The Beatles flop Paul McCartney turned into a solo hit
John Lennon once noted that The Beatles‘ 1968 LP The White Album was the least collaborative record the ‘fab four’ ever made. It marked a distinct shift in the dynamics the group had once relied upon, and there was a sense that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were drifting apart both as people and as a creative unit.
That being said, the album wasn’t entirely devoid of collaboration. It’s just that everyone was getting a little weary of compromising their vision for the sake of the other members. In the book Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, John discusses the creation of The White Album in a 1968 interview: “In India, we were writing a bit together,” he begins “But this album we wrote least of all together. Just ’cause of circumstances and all that, y’know. Or maybe we didn’t feel like it. I don’t know what.”
Lennon went on to note that The Beatles made a concerted effort to work together despite growing tensions. “But we do it any way, any combination you can think of, we do it, y’know,” he recalled. “From a line, from nothing — like ‘Birthday’ was written in the studio from nothing. ‘Let’s do one like that.’ And we did it.”
‘Birthday’ is fairly unique among its peers because, unlike most of the songs on The White Album, it was written and recorded very quickly. In just one day, in fact. McCartney was the one to kick things off, having arrived earlier at the studio than his bandmates. To keep himself occupied, he began playing around with the song’s main riff. When the rest of the band arrived, they developed the idea, eventually moulding it into ‘Birthday’.
Discussing the origins of the track in Many Years From Now, McCartney recalls: “We thought, ‘Why not make something up?’ So we got a riff going and arranged it around this riff. We said, ‘We’ll go to there for a few bars, then we’ll do this for a few bars.’ We added some lyrics, then we got the friends who were there to join in on the chorus. So that is 50-50 John and me, made up on the spot and recorded all on the same evening.”
The Beatles must have regarded ‘Birthday’ as something of a throwaway because they never released it as a single, meaning it failed to chart in the UK despite being featured on the chart-topping White Album, which hung around the upper echelons of the charts for eight weeks. Then, in 1990, Paul McCartney decided to release a live rendition of ‘Birthday’. It reached number 29 in the UK charts and stuck around for three weeks. The accompanying album, Tripping the Live Fantastic, reached number 17 and stayed there for no less than eleven weeks. So, although it was never a hit for The Beatles, this classic White Album cut found new life through McCartney’s solo career.
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