Music Tips
Listening to English songs is something that certainly helps us to improve our vocabulary and pronunciation skills.
Every week we will be showing some interesting facts about a band and sharing some links from popular music singers and bands.
Feel free to comment and also share your own interests with us!
The Beatles
The Beatles are both the gold standard and the launchpad for British popular music as a global force. Over the course of 11 studio albums and a run of worldwide number one singles - standards such as From Me To You, Help!, Day Tripper, Let It Be - EPs and countless sessions and interviews for BBC radio, often with their friend Brian Matthew (which were later compiled into two double albums), they took American rock ‘n’ roll and soul, added a unique sense of optimism, and set about charming the world.
The band was formed in Liverpool during the 1950s explosion of both rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle. John Lennon was leading a band of schoolmates called The Quarrymen and met a cocksure guitarist and singer called Paul McCartney, whose blossoming talents seemed to rival his own. They worked together, quality controlling each other’s songs and pushing the other on to new musical peaks. Paul brought in a hard-to-impress young guitarist called George Harrison, and the trio set about finding gigs (and drummers, where possible).
They forged a binding union while playing long hours in Hamburg - sometimes with a talented drummer named Ringo Starr - and at Liverpool’s now-legendary Cavern Club in 1961, the band hooked up with manager Brian Epstein, who brought them (plus Ringo) to producer George Martin. Under his tutelage the band was ready to take on all comers, changing their sound with each new release.
They started in 1963 with the solid beat group excitement of I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, later taking in muscular riff-pop (Ticket To Ride) and limpid balladry (Yesterday) and blossoming with the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, incorporating any new musical idea they could get their hands on, from Mellotrons (Strawberry Fields Forever) to sitars (Within You Without You) to La Marseillaise (All You Need Is Love, recorded for Our World, a global satellite TV show).
Having defined a generation, they took stock in India, learning to meditate and writing the songs for what became their double album The Beatles, but the camaraderie that kept them together was wearing off, and business arguments eventually tore them apart.
Their final album, Abbey Road, was a deliberate last Hooray! To both the band and the swinging 60s they had come to define.
Click at the link below and enjoy it!
Which other bands and singers would you like to know more about?