Brad Pitt names his favourite song by The Beatles: “I just know it works for me”
When he isn’t busy driving Formula One cars at ridiculous speeds, doing films with Quentin Tarantino or quite publicly getting divorced, Brad Pitt likes to listen to music. Quite a lot of it in fact. And there’s one band that he has spoken of with such reverie that you suspect he would happily swap being an ultra-famous multi-millionaire film star for getting to play even the occasional tambourine shake for them.
That band is the mighty Radiohead, the Oxfordshire legends who this week announced a new European tour, for which the fight for tickets will be, while not quite at Oasis levels, still similar to throwing a pack of freshly-cooked sausages into the middle of a group of peckish sharks.
Pitt has talked on several occasions of the esteem he holds Radiohead and their singer Thom Yorke in, and it’s basically as though they were untouchable musical deities, sent down from heaven to supply the world with first some excellent guitar rock and then some electronica that essentially founded completely new genres of music.
The Fight Club actor even wanted Yorke to soundtrack that film and sent missives along with Ed Norton to try to convince him, but to no avail. To give you a sense of just how high a regard Pitt holds the band, he once said of them: “What comes out in them, I don’t think is anything they could actually articulate, but I would certainly say that it’s that which we all know is true somewhere when we’re in our deepest sleep. That is their importance.”
Ok Brad! If there’s a previous equivalent to Radiohead though, a group that combined experimentation with mass popularity, then it’s surely The Beatles, a band that Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood has cited as a big influence on them, especially while recording the astonishing 1997 album OK Computer.
Pitt is similarly a fan of the Fab Four and a couple of songs in particular. The one that wins out, though, is the opening gambit from 1969’s magnetic masterpiece, Abbey Road. In revealing his favourite Beatles tracks, Pitt said: “‘Come Together,’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’ I love the psychedelic phase, but yeah, that’s really tough for me to pick. ‘Come Together’ is (great). I can’t tell you why. I’m not good that way. I just know it works for me.”
‘Come Together’ is based around a looping bassline played by Paul McCartney, but as with most Beatles songs it was sung by the writer, John Lennon. It came about after Lennon was visited by the American author Timothy Leary during a bed-in and he asked the Beatle to write him a song to back his running for Governor of California – the tag-line for which was “Come together and join the party.”
In the end, however, Lennon didn’t finish Leary’s song but took the opening words for a re-imagining of a Chuck Berry tune called ‘You can’t catch me’. Ringo Starr played his famous drum beat with the use of tea towels draped over his kit, and Lennon sang while clapping his hands. Perhaps slightly eerily, he also shouted the phrase “Shoot me” repeatedly.
Pitt, meanwhile, has been increasing the amount of producer roles he takes on with his company, which worked on huge Netflix smashes Adolescence and Baby Reindeer, expanding into Europe.
In another musical tie-in, he serves as executive producer on the forthcoming documentary about the late great singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, named It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.
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