Bravin / Wild The Beatles

1967-1970 & Beyond.Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-580-9
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

The Beatles 1967-1970 And Beyond picks up where The Beatles 1962-1966 left off, tracing the band's most daring and transformative years. As the Beatles abandoned touring and turned the studio into a creative laboratory, they began an era of boundless invention-Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be-albums that reshaped popular music. Key songs from this period still define the band's legacy: the ambition of 'A Day in the Life', the introspection of 'Strawberry Fields Forever', the gravity of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' and the optimism of 'Here Comes the Sun'.
Lesser-known tracks deepen the story. 'It's All Too Much' pushes psychedelia to its limits, 'Flying' embraces mood over form, and 'You Never Give Me Your Money' captures a band splintering yet still creatively unified. The book explores how psychedelia, avant-garde art, Eastern philosophy and cultural upheaval collided with fame, business tensions and four increasingly distinct personalities. It also traces how these final years shaped the Beatles' solo paths and enduring legacy, from Live At The Hollywood Bowl and Anthology to Love and 'Now And Then'.
Sharp and insightful, the book reveals not just how the Beatles ended, but how they became immortal.

Andrew Wild is a British writer, collector and long-time Beatles fan, who recalls hearing the Red and Blue albums in the mid-1970s and has been in love with their music ever since. He has copies of every known Beatles outtake and live concert recording. His thorough and exhaustive study of every song performed or recorded by the band, Four Sides Of The Circle, was republished in 2024. He has written numerous music-related books, including several in the On Track series, about artists as diverse as Paul Heaton, The Allman Brothers Band and Dire Straits.

Alberto Bravin is a musician, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. He is the lead singer of the progressive rock band Big Big Train. Alberto was previously a member of the highly-regarded Italian progressive rock band PFM - Premiata Forneria Marconi (2015-2022), and for many years, he also played with his Beatles tribute band Marshmallow Pies. He lives with his family in Trieste in the north-east of Italy. This is his second book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bravin, Alberto

Wild, Andrew

Leseproben

Prologue: Paul’s Not Dead

A minor accident on 26 December 1965 was the catalyst for one of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories of the last 60 years: that Paul McCartney died in an accident and was replaced in The Beatles by an equally-talented doppelganger called William ‘Billy Shears’ Campbell, or perhaps Shepherd.

The facts are these.

The Beatles’ final UK tour took place between 3 and 12 December 1965. At its conclusion, Paul stayed for a few days in London, attending a preview of Lionel Bart’s new musical Twang! on 19 December, before heading to Liverpool to spend time with his family. He was accompanied by his friend Tara Browne, a 20-year-old Irish socialite and heir to the Guinness brewing fortune.

‘I had a very good friend who lived in London called Tara Browne, a Guinness heir’, Paul says in The Beatles Anthology. ‘A nice Irish guy, very sensitive bloke. I’d see him from time to time and enjoyed being around him. He came up to visit me in Liverpool once when I was there, seeing my dad and brother. I had a couple of mopeds on hire, so we hit upon the bright idea of going to my cousin Bett’s house. We were riding along on the mopeds. I was showing Tara the scenery ... and I suddenly had a freeze-frame image of myself at that angle to the ground when it’s too late to pull back up again ... I looked at the ground, and it seemed to take a few minutes to think, ‘Ah, too bad – I’m going to smack that pavement with my face!’ Bang! There I was, chipped tooth and all. It came through my lip and split it. But I got up, and we went along to my cousin’s house ... she rang a friend of hers who was a doctor.’

Paul was stitched up, but his memory fails about what happened next.

‘In fact, that was why I started to grow a moustache’, he said. ‘It was pretty embarrassing, because around that time, you knew your pictures would get winged off to teeny-boppery magazines like 16, and it was pretty difficult to have a new picture taken with a big fat lip. So I started to grow a moustache – a sort of Sancho Panza – mainly to cover where my lip had been sewn.

It caught on with the guys in the group: if one of us did something like growing his hair long and we liked the idea, we’d all tend to do it. And then it became seen as a kind of revolutionary idea that young men of our age definitely ought to grow a moustache! And it all fell in with the Sgt Pepper thing because he had a droopy moustache.’

He’s jumping the gun here. Paul was first photographed with a moustache in November 1966, whilst on holiday. The public learned of this new facial hair as the band reconvened to start work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the interim, between Paul’s tumble and the arrival of that moustache, The Beatles took part in photograph sessions, made promotional films for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’, recorded Revolver and toured the Far East and the US.

The Beatles took part in two photograph sessions on 25 March 1966, three months after Paul’s accident. One of these was used on the (in)famous ‘butcher’ sleeve of the Capitol album Yesterday...And Today. You need to look closely at the album cover to see that there is scarring on Paul’s top lip. His broken tooth is crowned.

The Revolver album was recorded between 6 April and 21 June 1966. Promotional films for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’ would be filmed in the grounds of Chiswick House on 20 May 1966. Here, Paul’s chipped tooth is very obvious, suggesting that the crown didn’t hold or was temporary.

At the last session for the album, on 21 June, Paul fell out with the band and left early. Three days later, the band were in Germany. They played shows in Germany (24-26 June), Japan (30 June-2 July), the Philippines (4 July), and after a few weeks’ break, their calamitous final tour of the US (12-29 August).

They returned to the UK on 1 September and took an extended break from Beatledom that autumn before jointly returning to EMI on 24 November 1966. It had been five months since they finished ‘She Said She Said’.

A few days before Christmas, Paul’s friend Tara Browne was driving through South Kensington with his girlfriend, Suki Potier. He was under the influence of alcohol and other drugs and, as some reports suggest, was driving in excess of 100 mph (170 km/h). At the junction of Redcliffe Square and Redcliffe Gardens, Browne’s car collided with a parked lorry. He died of his injuries the following day, 18 December 1966. Paul McCartney attended the premiere of the film The Family Way later that evening.

And then, on 7 January 1967, Paul was free from other commitments, having spent the previous three evenings recording ‘Penny Lane’. According to author Jim Yoakum, McCartney hosted a lively party at his London home with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and others. Paul’s art dealer friend Robert Fraser was in attendance, as was Fraser’s Moroccan-born assistant Mohammed Chtaibi. At some stage, they decided to head to Jagger’s Hertfordshire home, The Arthouse, which is about an hour’s drive north of Cavendish Avenue. Chtaibi was tasked with driving Paul’s customised Austin Mini Cooper and, on route, was involved in a serious incident on the M1.

The car was written off, and Chtaibi would need hospital treatment. The car was recognised as McCartney’s, and word spread that he had been in an accident. The band’s official magazine, The Beatles Book, noted in its next issue, published in February 1967: ‘Stories about The Beatles are always flying around. A rumour swept London that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on the M1. But, of course, there was absolutely no truth in it at all.’

Unfortunately, the magazine stated that ‘The Beatles’ Press Officer found out when he telephoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself, who had been at home all day with his black Mini Cooper safely locked up in the garage.’

This was clearly untrue.

So, three motor accidents involving either Paul or one of his associates – all of them resulting in injury or death – took place between December 1965 and January 1967. These three unconnected events were, it seems, the index cases of the Paul-Is-Dead rumours.

John Lennon would write about Tara Browne in ‘A Day In The Life’, after reading a story in the 17 January 1967 edition of The Daily Mail, which reported the ruling on a custody action over Browne’s two young children.

He blew his mind out in a car

He didn’t notice that the lights had changed

A crowd of people stood and stared

They’d seen his face before

Nobody was really sure

If he was from the House of Lords

That, it seemed, was that, until almost three years later, when a college student in Michigan called into his local radio show.

A Rumour Is Born

Twenty-four-year-old American writer Nicholas Schaffner published his diligently researched and well-received book Beatles Forever in 1977. It was critically accepted as a balanced and entertaining look at the band’s history and legacy. It is still a terrific read.

Schaffner addresses the Paul-Is-Dead theory. On page 127, he writes:

On 12 October 1969, disk jockey Russ Gibb of WKNR-FM (Detroit’s ‘underground’ station) received an eerie phone call, which advised him to listen closely to the fade-outs of certain Beatles numbers, and to play others backward. Following instructions, Gibb and his listeners found among other ‘clues’ that John mutters ‘I buried Paul’ at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and that ‘Revolution 9’s oft-intoned words ‘number nine, number nine’ become ‘turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man’ when one spins the White Album [The Beatles] counterclockwise. By the same process, the message ‘Paul-Is-Dead man, miss him, miss him’ emerges from the gibberish sandwiched between ‘I’m So Tired’ and ‘Blackbird’. Gibb, smelling a dead, er, Beatle, became the first of many vocal promulgators of Paul’s untimely death. Two days later, The Michigan Daily ran a review of Abbey Road by Fred LaBour that took the form of an obituary, illustrated with a gruesome likeness of Paul’s severed head. According to LaBour, the LP cover shows The Beatles leaving a cemetery dressed as a minister ( John), an undertaker (Ringo) and a gravedigger (George). Paul is not only out of step with the others, but barefoot, as British corpses supposedly are prone to be buried. A cigarette in his right hand confirms that this is an imposter for the left-handed McCartney. ‘One and one and one is three’, concluded LaBour, who also cited corroborating ‘evidence’ on earlier LP sleeves.

Shaffner traced the story to a prank article called ‘Clues Hint At Possible Beatles Death’. This was written by Barb Ulvinden and published in the Northern Star, a student newspaper for Northern Illinois University, on 23 September 1969. It was full of unsubstantiated conjecture and several mistakes (Paul’s new wife was ‘Jane Eastman’, for example, and ‘Jane’ had previously dated Paul’s brother Michael).

In fact, Ulvinden had plagiarised the article, complete with...