Beatles Bits: Weekly news roundup

Beatles songs have been streamed more than a billion times since the band's music was made available via various services last year. That all adds up to more than $17 million in royalties.

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Did Paul McCartney intend to collaborate on a film with "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry? According to a new oral history on the classic series, it was in the offing.
There were several aborted film projects he was involved with, including one that would have seen Roddenberry collaborating with Paul McCartney, at the time soaring (no pun intended) with his Beatles follow-up band, Wings.

SACKETT: I have no idea whatever happened to that. It's probably stuck in a file, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Paul contacted him and was a Star Trek fan. He invited us to a concert, which was great, and we met backstage. Paul hired Gene to write a story about the band and it was a crazy story. Paul gave him an outline and Gene was supposed to do something with it. It was bands from outer space and they were having a competition. Gene was open to things at this point; Star Trek wasn't happening and he wasn't getting his scripts produced, but he had a family to feed. Gene began working on it and it was about the time they started talking about bringing back Trek, so he never got to complete anything for Paul.
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Where does Paul McCartney stand on the "Brexit"? In a state of confusion, apparently.
“I think like a lot of people, I was very confused,” McCartney said Monday from a tour stop in Denmark.
“I was actually doing concerts and I physically couldn’t get to it,” he said from his current European tour, which moves to the states next month. (McCartney plays a pair of shows at Washington, D.C.’s Verizon Center in August.) “But even if I had have been able to, I was so confused. You were hearing what seemed to be good arguments on both sides.”
Despite saying he wouldn’t have voted, “I think I would have come down on the remain side because people like the Governor of the Bank of England, a lot of financial experts, were saying that,” McCartney said. “I think the strongest argument that I heard, a friend of mine who was a political journalist said, [is that people] shouldn’t forget this is the longest sustained peace in Europe.”
As we posted here last week, Paul's brother Mike apparently had no uncertainties, tweeting a photo of his ballot marked "no."

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