An online Beatles fan club for and about Beatle fans
Monday, March 9, 2026
Former Beatle Hard at Work (1981)
Former Beatle Hard at Work
By Patrick Riordan
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
March 8, 1981
Just past the white-washed bridge not far from the carpenter shop, up the steep unmarked road that turns off to the right between the two ancient mango trees, is the sign Paul McCartney drives past every day about 1pm local time: Air Studios, Montserrat Ltd, strictly no admittance, except by prior arrangements.
Beefy guards from Professional Security Group Inc of New York stand watch over McCartney's personal safety and his 4.6 tons of musical luggage. From the looks of it, some secret project may be going on. Some people speculate that there will be a Beatles reunion record in memory of John Lennon, who was shot to death December 8.
"Not so," says George Martin, the legendary electronics engineer who was dubbed the fifth Beatle for his masterful recording techniques for the rock group during the 1960s. Martin, who happens to own AIR Studios, indicated the recording project is a McCartney album without the former Beatles group Wings.
Their tribute to John is in themselves," Martin said in an interview at the studio on Sunday. "To go and make a tribute album is cashing in, I think, on John's death."
Fueling the Beatles reunion rumor, were the presence recently of ex-Beatle Ringo Starr for a recording session, and reports that the third living former Beatle, George Harrison, may record some tracks for the album later in London.
The album that McCartney and Martin are working on will be the first they have produced together since Abbey Road, the last Beatles album. "We're trying to get back to something we had before," Martin said. "The album is expected to be completed by the end of March and is to be released later this year."
Except for a minor car accident that McCartney had with an Associated Press photographer recently, his month in the British West Indies has gone smoothly. He has declined to be interviewed by the newspaper and television reporters who converged on the isolated island after rumors began circulating earlier this month that the surviving Beatles were reuniting for an album.
Someone who is close to McCartney and who asked not to be named said that the singer-songwriter's only complaint has been the lack of wind surfers on the island. He waterskis a lot in Woodlands Bay.
McCartney drives to the studio from his rented villa on the island's Northwest coast. The villa is a converted monastery overlooking the nearby island of Redonda. He works hard in light of the February 28 deadline to put down his tracks for the album. "They start about 1pm, and they don't get out of the studio until midnight," a spokesman for AIR studio said of McCartney and Martin.
Locally, McCartney's visit inspired only moderate interest. While much of the outside world has hung on every word of a possible Beatles reunion, local folks still think last year's visit by the soul-oriented group Earth, Wind & Fire was more exciting.
Montserrat is a study in isolation, a crown colony that cultivates the image and, in large measure, seems to achieve the reality of the perfect, unspoiled Caribbean island. Few planes arrive. Indeed, one of the attractions of the 39-square-mile paradise, first colonized by the Irish, is that the difficulty of getting here discourages low-rent tourism.
No jets can land here to disgorge economy fair vacationers. The aircraft of choice is the British Norman tri lander, a tri-motor airplane with two propellers on the wings and a third mounted on the tail, known locally as the Mini Concord. It is the workhorse of Leeward Island air transport (LI A T), the only airline servicing the island. Most tourists arrive from Antigua, about 50 minutes away by propeller plane. Landing is a thrill. Planes fly low over the waves directly toward a sheer rock cliff until they're within a few 100 yards of land.
Living in a Home in the Heart of the Country
Two previously unseen snapshot photographs taken at High Park Farm, the Mull of Kintyre farm owned by Paul McCartney. The images were captured shortly before Wings departed for their Wings University Tour in February 1972 and offer a rare, candid glimpse into life at the farm.
One photograph shows Denny Laine (left), Henry McCullough (centre) and Paul McCartney (right) relaxing outside a stone outbuilding, surrounded by several of McCartney’s dogs and puppies.
The second photograph features Paul’s adopted daughter Heather McCartney together with his daughters Mary McCartney and Stella McCartney, alongside Henry McCullough’s daughter Jesse McCullough, seated in the fields with the family’s pets.
Both photographs come directly from the estate of Henry McCullough and have not previously been published. Preserved within his personal archive, they provide an authentic and intimate glimpse into the relaxed environment surrounding Paul McCartney and those close to him at his Kintyre farm during this formative period.
Thank you for 17 years!
Today Meet the Beatles...For Real turns 17 years old! Can you even believe that? I started this little site 17 years ago and have been going strong ever since! I never would have thought 17 years ago that I would still love sharing photos and stories of the Beatles and their fans as much as I do.
I want to thank all of you for joining me on this journey for the past 17 years. Thank you especially for all of those who have been there from the start and thank you for those who just found this site.
I sadly think of all we have lost in the past 17 years. Lizzie Bravo, Kathy Burns, and Marie Lacey especially come to mind. I miss their comments and insights to the world of Beatles fandom.
Every year on March 9 I have the opportunity to renew the domain for Meet the Beatles For Real (about $30 total a year). Thanks to the generous donations of fans the past year I have had no problems renewing for another year plus I had enough to pay for subsciption to newspapers.com to continue to find interviews and interesting article to share (I hope you have noticed an uptick in newspaper article). I look forward to year 17 of MTBFR being another one of Beatles fun and information for fans around the globe!
Peace and Love!
Sara S. (aka Starshyne)
Sunday, March 8, 2026
At 50, Paul McCartney transends age and rocks on (1992)
At 50, Paul McCartney Transcends Age - and Rocks On
By Roger Catlin
The Hartford Courant
June 1992
In the 1960s when the Beatles represented youth and hair and the future of popular music, Paul McCartney never dreamed he'd be doing rock and roll at 50.
"You automatically presume that you would be over the hill by age 30," says the man who wrote "Fool on the Hill." "In my 20s, I had this image of myself at 35 doing things like the 'Oratorio', walking around in one of those jackets with patches on the elbows."
. He achieved that by writing the "Liverpool Oratorio" last year, which topped the classical charts here earlier this year. But the man who may forever be known as the cute Beatle is also working in rock as well, even as he turned 50.
"I certainly don't feel old," McCartney said in a written interview with the Courant on the eve of his half-century mark. "I feel there's still a lot for me to do."
In answers faxed from England, McCartney addressed the recent success of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio and the recording of a second classical piece with his co-composer Carl Davis that should be out soon.
At the same time, McCartney described his forthcoming new solo album as harder rocking and more band-oriented, using most of the musicians who backed him on his 1989-90 World Tour, before 2.5 million fans.
He is already the most successful songwriter in US history, having written more than 32 number-one songs, and he has amassed 75 gold and platinum discs, more than anyone else. He regularly makes the list of the richest celebrities, reporting being worth $600 million. The Beatles may have been the most successful group ever, having sold more than 1 billion discs, according to the Guinness Book of Records. But McCartney has also gotten 17 gold albums during his post-Beatles solo and Wings career, all of which featured Linda McCartney, his American wife of 23 years, and he told the Courant he was surprised by how many Wings fans he encountered on the last tour. With one of the songs back on the radio, remade by Guns N Roses. (I love it. McCartney says)
He is also looking forward to getting on the road one more time, maybe to new places. McCartney has still never played Connecticut, although he came his closest with the proposed 1990 show that would have opened the Yale Bowl to rock concerts for the first time in a decade. The show came up against neighborhood opposition and was eventually tied up in city politics and finally canceled. After all that, McCartney suggested that fans keep a keener eye on elected representatives.
Perhaps still touchy from the volatile love-hate attitude of some fans, the most extreme example of which resulted in the assassination of his songwriting partner, John Lennon in 1980, McCartney failed to answer only one question-- about fans who have gone over the edge in the name of fandom, or who think his song speaks specifically to them.
Here is the text of the interview.
Q: Do you think the success of The Beatles will forever overshadow whatever new pop songs you come up with? Will people in concerts always prefer to hear Beatles songs to anything you come up with, no matter what it is? If so, is that frustrating ?
A: People obviously like the Beatles songs a lot, but not to the exclusion of anything else. When we were on tour, we found that there was a whole lot of Wings fans out there, particularly in the States, who prefer Wings to the Beatles.
The thing is that the hardest act to follow is yourself. I had to follow myself in the Beatles. I had to or I had to give up. But I've had success with songs since the Beatles. "My Love," "Jet", "Maybe I'm Amazed," "My Brave Face" have all done well, and "Mull of Kintyre" actually outsold any single The Beatles ever put out. But there's no frustration, because this is what I do. I write songs. If no record company ever wanted to record my stuff ever again, I'd still write songs. And I will keep on writing because there's a little bee in my bonnet that says, 'maybe I can write something that is really good.' One really good song, and that's what keeps me going.
Q: What do you think of the Guns N Roses version of "Live and Let Die"?
A: I love it.
Q: Your world tour was originally going to end here in Connecticut at the Yale Bowl in New Haven. Are you disappointed when local authorities can block a show that so many 1000s obviously want to see?
A: I'm sorry the fans were disappointed. I think the thing to remember with authorities is that they tend to be the people we elect, and we elect them because they say they're going to do what we want. So, if so many people want something, I think maybe they should ask how come their elected representatives ain't doing it?
Q: As someone who has had so many number-one albums in the past, how does it feel to have a number-one classical album?
A: It feels great. This was a new challenge for me. It took a long time to complete, and it's always a buzz when people who matter, the people who buy the records, encourage your efforts.
Q: Does this success encourage you to delve further into the classical field?
A: Yes, I'd like to write more stuff in this field. I thought about maybe doing a violin concerto or something classical for the guitar. I'd like to do more. In fact, Carl Davis and I already collaborated on another project, which has been recorded with an orchestra, and you should be hearing about that pretty soon.
Q: It was written once that you were working with John Lennon on a symphonic work as far back as 1968. Did something like that ever get started?
A: I've been dabbling with classical elements since "Yesterday", and "Eleanor Rigby."
Q: With this success, do you feel accepted in the classical field, or have you felt any visual snobbishness in the genre because of your pop past?
A: I'm very proud of my "pop past" and my "pop present" for that matter, I'm not going to start drawing up lines of which is better. It's all music, and the two fields, if you see them as distinct, can be complementary.
For instance, I've been toying with the idea of adapting some of my own rock shows. As far as any acceptance goes, I don't know. I'm still a rock and roller, and I'm not about to give that up. But the pleasure I get from hearing all these classical orchestras around the world want to perform the oratorio. It's been performed in Liverpool. It's been done in Carnegie Hall in New York. It's been done in Dublin. And now I'm told orchestras are planning to perform it in Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan, and I hear a lot of other countries are interested as well. So somebody seems up for accepting it.
Q: How similar was composing an oratorio to writing a new album's worth of material? Did you ever feel like there were similarities in melodic structures, or did you feel you were building something entirely different?
A: It was different and exciting, because for all my career, I've been used to mainly writing songs that said it all in three minutes. With an orchestration, you're dealing with something that says it in 95 songs.
The Oratorio was actually written while I was on my last world tour. I was on stage doing a rock show at night and writing this classical piece in hotels or whatever during the day. It took two years in all for Carl Davis and I to complete it, and there was a lot of work involved scoring it, doing the string section, the violin solo, the choir harmonies. And what I especially enjoyed was that writing for an orchestra was like using the ultimate synth, the ultimate synthesizer. You can get any note you want. You've got all this variety of sound at your command.
Q: Is it galling that this went to number one so easily, and Flowers in the Dirt, as good as it was, did not go higher than number 21 in the US charts, even with the mammoth tour?
A: Flowers in the Dirt was released quite a while before the tour, and we didn't really tour the album, but it did well. It went to number one in a lot of places around the world. I was pleased with it.
Q: How are you coming along on your new solo album?
A: We've been recording the album since after Christmas. It's not a solo album as such. I prefer to think of this one as a band album. It's sounding like quite a rocky little band album, with basically the same bunch of guys who were with me on tour. Linda and Wix are on the keyboard, Robbie McIntyre and Hamish Stewart are on guitars, and Blair Cunningham, our new drummer, joined us around the time that we did the all-acoustic Unplugged album. Hamish and I have co-written a couple of tracks together that have a kind of soul feeling to them.
Q: You seem well-suited to touring. Will there be another event of that magnitude following the next album? What is the timetable for its release?
A: I've said we'd like to tour this album, and I'd like to get on the road again. Maybe we'll go to new places this time.
Q: You're turning 50 this week. Any thoughts on continuing to create and perform in rock and roll at this stage? Is it anything you ever pictured yourself doing, or is it a notion of rock as a province of youth changing?
A: When I started out with the Beatles, you automatically assumed that the normal rules of show business would apply and you'd be clapped out by 30. But the thing about rock n roll is that it breaks the rules. I certainly don't feel old. I feel there's still a lot for me to do. And I think the only reason why rock n roll bands haven't tended to go on at our age is that rock n roll is too young as a musical form for any of us who came out of the 60s to have gotten that old yet.
I like the idea of being like the old bluesman and just carrying on. I mean, no one said Muddy Waters was too old to play. I don't believe that rock 'n' roll is just for younger bands, either. Someone suggested, when we were doing the last tour, that the 60s bands, us, the Stones, the Who, the Grateful Dead, who are all touring, were crowding out the younger bands. My attitude to that is, let the younger bands get better and have them try to crowd us out.
The Return of the Purple Shirt
Ringo shows us that Paul isn't the only Beatle who can still fit into his old clothes when he appeared in a fancy purple button-down shirt that he famously wore in 1968. Ringo was seen wearing this purple shirt during the recording of "Hey Jude," specifically, but he wore it during the recording sessions of 1968 -- right around the time he quit the Beatles.
While it looks a little lighter in the modern photographs, it has been made known that it IS the exact same shirt that Ringo hung onto all of these years. And I have to say that it looks very nice with the black blazer. Not one of my favorite Ringo clothing items, but still fun to see all of these years later.
Only Paul and Ringo still wear clothing that other rock stars would have hanging in a museum somewhere.
Thursday, March 5, 2026
She made him cry
I know being interviewed by Barbara Walters was considered a great honor, but I think she did Ringo dirty on this interview, as she talked to him about John. It had only been 3 short months since he was murdered and obviously Ringo emotions were very raw.
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