Posts From Colin Fleming
The Beatles’ Decca Audition: An Invaluable Lesson in Failure
Try to please everyone, and you please no one, including yourself. For the Beatles, January 1, 1962, was the day that the lesson was learned.
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Liverpool Get-Together: The Most Touching Show The Beatles Ever Gave
This was like having friends over for a boozy party, minus the booze, and in a theater instead of a parlor.
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The Blended Shane MacGowan: On the Death and Life of a Genius
The music of MacGowan and the Pogues is some of the most urgent you’ll ever experience. That immediacy is stunning.
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‘Get Back’: The Beatles’ Album That Was, Wasn’t And Is
When you listen to the LP as a cohesive experience, it feels like a genuine concept album—these guys being what they were.
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10 Career-Spanning (and Unique) Beatles Guitar Solos
They are rarely hailed as a band known for their guitar solos. But sorting out which solos stand apart from the rest is a pleasing task
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Gotta Bludgeon: The Delightfully Punishing, Hell-for-Leather Second Take of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’
Close your eyes and it’s not hard to picture George Martin in the control booth, thinking, “What on earth are we doing tonight?”
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The Important Half: John Lennon, ‘Julia’ and Singing to Reach
“The song, inspired by John’s late mother, “is brave, because in the delivery we hear a singer willing to be transported.”
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‘The Great Lost Kinks Album’: Revisiting an Overlooked 1973 Delight
Although compiled to satisfy a contractual obligation, the collection of stray tracks is “a corner of the room worth spending some time in.”
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10 Essential Rolling Stones Blues Songs
London’s finest were ace purveyors of the blues from the very start of their career. Our look back at highlights of the Stones’ blues-drenched catalog
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Session Kings: The Beatles at the BBC on July 16, 1963
One of the finest sessions in all of rock and roll history, this marathon date captured the band at its performing peak.
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