When The Beatles’ first album came out, John Lennon was only 22 years old. He was still a new talent, still learning his songwriting craft, so over the course of the band’s first few releases, listeners heard him slowly finding his sound and voice. By the time the band split, he was fully formed into the artist the world remembers him as, but having grown up on tape, that inevitably means there are some regretfully weak moments.

It’s only natural. If any artist looked back at things they made when they were young, there would be something to cringe about. There are bound to be moments when what they created back then didn’t make the grade, ageing badly and coming to be a source of embarrassment later down the time. Paul McCartney had the same thing as he looked back on tracks like ‘Hold Me Tight’ or ‘Little Child’ as weak filler songs that lacked anything special and didn’t live up to the talent he grew into.

But for Lennon, his embarrassment over one song was so fierce that he wished he could erase the song altogether. Surprisingly, it’s a completely harmless number. One might hope that he would have wanted to take back something like ‘Run For Your Life’ with its regretful misogynist lyrics. However, his pick only related to his view of his own talent and the fact that this song certainly wasn’t a good example of it.

“It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote,” he said, talking about ‘It’s Only Love’ from Help!, the band’s 1965 record. Made at the peak of Beatlemania to accompany the film of the same name, it was made during an incredibly busy and prolific time. In only two years, the band had released five albums. So, as the fifth, at the end of that hectic run, the weakness here could be excused as the musician simply being exhausted and all out of ideas.

But Lennon didn’t excuse himself. “Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then, I was so ashamed of the lyrics, I could hardly sing them,” he said, adding finally, “That was one song I really wished I’d never written”.

However, the throwaway lyrics of the track feel representative of the band at the time. As a songwriting duo, Lennon and McCartney, at the start of their career, were out to make hits. They wanted to write simple rock and roll tunes that would get people moving and please their listeners. Later down the line, they would come to care more about artistic worth or experimentation, but right now, it was all about the energy of a song.

“If a lyric was really bad, we’d edit it, but we weren’t that fussy about it, because it’s only a rock n’ roll song. I mean, this is not literature,” McCartney said. But even he admitted that perhaps their process was a little lazy when it came to allowing songs to slip by as placeholders on tracklists, stating, “Sometimes we didn’t fight it if the lyric came out rather bland on some of those filler songs like ‘It’s Only Love’”.

Maybe if the duo had combed over the track again and gave it another rework, Lennon might have been saved the future embarrassment.