The Beatles song Paul McCartney called a “pisstake” to play live
At the end of the day, The Beatles were just for lads. Especially in the early days, during the storm of Beatlemania, they were four young lads.
Back in the 1960s, that meant that chatting about feelings wasn’t really the norm, often making it weird for the band to be singing them.
On each and every one of the Beatles’ albums, there’s a ballad. The boys were pouring out big feelings of love, loss, grief and more, translating these feelings into powerful songs and doing it together. At a time when men talking about their emotions wasn’t really done, it gave the band an opening to get deep into how they were doing with one another.
But then, when the songwriting process was over and those songs had to hit the road, the boys made it all silly again, as they snapped back into their roles. It was partly that, but it was also partly that after singing the same songs over and over, something had to give. Especially for the slower, sadder or more loved-up songs, they became targets for the band’s antics.
“We could all take the piss out of each other,” McCartney said, reminiscing on old times in the early 1960s. As an interviewer questioned him about John Lennon singing “And now we’d like to do Hark The Angels Come” before ‘Let It Be’ on the album, seemingly joking about McCartney’s tender track about his late mother, McCartney said that that’s just what they were like.
When it came to an emotional number, it was like the tension had to be burst. “On the Royal Command Performance I had to sing ‘Till There Was You’ or something, in front of all these people, and while it’s easy to do a rock ’n’ roll song, it was never easy to do those ‘Yesterdays’ or ‘Till There Was You’s,” he explained. In particular, ‘Yesterday’ always felt specially targeted by those jokes as during the performance McCartney is referencing, which was actually in Blackpool, George Harrison speaks over the introduction to say, “For Paul McCartney of Liverpool, opportunity knocks!” referencing Opportunity Knocks, the talent show, as if McCartney was about to audition.
It’s pure banter and pure silliness, as McCartney said, “It was always a piss-take,” as ‘Yesterday’ ended up being the butt of the joke a lot. However, it was moments like that that kept them grounded amidst the chaos. These little moments where their personality kept onto stage, captured a lot in the Anthology albums, kept the boys feeling refreshed and themselves, as if these huge rooms really were no different from the clubs in Liverpool they first played and would mess about, taking the piss between songs.
It kept them feeling normal as McCartney said, “it was just part of The Beatles. Keeping each other’s feet on the ground. So that didn’t bother me.”
