The song that The Beatles “just couldn’t sing”
The Beatles didn’t exactly have the luxury of wasting material. Their recording contract stipulated that they put out roughly two albums every single year, and with their early days being a nonstop tornado of live shows, promotional appearances, film shoots, and recording sessions, most of the material written and recorded by the band eventually saw the light of day.
There are some exceptions. The band hated their own ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’ so much that they nixed in from the final mix of Help!, with Ringo Starr covering Buck Owens’ ‘Act Naturally’ in its place. Help! proved to be an album that saw quite a bit of excised material, with an instrumental track titled ‘12-Bar Original’ also hitting the cutting room floor. There was a third song that got to the mixing stage of the album before eventually being dropped as well: the Paul McCartney track ‘That Means a Lot’.
“The song is a ballad which Paul and I wrote for the film, but we found we just couldn’t sing it,” John Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “In fact, we made a hash of it, so we thought we’d better give it to someone who could do it well.”
Since it didn’t rise to The Beatles’ lofty standards, the band did give away the song. It was given to American singer P.J. Proby, who had a modest hit with the song in 1965. According to McCartney, the only reason ‘That Means a Lot’ was offered to Proby was that he and Lennon were being hounded for material by other artists. To get them off his back, McCartney gave up ‘That Means a Lot’, knowing that The Beatles would never release their own version of the song.
“Normally I’d try and bury these songs and not put them out, but there was so much pressure from people, they’d say, ‘Have you got anything?’” McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “I’d say, ‘I have, but you really don’t want to see them.’ They’d say, ‘I do! Believe me, I think I can make a good job of it, and your name on it would be a big plus.’ So PJ Proby, a friend of ours that we met during the Jack Good television show that we did, Round The Beatles, wanted to do it, so I gave it to him. He had a minor hit with it.”
Check out The Beatles’ version of ‘That Means a Lot’ down below.
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