Ray Connolly’s Being Elvis: A Lonely Life is a revelation. In many ways, it is the Elvis Presley biography that we’ve always needed—the one that takes us deep inside the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s dizzying highs and soul-crushing lows. Published in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of Presley’s untimely death, Being Elvis traces the […]
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Everything Fab Four: Sprinkling “Flowers In The Dirt”
“My Brave Face” clearly stands as the high point of McCartney’s post-Beatles songwriting partnerships. As the 10th and latest release in the Paul McCartney Archive Collection, Flowers in the Dirt makes for an interesting, if dubious installment. The previous entries have included a spate of Wings classics like Band on the Run and Wings Over […]
Everything Fab Four: Love, Love, Love—The Beatles and Saint Valentine’s Day
Saint Valentine’s Day’s longstanding associations with romantic love find their origins in fourteenth-century courtly love traditions. For the twentieth-century Beatles, the trials and tribulations of romantic love were their stock-in-trade—particularly during the band’s early years. Back in the heady days of Beatlemania, Lennon and McCartney mined romantic love for all its worth, celebrating the first […]
Everything Fab Four: The Evolving Artistry Of The Beatles In Sevenoaks, Kent
Fifty years ago, on January 31, 1967, the Beatles found themselves in the midst of a two-day film shoot for the “Strawberry Fields Forever” promotional video with director Peter Goldmann in Sevenoaks, Kent. During a production break, John Lennon was browsing the wares of a local antique store, when an old Victorian circus poster caught […]
Everything Fab Four: The Strange, Nefarious Life of Magic Alex
Yanni “Magic Alex” Mardas, the self-styled inventor who died of natural causes in Athens last week, was quite easily one of the most bizarre personages among the Beatles’ menagerie of hangers-on during the late 1960s. While much of the band’s entourage consisted of inveterate loyalists such as Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, Magic Alex was […]