Beatles Rewind Podcast

Could a bass bought for just £30 be the most valuable instrument on Earth? 🎸 In this video, we dive into the staggering world of Beatles auctions—from the recent $228,600 sale of Paul McCartney’s 1980s Yamaha BB-1200 to the "holy grail" 1963 Höfner violin bass that redefined music history. While David Gilmour and Kurt Cobain hold current world records for guitar sales, auction experts suggest Pau...

A bass guitar that Paul McCartney used during an unremarkable period in the 1980s just sold at auction for $228,600. 🎸 Not one of his Höfners. Not the Rickenbacker from the Sgt. Pepper sessions. Not an instrument from the years when the Beatles were rewriting what popular music could be. A working bass from McCartney’s least mythologized decade—the era of McCartney II and Tug of War, when he was...

There’s a version of Paul McCartney’s story that everyone thinks they know. The Beatles ended in 1970, he went to Scotland, he formed Wings, they struggled and then they didn’t, Band on the Run came out and saved everything, and Paul resumed his position as one of the most successful musicians on earth. That version is accurate as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far. 🎸 A new audiobook cal...

Most people think they know the story of why the Beatles ended, but Paul McCartney has been holding back the real truth for over 50 years. In this video, we dive into the brand-new revelations from the "Man on the Run" project. From his raw struggles in Scotland building furniture from potato pallets to the "Bread Strike" reconnection with John Lennon that the history books missed, Paul is finally...

If you spend enough time on eBay, you start to understand something that no museum exhibit quite captures: Beatles history is still circulating. It hasn’t been locked away. It’s out there, passing between collectors, surfacing in attics, changing hands in real time. This week, four items caught my attention—each one telling a different story about the band, about the music industry, and about what...

📺 Binge the Full "Beatles Auction" Series: I track the world's rarest Beatles eBay finds every week—watch the highlights here! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyiERO-9CT-YCKeb94xHDAtz8jZ2X1Egp This content contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated. Links to the auctions of Today's hottest Beatles Collectibles: (March 18, 2026) Beatles GREAT MARCH 1963 UK 'FAN CLUB PHOTO CARD...

The Beatles were sitting in a hotel room in Bangor, Wales, learning how to let go of earthly attachments, when they received the news that their manager was dead. 😶 It was August 27, 1967, and the band had traveled to North Wales to attend a Transcendental Meditation seminar with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—a pilgrimage that had been splashed across every newspaper in Britain, trailing cameras and repo...

Visit my Beatles Store at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3LlPVOI As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. See my archive of Beatles stories and videos: https://beatlesrewind.substack.com/archive The Man Behind the Curtain Ask a casual Beatles fan to name the “fifth Beatle” and they’ll say George Martin, the producer. Ask a more dedicated fan and they might say Pete Best, the drummer who...

Friday at Christie’s in New York, history got a hammer price. The “Jim Irsay Collection” auction brought together some of the most intimate artifacts of the Beatles’ reign—the actual physical objects they touched, played, argued over, and occasionally destroyed—and the bidding made clear that the world has not come close to getting over The Beatles. The centerpiece was John Lennon's Broadwood upri...

In 1966, the Beatles released an album cover that gave Capitol Records a collective heart attack. The cover showed the familiar mop-tops, but this time the image was … different. The Beatles were dressed in butcher’s smocks. With raw, bloody meat. And decapitated baby dolls. The Butcher Cover had arrived. Capitol Had It Coming 🎸 To understand why the butcher cover happened, you need to understand...

John Lennon is one of the most mythologized figures in music history. The working-class wit who became a global icon. The angry young man who found peace. The rebel who told us to imagine a better world. All of that is real. But so is something much less grand—a history of cruelty toward disabled people that ran through his early career like a dark thread—shown in his writing and visible onstage....

If you're a Beatles fan of a certain age, you already know the ache of it—the awareness that the music stopped. Two of the four are gone, and what you have is finite. No more first-time discoveries. No reunion. No lost album waiting to be finished. That's been the reality since April 1970, and most of us made our peace with it decades ago. But artificial intelligence has suddenly changed that—and...

The new McCartney documentary Man on the Run just debuted on Amazon Prime, a date Beatles fans had been circling for months. For most viewers, the film lived up to the hype. But some hard-core fans have quibbles. The problem: Man on the Run was dumbed-down for a general audience. Was it outright corporate censorship, or simply a strategy to cap the running time at 120 minutes? That question is wor...

February 16, 1963. EMI House, Manchester Square, London. A man in a nice suit is crumpled on his back on the floor of an office stairwell, staring up at the ceiling with a camera. Four amused young men from Liverpool are peering down at him from the balcony above. Nobody knows if this is going to work. 🎬 This is how one of the most famous album covers in music history got made—almost by accident,...

Something extraordinary is coming to the auction block in New York this month: The Jim Irsay Collection —widely regarded as the most significant private assemblage of rock and roll memorabilia ever gathered, and the Beatles portion alone is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars. It is, by any measure, a once-in-a-lifetime sale. SEE MY UPDATED ARTICLE ON THE AUCTION RESULTS Irsay, the In...

Amazon Prime dropped a new Paul McCartney documentary yesterday, and I sat down with sky-high expectations and a large beer. Two hours later, I emerged confused, sober with a half-empty mug, and the nagging sense that someone had been handed a great story and decided to make a mood reel instead. 🎬 Problem #1: the working title alone—Man on the Run—points directly at one of music’s most dramatic o...

Go back and watch Get Back again. Not for John Lennon’s wisecracks or Paul McCartney’s melodic brainstorming or George Harrison’s increasingly strained patience—watch the edges of the frame. There’s a massive bloke with thick eyeglasses, clipboard in hand, scribbling down lyrics as fast as the band can say them, hauling equipment, keeping the sessions from collapsing into total chaos, and grinning...

I’ll be honest—I stumbled onto this gem totally by accident. Last night I was scrolling through TV listings, looking for something Beatles-related I hadn’t already seen a dozen times, and there it was: Evolver:62, a documentary I’d somehow never heard of. The title alone was intriguing enough to click, but what I wasn’t expecting was just how good it turned out to be. Over the next 90 minutes or s...

A Cupboard Full of Rock History Just when you think you know everything about the Beatles, it turns out you don’t. Someone in Surrey, England, who was recently rummaging through their cupboard, unearthed 300 pages of confidential documents explaining the real reason for the Beatles’ breakup. 📦 What makes this archive so remarkable is that it moves the breakup story out of the realm of rock mythol...

The Impossible Second Act By the end of 1973, Paul McCartney had pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in rock history. 🎸 Band on the Run—recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, with a depleted lineup after two members quit—had silenced the critics, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and reminded the world that the most melodically gifted Beatle still had plenty of gas in the tank. Bu...

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will debut “Paul McCartney and Wings” on May 15th, 2026—the first major museum exhibition dedicated to exploring Wings’ decade-long journey from 1970 through 1981. It’s about damn time. For years, Wings has been treated as rock history’s awkward stepchild: too successful to ignore, too uncool to celebrate properly, forever overshadowed by what came before. This exhib...

Robert Freeman took perhaps the most iconic photograph in music history when he snapped a picture of the Beatles in a hotel hallway in 1963. The half-shadowed faces on With the Beatles became the visual template for what a serious rock band should look like. Before Freeman, album covers were just headshots of people grinning like they were posing for yearbook photos. After Freeman, darkness and mo...

September 8, 1969. The album is finished. Abbey Road won’t be released for another three weeks, but the four Beatles are gathered at their Apple offices on Savile Row for a meeting that should be celebratory. It isn’t. John Lennon has a proposal, and it’s less “let’s talk about the next record” and more “I want a divorce.” 💔 What John actually proposes is an “equal rights” system—a radical restru...

There’s a persistent legend about Paul McCartney that feels too charming to be fake. The story goes that Sir Paul—a man who could afford a gold-plated factory—used to make his guitar picks by lining up pennies on train tracks and letting a locomotive do the flattening. Whether it was a one-time experiment or a career-long habit is up for debate, but the image of the world’s most famous bassist sca...

Picture this. It’s 1968. John Lennon is at Kenwood, his sprawling home on the St. George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, Surrey. He’s in the middle of one of the most turbulent periods of his life—his marriage to Cynthia is falling apart, Yoko has arrived, and the world he’d carefully built is coming undone around him. He’s burning it all down—the house, the marriage, the version of himself that had l...