Category: Beatles

Hey Beatles/Hey Bingle!

I’m thinking Joe Sinnott probably had Bing Crosby’s Hey Jude/Hey Bing! album in his record collection. 65-year-old Bing covered two Apple label singles from the fall of ’68.

On December 11, 1961, ABC-TV in America broadcast a TV special that Bing had produced in England, in which he performed this humorous rendition of ‘The Sheik of Araby’.

A few weeks later, on January 1, 1962, the Beatles, with Pete Best on drums, recorded their own humorous take of ‘The Sheik of Araby’ at their Decca Records audition.

Beatles Rotator

I recently played my big sister’s original American copy of the 1966 Beatles album Revolver.* It’s in mono, and I was surprised by how good it sounds, considering the damage it endured. Here’s ‘Good Day Sunshine’.

Monitoring the playback with Audacity, I was impressed with how dynamic the sound is. There’s no compression going on here.

For comparison, here is the official online copy of the song.

Looking at the peaks, some loudness compression was apparently added to the recording. The 2009 mono Beatles set reportedly was transferred from the master tapes with dynamic range left intact, so perhaps this is a YouTube effect.

Okay, so let’s find out. What about ‘Good Day Sunshine’ when played from the Beatles 2009 CD mono box set? No loudness compression is confirmed.

* A 60-year-old record on a 50-year-old turntable, with a 30-year-old cartridge and a relatively new stylus.

Paul’s Lady Jane

From 1970, the same year as the very strange movie Performance with Mick Jagger, there is the strange and bawdy Deep End. With music by Cat Stevens, Jane Asher shows off what Paul McCartney gave up when they split.

Diana Dors, who is one of the cardboard figures on the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album cover, is considerably heavier here than she was at sixteen, in the first Huggetts movie with Petula Clark.