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A Day In The Life Of The Beatles Brain Of Britain

Since the '90s, Richard Porter has been zipping around London showing Beatles fans all the band's most famous hot-spots and regaling them with deep dive stories about the Fab Four. He's even earned the title "Beatles Brain of Britain."

In this special dispatch from our recent World Cafe trip to London, Porter shows us the Abbey Road crosswalk where The Beatles shot its iconic album cover. It's now a tourist attraction where people risk life and limb to recreate the photo while cars zoom by. We visit Montagu Square where Paul McCartney worked on the song "Eleanor Rigby," hear the tale of John Lennon's dramatic drug bust and Porter lets us in on which Beatles song was inspired by an incessant car alarm. And we make it to 3 Savile Row where The Beatles gave its last public performance up on the roof. Hop along on our Beatles tour in the gallery and player.

Copyright 2021 XPN. To see more, visit XPN.

Talia Schlanger hosts World Cafe, which is distributed by NPR and produced by WXPN, the public radio service of the University of Pennsylvania. She got her start in broadcasting at the CBC, Canada's national public broadcaster. She hosted CBC Radio 2 Weekend Mornings on radio and was the on-camera host for two seasons of the television series CBC Music: Backstage, as well as several prime-time music TV specials for CBC, including the Quietest Concert Ever: On Fundy's Ocean Floor. Schlanger also guest hosted various flagship shows on CBC Radio One, including As It Happens, Day 6 and Because News. Schlanger also won a Canadian Screen Award as a producer for CBC Music Presents: The Beetle Roadtrip Sessions, a cross-country rock 'n' roll road trip.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).