General - Part 2

1. The Fab Four had been asked to be in Disney’s The Jungle Book - sadly though, due to other commitments they had to drop out.
2. When the boys auditioned for Decca records in 1962, they were turned down. The executive who made this decision - possibly one of the worst in music history - did so because he thought that guitar groups were on the way out.
3. There has been a crazy conspiracy (fuelled even more after the invention of the world-wide web) that Paul died in a car accident and was replaced by a lookalike.
4. John was obsessed by Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and played it non-stop in his Rolls Royce all the way to the launch party for Sgt. Pepper.
5. According to John, the band got its eventual name from a dream he had where a man appeared to him on a flaming pie and said “You will be The Beatles, with an ‘a’”.
6. The animal noises at the end of Good Morning Good Morning are in the order in which the beasts would eat each other.
7. The Beatles were all huge supporters of equality. They said they would only play in America’s Deep South (which in 1964 was still a hotbed of inequality) if black fans were allowed to sit anywhere they liked.
8. Ringo’s inspiration for the song Octopus’s Garden came from a boat captain who explained to Ringo that Octopuses collect shiny things from the bottom of the sea and put them in a pile.
9. The French title of A Hard Day’s Night actually translates as Four Boys in the Wind.
10. George Harrison reminisced about the height of Beatlemania in his 1987 song When We Was Fab.