‘Little Child’: The last song any Beatles fan should listen to
The Beatles have always been a touch over-mythologised in terms of their excellence. A lot of what they’ve done has been hyped up to the moon for a damn good reason, but the whole point behind their music was about doing what came naturally rather than being the kind of musical auteurs that everyone claimed them to be. However, it took them a while before they actually realised what they had at their disposal in the studio.
Because before they had set themselves up as one of the greatest musical magicians of the modern age, the Fab Four were nothing more than a bar band. A shit hot bar band, to be fair, but still meant to be entertainment in the clubs before their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show caught the eye of every single kid in America that was born to listen to something more exciting than Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
While there were always hints of everything from blues to jazz in their back catalogue, they were still learning the ropes as songwriters in their early days. They had the means to make a fierce rock and roll song like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, but whereas Please Please Me is one of the greatest encapsulations of what the band could do live, you start to hear the fatigue on With The Beatles.
Beatles for Sale was the moment they started to grow a bit cynical, but there are a handful of tunes on their sophomore outing that feel like they were meant to fill up time on the record. ‘Not A Second Time’ is a perfectly serviceable song, and while their version of ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ is as strong as any of their other R&B covers, it does feel like they are repeating the formula a little bit by having their second album close with a barnburner of a cover like ‘Twist And Shout’ did.
If there’s one song that represents the nadir of the album, though, it’s ‘Little Child’. Whereas a tune like ‘Hold Me Tight’ was already a reject from their debut, this is a faint wisp of a song that has no real backbone behind it. Not every one of the band’s songs was meant to make you think in the same way that ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ did, but this is well below John Lennon’s usual standard for writing, only singing the odd line about how sad and lonely he is and trying to make everything fit around his passable harmonica solo.
Granted, the song could have probably worked better in the clubs, but it feels like it’s been scrubbed clean a bit too much in the studio. A lot of the instruments are separated properly and George Martin did a fantastic job making every instrument sound great, but since the whole thing is in service to a flimsy idea.
What makes it even more noticeable is the fact that it’s crammed between a few classics in their catalogue. ‘Til There Was You’ is one of the best cover songs that they had ever made, and coming after Paul McCartney’s ‘All My Loving’ and George Harrison’s ‘Don’t Bother Me’ makes the album feel like it’s about to grind to a halt before it really gets its feet off the ground.
Even compared to some of the questionable material they made in their later years, ‘Little Child’ is still far too uninspired to really hold any merit. Millions of people get a chill at the thought of listening to ‘Revolution 9’, but that song at least had a point behind it and could be interesting to look at in terror.
Although plenty of Liverpool bands were writing songs in the vein of ‘Little Child’ at the time, it definitely should be the last thing that any prospective Beatles fan listens to if they want to branch out into their old stuff. Because if this was the cream of the crop for them, there’s a good chance that they wouldn’t have made it far past the Cavern Club.
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