The poem Paul McCartney wrote about John Lennon’s killer
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The secret Beatle message Paul McCartney “copied” from John Lennon in the 1980s
Fans know every note of a Beatles record’s lyrics, and the band’s written words have been analysed and decoded for generations. And, of course, we all know about their characteristic experimentations in the studio.
It’s the other games that The Beatles play, which are often tougher to pick up on tape. The accidents or sonic winks, even to each other at times, that most listeners miss. With that, Paul McCartney picked up on a John Lennon hidden lyric and copied it almost 20 years later.
It was the early 1980s, and Paul was coming off his number one hit single ‘Coming Up’ by working the following year with Michael Jackson, who was on the verge of superstardom. The two got together in early ’81 to record the Jackson/McCartney-penned and George Martin-produced ‘Say Say Say’, which would be the lead single off Paul’s upcoming Pipes Of Peace solo album. By 1982 the duo were at it again, collaborating this time on the MJ-written ‘The Girl Is Mine’, which by the end of the year would feature as the lead on single on the biggest-selling album of all time, ‘Thriller’.
As hot as he was, McCartney would spend much of 1983 on his most ambitious solo project to that point, Give My Regards To Broad Street, a feature film for which he would write, star, and perform all the music. The story was campy and full of Paul’s whimsy and usual joie de vivre — and mawkishness was never a problem for Paul. From the Beatles’ white tux staircase finale of ‘Your Mother Should Know’, the Magical Mystery Tour film, his solo variety TV show James Paul McCartney and even the theatrical ‘Say Say Say’ video, Macca has given plenty of examples over the years. All those elements would come together by 1984 for his first non-documentary feature film since the Beatles’ Help! almost 20 years earlier.
His fellow surviving Beatles mates had made forays into movies by this time. George Harrison’s British production company HandMade Films had been going for years, and Ringo Starr had appeared in more than a dozen movies since the group disbanded. Now it was Paul’s turn. “I wanted to be involved in the making of a movie. I remembered from the time of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! what a pleasant experience it is,” he told Roger Ebert in 1984. “I’m a ham. I love to get up in front of people and perform. What we were doing in Hamburg, in some way I’m still doing.”
Whether audiences wanted to see Paul in that particular slice of ham or not became evident. Give My Regards To Broad Street was a rarity in Paul McCartney’s orbit – a critical and commercial flop. Prince’s musical feature film Purple Rain dominated theatres that year instead.
The film’s soundtrack, however, was a different story. It went to number one in the UK and was certified gold in the US, helped by six reworked songs from the Beatles catalogue. He leaned especially on the Revolver album from which Paul pulled four cuts to re-record for the film, including tunes the writer himself had never performed since the band put them to tape 18 years earlier.
“It isn’t an easy thing to do,” McCartney said at the time about re-recording Beatles songs. “It’s a bit of a daunting prospect, but it’s silly never to play it again. That’s how we thought until we said, ‘But this is crazy, come on. It’s my song. I like it. George [Martin] wants to record it. He’s happy about doing it. So let’s do it.’”
The Beatles, at times on their classic albums, had a few unrevealed secret moments hidden in plain sight over the years. There were the background singers repeating the word “tit” in a bit of mischief on ‘Girl’ and the harmony background vocals singing “Frère Jacques” on ‘Paperback Writer’. Even Martin admitted that the dramatic alarm clock sound effect on ‘A Day In The Life’ was merely a placeholder to count bars and was simply unable to be mixed out despite its inadvertent contribution.
Other subliminal studio messages on Beatles records were more muted but no less fun. In an apparent reference to the Beatles’ song ‘Tell Me Why’ from A Hard Day’s Night, John Lennon playfully mutters, “We told you why!” during the verse before the lead break on the Rubber Soul track ‘What Goes On’, when Ringo sings: “Tell me why…”. When Paul apparently hit a wrong note at about the 2:55 mark while recording ‘Hey Jude’, you can hear, just after he sings “…let her under your skin,” a background voice utter “fucking hell”. Recording engineer Geoff Emerick later said that Paul and John had heard the expletive in the mix and that Lennon, in particular, was adamant about keeping it. And during the ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ recording on The White Album, after Ringo sings “…don’t make me cry-yyy” and waits for the drum kick at the 2:38 mark, you can hear him whisper to himself, counting upwards from one to eight to measure instrumental bars during the break.
McCartney was especially keen on reproducing the Beatles songs for ‘Broad Street’ as meticulously to the originals as he could. That may have been one reason Ringo – who appears in the movie and elsewhere on the soundtrack – opted not to drum his own former parts on the Beatles tunes featured. Paul, though, wanted every other detail.
That meant reproducing a muted John Lennon utterance on the original ‘Good Day Sunshine’ track for the new version. While promoting the movie and album in a 1984 interview in Chicago, Paul looked back on what he called “the main moment” for him when reworking Beatles songs.
“When I was doing ‘Good Day Sunshine,’ I decided to really copy the Beatle records down to the last little thing,” he said. “And there was a little ad lib that John had done. I kind of sang, ‘She feels gooood,’ and John would go [imitates John’s quiet mumble] ‘she feels good.’ And I kind of copied that on the record, I must admit. Obviously, I had some fond memories of him when I did that little bit.”
The Lennon muttering can be heard at the song’s 1:25 mark on the original Revolver recording from 1966, and McCartney’s matching mutter comes in at the 1:27 mark on the re-recorded ‘Broad Street’ version. Then again, not all ears were able to tell one way or the other. “I didn’t notice that they were new versions,” George Harrison laughed in a 1988 interview about the ‘Broad Street’ soundtrack on the Toronto music program MuchMusic.
Stream both tracks below.
