Paul McCartney - December 1967 - The Beatles - Musician

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The 1963 song Paul McCartney knew could never be a single: “That is a good one”

Wed 27 May 2026 12:30, UK

No one was going to be questioning The Beatles when that first wave of Beatlemania swept across the world.

Everyone couldn’t get enough of these lads from Liverpool, and even if John Lennon and Paul McCartney weren’t making the most advanced music in the world at the time, it was impossible not to resist them whenever they played tunes like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. But even if they could crank out tunes faster than most people could process them, Paul McCartney felt that a few of their songs weren’t cut out to be singles like the rest of their catalogue.

Then again, the entire Lennon-McCartney repertoire was practically a damn hit factory back in the day. They were always concerned with making that one extra tune that could melt girls’ hearts, and even if they were writing to get a single almost every time they made a record, they weren’t going to lie to themselves and claim that tunes like ‘Little Child’ and ‘Hold Me Tight’ were their absolute best efforts or anything like that.

And when looking at the tunes that they featured in their live set, their best singles were released on their own for a reason. ‘She Loves You’ is still one of the best teenage rock and roll songs ever written, and even when they reached their later years, was there anyone complaining that ‘Hey Jude’ was too long? No. Because even if a Beatles song was seven minutes long, it was worth every single one of those minutes.

But even when Macca had absolute gold on his hands like ‘All My Loving’, he never thought that the record should have been released on its own. It was a fantastic album cut from With The Beatles, but despite having one of the greatest hooks of their early days, McCartney knew that the tune would be best served as a piece of their second album rather than being featured on its own.

McCartney even got a bit of encouragement from DJs to release the tune on its own, but he couldn’t ever wrap his head around the idea, saying, “[There was] the disc jockey David Jacobs, who was pretty hip. Still is actually – he knows pop music. He was always quite an expert, for one of the older generations. I remember him singling it out on his radio show and I think from that moment it did become a big favourite for people. And I heard it differently. Till then I’d heard it as an album track. But when he played it on his radio show, and it went over to however many million people on network BBC, it was like ‘Woh! That is a good one’.”

And looking at the construction of the song, ‘All My Loving’ is one of the few Beatles songs where every single piece of the puzzle is perfect. It’s easy to get swept up with one part of the mix every time the band plays, but no matter where you turn in this song, every band member is playing a hook, whether it’s George Harrison’s countrified solo, Lennon’s triplet strumming, Ringo Starr’s shuffling rhythm or Macca laying down one of the greatest walking bass lines of their early days.

The band might have missed out on making it a single, but that didn’t mean that they forgot about the power of the song later. It worked wonders when being on the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night, and despite never being given its own featured spot, being the first track to introduce the band to America on The Ed Sullivan Show wasn’t necessarily by accident.

Because no matter how many times people play a tune like this, it’s always going to give everyone the same rush that they had when they heard it for the first time. Almost half of The Beatles’ greatest songs are all about romance of some kind, but there aren’t many of their songs that get lovestruck ecstasy right this well.