John and Paul – Together at home

The global phenomenon “Our World – Together at home”, where artists phoned in video performances has been and gone. The only ex-Beatle contribution came from Paul McCartney, who performed a sincere and daring version of “Lady Madonna” (see video). There were no contributions from the kids either, like Sean, Julian, Dhani, Zak or James. But then, a lot of other artists also had no-shows during the marathon event.

Thankfully, John Lennon was represented during the proceedings. From China, Eason Chan performed Lennon’s “Love” from the Plastic Ono Band album.

About that album: Superdeluxeedition is certain that a fiftieth anniversary edition boxed set is in the works, which we have also suspected for a while. However, the album may be delayed as Paul McCartney recently disclosed in his interview with Howard Stern, releases are “up in the air”.

Paul celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his own solo debut by yet again re-do the still photo music video for “Maybe I’m Amazed”. Mike Carrera tells us that the video has been restored or re-made four times, the worst in terms of cropping the picture was of course the 2007 version made for the DVD release “McCartney Years”, where making all videos “wide screen” by zooming in on the videos severely cropped most of what was on it. This time, the video has been upgraded to 4K, but still suffers from a few cropping issues. Carrera published a comparison on Facebook, but didn’t bother about the 2007 version:

The title, “McCartney” has been replaced by a similar but slightly thicker font.

original font vs the new version

Anyway, the new version of the video is quite good, and not as yellow as the previous versions.

Of course, there was no need for McCartney to do a 50th anniversary boxed set of this album, as it was well covered in 2011 in his ongoing “archives” series, and got an audiophile vinyl release in 2017. Still, a half-speed-mastered version of the LP is expected for the rescheduled Record Store Day.

But back to the “Plastic Ono band” anniversary, Johnny Depp and Jeff Beck did actually release their version of the song “Isolation”. Of course, this is a very appropriate title these days, as most of us are living in countries under lock-down. But this was not the case when the team performed the song together in concerts in September last year.

Announcing the collaboration with this song, Beck said: “Given all the hard days and true ‘isolation’ that people are going through in these challenging times, we decided now might be the right time to let you all hear it. You’ll be hearing more from Johnny and me in a little while, but until then we hope you find some comfort and solidarity in our take on this Lennon classic.”