‘We Can Work It Out’: The one song Cillian Murphy couldn’t live without
One of Ireland’s finest exports, Cork’s Cillian Murphy has won Academy Award-winning plaudits for his eclectic range of roles, from the bewildered bicycle courier in 28 Days Later‘s apocalyptic horror, an IRA revolutionary in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and a transgender women in search for her mother in the poignant comedy Breakfast on Pluto.
While his turn as the titular tortured atom bomb physicist in 2023’s Oppenheimer is ingrained in the minds of many, it’s his fronting of the criminal Peaky Blinders gang in Edwardian Birmingham that will forever define him, his performance as the ruthless Tommy Shelby winning him a Bafta for ‘Lead Actor’.
He’s also a massive muso. As well as directing Money’s ‘Hold Me Forever’ video and hosting a limited late-night series on BBC Radio 6 Music, Murphy fronted the rock duo The Sons of Mr Green Genes with his younger brother Páidi before finding fame in Hollywood, specialising in “wacky lyrics and endless guitar solos” and combining a love for The Beatles and Frank Zappa that caught the attention of Acid Jazz Records, rejecting a five-album deal for the little money offered.
Naturally, Murphy makes for a perfect Desert Island Discs feature. Guesting last year on the long-running BBC Radio 4 series, Murphy shares the songs he’d take to his figurative island, revealing a collation of much loved songs which plays it safe compared to the psychedelic freakouts of his youth and the intrepid round-up of his nocturnal 6 Music playlists. Selecting cuts from Paul Simon, U2, Radiohead, Queen, and Séamus Ennis, it’s The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work it Out’ that cuts the mustard as his ‘Castaway Favourite’.
Released in 1965 as a double A-side with ‘Day Tripper’, ‘We Can Work it Out’ marked a crucial creative development in The Beatles’ musical evolution, dropped on the same day as Rubber Soul and boldly shaking off Beatlemania’s residue, albeit still enduring another year of its punishing touring schedule.
By this point, John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership had drifted slightly from the intense working intimacy of their earlier material but jumped back into their old ways of writing for a piece that shines with each Beatles’ contributions.
“I took it to John to finish it off, and we wrote the middle together. Which is nice: ‘Life is very short. There’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend’,” McCartney revealed in 1998’s Many Years from Now. “Then it was George Harrison’s idea to put the middle into 3/4 time, like a German waltz. That came on the session, it was one of the cases of the arrangement being done on the session”.
‘We Can Work it Out’ is a perfect alloy of the respective songwriting sensibilities poured into the piece, and its artful embrace of dual composition and EMI’s Mannborg harmonium touches signal a band brimming with confidence despite a UK music press suggesting their drying up in the charts. A canny exploration of mortality and everyday perspective set to an irresistibly inventive pop hook, The Beatles’ 13th number-one captures more magic in its two minutes than many bands glean their entire careers.
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