The Beatles track Paul McCartney called a “non-song”
What did The Beatles do? Before you look into the band’s legacy, the way that they had influenced fashion and music, and attitudes towards how people can make records, before the magnitude that they accomplished as a band and in their respective solo careers, the first thing they did was write songs.
The foundation of everything that The Beatles went on to accomplish is made up of the songs that they created. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were the main driving factors behind their incredible craftsmanship. However, George Harrison also wrote a number of excellent tracks for the band, and Ringo Starr proved himself an invaluable member of the band in the way he could drum over whatever was brought to him while also getting his name credited on a few tracks, too.
With all of the band members being able to contribute to the important art of songwriting, when they all joined forces on a track, it’s only to be expected that they would create something spectacular; however, that wasn’t the case. The very first piece in The Beatles discography on which they were all credited as songwriters was a nothing event, so much so that Paul McCartney even described it as a “non-song”.
‘Flying’ was a track written by the band for the Magical Mystery Tour. On the album, it sounds like a skippable filler of a track; however, this was very much intended. The band wrote it for the film to use it as a backing track for exposition shots. They didn’t want to overcomplicate things with words and themes. Instead, they added a simple wordless melody over a sweet-sounding bluesy instrumental.
It was successfully used in the movie and accompanied a number of landscape shots of Iceland taken from an aeroplane. These shots were originally done by Stanley Kubrick and were outtakes of the 1964 film Dr Strangelove.
Paul McCartney said: “’Flying’ was an instrumental that we needed for Magical Mystery Tour, so in the studio one night, I suggested to the guys that we made something up. I said, ‘We can keep it very, very simple, we can make it a twelve-bar blues. We need a little bit of a theme and a little bit of a backing’.”
He continued, “I wrote the melody. The only thing to warrant it as a song is basically the melody, otherwise it’s just a nice twelve-bar backing thing. It’s played on the Mellotron, on a trombone setting. It’s credited to all four, which is how you would credit a non-song.”
Though the piece is often overlooked when discussing The Beatles’ work, it does show how adaptable they were as songwriters. Whether reeling out a hit or creating something that could be used as a backing track, the band was more than capable of adapting, and that’s what made them such excellent musicians.
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