The Beatles Years

Academy Award-winner Ron Howard’s authorized and highly anticipated documentary feature film about The Beatles’ phenomenal early career The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years is based on the first part of The Beatles’ career (1962-1966) – the period in which they toured and captured the world’s acclaim. Ron Howard’s film explores how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came together to become this extraordinary phenomenon, “The Beatles.” It explores their inner workings – how they made decisions, created their music and built their collective career together – all the while, exploring The Beatles’ extraordinary and unique musical gifts and their remarkable, complementary personalities. The film focus’s on the time period from the early Beatles’ journey in the days of The Cavern Club in Liverpool to their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966…

Released in 1994, “Artifacts II” is the sequel to the ground-breaking Beatles rarities compilation issued the previous year by Italian bootleggers. Like its predecessor, “Artifacts II” is a sweeping 5-CD compilation of newly unearthed Beatles rarities presented in chronological order. It features outtakes, live concert tracks, demos, overdub sessions, and rehearsals covering the group's known recordings from 1960 through 1969 – it's essentially a best-of the rest of the Beatles' unauthorized output, from what were then the best-known sources of every track represented. The "Artifacts" box sets were clearly the prototype for the authorized collection of Beatles outtakes (“The Beatles Anthology”) issued by EMI in 1995. The official Beatles vault releases have made much of what is found on the “Artifacts” boxes obsolete, however, there are some tracks found on the bootleg box sets that don’t appear on “Anthology,” making it a worthwhile addition to any Beatles collection. This is the second 5 CD box set in the series.

IT'S FOUR YOU was a CD recorded & released in 1994 by the Australian Beatles tribute group The Beatnix. It featured the performances of Steven Shipley, Bruce Coble, David Wood & John Taylor, the four musicians who would go on to become the founding members of THE BEATELS shortly after this album was recorded. The idea for the album came from Australian music writer Glenn A Baker, and the album was originally released on Glenn's record label, Raven Records, in 1994. Glenn had seen the band perform, & knew what they were capable of, & so he approached them & asked if they would be interested in spending a few weeks in the studio recording and mixing 19 songs that Lennon & McCartney had written, but never released by The Beatles. Some tracks had never been recorded by The Beatles - they had been given to other NEMS artists such as PJ Proby, Cilla Black, & Peter & Gordon. Many tracks had gone to number one on the charts.

When Capitol decided to release the original British editions of the Beatles' albums instead of the bastardized American versions, they were left with a bit of a quandary. Since the Beatles had an enormous number of non-LP singles, some of their greatest hits – from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" through "Hey Jude" – would not be included on disc if Capitol simply served up straight reissues. They had two options: they could add the singles as bonus tracks to the appropriate CDs, or they could release a compilation of all the non-LP tracks…