From their earliest studio albums, The Beatles were keen to spread lead vocal performances out across all four members of the band, allowing each of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr’s respective personalities to show in their voices. But that was where the sharing stopped. No one outside of the Fab Four was allowed to sing an original Beatles song.
Sure, there were plenty of guest features on backing vocals, from members of The Rolling Stones on ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘All You Need Is Love’ to The Mike Sammes Singers on Disney pastiche ‘Good Night’. Lead vocals were another matter entirely, though. These were the preserve of the band themselves. Except for two lines in a solitary song, late into their career as a group.
There, for the first and only time, we hear a female voice out in front, even if it’s just for a couple of lines in the song’s final verse. The track in question is John Lennon’s somewhat disturbing cod-nursery rhyme, ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’. It was one of several on 1968’s White Album inspired by The Beatles’ real experiences at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation retreat in India.
The all-important lines arrive at a point in the song’s narrative when the titular tiger killer, Bill, is asked by local children whether it’s not morally wrong to kill an animal. Bill’s mother interjects, reasoning, “Not when he looks so fierce”, in reference to the big cat her son has in his sights. Lennon obviously decided he needed a woman to play this female character in the story, making a female lead necessary to sing the lines of dialogue he’d written for the mother.
This move was contrary to previous examples of Beatles songs partially written from a female perspective, from the early single ‘She Loves You’ and the Revolver track ‘She Said She Said’ to the character-driven narrative of ‘She’s Leaving Home’. “If looks could kill,” Bill’s mother continues, with Lennon joining along, “It would have been us instead of him.” This line was inspired by something another guest at the Maharishi’s retreat actually said to the Beatle when a tiger that entered the estate had been shot dead.
But who is the vocalist?
It wasn’t difficult for The Beatles to find a female vocalist ready and willing to play the part of the mother in the song. For the first time in the history of the band’s recording sessions, there was a woman with them in the studio throughout the making of their latest album. That woman was Yoko Ono, Lennon’s new partner, whose presence was a source of tension between him, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in particular.
The female voice we hear singing the mother’s part on ‘Bungalow Bill’ is Ono, yet she’s not the only woman to feature on the recording. Indeed, she’s not the only Beatles partner either, with Ringo Starr’s wife Maureen also contributing backing vocals to the song’s chorus. Yoko is singing lead; however, even for a brief moment in a single verse, she was breaching a line that had never previously been crossed on any Beatles recording.
McCartney likely wasn’t thrilled by this development, but if he hadn’t any objections to it he didn’t raise them at the time. And so, Ono’s part made it onto the record, and remains the only time anybody outside of the band sang lead on one of their songs.
