‘The Lovers That Never Were’: The masterpiece demo Paul McCartney never released
Every artist tends to have a handful of tunes that never see the light of day. Even if they had high hopes for what they could have been in the demo stages, there’s no telling whether one of the songs will be given prime time on an album, relegated to a B-side, or get left on the cutting room floor. Although Paul McCartney tends to have a lot of tunes that might fall by the wayside, Elvis Costello thought an early version of ‘The Lovers That Never Were’ was too good to just throw out.
But McCartney has never exactly been afraid of leaving something that wasn’t good enough on the shelf. He had already had enough foresight to think that ‘Her Majesty’ wouldn’t work for the medley on Abbey Road, and the fact that it shows up right at the end of the album felt more like a happy accident than something that was thought about from the very beginning.
And by the time that Macca started working with Costello in the late 1980s, he had already amassed one of the biggest repertoires in rock history. His work with Wings already put him in the same conversation as other 1970s rock legends, but with Costello, this was the first time that he had an actual partner with the same attitude and mannerisms that John Lennon had in his prime.
During the recording of albums like Flowers in the Dirt, Costello was known to be the more cynical songwriter compared to McCartney, usually fitting in little sarcastic lines that offset his usual optimism. The Beatles had written countless love songs in that vein, but ‘The Lovers That Never Were’ was the odd occasion where McCartney wrote a fully realised story like on ‘She’s Leaving Home’.
Costello certainly was no stranger to these kinds of love songs. He had been used to writing earnest tunes of devotion in the past, like ‘Alison,’ but he ended up getting edited out of the final mix when Flowers in the Dirt was being mastered, being replaced with Linda McCartney and the members of his backing band.
There is one version of this tune still in the vaults, and as far as Costello is concerned, it’s the masterpiece McCartney has yet to release, saying, “One of the best songs that Paul and I wrote together was written at the piano. It was a sweeping, romantic tune that could almost have been an epic Bacharach ballad. I’d say the rough recording of ‘The Lovers That Never Were’ is one of the great, unreleased performances of Paul McCartney’s solo career.”
It’s not like Costello didn’t make a good foil for McCartney on the rest of the album. Even though ‘My Brave Face’ works much better as a synth-driven McCartney single, hearing the acoustic version with Costello and McCartney harmonising together is enough to give even jaded Beatles fans flashbacks to those times when Lennon and McCartney used to share mics on tunes like ‘If I Fell’.
Although ‘The Lovers That Never Were’ never got that sort of treatment, it does remain a decent deep cut from this era of McCartney’s career. Much of the following album, Off the Ground, tends to bleed towards dad rock most of the time, but somewhere in this tune is the grown-up version of McCartney’s more whimsical story songs.
