John Lennon – ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’

To say that towards the end of The Beatles, individual members had creative differences would be a bit of an understatement. John Lennon grew horrendously tired of Paul McCartney’s constant pursuit of pop songs, and this shone through on a number of occasions, but none more so than ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’. The band’s engineer at the time recalled how angry Lennon was when he found out he needed to record the subpar track.

“John Lennon came to the session really stoned, totally out of it on something or other, and he [McCartney] said, ‘All right, we’re gonna do ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’,” remembered Richard Lush. He then said that Lennon “went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said, ‘This is it! Come on! He was really aggravated.”

Slash – ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’

It’s pretty hard to imagine now, given how successful the song is, but Slash couldn’t stand ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ when the band first wrote it. In fact, his iconic intro was intentionally scattered in a bid to get the track thrown out. The guitarist was on a mission to kill hair metal and rid Los Angeles of the soft rock bands who had taken over, and a ballad like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ seemed counterintuitive to this mission.

“You know what happens is you come up with something you think is cool, but how it’s going to translate to other people, you never know,” he said, “I was the guy who initially was not a big fan of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ back in the day. That was more not because of the riff, it was really more about the type of song it was at the time.”

Paul Stanley – ‘God of Thunder’

Let’s face it, it’s a Kiss classic, and really, who amongst us hasn’t been to a Kiss gig and waited with eager anticipation for them to play this hit. It was written by Paul Stanley, and while he originally saw the potential in it, he eventually grew to disdain it, as the track was snatched from his hands and given to bassist Gene Simmons.

“I was devastated,” he said, “I was broken […] I brought the song in, and I thought it was this signature song for me. We brought in a producer for many reasons, and one of them was to be the tiebreaker between Gene and I, because there certainly were times where Gene and I were at odds. So I played ‘God of Thunder’, and Bob goes, ‘That’s great, Gene is singing it’, and we go on to something else. And I’m just there, shattered.”

George Martin – ‘Only a Northern Song’

George Martin is frequently referred to as the fifth Beatle, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of their songs simply wouldn’t have become the gems that we know and love today without his involvement. Martin was always happy to work on different songs from different members, but when George Harrison came out with ‘Only a Northern Song’, he was less than enthused.

“I’m disappointed that George didn’t bring something better,” he said. It was originally written to go on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but due to its lack of quality, it was pushed back to appear on the record Yellow Submarine.

Marvin Gaye – ‘Here My Dear’

There was nobody better at singing heartfelt ballads than Marvin Gaye, so much so that Motown weren’t interested in him making politically charged music because they felt that it would be misusing his sweet-sounding voice. However, those heartfelt harmonies were dropped to the side when recording ‘Here My Dear’, a song about Gaye’s wife, which he performed while divorcing her.

You can just tell that he had no interest in recording this, for it’s not laced with sadness or heartbreak, but bitterness and anger so thick that it’s genuinely hard to get through the track. Rather than force himself to get through this horrendous ode to a broken home, Gaye should have simply moved on to something else.