The Beatles by Steve Turner Read Free Book Online Page A

memory at all of the tune,” Taylor later recounted. “You have to remember that melodies are as common around the Beatles as bugs in May. Some grow into bright butterflies and others shrivel and die. I wonder whether Paul really made up that song as he went along or whether it was running through his head already. Anyway, shortly afterwards, he arrived at the office with a demo tape of the latest single – ‘Hello Goodbye.’”
    The last part of the record, where the Beatles repeat the line ‘Hela, hey, aloha’ came about spontaneously in the studio. (‘Aloha’ is an affectionate form of Hawaiian greeting.)
    If ‘Hello Goodbye’ was nothing more than a word game set to music, in the mystical climate of 1967, Paul was expected to offer a deeper interpretation. In an interview with Disc , he gallantly tried to produce an explanation: “the answer to everything is simple. It’s a song about everything and nothing…to have white. That’s the amazing thing about life.”
    â€˜Hello Goodbye’ was released as a single in November 1967 and topped the charts in both Britain and America. The final ‘aloha’ chorus was used in the Magical Mystery Tour film.

    ONLY A NORTHERN SONG
    Originally recorded in February 1967 as George’s contribution to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , ‘Only A Northern Song’ first saw the light of day in Yellow Submarine. The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles. Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30 per cent of whose shares belonged to John and Paul, with Ringo and George owning only 1.6 per cent each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the group’s main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was a merely a contracted writer.
    In ‘Only A Northern Song’, George complained that it didn’t really matter what he wrote because the bulk of the money was going into other people’s pockets. Underlying this was his feeling, only expressed publicly after the group had broken up, that his songs were being ignored and that he his contributions were used as mere tokens.
    â€œAt first it was just great (to get one song on each album), it was like, hey, I’m getting in on the act too!” George commented. “After a while I did (come to resent this), especially when I had good songs. Sometimes I had songs that were better than some of their songs and we’d have to record maybe eight of theirs before they’d listen to one of mine.”
    It’s not surprising that George, who in 1964 claimed “security is the only thing I want. Money to do nothing with, money to have in case you want to do something”, ultimately became the Beatle least keen to resurrect the Beatles.

    ALL TOGETHER NOW
    â€˜All Together Now’ was written in the studio in May 1967 with Paul as main contributor. It was intended as another ‘Yellow Submarine’ and John was delighted later when he heard that British soccer crowds were singing it.
    One of the effects of psychedelia was a renewed interest in the innocence of childhood and nursery rhymes would begin to affect their post-Pepper work. Folklorist Iona Opie, editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes , believes that as the lines sound so familiar, it draws more on a shared memory: “I can’t distinguish any particular influence on ‘All Together Now’,” she says. “So many ABC rhymes exist and there are counting rhymes like ‘One, two, three, four, Mary at the cottage door..’ which come pretty close. The song seems to come out of a universal subconscious.”
    Paul has confirmed that he saw it in the tradition of children’s songs (“It’s a Play Away command song”) but that he was also playing with the dual meaning