The unique week in chart history that briefly reunited The Beatles
After The Beatles recorded ‘The End’ on Abbey Road and Paul McCartney pulled the plug on their mythical collaboration, there was nothing left but dust and solo careers in the making.
Although reunion rumours were rife, the only time the Fabs really brought their efforts back together was for a single week at the end of April 1971, exactly a year after McCartney’s breakaway press statement.
The roads were paved for The Beatles to each have their chance at a successful solo career, and none of them disappointed, so much so that one of each of their singles made it on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the same week. The boys were still somehow in sync, and a lot of the work they were making was either inspired by or in collaboration with the music they had made as the former boyband.
One notorious exception is John Lennon, who was set to pave his own way from the start. Ever the most socially conscious Beatle, Lennon released ‘Power to the People’ in 1971, which he produced alongside his partner Yoko Ono. The song had been written in response to an interview he gave in the Marxist newspaper Red Mole, where he had “felt inspired”, as Lennon explained, “So I wrote ‘Power to the People’ the same way I wrote ‘Give Peace a Chance’, as something for the people to sing”. Beyond its success in the charts, the song remained an anthem, making its way to protests and into both Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns.
Meanwhile, McCartney’s first post-Beatles endeavour, ’Another Day’, was taken straight from the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, then recorded during the Ram sessions, and again left off the album. McCartney was not one to waste precious material, especially when it was marked with the last of true Beatles character, and fans were ready to juice out every last drop.
The soft-spoken acoustic story of a woman in distress stayed sincere and free of voluminous electric sound. “On those early solo albums, I didn’t have the guys I developed things up with, John and George, and so things often remained acoustic,” McCartney told Music Radar.
George Harrison had written his single ‘What Is Life’ in 1969 while driving to West London, where he was producing an album for a friend. He was still a Beatle when he presented this catchy pop song to Billy Preston, a keyboardist who had been occupying his album That’s the Way God Planned It with anything but pop. The spark of genius came as a thunderbolt, and “I wrote it very quickly, 15 minutes or half an hour maybe, on my way to Olympic Studios,” Harrison recounted. The song wasn’t quite fit for the Beatles, either, so he waited and made it his own yearning, upbeat success.
Last but not least is Ringo, the fourth and underrated Beatle, who’s held the richest of solo careers and been the least problematic, was no stranger to keeping things civil, and kept on collaborating with his bandmates well beyond their break.
He’d gotten a fair bit of ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ down before he got “my good friend” Harrison in to help. In a radio interview, Starr explained, “I was very good at two verses and a chorus. And then I would take it over to George…he would put in all these chords that made me sound like a genius and tie the song up.” Like in most of the songs in this list, Starr’s work was fresh from his band breakup, and sounds remarkably like a Beatles song.
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