Bibek Acharya
The Beatles were, are, and always will be the most famous band in all of rock music history. That’s the standard statement that rolls off the tongue, and it is, of course, true in many respects. However, the stark reality of the matter was that during their tenure, things were often far from rosy – and if it wasn’t for the ultimate unity of the music, the ‘Yellow Submarine’ could have quite easily sunk to the deep depths of the sea with how strained their dynamic became.
Naturally, the top authorial voice on this state of affairs is Paul McCartney, who, as one half of the band’s most prolific songwriting partnership, has never shied away from doling out his real opinions on their work over the years. After all, as much as The Beatles may have seemed like a virtuosic goldmine, they did have to wade through a lot of dead weight in order to finally find their classic gemstones.
Of the two, without pitting them up against each other, Lennon did typically receive more of the acclaim for being an insightful artistic genius. Macca could pen a hit, sure, but sometimes his sole focus on the prize led to him churning out some pretty formulaic tunes that he perhaps regrets as time has worn on.
Across 13 albums and hits too many and massive to count in the space of only seven years, in some respects, it’s inevitable that some tracks fell to the wayside or simply didn’t live up to the heady heights of some of their sonic compatriots. Although it is admittedly a small minority, those are the certain tunes that McCartney wishes just never came to be – or at least could be deleted from history if he were given the choice.
But alas, as much as he is a god of rock and roll, he doesn’t quite possess that divine power to erase the memory or turn back the clock, so the songs stay on his otherwise illustrious discography. Indeed, one of his most scathing reviews came from the very beginning of the journey, in the form of the tune ‘Little Child’ from the Fab Four’s sophomore album With the Beatles. McCartney originally composed the track as a bit of a lacklustre effort, with Ringo Starr in mind to carry the load. But even his bandmate could clearly see straight through the nothingness and passed it up in favour of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, leaving Macca to flog the dead horse.
“‘Little Child’ was a work job,” McCartney admitted in the book Many Years From Now. “Certain songs were inspirational and you just followed that. Certain other songs were, ‘Right, come on, two hours, song for Ringo for the album’.” Complete with a scathing backhanded insult at Starr, it’s clear ‘Little Child’ was far from the musician in his lyrical prime, and as such a track he’d really rather forget.
In that similar vein, McCartney was all about throwing his supposed comrades under the bus because he happened to give George Harrison his big break only because he felt the song he’d written wasn’t up to par. Speaking of Harrison’s lead on ‘I Just Want to Dance With You’ from A Hard Day’s Night, he said: “It was a bit of a formula song. We knew that in E if you went to an A flat minor, you could always make a song with those chords; that change pretty much always excited you.”
Macca added: “We wouldn’t have actually wanted to sing it because it was a bit… The ones that pandered to the fans in truth were our least favourite songs but they were good. They were good for the time. The nice thing about it was to actually pull a song off on a slim little premise like that. A simple little idea. It was songwriting practice.”
Ultimately, as much as these were the tunes he’d rather not appear in his songbook, McCartney didn’t need to worry much about the efforts as he just palmed them off on the others anyway. It boils down to the fact that amid potential criticisms of his work, he wanted to prove that he could be as fruitful a writer as Lennon and sometimes simply fell short of that mark. He does hold plenty assets to vie to that claim, but it’s clear others are just best to left to the Beatles graveyard of days gone by.
