Latest news with #TheBeatles:GetBack
RTÉ News
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Life of Beatles' road manager celebrated with museum display
The life of the Beatles' road manager has been celebrated on what would have been his 90th birthday. Mal Evans was road manager and personal assistant to the band from 1963 until their break-up in 1970 but died six years later when he was shot by police in Los Angeles in the US. A display dedicated to Mr Evans was revealed at the Liverpool Beatles Museum on Tuesday, which would have been his birthday, in front of his children Julie Rossow and Gary Evans. Ms Rossow said: "I find it a real honour to be honest; the recognition and the interest people have in him. It's really lovely and very special." She said interest in his life had grown since he was shown in Peter Jackson's documentary series The Beatles: Get Back, which aired in 2021. A biography about him, Living The Beatles Legend, written by Kenneth Womack, was published in 2023. Ms Rossow said: "It's changed my life in ways. People who knew him and knew stories have been able to tell me and I've learnt more about him. It's been an incredible journey." She added: "I was born in 1966 when he was away with the Beatles and from what I know he was told by them 'your wife's had a baby girl - go and see her'. "He loved those four boys, to the detriment of his family at times. What a life he had." Among the items going on display on Tuesday is a signet ring which Mr Evans lost in a poker game to fellow roadie Neil Aspinall - whose son Roag Best runs the museum. The ring was apparently thrown into the pot by Mr Evans during card games in 1964, when the band stayed in Paris for concerts at the Olympic Theatre. Ms Rossow said: "I never knew this story. The ring was given to him on his 21st birthday from his parents so it was a bit naughty of him to lose it but he must have been caught in the wildness and excitement of a poker match. "From speaking to Roag I believe he lost the ring several times and was given it back but lost it finally to Neil." A portrait of Mr Evans, by artist Dave Miles, was also unveiled on Tuesday.
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tucson, Ariz.: Western Skies and Competitive Home Prices
'Is Tucson in Arizona?' John Lennon asked Paul McCartney as they worked out a hometown for Jojo in 'The Beatles: Get Back' documentary. McCartney's answer: 'Yeah, it is, yeah — it's where they make 'High Chaparral.'' More than half a century later, Tucson's vintage TV-Western identity lingers in the public imagination, and to be fair, this is still the kind of place where you'll find working ranches, as many pickups as sedans, and citywide school closures during February's Rodeo Break. But some things have changed. Since Jojo's day, the metro area population that has more than tripled, to about 1,080,000. Roughly 547,000 live in the city proper, although locals consider themselves rightful Tucsonans inside or outside the city limits. Today, Tucson is also the kind of place that boasts the first UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation in the United States, enough optical sciences expertise at the University of Arizona to service sone of the largest telescopes in the world — and so many local observatories, an official astronomy trail launched this year. ARIZONA SANTA CATALINA MTS. Phoenix Tucson SABINO CANYON CATALINA FOOTHILLS 10 Rillito R. Sun Link Streetcar Santa Cruz R. University of Arizona Temple of Music and Art Tucson BARRIO VIEJO 19 10 4 mileS By The New York Times Location: Pima County in southern Arizona, about 70 miles north of the Mexican border and 110 miles southeast of Phoenix Population: 547,239 in the city and 1,080,000 in the metro area Area: About 240 square miles in the city and 500 square miles in the metro area Homeownership: 52 percent in the city and 65 percent in the metro area The vibe: Aerospace hub meets outdoorsy college town with a distinct Mexican flavor. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
One to One: John & Yoko review – Lennon and Ono storm Manhattan in intimate post-Beatles doc
John and Yoko. Greenwich Village. Television. Activism. Vietnam. Richard Nixon. Insects. Peace. This skittish, channel-surfing archival documentary, co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards, touches on all of this and more. But it lingers on nothing. It's a spry, fleet-footed film that makes an intriguingly angular and jittery companion piece to Peter Jackson's weighty series The Beatles: Get Back, which explored, over nearly eight exhaustive hours, the making of the Beatles' 1970 final album, Let It Be. One to One, in contrast, covers an 18-month period shortly afterwards. It's 1971. Unshackled from the Beatles and burned by the hostility of the British press, Lennon and Ono have upped sticks and moved to a bohemian two-room apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The John Lennon we see in Jackson's film can be abrasive, a guarded presence. In One to One, he's lighter: engaged, curious and open, he seems positively chipper in some archival snippets. Ono, meanwhile, is reframed from the Beatles-wrecking succubus of popular media opinion at the time and shown as an articulate, if eccentric avant-garde artist who is candid about the personal cost of the hate campaign levelled against her. The move to New York is not just a relocation, but also, as the film tells it, a rebirth of sorts. Well, that's the approved narrative, at least. The film, which was made with support (and, one suspects, a considerable degree of oversight) from the Lennon estate, benefits from some extraordinarily revealing and intimate material, such as recordings of telephone conversations (Lennon believed they were being bugged and reasoned that he might as well be taping his phone calls if somebody else was already doing so). Footage threaded through this nonlinear collage film from the One to One concert at Madison Square Garden in 1972 – Lennon's last full-length stage performance – is electrifying, particularly a barnstorming rendition of Come Together. But it's also notable and somewhat frustrating that a veil is discreetly drawn over certain aspects of the Lennon-Ono relationship. There's no indication, for example, that the end of the period that the film covers coincided with the temporary breakdown of their marriage, and Lennon's affair with May Pang. Together with his co-director, Macdonald, whose previous forays into biographical documentary include Marley (2012), Whitney (2018) and, most recently, High & Low: John Galliano (2023), adopts a deliberately jarring and scattershot approach here. It's a picture about John and Yoko, certainly, but it's as much about the turbulent time and place in which they found themselves. In this, there's a clear parallel with Todd Haynes's thrilling, febrile documentary The Velvet Underground, which extended its reach beyond the band to explore the wider cultural New York landscape. With One to One, the film-makers take as a jumping-off point a throwaway comment from Lennon about his appreciation of television. 'It's replaced the fireplace,' he says, describing it as a 'window on the world'. A recreation of the apartment they shared shows a huge television looming over the bed. And cut together with the glimpses of Lennon and Ono, from interviews with journalists, audio recordings, home videos and live performances, is a barrage of ragged clips ripped from American television of the era. Some of it ties into the life the couple carved out for themselves in Manhattan: we see firebrand activist Jerry Rubin emptying both barrels during a late-night chatshow. And Rubin, together with fellow rock stars of the countercultural movement such as Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, was part of the circle within which Lennon and Ono moved. Elsewhere, the film skims through fragments of gameshows and advertisements – Cadillacs draped in bikini-clad showgirls, everything that the red-blooded all-American man could want in life – and delivers a skittering sensory assault of attention-grabbing headlines snatched from the rolling news coverage. We see Nixon, with his pinched, thin-lipped, lying smile. Shell-shocked reporters reeling from the Attica prison riot. The bruising horrors of Vietnam. High and low culture, news and current affairs: all of it, the film suggests, mainlined by John and Yoko. At times, the editing and far-ranging archival reach put me in mind of last year's Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat by Johan Grimonprez, another documentary that weaves together music and politics to exhilarating effect. If One to One lacks some of the elegant intellectual rigour of Grimonprez's picture, I suspect it's no accident. For John and Yoko, accustomed to British TV's sedate three channels, the brash noise and broad horizons of US television must have felt like a step into the wild west. The film's rattling pace and haphazard focus reflect the couple's voracious, if at times unfocused appetite for ideas and issues. Released from his Beatles responsibilities, Lennon apparently made the most of the newfound freedom. The excitement and enthusiasm in his voice as he bounces ideas for music and activism during a phone call is infectious and vital. Ultimately, One to One might not reveal a huge amount that's new about Lennon, but it makes him feel bracingly alive in a way few other documentaries have managed. In UK and Irish cinemas
Los Angeles Times
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘One to One: John & Yoko,' a couple against the world comes into focus
The challenge of the Beatles' greatness is that it's so universally assumed — and so relentlessly chronicled — that nothing more need be said about the subject. Even when a fairly major new work comes out, like Peter Jackson's revelatory 2021 documentary 'The Beatles: Get Back,' a certain degree of cultural fatigue immediately undercuts the excitement of never-before-seen footage. With the Fab Four's legend permanently woven into the fabric of society, what fresh terrain is left to explore? (Not that this would ever stop Hollywood: A quartet of Beatles biopics is due in 2028.) Kevin Macdonald has directed several documentaries about musical icons, including Bob Marley and Whitney Houston. But with 'One to One: John & Yoko,' he doesn't simply take an intriguing micro-view of his subjects, focusing on 18 crucial months in the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono — he ignores the Beatles' long shadow to look at Lennon independently of the group that made him famous. Aiming for an immersive immediacy, the Oscar-winning documentarian of 'One Day in September' tries to sidestep nostalgia, thrusting us back into the early 1970s after the band's breakup, as Lennon and Ono hole up in a small Greenwich Village apartment, their creativity, political activism and romantic relationship in full bloom. It's a compelling, occasionally uneven attempt to bring the Beatles back down to Earth by illustrating the humanness of one of its members and the wife he adored. Structured around the only full-length concert Lennon performed after the Beatles' dissolution, the documentary peaks with sequences from that benefit show, called One to One, which took place Aug. 30, 1972, at Madison Square Garden. But Macdonald is after more than just a concert film, letting those musical interludes serve as counterpoint to a larger investigation into Lennon and Ono's mindset at a moment of deep division within American society. Specifically, 'One to One' imagines how the copious amount of television the couple absorbed informed their view of the country, the documentary often metaphorically flipping channels between commercials, game shows and news reports on the Vietnam War and Watergate. Presented in Imax, 'One to One' overwhelms with this cascade of information, entertainment and consumerism, suggesting that Lennon and Ono's music and advocacy grew out of that visual maelstrom. To drive home the project's intimacy, Macdonald carefully re-creates the couple's New York apartment, the camera gliding across the space as we hear archival phone conversations. Blessedly, 'One to One' never includes Lennon and Ono lookalikes, which makes the empty apartment feel simultaneously lived-in and ghostly. The approach speaks to Macdonald's overall strategy, which eschews contemporary talking heads or much in the way of onscreen context for the film's period footage. The movie trusts you know who segregationist George Wallace was, just as you'll be able to appreciate the joy of seeing an unidentified Stevie Wonder on stage with Lennon. Macdonald doesn't want us to be awed by history unfolding. Rather, he embeds us in the warm, casual messiness of the couple's domestic life, underlined most amusingly by a seemingly superfluous subplot involving Ono researching how to obtain live flies for her latest art installation. 'One to One' spends no time rehashing Lennon's professional highlights from that era — how his spare, epochal 1970 solo record 'Plastic Ono Band' paved the way for the follow-up album 'Imagine' about nine months later. Instead, Macdonald provides clips of Lennon and Ono on talk shows discussing their marriage or disparaging his former Beatles bandmates for not standing up for Ono when the press denigrated her. The couple's day-to-day concerns draw us in, Lennon's fear of being deported as monumental as Ono's custody battle for her daughter Kyoko from a previous marriage. (Ono's struggles inspired her 1969 song 'Don't Worry Kyoko,' which she delivers with blinding intensity during the One to One show.) But the worrying state of U.S. politics is never far from their mind. Teaming up with counterculture rabble-rouser Jerry Rubin, Lennon and Ono speak of peace and love with a naïveté that is both poignant and inspiring. Much will be made of the documentary's modern relevance — Nixon's reactionary right-wing America feels like an opening act for the cruel nation we now inhabit — but there's a bruised defiance to Lennon's noting that, while the 1960s' dream of Flower Power may have failed, a new movement could always spring up in its wake. Lennon's outrage at the injustices he saw on TV fueled protest songs like 'Attica State' and 'John Sinclair,' later collected on the album 'Some Time in New York City,' which dropped two months before the Madison Square Garden concert. Sadly, his humanism and music weren't enough to stop America's creeping conservatism, but by positioning Lennon's passion as potently present-day, 'One to One' argues that the songwriter's message remains vital, even though its messenger is gone. If faint whiffs of boomer sentimentality are inescapable, 'One to One' at least supplies us with barnburner live versions of 'Come Together' and 'Instant Karma!' that might make you wonder why the originals aren't this fiery. That said, the film sometimes succumbs to the tireder tropes of the music-doc genre. Longtime Macdonald collaborator Sam Rice-Edwards, the movie's editor and co-director, unimaginatively juxtaposes concert performances with news footage. (Shots of Nixon set against Lennon ripping through a cover of 'Hound Dog' tell viewers nothing about either.) And while the notion that Lennon and Ono came to understand America through its television programming is provocative, too frequently the collage of grim news and glib ads leans toward the tritely ironic. The more Macdonald resists mythologizing or summing up, the more John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerge as fragile, complex individuals on a journey together during uncertain times. 'One to One' isn't a salute to the Beatles' brilliance or Lennon's genius. Despite the large screens this film will play on, the movie renders its subjects as touchingly life-sized.
