Posts tagged Paul McCartney

Culture Desk: Seven Decades of Desert Island Discs : The New Yorker

The New Yorker reviews the Desert Island Discs retrospective which was broadcast yesterday (and resists the temptation to use the US spelling of the word “Disks”):

If some castaways couldn’t resist the temptation to be clever—Alfred Hitchcock’s luxury item was a Continental railway timetable—and others surrendered to predictability (Philip Larkin chose a typewriter), a few gave their choices more soulful thought. Paul McCartney, who was the castaway thirty years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of the show, eschewed any Beatles hits, but included a track by John Lennon, from “Double Fantasy”—“Beautiful Boy.” Yoko Ono chose Gracie Fields’s sentimental favorite “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” because she had sung it with her aged mother. Daniel Barenboim, the conductor, who was married to the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, spoke of their discovery that she suffered from multiple sclerorsis. She had to stop playing when she could no longer feel her bow, and he chose one of the pieces she had loved most, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Ronald Searle, the cartoonist, who died last month, at ninety-one, spent much of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese in the Kwai jungle. He wanted to be cast away with the four last songs of Richard Strauss, he said, because they give you the courage to face death.

If you’d like to hear these snippets for yourself, the BBC is in the process of putting up a massive archive on the official site, with individual episodes available as podcasts. Yay for the TV Licence.

The Ten Best Musician/Comic Artist Friendships - New York Music - Sound of the City

Music and comics. Comics and music. They go together like peanut butter and jelly:

2. Neil Gaiman and Tori Amos
Though Gaiman has denied long-running rumors that his character Delirium—featured in his canonical series The Sandman—was based on Amos, he did admit that their friendship influenced his interpretation of the character. She later wrote an introduction for the collection of Sandman spin-off Death: The High Cost Of Living, and he repaid the favor by collaborating with Amos on story structure for her covers album Strange Little Girls. The platonic Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe for misfit ’90s kids with dramatic tendencies (more on Gaiman’s less platonic, just as public musical relationship later), they met after Amos, already a fan, sang about “me and Neil hanging-out with the Dream King” for her song “Tear In Your Hand.” (She later went on to sing about her anxiety that a lover might be unable to find her if “Neil makes me a tree,” which sort of happened in Stardust.) The pair share a love of folklore and a willingness to blow up odd ideas in a spectacular fashion, and an argument could be made that her friendship with Gaiman drove new readers to Sandman and Vertigo in general, and was one of several factors that helped make the art form’s less of a boy’s club.

It’s a great list, but misses off the most critical music/comics mutual appreciation of all: Jolly Jack Kirby and Paul McCartney. Read the story here and here.

The Quietus | Features | At The End Of The Grosse Freiheit: The Beatles In Hamburg

Retracing the drunken, delinquent footsteps of The Beatles at the dawn of the Sixties:

Life in Hamburg for these young Beatles was grim in a way which seems acceptable to lads in their teens and early twenties, and utterly degenerate in a way which must have seemed fantastic. Their first booking was at the Indra, a strip joint run by Bruno Koschmider, car-coated entrepreneur and veteran of a Panzer Division. Koschmider, a humourless man of porcine appearance and dubious connections, first had The Beatles sharing a bill with “dancers” whose gender was sometimes indeterminate, often up on the tiny stage for seven hours a night.

Which songs from the canon did these adventures inspire, d’ye think?

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Бурановские Бабушки feat. БИТЛЗ (via yumshan005)

Yesterday, Resonance FM celebrated Paul McCartney’s 68th birthday with a 24 hour broadcast of, um, “Yesterday”.

Specifically, they played a selection of cover versions, which the Guinness Book of Records numbers in the 1600s. There’s a lot of dross in there - Richard Clayderman? Kenny G? - but this one is particularly moving. 

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