Magical Mystery Tour

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English rock musician, singer-songwriter, author, and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles. With Paul McCartney, Lennon formed one of the most influential and successful songwriting partnerships of the 20th century and “wrote some of the most popular music in rock and roll history”. The second most successful songwriter in Billboard singles chart history after McCartney, Lennon was responsible for 27 number one singles on the U.S. Hot 100 chart as a performer or songwriter.

Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and an acerbic wit in his music, his writing, on film and at press conferences and interviews. He was controversial through his work as a peace activist and visual artist with his wife Yoko Ono. After The Beatles broke up in 1970, Lennon enjoyed a commercially successful and critically acclaimed solo career, selling 14 million RIAA certified albums in the US alone, with albums such as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine and iconic songs such as “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine”.

After a self-imposed “retirement” in 1975 to raise his son Sean, Lennon reemerged in 1980 with a comeback album, Double Fantasy, but was murdered less than one month after its release. The album won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year and is Lennon’s best-selling studio album at three million shipments in the US.

In 2002, respondents to a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted Lennon eighth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Lennon #38 on its list of “The Immortals: The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time” (The Beatles were ranked number one). He was also ranked fifth greatest singer of all time by Rolling Stone in 2008. He was posthumously inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. —Wikipedia

In tandem with John Lennon, musician Paul McCartney is responsible for composing most of the songs in the nine-year history of the Beatles. While still a member of the group, McCartney wrote the score for the 1966 film The Family Way; it would be his last solo gig until the Beatles’ breakup in 1970. So prolific and popular was McCartney in his post-Beatle years that it became a standard joke amongst post-postwar kids to query “You mean that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” Also grist for the humor mill was McCartney’s incredible wealth; his legal ownership of virtually every song ever written (including such state anthems as “On Wisconsin”); and the strict vegetarian edicts of his wife and business partner Linda Eastman McCartney. Paul McCartney has also kept active in the film world, penning the theme for the 1973 James Bond flick Live And Let Die, and producing, scoring and acting in the 1984 vanity project Give My Regards to Broad Street, in which viewers were offered the unlikely premise that McCartney would face bankruptcy if he didn’t locate a lost record album. —allmovie guide

Liverpudlian George Harrison (1943-2001), lead guitarist of the Beatles, was the youngest and, for many years, least appreciated of the Fab Four. Often labeled the “quiet Beatle” in the early 1960s, Harrison seemed so retiring and self-deprecating that the makers of the first Beatles flick A Hard Day’s Night took pity on him and wrote him his own individual sequence. The result was the hilarious “shirt scene,” wherein Harrison finds himself auditioning for a specious teen-oriented TV show. For the next Beatles film Help (1965), Harrison broke the Lennon-McCartney stranglehold on the musical score by writing the song “I Need You”.

After the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, Harrison was also the first of the four to make the charts with a hit song. Not having appeared in a film since 1974’s Concert for Bangladesh, Harrison re-entered the movie business in the late 1970s as a producer, backing such films as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Time Bandits (1982) and Brazil (1984). He also occasionally played small, uncredited roles in such films as Shanghai Surprise (1986) (for which he also contributed several songs). One of George Harrison’s most ingratiating post-Beatles appearance was as a BBC announcer on the parody TV documentary The Rutles—a merciless lampoon of a certain mop-topped foursome of the 1960s. —allmovie guide