The 10 Beatles songs Paul McCartney hated most
Of all the former band members, Paul McCartney seemed to be doing the most to keep The Beatles legacy pristine. McCartney was the primary driving force behind trying to keep the band together in the late 1960s as financial woes and artistic differences weighed heavy on the group’s shoulders. If it wasn’t for McCartney, The Beatles could have split at any time following the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967.
Ironically enough, it was McCartney who put the final nail in The Beatles’ coffin. While answering his own questions for a promotional interview supporting his 1970 solo debut McCartney, McCartney claimed that he had no intentions of working with his bandmates in the near future. The press interpreted that statement as a breakup, and although John Lennon had privately left the band in 1969, McCartney was seen as the one who instigated the split.
Perhaps because of his generally positive and cheery demeanour, McCartney hasn’t ever been as dismissive of The Beatles and their litany of songs as Lennon was. Whereas Lennon could be excessively harsh, McCartney preferred to stay on the lighter side of the divide, never appearing more than just slightly disappointed in any of the band’s songs. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find him talking down to any of The Beatles’ songs, forcing curious fans to read between the lines to find the ones that he didn’t care for.
While “hate” might be too strong of a word, there were undoubtedly a few Beatles tracks that McCartney didn’t think very highly of. Whether they were tossed off pieces of album filler or excruciating recordings to have to work through, McCartney has let slip a few of his least-favourite Beatles songs over the years.
Here are ten Beatles songs that Paul McCartney wasn’t a fan of.
The Beatles songs Paul McCartney hated:
1. ‘Little Child’
The early days of The Beatles were lightning-quick. Between recording sessions, tours, promotional appearances, film shoots and much more, the need for constant new material was always a demand. McCartney originally conceived the With The Beatles cut ‘Little Child’ as a song for Ringo Starr and made it purposefully simple. When Ringo took on ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ instead, McCartney still felt that ‘Little Child’ was only barely worth inclusion.
“‘Little Child’ was a work job,” McCartney admitted in the book Many Years From Now. “Certain songs were inspirational and you just followed that. Certain other songs were, ‘Right, come on, two hours, song for Ringo for the album’.”
2. ‘Hold Me Tight’
John Lennon was frequently considered the Beatle with the most distaste for the band’s material. Lennon was especially dismissive of early songs like ‘Hold Me Tight’, the likes of which he could barely recall years later. “That was Paul’s. Maybe I stuck some bits in there – I don’t remember,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “It was a pretty poor song, and I was never really interested in it either way.”
In a rare case of agreeing with his bandmate’s negative assessment, McCartney also didn’t think too highly of ‘Hold Me Tight’. “When we first started, it was all singles, and we were always trying to write singles,” McCartney said in Many Years From Now. “That’s why you get lots of these two minute 30 second songs; they all came out the same length. ‘Hold Me Tight’ was a failed attempt at a single which then became an acceptable album filler.”
3. ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’
On A Hard Day’s Night, Lennon and McCartney got to shine as the sole credited songwriters for the first (and last) time on a Beatles album. The pair even penned George Harrison’s lead vocal feature, ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’, which neither Lennon nor McCartney wanted to sing themselves.
“It was a bit of a formula song. We knew that in E if you went to an A flat minor, you could always make a song with those chords; that change pretty much always excited you,” McCartney explained in Many Years From Now. “This is one of these. Certainly ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ was. This one anyway was a straight co-written song for George. We wouldn’t have actually wanted to sing it because it was a bit… The ones that pandered to the fans in truth were our least favourite songs but they were good. They were good for the time. The nice thing about it was to actually pull a song off on a slim little premise like that. A simple little idea. It was songwriting practice.”
4. ‘Tell Me What You See’
McCartney rarely felt the need to get vitriolic when it came to assessing his past material. Unlike Lennon, McCartney was willing to give himself the benefit of the doubt: he was young, he was green, and he needed material. Usually, the worst that McCartney could do was brush off a lesser song, as he did with Help!‘s ‘Tell Me What You See’.
“I seem to remember it as mine. I would claim it as a 60-40, but it might have been totally me,” McCartney later claimed. “Not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or b-sides. You need those kind of sides.”
5. ‘What You’re Doing’
Paul McCartney’s relationship with actor Jane Asher inspired some of his most memorable songs of the mid-1960s, including ‘I’m Looking Through You’, ‘You Won’t See Me’, and ‘For No One’. But the strained relationship also found its way into songs that McCartney felt weren’t quite up to snuff, like the Beatles For Sale song ‘What You’re Doing’.
“‘What You’re Doing’ was a bit of filler,” McCartney said. “I think it was a little more mine than John’s… You sometimes start a song and hope the best will arrive by the time you get to the chorus, but sometimes that’s all you get, and I suspect this was one of them. Maybe it’s a better recording than it is a song; some of them are. Sometimes a good recording would enhance a song.”
6. ‘She Said, She Said’
As The Beatles embraced psychedelic experimentation in the mid-1960s, differences in approaches often came to the fore. McCartney was usually seen as the most picky and perfectionist among the group, so when he didn’t get his way, it could cause problems. That’s what occurred when McCartney’s idea for an arrangement on ‘She Said, She Said’ was ignored.
“John brought it in pretty much finished,” recalled McCartney in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now. “I’m not sure, but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we’d had a barney or something, and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George played bass.”
7. ‘Yer Blues’
The notion that Paul McCartney didn’t like ‘Yer Blues’, the classic White Album blues number, is contested by the man himself. “We were talking about this tightness, this packed-in-a-tin thing,” McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2016. “So we got in a little cupboard – a closet that had microphone leads and things, with a drum kit, amps turned to the walls, one mic for John. We did ‘Yer Blues’ live and it was really good.”
However, in his book Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald claimed that McCartney was “sulky” during the song’s recording, not being happy with the final result. McCartney has dismissed Revolution in the Head as “a kind of toilet book” that is mostly “incorrect”, so perhaps his true feelings about ‘Yer Blues’ are a bit more nuanced.
8. ‘Revolution 9’
Perhaps the most infamous example of McCartney disliking a Beatles song, ‘Revolution 9’ has actually never come under the direct attack of McCartney himself. Instead, it’s mostly third-party accounts that have caused the experimental White Album cut to be associated with McCartney’s ire. What we do know is that McCartney originally wanted ‘Revolution 9’ cut from the album but was unsuccessful in trying to convince Lennon.
“Paul simply didn’t see it as Beatles music,” engineer Geoff Emerick wrote in his memoir Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. “And he certainly didn’t agree that it was the direction that The Beatles should go in.” McCartney was given a songwriting credit, as was customary, but his participation in the making of ‘Revolution 9’ was near zero.
9. ‘Across the Universe’
McCartney’s dislike for Lennon’s lush ballad ‘Across the Universe’ has less to do with the song and more to do with the circumstances surrounding it. Originally recorded in 1968 before the band departed for India, ‘Across the Universe’ saw multiple attempts across various sessions before it ultimately appeared on a World Wildlife Fund charity album, No One’s Gonna Change Our World.
Ultimately, ‘Across the Universe’ found a permanent home on Let It Be, featuring an over-the-top overdubbed arrangement by Phil Spector. McCartney wasn’t a fan of the overdubs, although he mostly took issue with his own songs like ‘The Long and Winding Road’. After the fact, Lennon infamously claimed to David Sheff that McCartney had “sabotaged” ‘Across the Universe’ with an “atmosphere of looseness and casualness.”
10. ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’
By the end of their recording career, The Beatles had mostly returned to a more congenial working relationship. Abbey Road was largely a cordial affair, but there were still lingering issues that surrounded the group. McCartney’s big swing was in the album’s side two medley, but according to Geoff Emerick, he didn’t approve of the experimentation that was being used on ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
“Over my shoulder, I saw a dejected Paul sitting slumped over, head down, staring at the floor. He didn’t say a word, but his body language made it clear that he was very unhappy,” Emerick wrote in his memoir. “To Paul, it must have been like ‘Revolution 9’ all over again. John was deliberately distorting the Beatles music, trying to turn the group into an avant-garde ensemble instead of a pop band”.
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