Double Dose of Beatles for Fab Four Fans
LONDON (Reuters) – Beatles fans had two reasons to twist and shout on Tuesday with announcements of a Europe-wide tour by Paul McCartney and the release of a never-before seen video of three Beatles jamming together.
Fresh from a hugely popular North American tour, McCartney said he would kick-off his first British tour in 10 years in April, with gigs featuring 22 Beatles songs from “All My Loving” to “Let It Be.”
His “Back In The World” series of marathon concerts — each nearly three hours long — will also hit European cities in France, Spain, Germany and Scandinavia.
“I had a lot of fun touring this show around America last year, but now I’m bringing it on home and that’s special to me as I always look forward to playing to a home crowd,” McCartney, 60, said in a statement.
“We’ll be playing some of my Beatles stuff — rather a lot of Beatles stuff, actually — some Wings stuff and some more recent stuff, so basically the show pretty much spans my whole career,” he added.
His sweep through Canada, the United States, Mexico and Japan last year broke sales records and was hailed by Billboard Magazine as the tour of the year.
For Beatles fans unable to get their hands on a concert ticket, a reunion performance by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison filmed in 1994 will be released on DVD in March.
The session was filmed at Harrison’s studios at his mansion in Oxfordshire, England and is the only time the three played together after the Beatles split in 1970.
A small segment of the footage was featured in the 1996 Beatles Anthology Video.
John Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York apartment in December, 1980 and Harrison lost a battle with throat cancer in November, 2001.
More recently, McCartney has been involved in a dispute with Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, after he reversed the credits on his latest album from the traditional “Lennon-McCartney” to “By Paul McCartney and John Lennon.”
McCartney has said he was not worried about Ono’s displeasure at the credit reversal and called the spat a “long-running and rather silly dispute.”
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