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In the earliest days of The Beatles, the fact that John Lennon and Paul McCartney began composing their own material as opposed to using songs provided by other songwriters was highly unusual. In fact, at the time — the early 1960s — it simply wasn't done. Undoubtedly in the beginning it was probably seen more as an oddity rather than an indication of the duo ultimately being credited as one of the great songwriting teams of all time. "It wasn't the norm," Bill Harry, editor of Liverpool's Mersey Beat, the first and most recognized newspaper devoted to the local music scene, and lifelong friend of The Beatles, explains in an exclusive interview. "In America you have the Brill Building and things like that, with professional songwriters like Carole King and different people. That was the situation. The songwriters wrote the songs and the artists were given songs by the songwriters. It...

Looking back at Derek Jarman’s 1987 experimental manifestation of the loss of traditional English culture, The Last of England, his creation remains an incredibly unconventional, but highly personal semi-narrative that cuts through a scorched Earth left behind by Margaret Thatcher and the AIDS epidemic. The film is lined with his thematic staples of explicit homoeroticism and the punk movement that he was so much a part of during the 70s. With help from his longtime on screen collaborators Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh and Nigel Terry, Jarman made a return to the Super 8 format for its low cost and political freedom, and with it found the format fitting of the kaleidoscopic nightmare he managed to mold. His often manically abrasive, sometimes hauntingly vexatious aesthetic serves an imperative purpose, but man, is it hard to watch.

We move through time at an expedient rate – actually, dizzying is more accurate. Nearly all...