles concert at the ABC Cinema (Image: davidduggleby.com)

[www.hulldailymail.co.uk]

Directing the Beatles Was Just One Part of His Long and Winding Career

The filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who attracted some social media scrutiny after his appearance in Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” finds peace in New York’s Hudson Valley.

By Alex Williams

July 5, 2022

HUDSON, N.Y - — Of course I wanted to talk with Michael Lindsay-Hogg about the Beatles. Everyone wants to talk with him about the Beatles, especially since his star turn in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s epic documentary, which debuted last fall on Disney+.

In January 1969, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was the brash young film director who tried to charm and cajole John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr through warring agendas as they hashed out new songs and gave their last concert on a London rooftop. Soon after that, he started shaping his nearly 60 hours of footage into the documentary “Let It Be,” a film largely unavailable since its initial theatrical run in 1970.

Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s footage, as well as more than 100 hours of audio that he recorded with his crew, some of it with hidden microphones, got new life when Mr. Jackson cleaned it up and reassembled it for his nearly eight-hour series. Mr. McCartney and Mr. Starr, along with most critics, hailed “Get Back” as an upbeat corrective to Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s more somber take.

So would he like to talk about his time with the Beatles?

“That was a small part of a long career,” he said in the sitting room of his three-bedroom Civil War-era house in Hudson, N.Y.

He had a point. In the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg made a name for himself as a creator of the music video, directing promotional films, as they were then called, for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who a decade and a half before MTV. In the early 1980s, he was again a trailblazer, as the co-director of “Brideshead Revisited,” an 11-hour adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel that was a forerunner of prestige television dramas like “The Sopranos.” He is also a Tony-nominated stage director, painter and author. Oh, and Orson Welles may very well be his biological father.

It’s almost too much to get through. No wonder he had a request, delivered in a deadpan voice: “Please make the entire article about my painting.” But eventually, over the course of three interviews, we got around to John, Paul, George and Ringo.

The Third Man

Mr. Lindsay-Hogg, 82, lives with his wife, Lisa Ticknor Lindsay-Hogg, a former fashion model and casting agent, in a narrow cream-colored house in this river town nestled into lush green hills. The rooms have a lived-in feel, with book stacks rising from table tops and the walls blanketed with paintings, many of them scavenged from flea markets, and photos from his varied career.

“I am the maximalist,” he said. “Lisa is the organizer.”


In addition to working with the Beatles, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg directed the Rolling Stones in the concert film “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” Credit:Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

Sprinkled among the decorations are posters from past projects, including “Agnes of God,” a 1982 Broadway play he directed, for which the actress Amanda Plummer won a Tony, and “The Object of Beauty,” a 1991 film written and directed by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg, with John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell in the lead roles. A sculpture of a rabbit head sits on a credenza. He got it in Harare, Zimbabwe, when he filmed Paul Simon’s “Graceland: The African Concert” in 1987.

Three cats provide daily entertainment. “She’s a movie star waiting to happen,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said when a black cat named L’il Mew brushed against my leg.

The couple has lived here less than two years. During lockdown, they rented a rock-star-style tour bus and fled Los Angeles, where they had lived since they were married in 2002. California’s wildfires were part of what drove them out.

“The sky was yellow,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said. “You could taste the soot.”

The move meant abandoning a city where he had deep ties. Although he was born in Manhattan and educated at Choate, the Connecticut prep school, he spent six years of his childhood in Hollywood, mingling with William Randolph Hearst, Olivia de Havilland and Humphrey Bogart.

His mother was the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who starred opposite Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s “Wuthering Heights” in 1939. His father — at least, according to his birth certificate — was Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a baronet of Rotherfield Hall in East Sussex, England. The younger Mr. Lindsay-Hogg inherited the title upon the elder’s death in 1999.

“Technically, I could be a ‘Sir,’ but unlike Mick and Elton, I didn’t earn it,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said, referring to his friends Mick Jagger and Elton John.


His leather-bound diaries, which he started keeping in the mid-1960s, in his library in Hudson, N.Y. Credit:Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

The question of paternity has long hovered over him. His mother, born in Ireland, made her American stage debut opposite Orson Welles in a 1938 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.” The production was directed by Mr. Welles at the Mercury Theater, the New York repertory house he had co-founded. When Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was a teenager, his mother told him of the rumors that Mr. Welles, best known for his 1941 film classic “Citizen Kane,” was his biological father.

“It certainly played into my life growing up, partly because of the way I look,” he said. “I was heavy when I was young, and Orson was heavy. I have a round face; he had a round face. I didn’t look like Edward Lindsay-Hogg, who, if anything, looked more like, say, Jeremy Irons.”

At 19, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg had a small role in Mr. Welles’s stage production of “Chimes at Midnight” in Dublin. “I knew him over the years, and he’d pop up every so often,” he said. Shortly after the run, Mr. Welles offered him a job in a London production of Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” “He said, ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days and you can come over,’” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg recalled. “I then did not hear from him for five years.”

Decades later, his mother, who had Alzheimer’s at the time, gave a cryptic confirmation that Mr. Welles was his father — then seemed to contradict it. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg got an answer when he spoke with Gloria Vanderbilt, a friend of his mother’s whom he had dated in the 1980s, while working on his 2011 memoir, “Luck and Circumstance.”


A young man in Swinging London: Mr. Lindsay-Hogg in 1965, when he was a director of the British pop music show “Ready Steady Go!” Credit: Evening Standard, via Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“Gloria said, ‘I hesitate, because I promised your mother I wouldn’t say this, but she’s dead now. Geraldine told me Orson was your father,’” he recalled. He took a pause. “I’m kind of past that,” he said. “Whoever was in the bed that night was in the bed that night.”

‘Seventh Career’

He led me up a narrow staircase to a well-lit bedroom that he had converted into a painting studio. His latest work was on the easel: a portrait of a couple with haunted eyes that recalled the German Expressionists of the 1920s. Painting has become “a seventh career of sorts,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said.

He said he recently sold four pieces at the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles, but art is more of a passion than a business. Painting also comes as a relief for someone who has endured the pressures of directing. “It’s all yours,” he said. “There’s no producer to say, ‘I don’t like that scene, why don’t you cut it out.’”


Mr. Lindsay-Hogg in his studio. Credit: Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

He hasn’t abandoned show business entirely. In recent years he directed several episodes of the web comedy series “Tinsel’s Town,” about a YouTube star in Hollywood, and he is writing a script for a film he hopes to direct, set in 1946 Nevada.

On the wall next to the staircase were two black-and-white close-up portraits of Mr. Jagger in his early 20s, both stills from the 1960s British pop music show “Ready Steady Go!,” the program that gave Mr. Lindsay-Hogg his start in directing at 24, a few years after he dropped out of Oxford. On the third episode he directed, the Rolling Stones performed “Play With Fire,” and Mr. Jagger made an immediate impression.

“He was absolutely beautiful, like a Botticelli cosh boy,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg recalled, using an old British slang term for stylish teenage hoodlum.

He went on to direct more than a dozen Rolling Stones music videos, from early hits like “Paint It Black” to “Start Me Up” in 1982, and has remained close with Mr. Jagger. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said he called him for advice last year, shortly before he was scheduled to have valve-replacement heart surgery, a procedure Mr. Jagger had gone through.

“Mick is creative,” he said, “but he’s also extremely practical.”

In 1968, around the time of the release of the Rolling Stones album “Beggars Banquet,” Mr. Jagger asked him to direct a TV concert film. A few weeks later, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg called Mr. Jagger and said, as he recalled it: “‘I’m going to say seven words to you: “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”’ And he got it. It just sounded right.”

The production, filmed during a grueling one-day shoot on a London soundstage, included performances by the Who, Jethro Tull and a supergroup called the Dirty Mac featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Yoko Ono. The Rolling Stones closed the show. Now considered a classic, the film was shelved until 1996, when it premiered at the New York Film Festival.

“In late January ’69, while doing ‘Let It Be,’ I showed a rough cut to Mick, Keith and Allen Klein,” he said, referring to the guitarist Keith Richards and the group’s manager at the time. “When it was over, they thought the Who were great, but didn’t think the Stones were as good as they could be. Keith said, ‘If it were called “The Who’s Rock and Roll Circus,” I wouldn’t mind.’”

Mr. Lennon’s appearance came as little surprise. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg had been working with the Beatles since 1966, when he directed promotional films for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” Two years later, he was at the helm for the videos for “Revolution” and “Hey Jude.”

Let It Be?

In late 1968, Mr. McCartney asked him to direct a television special meant to accompany the album the band was about to record. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was enthusiastic, but he knew from experience that “four Beatles would be four opinions.”

“Giving an idea to them was like putting a lump of meat in an animal’s cage,” he said. “One of them would pick it up and sniff it and toss it to the next one to take a bite.”


A poster in Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s home of a 1991 film he wrote and directed, “The Object of Beauty.” Credit: Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

After 10 days of filming, it became clear that the production he had envisioned — a concert in a cinematic location, with Mr. Lindsay-Hogg pushing for an amphitheater in Libya, as well as a separate show documenting the rehearsals to run as a kind of teaser — was not going to happen. In the end, he did what he could to salvage something of the original idea by nudging the Beatles to the roof of the Savile Row building that housed Apple Corps, the group’s media company. There they played a glorious lunchtime set as passers-by peered up quizzically from the sidewalks below.

Drawing from the dozens of hours that did not make it into “Let It Be,” Mr. Jackson turned Mr. Lindsay-Hogg into a major character in “Get Back”; his efforts to maintain some kind of momentum against long odds provided the three-part series with a narrative through-line. When “Get Back” started streaming, however, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg found himself in a vulnerable position: The man accustomed to a behind-the-camera role was now in the spotlight.

And so he was seen chomping on a cigar and suggesting that he could film the Beatles playing a benefit show for orphans or sick children. “But I don’t mean for really sick kids,” he was quick to tell the group. “I mean for kids with broken legs. I mean, really, kind of, 1944 Hollywood musical Bing Crosby kids.” On social media, Disney+ viewers took swipes at his 28-year-old self, calling him “the upper class twit of the year,” among other insults.

“I try to steer as clear from social media as possible,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said.

He added that he is more concerned about the legacy of his own documentary. The Beatles skipped the premiere, and “Let It Be” has never appeared as a DVD or on streaming platforms. Most fans know it from washed-out videocassettes; and its reputation has suffered thanks to remarks made by Mr. Starr and Mr. McCartney. “There was no joy in it,” the Beatles drummer said last year on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

Mr. Lindsay-Hogg disagrees with that assessment.

“There are moments of great sweetness,” he said. “No matter where you put the camera, no matter how you edited it, they loved each other. Anybody who sees ‘Let It Be’ again will find that.”

He believes the tone he struck is not really so far from that of “Get Back,” which he said he found “terrific.” Mr. Jackson’s account, he added, had the advantage of being five times longer, its images and sound enhanced by 21st-century technology. “He had canvas to fit a Rubens painting,” he said, “and I had a canvas to fit a little David Hockney painting.”

On July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the four Beatles and some family members attended a private screening of a rough cut of “Let It Be” in Hanover Square. They seemed pleased, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said. Afterward, he and his girlfriend at the time, the British actress Jean Marsh, went for a late dinner at Provans, a restaurant in the Fulham section of London, with Paul and Linda McCartney, Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono, and the Apple executive Peter Brown.

“It was a friendly meal,” he recalled. “We had a couple of bottles of wine and mostly talked about our differing childhoods. They were happy with the way things were going, certainly, otherwise there would have been no dinner.”

“They were grown men, not the Fab Four of the early 1960s,” he added. “And they were OK with being shown navigating relationships which were old, but changing.”


A photo on display in Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s home of a dinner in London more than 50 years ago, after a screening of his film “Let It Be.” Credit: Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

The film was a victim of bad timing, in his view. By the time of its May 1970 premiere, the Beatles had broken up. Traumatized fans saw it as “a breakup movie: ‘Mom and Dad are getting divorced!’” he said.

Apple has said in the past that it had plans to rerelease “Let It Be” at some point, and Mr. Lindsay-Hogg believes it deserves a fresh viewing; but he doesn’t dwell on his time with the Beatles, or the past in general, he said.

“I have a very, very good memory,” he said. “It may be because I never took all the drugs. But I’m very not-nostalgic. Nostalgia is, for me, like the vermouth that I do not put in my martini.”

He has preserved much of what he went through with the Beatles in diaries, which he has kept since the “Ready Steady Go!” years.

He led me to a bookcase in the memento-filled library next to his art studio. It was filled with dusty leather-bound diaries, many overstuffed with letters and photos. At my suggestion, he dug out the volume from 1969. It was curiously slender.

He thumbed through the pages and landed on January 30, the blustery day in London when the Beatles played in public for the last time. As captured by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg and his team, their swan-song performance was the climax of both “Let It Be” and “Get Back.”

The diary page was blank, except for one word scribbled in black ballpoint pen.

Roof.

“The busier you are,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said, “the less you write down.”

[www.nytimes.com]

Interesting Lindsay-Hogg article. Thanks for bringing it out of the paywall.

I found the (presumably) house style a bit strange. Mr Lennon etc.

eg "Mr. Jackson turned Mr. Lindsay-Hogg into a major character"

--
Captain Corella
60 Years a Fan

My pleasure, Captain!

Why not? The window of opportunity is quite narrow here so they better start going then...

> The Rolling Beatles, could it happen? <

No - because Ringo needs a second drummer ....

Maybe they can go on an audition

__________________________

Les Rolling BeatStones:

On 25 June 2022, Paul McCartney played Beatles-songs at Glastonbury Festival while at same time the Rolling Stones played at London's Hyde Park during their SIXTY-Tour.

It's just a funny meme. I sincerely doubt that Ringo has played a full sets worth of music in decades. When I saw the All Starr Band decades ago, I think Ringo drummed on one song, and even then had a second drummer on stage.

Yeah. Ringo drumming at this point could be trouble. But, where there’s a will, there’s a way. If they want it to happen, I could see them doing a super-mini tour. Maybe 4 shows or so. NY/LA/London/Japan?