Talking about which songs by The Beatles shouldn’t be released legitimately feels like playing dice with the butterfly effect. Sure, there’s no way the likes of ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hey Jude’ would make it on this list for any reason other than the joy of watching terminally online Beatles fans get very cross indeed, but you never know with The Fabs.
Removing what might seem like a throwaway track from With The Beatles could also mean losing a recording technique later perfected on The White Album—a technique that Alan Parsons famously introduced to Pink Floyd for Dark Side of the Moon. Suddenly, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and you’ve created a world where landfill indie never ended, Jamie XX works at a supermarket, and Charli XCX is remembered as a one-hit wonder for ‘Boom Clap’. Nobody wants that.
Fortunately, this is just a hypothetical, based on my experience listening to these songs as nothing more than patchier efforts from one of the most influential acts in pop culture. Specifically, the wobbly-headed part of one of the most influential acts of pop culture. Critically speaking, Paul McCartney had the roughest time you can get in The Beatles without writing ‘Octopus’ Garden’, and while that’s categorically not fair, there are a few moments of his titanic discography that roll a few eyes.
So, we’re going to rank them. Here are five songs Paul McCartney wrote for the Beatles that should never have been released.
Five songs The Beatles should never have released:
‘She’s A Woman’
A song written and recorded in about 25 minutes, and sweet baby James does it sound like it. As an arrangement, it rocks about as hard as you can get from the early Beatles, which is always a bit of fun. As a piece of songwriting, though, Macca had grown out of this long before its release in 1964. Even the song’s basic message of “I don’t need trinkets when I got your sweet luuurve” was done with more fun in the same year as ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Not to mention a lot less… knuckle-dragging.
To be clear, Macca isn’t going full Captain Caveman the way John Lennon was prone to on early Beatles records (the Lennon version of this list is just ‘Run For Your Life’ five times in a row). Paul’s repeated mention of “she don’t give boys the eye” is icky at best, though. Yes, it was a B-side, so they weren’t exactly trying to break boundaries, but considering that the same year, they put ‘If I Fell’ as a B-side, that still doesn’t hold up.
‘I Will’
Yes, I know, I know, I know, but you try finding five duff Paul McCartney songs without at least one of them having a melody as spellbinding as this? Only Beatles songs as well; you can’t even go with the Frog Chorus. It’s true, though, ‘I Will’ found its way onto Macca’s solo concert setlist way up to the 21st century because, as the man himself once put it to Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now, “It’s still one of my favourite melodies that I’ve written.”
Beyond that… well, it’s a love song and literally nothing more. Keep in mind, this is the same songwriter who gave us The White Album and had already penned ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ and ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Even ‘When I’m 64’—written by Captain Bobble-Head himself at the age of 14—is a more thematically interesting take on a love song. By comparison, “Love you when we’re together. Love you when we’re apart.” It’s some “Cat sat on the mat” nonsense, no matter how beautifully it’s sung.
‘Her Majesty’
I’m bending the rules here, because not only do I believe this song shouldn’t have been released, but so did The Beatles themselves. This peculiar track was originally considered for the iconic second-half medley of Abbey Road, intended to slot between ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘Polythene Pam’. However, once McCartney decided it didn’t fit, he actually ordered the tape it was recorded on to be destroyed—only to be reminded that EMI policy strictly prohibited the destruction of any Beatles recording.
Thus, ‘Her Majesty’ was tucked at the end of the album’s master tape so it could be easily cut off when production finished. Everyone promptly forgot about this until the final playback before release, when after one of the greatest album endings of all time, this weird little curio about how much Paul McCartney fancies Lizzie Windsor crashed in. Everyone cracked up and decided to leave it in. Possibly while high. They shouldn’t have.
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’
From a purely artistic perspective, I can’t help but get a warm, fuzzy feeling from this slice of purest Macca granny music. The man’s love for music hall was pure, and you can tell from the way that Paul delivers this shockingly dark story of a serial killer with the broadest grin on his face and jazz hands a plenty. Camper than Alan Carr’s holiday plans and very, very British, I couldn’t argue if you thought this was hogwash but what puts it on my list? The fact that while Paul may have loved this song, he was the only Beatle who did.
Getting ‘Maxwell’ right became his hill to die on, no matter how much the band, especially Lennon, despised the song. In 2008 Ringo Starr told Rolling Stone that it was “the worst track we ever had to record”, which coming from him is a damning remark. Yes, they all hated each other anyway, it probably wouldn’t change anything, but my God Maxwell and his silver hammer didn’t have to make it so much worse.
‘Two of Us’
This one’s just sad. ‘Two of Us’ is a game attempt to remember the good times Paul and John shared way back when, despite how badly their relationship had broken down. For all the amazing moments the Get Back documentary showed, my abiding memory of it is John and Paul, eyes locked, harmonising on this song through comedy with gritted teeth.
A good bit on the surface. The more one thinks about it, it smacks of trying to address the elephant in the room and just making it worse. It is one of those moments where someone makes a joke, and the whole room tries to smile at them despite it touching a nerve with everyone. The song is also a nothing-burger, but this should have stayed in the vaults for a much more simple reason. Paul and John’s dirty laundry needed to stay between them.
