Tuesday, September 8, 2009

It's All About The Beatles


Tomorrow may as well be called International Beatles Day! The 9th September will see not one, not two, but three HUGE Beatles related events ripple across the world, at what will surely be lightening speed.

The first event is the launch of 'The Beatles: Rock Band'. I posted about this back in June, and I am still just as excited. The latest of the Rock Band episodes gives you the opportunity to experience the greatest rock band of all time. You get to be part of the Beatles’ rise to fame and become the band that made music history. Play as John, Paul, George or Ringo; get your mates around, practise your harmonies, and enjoy newly designed custom-built instruments.

As part of the pre-launch advertising campaign, the latest ad has been released, and as with the others, it's pretty awesome. The ad takes the iconic photograph of The Beatles crossing Abbey Road and brings it to life.



I expect to be playing the game tomorrow night at the Irish launch event in Whelans, so I'll do an update tomorrow on just how good it is.

One of the most interesting things about 'The Beatles: Rock Band' is that it will feature over 45 original Beatles songs. What makes this interesting is that even though The Beatles are one of the biggest selling bands of all time, their music is virtually unavailable legally in digital formats. You simply cannot legitimately download a Beatles song. So that brings us to Beatles event number two: (as reported by a number of sources) iTunes looks set to finally have The Beatles back catalogue available through its iStore.

This in itself may actually be directly linked to the third and final Beatles event. As reported by Rolling Stone Magazine, 9th September will see the release of the complete re-mastered Beatles collection. What does that mean? Well, nearly 22-years later, all of The Beatles back catalogue will be available as digitally remastered versions of the original studio albums. The best part isn't just that they are remastered, each album will feature the track listings and artwork as it was originally released, but with the addition of an expanded booklets including original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a short time, all of the 12 studio albums will come with an “embedded” documentary about its making.

So whether you were there for the rise of The Fab Four, or you grew up listening to your parent's vinyls, tomorrow is an exciting day.

2 comments:

nicola-t said...

Did you go to the Rock Band launch in Whelan's in the end?

Christian Hughes said...

I did - it was a lot of fun. Silly me took all my pictures in RAW (was what it was set to from last shoot I did) and I just haven't had time to go through them to publish.