Way back in the 1990s, I bumped into Paul when he was doing a poetry reading at my university. I'd missed out on tickets because I was a lazy student and didn't feel like waiting in a long queue. So I hung around the stage door and got a quick photo of him. Those were back in the analogue days before selfies were a thing. I've no idea where that flimsy piece of cardboard is now.

A few years later, my cousin Mick was in Paul's band when they played The Cavern. The gig was one of the first to be streamed live over the Internet. From my contemporary posts on Usenet's rec.music.beatles the streaming wasn't a success, with lots of frustrated fans. We spent our time imagining what the gig was like.

And so, 25 years later, I used half-a-dozen laptops to grab a pair of tickets to the first night of the London portion of his tour. Honestly, I think I would have paid anything (yay dynamic pricing) but was mildly relieved to be in the "cheap" seats. Unlike when we saw "The Who", we were right by the stage - albeit quite high up.

What can I say? It was magical.

Obviously it is a crowd-pleasing set. About the deepest cut is something like Junior's Farm. No one is here for the obscure B-Side to a disc that was only ever a top 75 hit in Japan. Does it turn into sing-a-long-a-Macca? Absolutely! And why not? This isn't the time to sit in silent contemplation; it is a time for exuberant joy.

When he played Now and Then, I don't think there was a dry eye in the house. I know I wept freely.

The Xmas banger "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime" was accompanied with a huge flurry of paper snow which covered the stage. It was, somewhat disturbingly followed by "Live and Let Die" with its obligatory fire cannons. Health and Safety be damned!

There's nothing to compare it to. You can watch all the Beatles cover-bands you like, but you'll never hear several thousand women screaming like they do for Paul. Every song seems deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Holding the hand of my wife while Paul played "Maybe I'm Amazed" - seemingly just for us - was sublime.

A few days later and I'm still reeling from how joyous it was. Well worth the wait.

A couple of the stories are explicitly Beatle-y, the others aren't. The titles don't seem to bear any resemblance to the stories told. Indeed, one was obviously originally named "Octopus's Garden" - featuring a rather good tale of a man who dreams he's an octopus, and vice-versa - but has been shoved into the "There's A Place" slot.

There are a couple of stand-out stories. "Love Me Do" is a rather nice twist(!) on a classic pen-pal romance - the lovers leaving messages on their parents' graves. And "Do You Want To Know A Secret?" gives us a rather dark perspective on the Santa Clause Cinematic Universe.

The rest of the stories are basically fine. It's a rather random collection of stories and it might have been nice if they had some thematic consistency.

Why '62? Well, that's the year everything changed. Mark makes a convincing case that 1962 is when pop culture changed forever. Not just with the formation of the band (and them legally splitting up) but the entire culture of era being ready for something new.

There's an astounding amount of ephemera in here. Some of it from obscure legal documents from deep within the archives. Some of it snippets of old magazines. And a few bits you may have seen before.

It occasionally turns into pub-trivia, but that's what we're here for; the footnotes to the cannon. A few of the coincidences are a little stretched - did McCartney read about his future wife's mother's death in a newspaper on the week he was due to catch a plane? Maybe...?

But - and I have no hestiation in resorting to cliché - a splendid time is guaranteed for all. Well, as long as all of you are Beatles fans.

A few tickets are still available for tonight's performance in London. Grab them if you can.

Bits of it are just sublimely beautiful. Listening to George Harrison's first performance of I, Me, Mine is breathtaking. And then it is devastating to watch the fall-out as the emotional illiteracy of his band-mates drive him from the group.

There are moments of genuine shock - like the hidden microphone capturing a private discussion between John and Paul. And moments of genuine wonder as you watch The Beatles try to find the right lyrics for a song. You'll feel like screaming at the TV as they miss the obvious lyrics which are burned into your mind.

Is there a bit of Spın̈al Tap in there? Obviously! Endless meandering discussions, weird little in-jokes, and the interminable technobabble of recording musicians are now a well-worn trope. But Peter Jackson brings it all to life - not least with the glorious improvements to the cheap 16mm prints.

It is enormously enjoyable watching these blokes dick about. Jamming, Elvis impressions, banging away on the piano. But, after a while, it's obvious that there's no impetus there. Without the guiding influence of Brian Epstein to tell them what to do and when to do it, they're adrift. It becomes the Paul McCartney show - simply because he's the only one who seems to want to produce anything. That, of course, builds up the resentment of the others from being bossed around - but in the absence of a unifying figure, what else could be done?

The tone changes when Billy Preston arrives. No only does he light up the screen with his smile and infectious good humour (c'mon, how big would the smile on your face be if The Beatles casually asked you to be in their band?!?!) but all of a sudden the boys are on their best behaviour and the music starts flowing. Preston makes playing the electric piano look effortless. The chords flow like endless wind. As soon as he steps away, the energy goes flat.

I loved the glimpses of an alternative history. What if they had played a Libyan amphitheatre with Nicky Hopkins on keyboard? Imagine if The Beatles did their gig on the rooftop of Parliament - with Dylan singing backup? A concert on Primrose Hill but without George?

And, in the end, it's the people outside of the Fab Four who make this movie. Debbie Wellum - who is a disembodied voice - is an absolute superhero in her diversionary tactics with the police. Mal's cheerful meandering through the background is a delightful presence. Glyn's wardrobe is scene-stealingly fabulous. The Beatles aren't just The Beatles - if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an infinitely patient team to elevate a rock band.

The final concert is amazing. How do you decide which angle you show to the world? Jackson sensibly abdicates this decision and gives us a control-room view of all the cameras simultaneously! Which gives us these rather wonderful shots:

Isn't it a pity that it has to end. To be trapped in a room with such talent - seeing how they make it up as they go - what a joy and honour.

Things are never as bleak as they seem. And, with judicious editing, a memory can be more uplifting than prosaic reality.

Thanks! I hate it!

Ingredients

• Raspberry Pi
• USB floppy drive
• Audio Cable / Headphones
• USB Battery

WHY?!?!

As I discussed yesterday, it's possible to fit half an hour of speech on a single floppy disk. The best band in the world are The Beatles, and their shortest album is A Hard Day's Night - at 30 minutes, 45 seconds. Beatles audio was designed to be played over crappy AM radio in mono, so is well suited to being compressed using the latest audio codecs.

OK, I also got sent a USB floppy drive to review and wanted to do something interesting with it!

Compress your audio

A floppy disk can hold a maximum of 1,457,664 Bytes.

Using the Opus Audio Codec, you can squish audio to miniscule file sizes.

I got a single WAV of the album, and ran this command - which is about the best quality within the target filesize:

opusenc hdn.wav --downmix-mono --bitrate 6.7 --framesize 60 --discard-comments --discard-pictures --cvbr hdn.opus

That got it down to a trim 1,429,105 bytes. Enough space left over for some low-resolution cover art!

You can shrink the audio by a few more bytes by using removing the default metadata from .opus files.

How does it sound?

The copyright for Hard Day's Night should have expired in 2014. Sadly, the law was changed in the UK in 2013. So it doesn't expire for another 14 years. Here are some samples which I am using for non-commercial research purposes. This, I hope, falls under the fair dealing exception.

(I've re-encoded it to MP3 in order for it to play in the browser.)

Building It

Sadly, the Pi Zero doesn't have an an audio out jack. But the USB floppy drive is pretty big, so we don't lose much space by going for a full-sized Pi. The Pi has a weird combined video / audio jack. I powered it using a USB Battery.

All held together with rubber-bands. Classy!

Here's a high tech block diagram:

🔋---→💻---→ 🎧 
      ↑
      |
      💾

Run these magic commands

I used Raspberry Pi OS Lite which doesn't have a desktop manager, and fits on a 4GB microSD card.

Set the audio output to go via the headphone jack:

sudo raspi-config

Then choose: Option 7 (Advanced Options), then A4 (Audio), then 1 (Headphones).

Set the headphone volume to 100% (or whatever you fancy):

amixer sset "Headphone" 100%

Make sure you have the Opus tools and codecs installed:

sudo apt install opus-tools

Make sure that the floppy disk has been detected:

dmesg

It will probably show us as sda - mount it with

sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt

Go to the directory with your audio in it:

cd /mnt

Decode the file and pass it through to aplay - this should start playing music straight through your headphones.

opusdec --force-wav --quiet hdn.opus - | aplay

ENJOY!

Notes

Depending on the speed of your drive, and the framesize of your audio, you may experience buffer-underruns. This will cause the audio to skip. Just like jogging with a CD Walkman!

I printed the album cover on a Bluetooth Thermal Printer.

ToDo

• Build a circuit to let me press buttons to play, pause, and skip tracks.
• Make it auto-play when the disk is inserted.
• Use the Rockband Moggs to make acapella / vocal only disks. Should be better quality without the backing music.
• 3D print a case so I can go jogging with it while wearing a shell suit.
• Register a patent on the blockchain so people have to pay me a trillionth of a EdentCoin every time they play music using my brilliant invention.

Put your ideas in the comment box.

Thanks

Huge thanks to Alistair for sending me a bunch of old floppies to play with.

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I think it looks great during video calls.

Here's how I did it:

Step One - Stalk eBay

With lockdown, I couldn't exactly go to my local record store. And I didn't fancy rummaging through bins of second hand items trying to find exactly what I wanted. So I decided to buy a job-lot of records from eBay.

Beatles collections are regularly sold. Some are designed for people who want pristine records, and some who want original pressings. Prices can go absolutely wild. I managed to find someone selling a collection of Beatles (and solo) records which had attracted no bids. While other sets went for £400, I snapped up 33 records for £165 including delivery.

A fiver per LP!

While it might have been nice to have factory-fresh covers, I kinda like the worn æsthetic.

OK, it didn't include every record that I wanted. And had a few that I didn't really want on my wall (sorry Michael Jackson fans!) so the real cost was about a tenner per record.

Step Two - Hang 'em High!

Sticking things to walls is fun! But I didn't want to damage the record sleeves, and I wasn't overly keen on drilling a hundreds of holes in the wall. I considered lots of solutions (see later) but ended up using...

STICKY MAGNETS!

These strong magnets come with 3M glue pads to stick them to non-magnetic surfaces.

These particular ones were £9 for 10 magnets. A cost of £1.80 per album

Step 3 Test

I stuck one of the magnets to the wall. The glue held it tight, so I tested whether two magnets could hold up a the weight of the cover and the record. They couldn't. I could have bought some more powerful magnets, but I decided just to ditch the vinyl.

I didn't want to damage the record sleeve, so I stuck the magnet to a bit of cardboard which was small enough to fit inside the sleeve.

Moment of truth...

IT WORKS!!

Step 3 - Stabilise

Getting the interior magnet in exactly in the right place was a bit annoying. Especially as my grid wasn't exactly perfect.

The strip of cardboard was just what I needed. I could snap the magnets together, and then move the album sleeve vertically and horizontally - keeping the magnet in place.

Flapping open

Some albums aren't just sleeves, they open up gatefold style. I didn't want them flapping about, so needed a non-destructive way to keep them shut.

I used paperclips. They're small, discreet, and cheap.

Sorry that I didn't use some 3D printed, biosonic, weak-nuclear-force, mechanised doo-dahs. Sometimes simple is best!

Step 4 - More Music

I had 10 magnets, so I stuck five albums up - one by each Beatle, and Sgt Pepper.

Step 5 - More Magnets

I had proved that the set-up worked. So I bought a butt-load more magnets. They're cheaper in bulk. And you can always find a use for a spare magnet.

Final Costs

• £10.31 per LP
• £ 1.69 per pair of magnets
• =====
• £12.00 per stuck up sleeve. Not bad!

I also have a bunch of records to sell, or swap, and four pairs of magnets for other projects.

Other options I considered

Buy pre-framed records.

Some enterprising folk sell pre-framed Beatles record covers for £20 each.

Didn't include the vinyl. But ready to go.

Solo Frames

If I just wanted 12x12 frames, the cheapest I found was around £9 each.

Print your own

There are loads of high resolution scans of album covers. Printing a ready-to-hang canvas box frame would cost about £15 each.

Minor risk of copyright infringement. Lack of authenticity. A bit sterile?

Simple Hangers

I found these hangers with built in record sleeves for £15

The plastic might be too glossy. The reviews mention the sleeves tearing easily. There's also no sense of mystique that you get with floating magnetics.

But, £1.88 per record is a good price, and they're a lot easier to hang - just bash a nail into the wall!

3D printed shelves

I found a bunch of 3D printed mini-shelves on Etsy

They were about £2 - £4 each. They looked nice - but I was worried they'd be too fragile. And, they're really only suitable for holding records. With my magnets, I can swap to anything light enough.

Final Thoughts

I don't care if I'm going through a mid-life high-fidelity crisis. I've turned a plain, boring wall into something that brings me joy. If my tastes change, I can quickly and easily shuffle the record sleeves around.

And there's no way I'm buying a record player!

Famous and important people have companies. Lots of them use lawyers and accountants to handle their business affairs. But occasionally they have to sign their own paperwork.

I've spent a bit of lockdown sperlunking through some of the old and interesting documents. Here's what I found, feel free to add your own curios in the comments box.

The Beatles

I'm a big Beatles fan. You can read the documents related to "The Beatles Ltd" going back to 1967.

And there, nestled in a document changing The Beatles Ltd to Apple Music Ltd is George Harrison's signature.

Monty Python

All the documents I could find were signed by lawyers - but this one has a nice titbit.

James Bond

Sir Sean Connery was briefly a director of Independent News And Media Ltd

Science Fiction (Double Feature)

The British Science Fiction Association has a long and turbulent history.

Right at its incorporation are signatures from Brian Aldiss, E.C. Tubb, H. Kenneth Bulmer, and others.

Spies like us

Former head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington became a Director of Refuge.

Of course, that's probably not her real signature!

Amy Winehouse

The troubled singer was the Director of several companies.

Steve Jobs

Is there a point to any of this?

Well, it's not exactly like I can leave the house to go autograph hunting. Right?

Yesterday...

In 1960s the predominant form of music recording was in mono. Indeed, The Beatles weren't involved in many of their stereo mixes.

If you listen to some of those early tracks, you'll get an idea of how stereo worked back in the day. For example, here's the right speaker from "I Wanna Be Your Man"...

While there's a little bit of mixing going on - the vocals are almost entirely constrained to one side. If we take a look at the waveform, we can get an idea how how diverse the stereo track is.

Here's the left of "Get Back"

...and the right...

Slightly better mixing - although you'll note that the lead guitar is exclusively on the left. The effect is almost as though you are standing on stage with The Fab Four and have them playing all around you. Almost...

What would it have been like if 5.1 surround sound was available back then?

(As an aside, some of their later solo work was released in Quad format.)

..and Today

If you have a surround-sound system, it is likely that it will try to "upmix" a stereo recording. That is, use digital jiggery-pokery to play the sound in all the speakers. But that's an imperfect substitute. Sounds get muddled together and the whole thing sounds a bit shabby.

Due to the limited nature of The Beatles' recording technology it's hard to get pristine, discrete tracks of Beatles sessions. That is, a file which only contains the bass guitar part, or a track with just the vocals.

Until, that is, The Beatles Rock Band video game!

For the game, engineers went back to the original master tapes and separated each element of the recording. Rock Band has a simple premise - play along with the track - if you miss a note, it doesn't make any noise. So the game needs individual guitar, drums, bass, vocals, etc.

If you've got a copy of The Beatles Rockband, you can extract the song files from the disc. These are MOGG (Multitrack OGG) files - there are 64 different songs available.

On some songs, it's clear that these are pure extractions from the original tape.

Here, for example, is just the bass-line from "Get Back":

On others, it appears that the engineers have done the best that they have with limited mono and stereo recordings. Have a listen to this "solo" drum track, again taken from "I Wanna Be Your Man":

Tomorrow Always Knows

So, this is what I'm doing. Taking those multitracks and assembling an album which attempts to recreate The Beatles' stereo sound in surround. Ringo behind you, Paul's bass on your right, John singing off-centre, and a George solo shining in the corner.

I'm not an audio engineer - I'm not trying to create a beautiful modern album with perfectly mixed levels and a blended sound. I'm also trying, as far as possible, to stay away from fancy audio tricks and sweeping sound effects.

I want you to feel like you have been magically transported inside Abbey Road and have the Fab Four surrounding you.

Here's a snippet from "Get Back" in 5.0 OGG format. You need to listen to it on a surround sound system in order to get the full effect.

As you can see from the waveform, all the tracks are fairly discrete, which makes it simply a matter of deciding which channel to place them in.

Take a listen to this "Dear Prudence" sample on a 5.1 system. You'll hopefully notice that some of the music is deliberately placed in the virtual "rear" speaker - that is, it should appear to come from directly behind you (assuming your speakers are properly calibrated).

Well - that's my summer project. You'll find some similar works done by much more talented remixers floating around the web. But if you ever want to hear my take on the classics, you'll either have to pay me a visit or wait for copyright laws to regain a sense of perspective.