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“Actually a nick”: The Beatles song George Harrison thought they stole

Thu 14 November 2024 18:00, UK

There are hardly any musical avenues to go down that The Beatles didn’t have a hand in paving. Whether it was their approach to pop music in the early days of their career or making the wildest left turns imaginable by a pop group, the Fab Four were responsible for opening people’s eyes to what was possible in the length of a three-minute single. That doesn’t come without a fair bit of stealing, though, and George Harrison thought that John Lennon and Paul McCartney weren’t completely original when they crafted this winsome ballad for their debut record.

Then again, half of the band’s debut is focused on playing the material that they had been working on in the Cavern Club every day. Not everything was meant to be completely original, and even McCartney himself admitted to stealing the bassline of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ from Chuck Berry when putting together the opening track.

Even when they stole from other people, there was still that Beatles brilliance shining through. Lennon’s attempt at a soulful number on ‘Ask Me Why’ is a nice Liverpudlian twist on the traditional Motown formula, and ‘There’s A Place’ might be one of the most Beatlesque songs of their early years, complete with strange turns in the chord progression or the crunchy harmonies that are incredibly close during the verses.

While Harrison didn’t have much time in the spotlight on the first record, it’s easy to see him becoming a better singer in real time. His take on the song ‘Chains’ does feel a bit like amateur hour, but once he hit ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’, he settled into his role as the quiet craftsman of the group.

Ignoring that half of the song is completely out of tune, a tune about a timid guy quietly telling his crush that he’s in love with her is much more believable coming out of shy Harrison rather than McCartney. When listening back to the song ‘I Really Love You’ to cover on his solo album Gone Troppo, though, Harrison thought that his bandmates might have been listening too much to The Stereos before writing the tune.

Compared to every other Beatles original, Harrison thought ‘Secret’ was a direct lift of ‘I Really Love You’, saying, “I’ll tell you that the Beatles wrote a song that I think was actually a nick, a bit of a pinch off that one. It was a song that John wrote and I sang on the very first Beatle album called ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’. If you check that against the song you’re referring to on Troppo, that’s round two of where ‘Secret’ came from.”

But if Harrison thought he would do his old group one better, his take on the original ‘I Really Love You’ is downright disorienting. Outside of the majority of Gone Troppo sounding like an imitation of yacht rock, hearing the insanely low background vocalists behind him on the tune makes the tune sound like a goofy song that would play over a segment on the first season of Sesame Street.

Even if Lennon and McCartney did have the tune in mind when making ‘Do You Want To Know a Secret’, part of the magic behind their version is how they made it their own. They were never sobs when it came to the music they liked, but even if it wasn’t their usual style, they could twist any song into a Beatle-fied version in no time flat.