Sgt. Pepper's icon set to drum up £150,000 [Times]

he marketing team describe the 110-room four-star hotel as "boutique" but it lacks the intimacy and truly original touches to be classified as such. In the rooms you can watch Beatles films piped directly on to a flat-screen TV while lounging beneath artwork by Beatles artist Shannon, whose work is mediocre at best. Other artworks, acquired from Lennon's relatives and Mike McCartney (Paul's brother), are scattered around the hotel.

"The key thing is the art work," said Neil Sankey, the marketing manager, during a sneak preview. Hmm, perhaps they should concentrate on the music.

The hotel has some nice touches. It claims to be the only hotel in Liverpool where each of the three concierges hold the "key to the city", meaning they are brimming with useful local knowledge. The sweeping ornate staircase has been restored and is punctuated by polished marble pillars. It encloses a half-moon underlit glass lift still in its original shaft. And maintenance is informed instantly by email when a bulb blows anywhere in the building.

Downstairs, though, is a bit of a write off. An underground conference room with swirling brown Seventies' style carpet sits in a dead end beyond the token Buddha-themed Hari's Bar, a bow to the Beatles trippy Indian spell, decked out with the sort of artefacts commonly found at kitsch spas and clad in hideously expensive £1,000-a-roll silk wallpaper.

Room rates currently start at £120/night, but there are also £650-a-night Lennon and McCartney suites that feature as their respective "themed pieces" a white baby grand and a suit of armor. Because Macca's a knight, get it? Yeah, I think that room should get a bit of a discount, too, unless the armor is there to be worn.

Hard Days Night Hotel [Official site]
'Liverpool's Beatles hotel should stick to the music' [Times Online]

It's not as fetching as the $1.5 million pair of Lennon-worn specs that went up for auction over the summer, but there's something—how do you say it?—really really creepy about the fact that a lock of the former Beatle's hair fetched almost as much as one of your more obnoxious SUVs during an auction at Gorringes House. The AP story quotes auction-house spokeswoman Francesca Collin as saying, "To have some of Lennon's hair along with a signed note from him really does give it fantastic provenance and authenticity," but I can't help but wonder if the "unnamed telephone bidder" who won the auction isn't some nostalgia-crazed mad scientist who's sitting by his postbox, waiting for his bounty to arrive so he can begin the cloning work that he's worked toward for his entire life.

Lock Of Lennon's Hair Sells For $48,000 [AP]
[Photo: AP]

Fender is producing copies of Police guitarist Andy Summers's 1961 Telecaster — which he bought used in 1972 for $200 — which are authentic right down to the broken bridge and quirky custom electronics. The 250 replicas are being offered at $15,000 each; dealers have already sold most of them, sight unseen, according to Fender and dealers.

This summer, Mr. Summers is using three of the replicas on his band's reunion tour; he is leaving the original home in Los Angeles. The British-born guitarist says that visually and musically he can't tell the difference between the doppelgangers and the original, whose battered paint job he compares to "a map of a foreign planet."

When Mr. Summers was shown the first finished duplicate, at a recording studio in Los Angeles, he says he experienced "a quantum-physics moment. I said: 'It's back at my house. How's it here? It's an impossibility!"'

Such sentiments run counter to the emotional attachment many guitarists feel to their main instrument. In an autobiography published last year, Mr. Summers wrote about his Telecaster in deeply romantic terms: "Arriving at this guitar was a bit like having several relationships with the wrong women before finding the one you truly love and will spend the rest of your life with."

Selling duplicates to potentially any hobbyist with a five-figure budget, then, spawned "a peculiar feeling," Mr. Summers acknowledges. But he says, he doesn't want to be "insane" in his possessiveness. "People love it and I want to share it." The "reasonably substantial" fee Fender is paying him has helped him get over any lingering hesitation. "It's like found money," he says.

On the tour, Mr. Summers's bandmate Sting is playing a replica of his worn 1955 Fender Precision bass. The company says it made just one copy for him, and hasn't approached Sting about a production model of his instrument.

A move that's probably for the best, all things considered. Fender wouldn't want to turn off that tap too early, what with the economy being as topsy-turvy as it is right now!

The Easy Way To Hard Rock: 'Distressed' Guitars

Lennon's glasses for sale in Web auction [Reuters]

^* Unless you're the person who started this thread. "Aretha Franklin never played an instrument in her life!" Except for the piano she's seated at in every picture of her in a studio ever! You tell 'em, assembled Monkees fanboys!

Today, concert-promotion behemoth Live Nation announced that it would be rechristening Miami's Jackie Gleason Theater, giving it a Fillmore makeover and calling it—deep breath—the Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater. In a Billboard.biz piece on the rebranding, Live Nation CEO Bruce Eskowitz had this to say:

"We do this all day, so I think you can look at us converting other buildings we have in North America to House of Blues or Fillmores, as well as continue to expand."

We're just wondering if Eskowitz's plans to "continue to expand" also refer to the increasingly unwieldy names of his company's venues. After all, if they pick a venue in, say, Sault Ste. Marie for their next bit of rebranding, the new, dizzying heights of ten-word names can be reached—before being promptly ignored by 95% of concertgoers, of course.

Live Nation Expands Fillmore To Miami [Billboard.biz]