Things They Said Yesterday
"The Songs"

Hello Little Girl
John Lennon: This was one of the first songs l ever finished. I was about eighteen and we gave it to the Fourmost. I think it was the first song of my own that l ever attempted to do with the group.

How Do You Do It
Paul McCartney: He (George Martin) wanted us to do Mitch Murray's song 'How Do You Do It'. He knew it was a number one hit so he gave us it on a demo. We took it back to Liverpool and said, "What are we gonna do with this? This is what he wants us to do, he's our producer, so we'll have to do it." So we did, but we didn't like it and we came back to George and said, "Well, it may be a number one song but we just don't want this kind of song, we don't want to go out with that kind of reputation. It's a different thing we're going for, it's something new."

Love Me Do
Paul McCartney: 'Love Me Do' was us trying to do the blues. It came out whiter because it always does. We're white and we were just young Liverpool musicians. We didn't have any finesse to be able to actually sound black. But 'Love Me Do' was probably the first bluesy thing we tried to do.

I Saw Her Standing There
Paul McCartney: I wrote with John in the front parlour of my house in 20 Forthlin Rd, Allerton. We sagged off school and wrote it on guitars and a little bit on the piano that I had there. I remember I had the lyrics "just 17 never been a beauty queen" which John - it was one of the first times he ever went, "What? Must change that ..." and it became "You know what I mean".

Please Please Me
Paul McCartney: George Martin's contribution was quite a big one, actually. The first time he actually ever showed that he could see beyond what we were offering him was 'Please Please Me'. It was originally conceived as a Roy Orbison-type thing, you know. George Martin said, 'Well, we'll put the tempo up.' He lifted the tempo and we saw it was much better and that was a big hit.

Do You Want To Know A Secret?
John Lennon: I wrote that one. I remember getting the idea from a Walt Disney film - Cinderellla or Fantasia. It went something like: "Do you wanna know a secret, promise not to tell, standing by a wishing well''.

A World Without Love
John Lennon: McCartney. I think he had the whole song before The Beatles and resurrected it to give to Peter and Gordon. Peter is now the famous Peter Asher. I don't know what became of Gordon. Anyway, we always used to crack up at the lyrics ... "Please lock me away ..."

From Me To You
John Lennon: Paul and I wrote this when we were on tour. We nearly didn't record it because we thought it was too bluesy at first, but when we'd finished it and George Martin had scored it with harmonica it was all right.

Paul McCartney: We wrote 'From Me To You' on the bus too, it was great, that middle eight was a great departure for us. Say you're in C then go to A minor, fairly ordinary, C, change it to G. And then F, pretty ordinary, but then it goes (sings) " got arms" and that's a G Minor. Going to G Minor and a C takes you to a whole new world. It was very exciting.

Thank You Girl
John Lennon: Paul and I wrote this as a B side for one of our first records. In the old days we used to write and write all the time.

She Loves You
John Lennon: 'She Loves You' was written right about the ... wait. From Me To You was the third single after 'She Loves You', wasn't it? Or was it the other way around - 'From Me To You' after 'Please Please Me'? Well, 'She Loves You' was written by the two of us together. I remember it was Paul's idea. Instead of singing I love you again, Paul decided we would have a third party passing and latch it on to something else. The "woo woo" was taken from the Isley Brothers' 'Twist An Shout'. We stuck it in everything - this, 'From Me To You'. I don't know where the "yeah, yeah, yeah" came from. I remember thinking when Elvis did All Shook Up that it was the first time in my life that I heard "uh huh" and "oh yeah" and "yeah yeah" all sung in the same song.

All My Loving
Paul McCartney: I always liked it. I think it was the first song where I wrote the words without the tune. I wrote the words on the tour bus with Roy Orbison. We did a lot of writing then. Then when we got to the gig, I found a piano and worked out the music. That was the first time that I'd actually written that way.

Not A Second Time
John Lennon: I wrote this for the second album, and it was the one that William Mann wrote about in 'The Times'. He went on about the flat sub-mediant key switches and the Aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler's Song Of The Earth. Really, it was just chords like any other chords. That was the first time anyone had written anything like that about us.

I Call Your Name
John Lennon: I like this one. I wrote it very early on when I was in Liverpool, and added the middle eight when we came down to London.

I'm Happy Just To Dance With You
John Lennon: I wrote this for George to sing.

I'll Cry Instead
John Lennon: We were going to do this in 'A Hard Days Night', but the director Dick Lester didn't like it, so we put it on the flip side of the album. I like it.

Anytime At All
John Lennon: Another of those songs we wrote about the time of 'A Hard Days Night'. I don't write in the same way anymore, but I suppose I could if l tried.

You Can't Do That
John Lennon: This was my attempt at being Wilson Pickett, but it was on the flip side because 'Can't Buy Me Love' was so good.

I'll Be Back
John Lennon: An early favourite that I wrote.

I Feel Fine
John Lennon: I wrote this at a recording session. It was tied around the guitar riff that opens it.

I Don't Want To Spoil The Party
John Lennon: That was a very personal one of mine. In the early days I wrote less material than Paul because he was more competent on Guitar than I. He taught me quite a lot of guitar really.

Ticket To Ride
John Lennon: That's me, one of the earliest heavy metal records. Paul's contribution was the way Ringo played the drums.

You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
John Lennon: That's me in my Dylan period. I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Bob Dylan.

We Can Work It Out
John Lennon: Paul's first half, my middle eight. He came to the house with the first bit and came up with "Life is very short and there's no time, for fussing and fighting my friend ..."

Norwegian Wood
John Lennon: I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was writing about an affair, so it was very gobbledegook. I was sort of writing from my experiences, girls' flats, things like that. I wrote it Kenwood. George had just got the sitar and I sad, "Could you play this piece?" We went through many different sort of versions of the song, it was never right and I was getting angry about it, it wasn't coming out like I said. They said, "We'll just do it how you want to do it." And I said, "Well I just want to do it like this." They let me go and I did the guitar very loudly into the mike and sang it at the same time and then George had the sitar and I asked him could he play the piece that I'd written, you know, dee diddley dee diddley dee, that bit, and he was not sure whether he could play it yet because he hadn't done much on the sitar but he was willing to have a go, as is his want, and he learned that bit and dubbed it on after.

Nowhere Man
John Lennon: I was just sitting, trying to think of a song, and I thought of myself sitting there, doing nothing and getting nowhere, Once I'd thought of that, it was easy. It all came out. No, I remember now. I'd actually stopped trying to think of something. Nothing would come. I was cheesed off and went for a lie down, having given up. Then I thought of myself as "Nowhere Man" - sitting in his nowhere land.

Girl
John Lennon: That was about dream girl. When Paul and I wrote lyrics in the old days we used to laugh about it like the Tin Pan Alley people would. And it was only later on that we tried to match the lyrics to the tune. I like this one. It was one of my best.

Yellow Submarine
John Lennon: Paul's baby. Donovan helped with the lyrics. I helped with the lyrics. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio but it was based on Paul's inspiration, his idea, his title. I count it as his song. And it was written for Ringo.

Paul McCartney: I knew it would get connotations, but it really was a children's song. I just loved the idea of kids singing it . With 'Yellow Submarine' the whole idea was "If someday I came across some kids singing it, that will be it".

She Said She Said
John Lennon: I like this one. I wrote it about an acid trip in Los Angeles. It was only the second trip we'd had. We took it because we started hearing things about it and we wanted to know what it was all about. Peter Fonda came over to us and started saying things like "I know what it's like to be dead, man" and we didn't really want to know, but he kept going on and on. Anyway, that's where the song came from, and it's a nice song too.

Got To Get You Into My Life
John Lennon: We were influenced by our Tamla Mowtown bit on this. You see, we're influenced by whatever's going.

Tomorrow Never Knows
John Lennon: With 'Tomorrow Never Knows' I'd imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical of course and we did something different. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realise now that was what I wanted.

Strawberry Fields Forever
John Lennon: Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved on with my auntie who lived in a nice semi-detached place with a small garden ad doctors and lawyers and all that ilk living around - not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. Near that home was this Strawberry Hills, a house near a boy's reformatory where I used to go with my friends Nigel and Pete. We would go there and hang out and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. We always had fun at Strawberry Fields. So that's where I got the name. But I used it as an image. "Living is easy. Misunderstanding all you see." It still goes, doesn't it. The awareness apparently trying to be expressed is - let's say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from all the others. I was different all my life. The second verse goes, "No one I think is in my tree." Well, I was too shy and self doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore I must be crazy or a genius - "I mean it must be high or low," the next line. It was scary as a child, because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my auntie nor my friends nor anybody that could ever see what I did. It was very, very scary and abut the only contact I had was reading about an Oscar Wilde or a Dylan Thomas or a Vincent Van Gogh - all those books that my auntie had that talked about their suffering because of their visions. Because of what they saw, they were tortured by society for trying to express what they were. I saw loneliness.

Paul McCartney: At the end of 'Strawberry Fields' that wasn't "I buried Paul" at all, that was John saying "cranberry sauce". That's John's humour. John would say something totally out of synch, like 'cranberry sauce'. If you don't realise that John's apt to say 'cranberry sauce' when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think, "Aha!".

Penny Lane
Paul McCartney: Penny Lane is a bus roundabout in Liverpool; and there is a barber's shop showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know - no that's not true, they're just photos of hairstyles, but all the people who come and go, stop and say hello. There's a bank on the corner, so we made up the part about the banker in his motor car. It's part fact, part nostalgia for a place which is a great place, blue suburban skies a we remember it, and its still there. And we put in a joke or two, "Four fish and finger pie." The women would never dare sat that, except to themselves. Most people wouldn't hear it, but "finger pie" is just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut.

All You Need Is Love
Paul McCartney: George Martin always has something to do with it, but sometimes more than others. For instance, he wrote the end of "All You Need Is Love" and got into trouble because the "In The Mood" bit was copyrighted. We thought of all the great cliches because they're a great bit of random. It was a hurried session and we didn't mind giving that to do - saying "There's the end, we want it to go on and on". Actually what he wrote was much more disjointed, so when we put all the bits together we said, "Could we have 'Greensleeves' right on top of that little Bach thing?" And on top of that we had the "In The Mood" bit. George is quite a sage. Sometimes he works with us, sometimes against us. He always looked after us. I don't think he does as much as people think. He sometimes does all the arrangements and we just change them.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band
Paul McCartney: I was just thinking of words like Sergeant Pepper, and Lonely Hearts Club, and they came together for no reason. But after you've written it down you start to think, "There's this Sergeant Pepper who has taught the band to play, and got them to play so that at least they found one number. They're a bit of a brass band in a way, but also a bit of a rock band because they've got the San Francisco thing."

Paul McCartney: ... Billy Shears is another (name) that sounds like a schoolmate but isn't. Ringo's Billy Shears. Definitely. It just happened to turn out that we dreamed up Billy Shears. It as a rhyme for "years" ... "band you've known for all these years ... and here he is the one and only Billy Shears". We thought, that's a great little name, it's an Eleanor Rigby-type name, a nice atmospheric name, and it was leading into Ringo's track. So as far as we were concerned it was purely and simply a device to get the next song in.

John Lennon: Paul wrote it after a trip to America. The whole west coast long named group thing was coming in, you know, when people were no longer called the Beatles or the Crickets, they were suddenly Fred and His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes. He got influenced by that and came up with this idea of doing us as somebody else. He was trying to put something between the Beatles and the public. It took the "I" out of it some. Like the early days, saying "She loves you" instead of "I love you." So that's the song.

Within You Without You
George Harrison: Klaus (Voorman) had a harmonium in his house, which I hadn't played before. I was doodling on it, playing to amuse myself, when 'Within You' started to come. The tune came first, then I got the first sentence. It came out of what we'd been doing that evening.

John Lennon: I think that is George's best songs, one of my favourites. I like the arrangement, the sound and the words. He is clear on that song. You can hear his mind is clear and his music is clear. It's his innate talent that comes through on that song - that brought the song together. George is responsible for Indian music getting over here. That song is a good example.

Good Morning Good Morning
John Lennon: I often sit at the piano, working at songs, with the telly on low in the background. If I'm a bit low and not getting much done then the words on the telly come through. That's when I heard "Good Morning, Good Morning". It was a Corn Flakes advertisement.

The Inner Groove
Paul McCartney: Then the this-little-bit-if-you-play-it-backwards stuff. As I say, nine times out of ten it's really nothing. Take the end of Sgt. Pepper, that backwards thing, "We'll f#*k you like supermen." Some fans came around to my door giggling. I said, "Hello, what do you want?" They said, "Is it true, that bit at the end? Is it true? It says, 'We'll f*#k you like supermen'". I said, "No, you're kidding. I haven't heard it, but I'll play it." It was just some piece of conversation that was recorded and turned backwards. But I went inside after I'd seen them and played it studiously, turned it backwards with my thumb against the motor, turned the motor off and did it backwards. And there it was, sure as anything, plain as anything. "We'll f#*k you like supermen." I thought, Jesus, what can you do?

The Inner Light
Paul McCartney: George wrote this. Forget the Indian music and listen to the melody. Don't you think it's a beautiful melody? It's really lovely.

Hey Jude
Paul McCartney: I happened to be driving out to see Cynthia Lennon. It was just after John and she had broken up, and I was quite mates with Julian. He's a nice kid, Julian. And I was going out in my car just vaguely singing this song, and it was like "Hey Jules". I don't know why, "Hey Jules". It was just this thing you know, "Don't make it bad, take a sad song ..." And then I just thought a better name was Jude. A bit more country and western for me.

Glass Onion
John Lennon: I was having a laugh because there'd been so much gobbledegook about 'Pepper', play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.

Revolution
John Lennon: There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one the said "Count me Out". The original version which ends up on the LP said, "Count me in" too. I put in both because I wasn't sure. On the version released as a single I said "When you talk about destruction you can count me out". I didn't want to get killed.

Come Together
John Lennon: This is another of my favourites. It was intended as a campaign song at first, but it never turned out that way.


Ringo Starr: I used to wish that I could write songs like the others - and I've tried, but I just can't. I can get the words all right, but whenever I think of a tune and sing it to the others they always say "Yeah, it sounds like such-a-thing'" and when they point it out I see what they mean.