The Beatles songs by Paul McCartney would rather forget: “Just work songs”
In April 1970, The Beatles finally broke up amid growing tension, parting the invincible John Lennon and Paul McCartney songwriting partnership for the first time since their formative years as The Quarrymen. Lennon embarked on his more politically fuelled solo mission with the Plastic Ono band, while McCartney formed Wings with his wife, Linda.
These two disparate creative directions illustrated part of what made The Beatles so powerful through the 1960s. As Lennon and McCartney emerged from the comfort of classic R&B covers, they began to fashion complementary yet nuanced respective songwriting identities. Lennon would favour darker, introspective songs, while McCartney handled the twee, romantic side of proceedings.
That creative contrast became one of The Beatles’ greatest strengths. Even when Lennon and McCartney were pulling in opposite artistic directions, the tension between their styles ensured the band rarely became too sentimental or too abrasive for long.
Towards the end of The Beatles’ time together, arguments were a common feature of studio sessions. A notably sour climate brewed when McCartney insisted on the merits of his divisive Abbey Road contribution ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. Although the band spent hours trying to get it right, McCartney was the only one of the four who liked it.
The disagreement over ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ also reflected how fractured the group had become by the late 1960s. What might once have been settled with humour or compromise increasingly turned into stubborn creative stand-offs as each member fought harder for control over the band’s direction.
Lennon once declared that he “hated” ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, adding that McCartney “did everything to make it into a single, and it never was, and it never could’ve been”. Meanwhile, Harrison noted McCartney’s penchant for the bizarre and gaudy. “Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs,” he told Crawdaddy in the 1970s. “I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity.”
While McCartney’s bandmates became rather vocal critics of his work by the end of the 1960s, the bassist was all too aware of some of his songwriting duds. In past interviews, the former Beatle has dismissed a few rather forgettable Beatles tracks that failed to hit the mark.
Discussing ‘What You’re Doing’, a track from the band’s fourth studio album, Beatles for Sale, McCartney noted how what began as a promising idea fell flat on its face. “I think it was a little more mine than John’s,” McCartney explained in Many Years From Now. “You sometimes start a song and hope the best will arrive by the time you get to the chorus, but sometimes that’s all you get, and I suspect this was one of them. Maybe it’s a better recording than it is a song; some of them are. Sometimes a good recording would enhance a song.”
McCartney’s honesty about his weaker material is striking considering how fiercely many fans defend every corner of The Beatles’ catalogue. Rather than pretending every song was a masterpiece, he often acknowledged that some tracks simply existed to fill out albums during an astonishingly prolific period.
The 1964 album holds another song McCartney remembers as a failed attempt at a single. “‘Every Little Thing’, like most of the stuff I did, was my attempt at the next single… but it became an album filler rather than the great almighty single. It didn’t have quite what was required,” he said.
Likewise, McCartney once downplayed the debut album song ‘Hold Me Tight’ as another “failed attempt at a single.” He elaborated: “I can’t remember much about that one. Certain songs were just ‘work’ songs… you haven’t got much of a memory of them. That’s one of them.”
McCartney also found the Help! cut ‘Tell Me What You See’ to have faded into the background over the years. “I seem to remember it as mine,” McCartney told Barry Miles in 1997. “I would claim it as a 60-40 but it might have been totally me. Not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs, but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or B-sides. You need those kind of sides”.
Below, we have listed six Beatles songs by Paul McCartney that he has dismissed as forgettable or otherwise sub-standard.
The Beatles songs Paul McCartney dislikes:
- ‘Tell Me What You See’
- ‘What You’re Doing’
- ‘Every Little Thing’
- ‘Hold Me Tight’
- ‘I’m Just Happy To Dance With You’
- ‘Little Child’
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