The lost Paul McCartney song that was rejected by Marianne Faithfull
For many years, the only songwriter who could compete with the number of hits churned out by Paul McCartney was his partner in crime, John Lennon. Almost everything they created troubled the hit parade, even if it didn’t have The Beatles’ name attached to the project. However, one McCartney song from this period is lost forever.
The track in question is titled ‘Etcetera’, an early version of a song later named ‘Thingumybob’. It’s one of the rarest Beatles songs in existence and was never officially recorded by the group, which McCartney believes is for a good reason. The Black Dyke Mills Band created their own for Apple Records, but it was originally intended for Marianne Faithfull rather than them.
At the time, Faithfull was romantically involved with Mick Jagger, an associate of The Beatles and a friend. The Fab Four had already gifted The Rolling Stones a hit with ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, and now it was Faithfull’s turn to follow in her partner’s footsteps by taking on a track from The Beatles’ lost property bin.
The Beatles’ engineer Alan Brown later said of the track: “This was a very beautiful song. I recall it was a ballad and had the word ‘etcetera’ several times in the lyric. I only heard it twice: when he recorded it and when we played it back to him. The tape was taken away and I’ve never heard of it since.”
However, McCartney was less enthused by the creation and admitted it was “a bad song”. He also said he was relieved ‘Etcetera’ “died a death in some tape bin”. Macca said to Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now: “I knew Marianne so it was natural that I would be asked to write a song at some point. I did write a song but it was not a very good one. It was called ‘Etcetera’ and it’s a bad song. I think it’s a good job that it’s died a death in some tape bin”.
“Even then I seem to remember thinking it wasn’t very good. There was always the temptation to keep your better songs for yourself and then give your next-best songs to other established people, so when it was someone like Marianne, who at the time was a newcomer, those people would tend to end up with fairly dreadful offerings of mine.”
He elaborated: “I suppose, thinking back on it, after ‘As Tears Go By’ maybe they were looking for more sort of a ‘Yesterday’, something more poignant, more baroque. I probably thought, well, this is really all I’ve got at the moment. I’ll send it round and hope it’s all OK, and maybe they’ll put a baroque thing on it and that’ll make it OK. She probably did ‘Yesterday’ because they figured, Well at least it’s better than ‘Etcetera’.”
Judging by McCartney’s comments, he completely understands why Faithfull decided against taking him up on his offer of recording ‘Etcetera’. While she was only an emerging artist, the singer knew the track wasn’t right for her and instead chose to record a cover of ‘Yesterday’.
