Paul McCartney’s favourite Beatles song is “not great”
The recording process of The Beatles‘ final album, Let It Be, was arduous, to say the very least. As documented in Peter Jackson’s Disney+ documentary Get Back, the band saw the departure and return of guitarist George Harrison, and it was all too evident that the end of The Beatles was just around the corner. Let It Be contained some of the band’s best songs, but it also undoubtedly had others which likely signalled the band’s demise.
The track ‘One After 909’ arrived as part of Let It Be, but it had actually been in the Beatles’ arsenal for some time before it was released on their final album as a band. In fact, the band had recorded a version as far back as 1963, on the very same day as they made ‘From Me To You’.
John Lennon remembers having the song written when he was just a teenager. “The ‘One After 909’, on the whatsit LP, I wrote when I was 17 or 18,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes and also because they would say, well, you’re going to make an album together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”
Elsewhere, Lennon also noted the fact that the song was given its title because of his (mistaken) biographical details. “That was something I wrote when I was about seventeen. I lived at 9 Newcastle Road. I was born on the ninth of October, the ninth month [sic]. It’s just a number that follows me around, but numerologically, apparently, I’m a number six or a three or something, but it’s all part of nine.”
Meanwhile, McCartney claimed that he and Lennon had written the track together, “trying to write a bluesy freight-train song,” he said, “There were a lot of those songs at the time, like ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Freight Train’, ‘Rock Island Line’, so this was the ‘One After 909’; she didn’t get the 909, she got the one after it! It was a tribute to British Rail, actually. No, at the time, we weren’t thinking British; it was much more the Super Chief from Omaha.”
Interestingly, the Let It Be track was not played often by the Beatles, and McCartney didn’t even think it was actually a good track compared to the many other Beatles song. Still, that didn’t stop Macca from letting it become one of his favourites.
“It was a number we didn’t used to do much, but it was one that we always liked doing, and we rediscovered it,” he added. “There were a couple of tunes that we wondered why we never put out; either George Martin didn’t like them enough to, or he favoured others. It’s not a great song, but it’s a great favourite of mine.”
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