Author

The Beatles

Author's books

The Beatles – Complete Scores

£84.99

A fitting tribute to possibly the greatest pop band ever – The Beatles. This outstanding hard-cover edition features over 1100 pages with full scores and lyrics to all 210 titles recorded by The Beatles. Guitar and bass parts are in both standard notation and tablature. Also includes a full discography. Songs include: All You Need Is Love * And I Love Her * Baby You’re a Rich Man * Back in the U.S.S.R. * The Ballad of John and Yoko * Blackbird * Can’t Buy Me Love * Come Together * Drive My Car * Eleanor Rigby * From Me to You * Glass Onion * A Hard Day’s Night * Help! * Hey Jude * I Saw Her Standing There * I Want to Hold Your Hand * Michelle * Penny Lane * She Loves You * Twist and Shout * Yesterday * and many more. The book is packaged in its own protective box. A must-own for any serious Beatles fan or collector.

The Beatles – Get Back

£40.00

The book opens in January 1969, the beginning of The Beatles’ last year as a band. The Beatles (The White Album) is at number one in the charts and the foursome gather in London for a new project. Over 21 days, first at Twickenham Film Studios and then at their own brand-new Apple Studios, with cameras and tape recorders documenting every day’s work and conversations, the band rehearse a huge number of songs, culminating in their final concert, which famously takes place on the rooftop of their own office building, bringing central London to a halt.

 

The Beatles: Get Back tells the story of those sessions through transcripts of the band’s candid conversations. Drawing on over 120 hours of sound recordings, leading music writer John Harris edits the richly captivating text to give us a fly-on-the-wall experience of being there in the studios. These sessions come vividly to life through hundreds of unpublished, extraordinary images by two photographers who had special access to their sessions-Ethan A. Russell and Linda Eastman (who married Paul McCartney two months later). Also included are many unseen high-resolution film-frames, selected from the 55 hours of restored footage from which Peter Jackson’s documentary is also drawn.

 

Legend has it that these sessions were a grim time for a band falling apart. However, as acclaimed novelist Hanif Kureishi writes in his introduction, “In fact this was a productive time for them, when they created some of their best work. And it is here that we have the privilege of witnessing their early drafts, the mistakes, the drift and digressions, the boredom, the excitement, joyous jamming and sudden breakthroughs that led to the work we now know and admire.” Half a century after their final performance, this book completes the story of the creative genius, timeless music, and inspiring legacy of The Beatles.

 

“It would be fair to say that today Let It Be symbolizes the breaking-up of The Beatles. That’s the mythology, the truth is somewhat different. The real story of Let It Be has been locked in the vaults of Apple Corps for the last 50 years.” – Peter Jackson

The Beatles’ Let It Be

£9.99

The recording sessions for Let It Be were actually begun as rehearsals for a proposed return to live stage work for the Beatles, to be inaugurated in a concert at a Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia. Here, Steve Matteo delves deep into the complex history of these recording sessions. He talks to many of the people involved in the recording of these songs, and the accompanying documentary. And he also looks at the Spector-less version of the album released in 2003. 33 1/3 is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. Focusing on one album rather than an artist’s entire output, the books dispense with the standard biographical background that fans know already, and cut to the heart of the music on each album. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives, often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. (A task that can be, as Elvis Costello famously observed, as tricky as dancing about architecture.) What binds this series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors – musicians, scholars, and writers – are deeply in love with the album they have chosen. Previous titles in this now well-established series have beaten sales expectations and received excellent review coverage – the third batch is sure to continue this success.