Remembering Eleanor Rigby!

  Eleanor Rigby, wife of Thomas Woods, granddaughter of John and Frances Rigby, died on October 10, 1939. Made immortal by the Beatles song from their 1966 album Revolver, the song was primarily written by Paul McCartney with significant lyrical contributions from John Lennon, and credited to Lennon–McCartney. In an October 2021 article in The New Yorker, McCartney […]

Read more

From the Vault — The Beatles’ Penny Lane trumpeter, David Mason

56 years ago today on January 17, 1967, The Beatles finished recording Penny Lane in Studio Two at Abbey Road Studios including David Mason’s famous piccolo trumpet solo. As the story goes, the Beatles began recording Penny Lane on December 29. As time passed, Paul became somewhat dissatisfied at the initial attempts at the song’s instrumentation and […]

Read more

R.I.P. Cilla Black

When news on Saturday broke of the passing of Cilla Black, a name synonymous with the likes of Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and Lulu, and, arguably, one of Britain’s best known and most-loved female performers, I immediately went in search of the recent ITV biopic, Cilla, the three-part drama which chronicled the early career of Cilla […]

Read more