The Beatles up for grabs
QUESTION How did Michael Jackson come to own most of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songs?
The history of The Beatles catalogue is complicated. Michael Jackson bought the publishing rights to the songs, not the songwriters’ rights, which were worth 50 per cent of the royalty fees, so Paul McCartney was never going to go hungry.
The Beatles were earning so much money in the Sixties that they were being taxed at 90 per cent, hence George harrison’s song Taxman. Putting the publishing rights in a public company meant their money would be taxed as capital gains at a far lower rate.
In 1963, Lennon and McCartney assigned their publishing rights to Northern Songs, a company created by The Beatles manager Brian epstein and music publisher Dick James.
Lennon and McCartney each retained 15 per cent of the shares; George harrison and Ringo Starr held 1.6 per cent between them; Brian epstein’s NeMS company was assigned 7.5 per cent; and Dick James and his partner Charles Silver had 37.5 per cent. The remaining 23.4 per cent were owned by various financial institutions.
Following Brian epstein’s death, Lennon and McCartney’s relationship with Dick James went sour and he chose to sell his shares to media magnate Sir Lew Grade, head of ATV.
Lennon and McCartney had hoped to take control of the company, but such was the financial clout of Grade, that they were forced to sell their shares.
In 1984, ATV was bought by Australian billionaire Robert holmes à Court. he soon put the music catalogue up for sale.
In the early eighties, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney were firm friends, recording the hits Say Say Say and The Girl Is Mine together.
Ironically, it was McCartney who advised Jackson that buying up publishing rights was good business. Jackson received a tip that ATV Music was available and bought it for $47.5 million in 1985. At the time, McCartney was unwilling or unable to buy the rights. he was apparently livid that Jackson went ahead with the deal.
It proved a shrewd investment. Sony Corp paid Jackson $95 million in 1995 to merge ATV with Sony and form Sony/ ATV Music Publishing, a 50- 50 joint venture.
In 2016, Sony officially agreed to buy out the Jackson estate’s stake in Sony/ ATV for $750 million, making Sony the sole owner of the Lennon-McCartney catalogue of The Beatles songs.
Colin Hall, Rochester, Kent.
QUESTION How did cottage cheese acquire its name?
CoTTAGe cheese differs from other cheese in that it is not pressed, so the curds are loose, and it doesn’t require rennet (an enzyme found in the stomach of calves that is used in cheese-making to separate the curds and whey), but uses naturally occurring mesophilic lactic acid bacteria instead.
The milk is simply put near a fire or warm place to trigger the bacterial action. It is easy to make and has been eaten for thousands of years.
The ‘cottage’ part in the name simply refers to the fact this type of cheese was made in country homes.
The first documented reference to cottage cheese appeared in the July 1831 Godey’s Lady’s Book, Volume 3, an American women’s paper, in a wonderfully scathing article titled Country Lodgings, A Sketch, by a Miss Leslie: ‘The aspect of the tea table was not inviting. every thing was in the smallest possible quantity decency would allow.
‘There was a plate of rye bread, and a plate of wheat, and a basket of crackers; and another plate with half a dozen paltry cakes that looked as if they had been bought under the old Court house; some morsels of dried beef on two little tea-cup plates; and a small glass dish of that preparation of curds, which in vulgar language is called smear case, but whose
nom de guerre is cottage cheese, at least that was the appellation given it by our hostess.’
Mrs G. L. Fearne, Haverhill, Suffolk.
QUESTION Are reports of an Italian supervolcano scaremongering?
CAMPI Flegrei, or ‘burning fields’, in the Bay of Naples is an active supervolcano. It will erupt again — the question is when and how big the explosion will be.
Its vast network of underground chambers formed hundreds of thousands of years ago, stretching from Naples to under the Mediterranean Sea.
There were vast eruptions 200,000, 39,000, 35,000 and 12,000 years ago. The Campanian Ignimbrite eruption of 39,000 years ago threw 70 cubic miles of molten rock and 450,000 tons of sulphur dioxide 45 miles into the stratosphere.
The ash cloud, which stretched across europe as far as central Russia, was high in fluorine, which poisoned plants.
Animals starved, temperatures dropped by 4c and some anthropologists believe it may have hastened the extinction of our cousins, the Neanderthals.
The past 500 years have been peaceful for the supervolcano. There has been little activity since the 1538 Monte Nuovo eruption. half a million people live in the seven-mile-long caldera — the cauldronlike hollow of the volcano.
however, heightened activity within the caldera saw the Italian government raise the threat level in December 2016. Fears are growing that magma could be reaching the critical degassing pressure — the trigger point for an eruption.
An eruption will occur when the pressure of this molten rock causes the ground to stretch to breaking point.
A study published in the scientific journal Nature in May 2017, which claimed ‘ results provide the first quantitative evidence that Campi Flegrei is evolving towards conditions more favourable to eruption’, prompted scaremongering headlines around the world.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
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