Saturday
Today, 25 June, we celebrate what is arguably the most influential band and one of the biggest things to happen to not only the 60s, but the entire 20th century: The Beatles.
Global Beatles Day is a day to look back on the great band that was. It is a day of honoring The Beatles’ ideals and gifts to the world including their promotion of peace, love, truth and youth as well as their expansion of human consciousness. It is also a day of celebrating their innovative music.
For those who don’t know exactly who The Beatles were, they were a legendary rock group formed in Liverpool, England, in 1960. They went to transform popular music as a creative and highly commercial art form over the next decade. With Paul McCartney on bass, Ringo Starr on drums and George Harrison and John Lennon on lead and rhythmic guitar, they produced songs like “Yesterday”, “Hey Jude”, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Penny Lane” and set a new standard for commercial and artistic success in pop.
Introduced through a mutual friend called Ivan Vaughan, Lennon and McCartney met on 6 July 1957 at a local church festival where Lennon’s band, Quarry Men was playing. Harrison, McCartney’s schoolmate, joined the Quarry Men seven months later after playing “Raunchy” by Bill Justis for Lennon on the top of a double-decker bus.
Starr joined somewhat later and the rest, as they say, is history. The Beatles went through much together including a time when Harrison was deported from Germany when it was found he was only 17 and therefore too young to play legally in a nightclub. McCartney was also deported shortly after for being arrested after he nailed a condom to a club wall and set it on fire.
Here are some must-hear Beatles songs:
What’s your favourite Beatles song?
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