Bernard Webb: the most famous songwriter you’ve never heard of
In 1966, anything released with Lennon-McCartney attached was a certain hit, even if it wasn’t released by The Beatles. After a prolonged period of triumph, Paul McCartney began questioning whether his name played a more significant role in his success than the quality of his output. With a nagging sense of doubt, the musician tested this theory by creating the exceptionally vanilla pseudonym of Bernard Webb.
Every musician in the world would happily lose an arm if it meant they could be associated with The Beatles at the height of their fame. Luckily for Peter Asher, his sister Jane was romantically involved with the baby-faced bass player McCartney. Occasionally, Asher was given samples of unrecorded songs by the Fab Four to use for his and Gordon Waller’s musical duo, Peter & Gordon. Realistically, record labels could have potentially purchased these songs for vast amounts of money, but Asher’s nepotism brought them to his grasp.
“We were sharing the top floor of the house at the time,” Asher recalled to WUN about his early experiences with The Beatles. “There was a small room in the basement… my mother used to teach piano lessons there and told Paul he could use the piano, a very small upright piano which is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One day John Lennon came over, and the two of them were down there for a couple of hours. As I recall, I was alone in the house, everyone else was out, and Paul called up the stairs to me after a couple of hours and asked if I wanted to come down and hear the song they had just finished”.
Asher continued: “So I went downstairs to the basement and sat in this little room on a small two-person sofa. They sat side by side on the piano bench, no guitars. They hammered out this version of a brand new song they had just finished called ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and The Beatles were the biggest band in the world, asked me what I thought… I told them I thought it was very good. I was in the right place at the right time.”
Soon afterwards, The Beatles became the biggest band in the world and an unstoppable force. In fact, they had so many hits coming out of their pores that they even gifted The Rolling Stones their first number-one and penned Peter & Gordon’s debut single, ‘A World Without Love’, which also went to the top of the charts. McCartney also wrote ‘Nobody I Know’ and ‘I Don’t Want To See You Again’ under the same Lennon-McCartney moniker for the duo.
However, McCartney truly believed in their talent and wanted to prove his connection to the group wasn’t the sole reason behind their hits. With a cheeky idea ringing around his mind, McCartney gifted Peter & Gordon his song, ‘Woman’, but on the strict condition: it must be credited to Bernard Webb. It still slightly troubled the chart, but only reached 28 in the UK and 14 in the US.
At a press conference in 1966, McCartney commented about the song: “People come up to them [Peter And Gordon] and say, ‘Ah, we see you’re just getting in on the Lennon-McCartney bandwagon.’ That’s why they did that one with our names not on it, ‘Woman’, because everyone sort of thinks that’s the reason they get hits. It’s not true, really.”
While McCartney used the Bernard Webb name for ‘Woman’ to prove Peter & Gordon didn’t need his affiliation, it had the opposite effect. Although the duo had a couple more minor hits after the track, they were never going to be the next Beatles and disbanded in 1968.
