The 30 worst Beatles songs, according to data science
There were only 2,775 days between the release of The Beatles’ first single and their last. The bloody Nintendo Switch has been around longer than that!
In that brief time, the Fab Four released more than 200 songs, and irrevocably changed the world. What they achieved in that time causes the mind to boggle. Even modern greats, Fontaines DC, have been releasing music for over 3,000 days now, and they’re rightly considered a prolific and influential triumph.
The sheer volume of art that The Beatles unloaded is well worth noting. It stretches far beyond prolific and influential, and it positioned them on a pedestal that remains their own. In a whirlwind of Beatlemania and manic creative flow, they rattled through album after album, each distinct from the last, and even had time to shoot a few movies too.
This outlook, however, also has created a retrospective oddity: every now and again, even the most ardent fan will idly happen upon a Beatles song that they have never heard before, or, more accurately, they have forgotten, for it is also an irrefutable truth that some of their back catalogue was forgettable.
After all, you can’t release a song on average every 13 days while touring, filming, frying your brain on substances, meeting the King of Pop, the Queen of England, and blowing minds on Ed Sullivan, all while in your 20s, and expect each of them to be perfect. If anything, it was The Beatles’ willingness to embrace imperfection that made them uniquely brilliant.
Obviously, it seems forgone these days that Revolver would be embraced by the masses, but at the time, George Martin admits that their camp was rife with worry about their popularity waning. They were outsold by Herb Albert in 1966, after all. But none of that worry is conveyed in the shocking radicalism of their music, which was suddenly 180 degrees different from the boyband beginnings of the group.
So, while ‘Revolution 9’ might split the crowd with many picketing against it as a pretentious mess, myself included, you can also forgive them for it because without the arc towards more highbrow avant-gardism, we wouldn’t have had ‘I Am the Walrus’ either. In fact, their so-called ‘worst’ songs make equally fascinating viewing to those that sit pretty at the top.
So, what are The Beatles’ worst songs?
Well, according to Henrik Franzon, who has compiled endless sources and studied the data on the reception of the songs, only 30 of the group’s releases can be classified as outside the 10,000 greatest songs ever written. That’s a remarkable result from such an intensive study. And even with that in mind, ‘Her Majesty’ seems hard done by.
Alas, what can be gleaned from the unfortunate 30, is that while the polish and pruning is perfectly evident on songs like ‘Yesterday’, no matter how interesting ‘Fixing a Hole’ may be to listen to, it’s also clear that something is awry. In these infrequent moments when the idea is clear but the execution is not, you can gain, paradoxically, a unique insight into how they worked.
As was evidenced on the extensive Get Back documentary, ideas were plentiful, and they clung to them like a dung beetle to a ball of turd, hoping that in time, their enthusiasm and form could fashion it into a polished gem indistinguishable from its humble beginnings. But sometimes, ahem ‘Piggies’, the balled up potential remained, well, turd.
Still, when your back catalogue has been stacked against practically every song to receive any public attention, and only 30 of them sit outside the top 10,000, with a few on the brink of breaking into that rarified world, you’ve done alright. And the best, according to science? That honour goes to ‘A Day in the Life’.
The worst Beatles songs, according to science:
- ‘My Bonnie’ – 1962
- ‘I’ll Get You’ – 1963
- ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ – 1963
- ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ – 1963
- ‘Rock and Roll Music’ – 1964
- ‘She’s a Woman’ – 1964
- ‘You Can’t Do That’ – 1964
- ‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party’ – 1964
- ‘Any Time at All’ – 1964
- ‘I Need You’ – 1965
- ‘The Night Before’ – 1965
- ‘It’s Only Love’ – 1965
- ‘If I Needed Someone’ – 1965
- ‘I’m Looking Through You’ – 1965
- ‘Another Girl’ – 1965
- ‘Good Day Sunshine’ – 1966
- ‘Doctor Robert’ – 1966
- ‘Fixing a Hole’ – 1967
- ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ – 1967
- ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ – 1967
- ‘Flying’ – 1967
- ‘Long, Long, Long’ – 1968
- ‘Birthday’ – 1968
- ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ – 1968
- ‘Revolution 9’ – 1968
- ‘Cry Baby Cry’ – 1968
- ‘Piggies’ – 1968
- ‘Honey Pie’ – 1968
- ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ – 1969
- ‘Her Majesty’ – 1969
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.