G7: Music - The Beatles: Resources

Almost everyone can sing along with the Beatles, but how many young readers know their whole story? Geoff Edgers, a Boston Globe reporter and hard-core Beatles fan, brings the Fab Four to life in this Who Was...?book. Readers will learn about their childhoods in Liverpool, their first forays into rock music, what Beatlemania was like, and why they broke up. It's all here in an easy-to-read narrative with plenty of black-and-white illustrations!

In this contemporary graphic novel, twelve-year-old Lucy discovers her father's collection of Beatles records and is inspired to form an all-girl rock band. It's the first day of seventh grade, and everything is going downhill for Lucy Sutcliffe. At school, she has the feeling her friends are all leaving her behind. At home, her single father is in a rut, and her perpetually traveling photojournalist mother is more absent than ever. Worst of all, Lucy's grandmother is undergoing chemotherapy and is no longer the warm, vibrant presence that her family has come to depend on. But everything changes the day Lucy discovers a box of her father's Beatles records. Inspired by their music, she gets a drum set and forms an all-girl rock band with her friends. But can she keep the band together when petty rivalries, unrequited crushes, and outside pressures threaten to tear it apart?

Taking us through the early days of rock 'n' roll, and their lives in Liverpool during the 1950s, we journey with The Beatles to Hamburg as they come of age and, through grit, determination and masses of talent, became the lads who made the sixties swing!

The 'now' part of this book is drawn from Robin Bextor's exclusive interviews with Paul McCartney during which he talked candidly of his private life, of his life as a singer, musician, composer and businessman. Tony Barrow looks back on McCartney as he was 'then', offering an account of life inside the Fab Four camp.