The Oscar-winning Songs Countdown: 1967

Hello and welcome to a new thematic unity! Always willing to try something new for your pleasure, every Saturday we'll revisit the Oscars, by way of a countdown of the Oscar-winning songs. At the same time we'll also be presenting the main Oscars of that year, as well as relevant stories of interest.

A few things that need explaining: first of all, the year; when people refer to the Oscars of a certain year, they either use the year which is honored by the Oscars, or the year which the actual ceremony takes place. For example: the last Oscars were given in the beginning of 2016, but were honoring films made in 2015. The "traditionalists" would refer to them as Oscars 2015, while the "modernists" would refer to them as Oscars 2016. I am part of the traditionalists. So the year we're presenting today is about movies made in 1967, while the ceremony took place in 1968. If this is confusing now, give it time.

Another thing: when two songs are more or less of equal merit, the one that unjustly prevailed over worthier opponents will be lower down my list. Because, justice. Enough foreplay. Let's get on with the action!

In 1967, the big studios were on their way out. Warners attempted to replicate the success of My Fair Lady by taking another Lerner and Lowe musical from Broadway and once again cast another actress in the Julie Andrews' role. This time it was Vanessa Redgrave who became Warner's Guinevere in Camelot, an expensive production that opened to dreadful reviews and failed to earn back its cost. The only noteworthy thing that came of it was Vanessa's real-life love affair with the film's Lancelot, Italian actor Franco Nero. It led to Redgrave's separation from her then husband, director Tony Richardson.

The same thing over at the Fox studios. The success of The Sound Of Music was too sweet to not try to create lightning in a bottle for a second time. They mounted a big budget production of a musical version of Doctor Dolittle. Tough luck: terrible reviews and the movie garnered only a third of its cost at the box office. It turned out to be more disastrous for the studio than even Cleopatra.

Losing the role in Camelot proved to be a blessing in disguise for Julie Andrews, who starred alongside Carol Channing in a modestly budgeted musical called Thoroughly Modern Millie, which was well-reviewed and made a decent profit.

It was really Sidney Poitier's year though: he starred in three of the year's most successful films: To Sir With Love, a hit movie, with an even bigger hit in the shape of its theme song, was one. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, the final movie starring the legendary pair of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, was another. Tracy died just 10 days after filming was completed.

Poitier's third hit of the year was also the best reviewed. A crime melodrama called In The Heat Of The Night, in which he portrayed a Philadelphia police detective stranded in a small town when a murder is comitted and having to deal with the bigoted small town sheriff played by Rod Steiger. The film's highlight comes when Rod Steiger's sheriff remarks that "Virgil is a pretty fancy name for a black boy like you," and asks what people call him at home, Virgil Tibbs (Poitier's character) forcefully responds "They call me Mister Tibbs!"

In The Heat Of The Night wasn't the only film that year that produced memorable quotes: The highest grossing film of the year had a number of them. From the one-word career advice: "plastics" to the phrase "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.", The Graduate offered plenty of funny and memorable one-liners. The film also sported Simon & Garfunkel's iconic soundtrack. It also had Anne Bancroft perfectly cast as Mrs. Robinson, as well as two young actors who caused a sensation. Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross. Hoffman in particular received career-making reviews, although not about his looks: the New York Daily News said "he's rather plain-looking, resembling both Sonny and Cher."

The most controversial film of the year was Bonnie And Clyde. Reportedly Warren Beatty got down on his knees to beg Jack Warner to finance the film after two other studios had turned him down. The critics were divided: the younger ones praised the film, while the older ones attacked it for glamorizing violence and criminal behavior. In fact, the film caused an esteemed film critic to lose his job: the editorial board of The New York Times persuaded Bosley Crowther to step down, after 30-odd years at his job, because he couldn't relate to Bonnie And Clyde.

Another very successful film was Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman as a cocky convict who defied authority and took off his shirt a lot. The film's ads capitalized on the comment Strother Martin's prison guard uttered every time Newman misbehaved - "What we have here is a failure to communicate" - and the line became a rallying cry for both sides of the generation gap.

Newman's costar, George Kennedy, playing a fellow inmate, was worried that the studio wasn't interested in doing any campaigning for him, so he spent $5000 of his own money on trade-paper ads to goad Academy members to see his performance.

That, however, paled before Fox's "operation Dolittle". The studio made Doctor Dolittle its prime target for Academy Award consideration and provided champagne and coctails and a luscious buffet dinner before every Academy screening.

The Nominations

The wining and dining paid off for Fox: Doctor Dolittle received 9 nominations, including Best Picture. "It's outrageous!", Truman Capote screamed: The film based on his best-seller In Cold Blood, a movie with excellent reviews, received 4 major nominations, including Best Director, but lost out the fifth Best Picture slot to Doctor Dolittle. The other four films that were nominated for Best Picture as well as for Best Director were Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (10 nominations), Bonnie And Clyde (10 nominations), In The Heat Of The Night (7 nominations), and The Graduate (7 nominations, including one each for Hoffman, Bancroft and Ross).

George Kennedy's campaigning paid off, as he received a Supporting Actor nomination. Paul Newman, the score and the screenplay of Cool Hand Luke also received nominations.

Sidney Poitier received no nominations, possibly his movies cancelled each other. His costars did, however: Rod Steiger in In The Heat Of The Night and all of Tracy, Hepburn, Cecil Kellaway and Beah Richards in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. The most acting nominations for a film in 1967, however, went to Bonnie And Clyde, which received five: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons.

Camelot received 5 nominations in the Arts & Crafts categories, while Thoroughly Modern Millie did better with 7 nominations, including one for Carol Channing as Supporting Actress.

Another memorable fact was that this was the first year that the Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design categories gave one award each; before that, they each gave awards for black-and-white and color movies separately. The reason was that black-and-white movies were hardly being made anymore, because TV networks preferred to broadcast color movies - and the studios counted on selling their movies to TV.

The five Best Song nominees were:

The Bare Necessities from The Jungle Book • Music & Lyrics: Terry Gilkyson:

The Eyes of Love from Banning • Music: Quincy Jones • Lyrics: Bob Russell:

The Look of Love from Casino Royale • Music: Burt Bacharach • Lyrics: Hal David:

Talk to the Animals from Doctor Dolittle • Music & Lyrics: Leslie Bricusse:

Thoroughly Modern Millie from Thoroughly Modern Millie • Music and lyrics: Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen:

Not a thoroughly remarkable batch: the only song that stands out, well above the rest, is The Look of Love from Casino Royale, a classic.

There were some incredible omissions from the list. I mean, OMG, no To Sir With Love?!?:

No theme from Valley Of The Dolls?!?:

No theme from The Happening?!?:

All three of the above certainly should have been nominated. But those were the times...

The Oscars

The ceremony almost didn't happen, and for a very sad reason: four days before the scheduled date, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assasinated. The then President of the Academy Gregory Peck called an urgent meeting of the Board of Governors and they decided to postpone the ceremony for after the funeral and cancel the annual Governors' Ball altogether.

Finally, the ceremony took place and the Academy spread the wealth: In The Heat Of The Night got Best Picture, Best Actor for Rod Steiger, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Sound. Best Director went to Mike Nichols for The Graduate. Katharine Hepburn received her second Best Actress Oscar for Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, which also got Best Original Screenplay. Bonnie And Clyde secured a Best Supporting Actress award for Broadway actress Estelle Parsons, as well as Best Cinematography. George Kennedy's $5000 were well spent, for he won Best Supporting Actor for Cool Hand Luke. Camelot won Best Scoring of Music (Adaptation or Treatment), as well as Best Art Direction and Costume Design. Thoroughly Modern Millie was rewarded for Best Original Music Score for Elmer Bernstein, his only Oscar. The Dirty Dozen, a violent war movie starring many familiar faces which was a great box office success and a template for war movies to come won Best Sound Effects. The Best Foreign Movie award went to the good Czechoslovakian film by Jiri Menzel called Closely Watched Trains.

You could hear the "Oh, nos" loudly in the theater when Barbra Streisand announced the winner for Best Song: Doctor Dolittle. My #82 favorite Oscar song in a list of 82. The same movie also won for Best Visual Effects.

As an epilogue, I want to say that this is a labor of love and there's a lot of work in it. If you like it and want me to continue, please write something in the comments section. It can be something very short and it can be in any language, if you're not comfortable writing in English. I will seriously not continue this thematic unity if I get no comments, it will probably mean that you don't like it won't it? I will also think seriously about continuing altogether. Thank you for your attention.

The Beatles Top 100 (#04-01) & The Beatles Covers Top 20 Countdown (#04-01)

We have finally reached the ultimate day of the Beatles' countdown. Some may think that 15 days of Beatles in a row are too many. Well, I gave as many to the Stones and will give as many to Dylan (eventually). Although these were spread over a longer time with other projects in-between. But I had given 6 continuous days to REM. And they were read by one third of the people that followed the Beatles saga. So...

At #4 in my list of best Beatles covers is the only song by a solo Beatle that could easily stand shoulder to shoulder with the Beatles' best. Imagine, the 1971 song by John Lennon that has become a classic among classics.

The morning after the November 2015 Paris attacks, German pianist Davide Martello brought a grand piano to the street out in front of the Bataclan, where 89 concertgoers had been shot dead the night before, and performed an instrumental version to honour the victims of the attacks; video of his performance went viral. This led Katy Waldman of Slate to ponder why Imagine had become so frequently performed as a response to tragedy. In addition to its general popularity, she noted its musical simplicity, its key of C major, "the plainest and least complicated key, with no sharps or flats" aside from one passage with "a plaintive major seventh chord that allows a tiny bit of E minor into the tonic". That piano part, "gentle as a rocking chair", underpins lyrics that, Waldman says, "belongs to the tradition of hymns or spirituals that visualize a glorious afterlife without prophesizing any immediate end to suffering on earth". This understanding is also compounded by the historical context of Lennon's own violent death, "remind[ing] us that the universe can run ramshod over idealistic people". Ultimately, the song "captures the fragility of our hope after a violent or destructive event ... [but] also reveals its tenacity".

I will include two versions of the song here, because: a. they will allow me to present two great Ladies of song, and b. they perfectly complement each other. While Diana Ross' version (an album track from Touch Me In The Morning, 1973), is a serene prayer from a person imagining this utopia, Patti LaBelle's version, from The Live Aid concert (1985), is a triumphant affirmation: this utopia is already around the corner.

Here's Diana Ross:

... And here's Patti LaBelle:

At #3 is a cover that was also in AFHI's list: Ticket To Ride, as its composer, John Lennon, once claimed, was "one of the earliest heavy-metal records." The Carpenters take it in another direction altogether. Richard gives the song the Soft-Rock treatment that was so popular in the early 70s, but it's Karen's otherworldly vocals that elevate the song from the heap and turn it into something magic. It's so sad that both the composer and the singer left this world so soon. They still had so much to offer!

At #2 is a song that somehow defies the characterization of a cover, since it was released months before the actual Beatles song. Aretha Franklin belts out Let It Be, and literally takes it to church. There is such strength in her version, that, to use the title from a funky classic of the 70s, it "Tear(s) the Roof off the Sucker". Aretha's brand of Soul was unique, especially everything that she released between 1967-1976. No one had reached this unique mixture of precision and power before, and no one has since.

Before I get to #1, let me explain about an intentional omission. I deeply appreciate Judy Collins' version of In My Life, although I don't have any particular emotional ties to it. It would've been in my Top 20, but since I was sure that AFHI (and possibly RM) would include it in their top positions, I decided to leave it out, so that I could include some other songs that I felt had to be mentioned.

Now, it's time for our #1: I will absolutely agree with AFHI on this one. One cannot consider Beatles' covers without noting that this is the definitive cover.

There were two things that really stood out in Woodstock, in my humble opinion: one was Jimi Hendrix's rendition of The Star-Spangled banner. The other was Joe Cocker singing With A Little Help From My Friends. He came on stage high as a kite (on one or possibly more substances), so much that one was overcome by the agony of whether he would make it through or collapse. he did make it through, and we were treated to a Dionysian feast of the highest order.

Joe Cocker must have loved the Beatles: 4 out of his first 7 singles were Beatles' covers: I'll Cry Instead, Something, She Came In Through the Bathroom Window, and the biggest one of all, With A Little Help From My Friends, which peaked at #1 in the UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland, #3 in Germany and France, #6 in Austria, #8 in Belgium, and, for reasons unknown to me, only #68 in the US.

Now let's count down the Top Four songs actually sung by The Beatles. An unusual occurence for such a list: two of the four songs are the two sides of the same single. Naturally, the four of us consider this to be the best single ever made, if you take both sides into consideration. One of the sides is at #4.

John Lennon wrote Strawberry Fields Forever in September 1966 in Spain, where he was making the film How I Won the War. Alone, with no Beatles business for the first time in years, he found himself free to reach deep for inspiration, going back to childhood memories. As Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1968, "We were trying to write about Liverpool, and I just listed all the nice-sounding names arbitrarily. But I have visions of Strawberry Fields. . . . Because Strawberry Fields is just anywhere you want to go." Strawberry Field (Lennon added the "s") was a Liverpool children's home near where Lennon grew up with his Aunt Mimi. When he was young, Lennon, who had been abandoned by both his parents, would climb over the wall of the orphanage and play in its wild gardens.

"I was hip in kindergarten," Lennon explained in 1980. "I was different all my life. The second verse goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius — 'I mean it must be high or low,' the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see."

After finishing the song on a Spanish beach, Lennon returned to England and played it for the rest of the band. As engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, "There was a moment of stunned silence, broken by Paul, who in a quiet, respectful tone said simply, 'That is absolutely brilliant.'" At that point, it was an acoustic-guitar ballad, reminiscent of Bob Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. But in the studio, it became a whole new thing, as the Beatles experimented with it for days. Having retired from touring earlier that year, they were free to record at their leisure, cutting dozens of takes in the next two weeks. McCartney composed the intro on a Mellotron, a primitive synthesizer.

Lennon wanted to keep the first part from one take (Take 26) and the second part from another, recorded the previous week (Take 7) - despite the fact that they were in different keys and tempos. Producer George Martin accomplished this by slightly speeding up one take and slowing down the other. The manipulation of time and key only added to the brooding, ghostly feeling of Lennon's vocals, giving the entire song an aura of surreal timelessness. The finished take ends with a fragment of a long jam session, in which Lennon says "cranberry sauce": Paul Is Dead freaks believed he was saying, "I buried Paul."

Strawberry Fields was the first track cut during the Sgt. Pepper sessions. The innovative studio techniques the Beatles employed recording it and McCartney's Penny Lane, another childhood memory of a Liverpool landmark, heralded the band's new direction - as did the acid-inspired reverie in the lyrics of both songs. The tracks were to be centerpieces of the Beatles' greatest album, but under pressure by EMI to produce a new single (it had been six months since their last 45), they released both songs in February 1967 as a double A side. Martin later regretted the decision to remove the tracks from Sgt. Pepper as "the biggest mistake of my career."

Growing up "was scary because there was nobody to relate to," Lennon once said. Strawberry Field the place (which closed in 2005) represented those haunting childhood visions. With Strawberry Fields the song, he conquered them forever.

This is only the first 1:22 of the song:

Here's all of it:

Strawberry Fields Forever

At #3 is Hey Jude, a Paul song which was a single in 1968. there are many records concerning this song: It was the first single from the Beatles' record label Apple Records. More than seven minutes in length, it was at the time the longest single ever to top the British charts. Since the fade-out coda lasts for more than four minutes, it was the first ever hit whose fade-out lasted more than the actual song. It also spent nine weeks at number one in the United States, the longest for any Beatles single.

The single has sold approximately eight million copies and is frequently included on professional critics' lists of the greatest songs of all time. In 2013, Billboard named it the 10th biggest song of all time.

Hey Jude was inspired by John and Cynthia Lennon's five-year-old son, Julian. "Paul and I used to hang out quite a bit - more than Dad and I did," Julian said. "Maybe Paul was into kids a bit more at the time."

McCartney was visiting Cynthia after she and Lennon had broken up, and he was thinking of Julian on the drive over there. "I was going out in my car, just vaguely singing this song," McCartney said, "and it was like, 'Hey, Jules. . . .' And then I just thought a better name was Jude. A bit more country & western for me." The opening lines were "a hopeful message for Julian: 'Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you're not happy, but you'll be OK.'"

Hey Jude can also be heard as McCartney's song of consolation to himself as his relationship with Jane Asher was ending and as the Beatles' future was growing more uncertain. The song was recorded in the middle of the White Album sessions, which were plagued by fighting within the band and increasing alienation as the individual songwriters started treating the other Beatles as sidemen on their songs - if they used them at all. McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr resented the constant presence of John's new girlfriend, Yoko Ono, in the studio. Engineer Geoff Emerick found the squabbling so unpleasant that he quit. George Martin, also exhausted from the bickering and from running between the individual Beatles recording simultaneously in separate studios, abandoned the sessions to take a vacation, leaving production of the album for several weeks to his assistant Chris Thomas. Fed up himself, Starr left the band for two weeks (the first band member to quit the Beatles).

When Lennon first heard Hey Jude, he loved it - he thought McCartney was singing to him, about his relationship with Ono and the strains on the Lennon-McCartney partnership. (Lennon's contribution to the song came when McCartney pointed out a place-holder line in the fifth verse: "The movement you need is on your shoulder." Lennon insisted he leave it as is. "That's the best line in it!" he said.) Calling Hey Jude one of McCartney's "masterpieces," Lennon said in 1980, "I always heard it as a song to me. . . . Yoko's just come into the picture. He's saying, 'Hey, Jude - hey, John.' Subconsciously he was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.'"

The band hired a 36-piece orchestra for the session; the classical musicians were encouraged to sing and clap along to the song, for double their usual rate. One musician would not go along. "'I'm not going to clap my hands and sing Paul McCartney's bloody song,'" Martin remembered him saying. "He said his union card said he was a violinist, and he walked out of the studio. Much to everyone's amazement." There were other problems too: McCartney had to tell Harrison to tone down his guitar-playing, which was cluttering up the verses. (Harrison "wasn't into what I was saying," said McCartney. "It was bossy, but it was also ballsy of me, because I could have bowed to the pressure.") And when it came time to record the master take, McCartney hadn't noticed that Starr was in the bathroom. Fortunately, the drums come in so late in Hey Jude that Starr was able to sprint back behind his kit and come in right on time.

The ending refrain goes on for a full four minutes, even longer than the verses, which clock in at just over three minutes. The band hadn't planned it that way, but McCartney was having too much fun ad-libbing to quit. "I just wouldn't stop doing all that 'Judy Judy Judy - wooow!" he said. "Cary Grant on heat!"

Martin objected to the song's length, claiming radio wouldn't play the tune. "They will if it's us," Lennon shot back.

At #2 in our list is not one song, but a 16-minute medley of several short songs, recorded over July and August 1969 and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. It took up most of the second side of the Abbey Road LP.

The original idea was McCartney's, but George Martin claimed that the final triumph of the Beatles' life as a recording band - the eight-song medley dominating Side Two of Abbey Road - was at least partly his. "I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music," the producer said. "Paul was all for experimenting like that." McCartney, in fact, led the first session for that extended section of the album - on May 6th, 1969, for You Never Give Me Your Money, his deceptively sunny indictment of the business nightmares at Apple Corps.

Lennon was a lot less interested in the medley, although he contributed some of its most eccentric parts, like the sneering Mean Mr. Mustard and the quick, funky put-down Polythene Pam. He subsequently dismissed the concept as "junk" in Rolling Stone, saying that "none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together."

He was right in one sense. The 16-minute sequence - veering from Money and the luxuriant sigh of Lennon's Sun King to McCartney's heavy-soul shard She Came in Through the Bathroom Window and the sweet lullaby Golden Slumbers, and closing with McCartney's famous prescription in The End ("The love you take/Is equal to the love you make") - has no narrative connection. But the Abbey Road medley is the matured Beatles at their best: playful, gentle, acerbic, haunting and bonded by the music. Their harmonies are ravishing and complex; the guitars are confident and cutting. "We were holding it together," McCartney said proudly. "Even though this undercurrent was going on" - a reference to the pressures and differences that had been pulling them apart since the White Album - "we still had a strong respect for each other even at the very worst points."

The Beatles recorded the sections of the medley at various times, out of order, during the July and August 1969 sessions for Abbey Road. Mean Mr. Mustard dated back to early 1968. The lingering hysteria of Beatlemania cropped up in She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, which was inspired by an overeager fan. But the emotional heart of the suite was the financial woes that were consuming the Beatles' energy and were on the verge of bankrupting them. Lennon was instrumental in the hiring of Allen Klein, the business manager of the Rolling Stones, to straighten out the books and the chaos at Apple Corps; McCartney wanted the band to hire Lee and John Eastman, his future father- and brother-in-law. McCartney admitted that You Never Give Me Your Money was "me directly lambasting Allen Klein's attitude to us - all promises, and it never works out."

Later, in Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight (the former with lyrics copied from a lullaby published in 1603), McCartney returned to the theme of exhaustion. "I'm generally quite upbeat," he said, "but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can't be upbeat anymore, and that was one of those times. 'Carry that weight a long time' - like forever!"

The swapping of guitar solos in The End was a band brainstorm. Harrison thought a guitar break would make a good climax. Lennon suggested he, Harrison and McCartney all trade licks. McCartney said he'd go first. Coming after Starr's first and only drum solo on a Beatles record, the scorching round-robin breaks - with Harrison in the middle and Lennon at the end - were cut live in one take, a last blast of natural brotherhood from a band only months from splitting.

"I didn't know at the time that it was the last Beatles record that we would make," Harrison said of Abbey Road. "But it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line."

"Out of the ashes of all that madness," said Starr, "that last section is one of the finest pieces we put together."

After two full weeks of Beatles songs, it's time to listen to the concensus #1 of the four wise men. It's the other side of the single that was at #4: it's Penny Lane.

Penny Lane was Paul McCartney's ode to the Liverpool he knew as a child, but the song also had a hidden inspiration: His white-hot competitive streak. "The song was generated by a kind of 'I can do just as well as you can, John,' because we'd just recorded Strawberry Fields," said George Martin. "It was such a knockout, I think Paul went back to perfect his idea. And they were both significant. They were both about their childhood." The songs would be released together - opposite sides of the first single from the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions.

Many of the lyrics come straight from McCartney's adolescence. Penny Lane is a Liverpool neighborhood where Lennon lived as a child and also the name of a bus depot McCartney would pass through on the way to Lennon's house. A barbershop in the area, Bioletti's, displayed pictures of different haircuts it offered - hence the lines "There is a barber showing photographs/Of every head he's had the pleasure to know." As McCartney put it, "The song is part fact, part nostalgia for a place which is a great place - blue suburban skies as we remember it."

Penny Lane was striking not just for McCartney's gorgeous melody but also for its complex arrangements. The Beatles "were avidly hungry for new sounds," Martin said. With McCartney playing three piano parts, bass, harmonium and tambourine; his bandmates playing more piano, guitar, drums and a hand bell; and several horn sections, Penny Lane built a detailed wall of sound that achieved the force of a Rock song without sounding anything like one.

The recording's crowning touch was inspired by a televised performance of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 that McCartney saw after the basic track for Penny Lane had been recorded. He arranged for the trumpet player he'd heard on the broadcast, David Mason, to come in and add a piccolo trumpet solo (as well as a brief coda, which appeared only on early promotional copies).

Besides giving the Beatles a chart-topping hit, Penny Lane gave Lennon's old neighborhood a boost as well: The Penny Lane area became a significant tourist attraction, and Beatles fans quickly went about pilfering its street signs.

Northern Songs, the publishing company that owned all but four of the Beatles songs, was acquired by ATV – a media company owned by Lew Grade in 1969. By 1985 the company was being run by Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes à Court, who decided to sell the catalogue to Michael Jackson.  Before the sale, Holmes à Court offered his 16-year-old daughter Catherine the chance to keep any song "in her name" from the catalogue. She chose Penny Lane as it was her favourite - despite her father's urging to choose Yesterday, which was by far the biggest royalty-earning song on the books (and is in the top four global royalty earning songs of all time).  Catherine Holmes à Court-Mather is still the copyright owner of Penny Lane today, one of only five Beatles songs not owned by Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

That was it folks! Thanks for your patience and I would be grateful for any comments concerning our small project. have a great one!