In 1963, The Beatles released “Twist And Shout”, a song that would become one of their biggest hits. Written by Phil Medley and Bert Russell, “Twist And Shout” is on both Introducing…The Beatles, their first record in the United States, and Please Please Me, The Beatles’ debut record released in the United Kingdom.

Before The Beatles recorded “Twist And Shout”, it was first released by R&B group, The Top Notes in 1961. One year later, The Isley Brothers released “Twist And Shout”, a version that inspired The Beatles to put their own spin on the song. Unfortunately, singer John Lennon was ill when they recorded “Twist And Shout”, making it a challenge for him in the studio.

Lennon was already suffering from a cold when The Beatles went in to record “Twist And Shout”. Struggling with a sore throat, The Beatles were at the end of a 12-hour studio session when they decided to record “Twist And Shout”.

“Someone suggested they do ‘Twist and Shout’ with John taking the lead vocal,” studio engineer Norman Smith recalls. “But by this time, all their throats were sore; it was 12 hours since we had started working. John’s, in particular, was almost completely gone so we really had to get it right the first time. The Beatles on the studio floor and us in the control room.

“John sucked a couple more Zubes,” he adds,” referring to a type of throat lozenges, “had a bit of a gargle with milk and away we went.”
What Happened After The Beatles Recorded “Twist And Shout”.  By the end of the recording session, Lennon was reportedly so sick that he sang without his shirt on. The Beatles did two takes of “Twist And Shout”, using the first one.

“Twist And Shout” became a No. 1 hit for The Beatles. But the song, although a massive hit for the group, wasn’t as big as some of their other hits. The Beatles dominated 16 consecutive weeks in the No. 1 spot on the charts in 1964. They spent eight weeks in the top spot with “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, followed by two weeks with “She Loves You”, one week of “Twist And Shout”, and five weeks with “Can’t Buy Me Love”.

Later in 1964, The Beatles returned to the top spot for one week, with “Love Me Do”, followed by three weeks with their “A Hard Day’s Night” single. At the end of 1964, The Beatles spent one week at No. 1, with “I Feel Fine”.

Source: americansongwriter.com/Gayle Thompson

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For Paul McCartney, songwriting isn’t only a job, a craft and an emotional outlet. It’s a compulsion and a craving.

“People say, ‘Well, why do you still write songs?’ And it’s just because I love it. I’m addicted,” he said in an interview at Boulevard Carroll, a warren of recording and rehearsal studios on Manhattan’s Far West Side, where McCartney, 83, had just wrapped up an afternoon of band practice for the season finale of “Saturday Night Live.” “Out of a black hole comes forth milk and honey. And it’s so great, the feeling.”

Prolific as he has been — through the Beatles, Wings and solo albums — McCartney doesn’t follow any songwriting discipline or routine. “I’ll just be somewhere, and with some time to spare, and my guitar will be there, or I’ll be near a piano. And the urge will take me,” he said. “Whenever I’ve hit something, it’s just like, ooh, wow. It’s a great feeling. You know, the whole creative thing is a great thing. I say it beats working.”

Even for a rehearsal, McCartney was nattily dressed. He sported a blue jacket, a black shirt with pink pin dots, black pants, white-soled shoes like karate slippers and socks with a psychedelic design of blue bubbles below a bright yellow stripe.

A few days afterward, McCartney would perform on “S.N.L.," playing old and new songs, including “Days We Left Behind” from his new album, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane.” Then, five days later, McCartney was the surprise final guest on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the Beatles made their North American debut in 1964. As a musical finale for Colbert, he sang the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye.”

In person, McCartney carries his six decades of fame with extraordinary grace. He’s genial and unpretentious, proud but not arrogant and still amazed and delighted at his life as a musician. “I wonder these days at how I ended up as a songwriter,” he mused. “Because, you know, I’m just some kid who went to school, went to the careers master who said to me, you know, ‘You haven’t got qualifications and, there’s not … I don’t see a great future for you.’

“So I had to take that and just sort of think, ‘Sod you — I’m gonna do something.’ And it made me work for success harder, because I wasn’t supposed to be successful. So writing songs was one of the great things about my growing up.”

The first song he wrote was a rockabilly-flavored tune, “I Lost My Little Girl.” McCartney recalled, “Someone pointed out to me later, ‘That was about you losing your mum.’ I wrote it at about 14, 15 years old, and she had died quite recently.” Although the Beatles didn’t record the song, McCartney would later unveil it in the 1970s with Wings. “This is an interesting thing about songs,” he said. “Without knowing it, you’re delving into stuff that maybe would be difficult to talk about.”

Source: nytimes.com/Jon Pareles

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Paul McCartney has finally made the admission all Beatles fans have been waiting for – that the quartet are the greatest band across the universe.

The musician, 83, has always modestly claimed that the best singer-songwriters of all time were crooning duo The Everly Brothers, whose songs included “Cathy’s Clown” and “All I Have to Do is Dream”.

However, in a TikTok Q&A interview ahead of his new record, McCartney revealed he feels fine saying The Beatles – made up of McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – probably pip them to the post.

“It is phenomenal, it is really phenomenal,” he said of the band’s stratospheric success.

“When we started out, we were just kids, and rock and roll was just really coming in, and we thought, ‘If we’re lucky, we’ve got a couple of years’ – that’s how long people normally lasted. They couldn’t really sustain much more after that.“

He said he only expected their music would be played for “maybe five years max”, adding: “Then that became 10, and we were kind of still going and the scene’s still there. Then it became 20, then 30, and now it’s right up there. It’s great, it is a lovely feeling.”

McCartney said he enjoys hearing people tell him their kids love The Beatles.

“That’s something, you know, because you can’t indoctrinate [kids], they just either like it or they don’t. I think The Beatles were the greatest band ever. I’m a fan.”

McCartney once named Don and Phil Everly as the musicians who inspired him and Lennon the most, stating: “To this day, I just think they’re the greatest. And they were different.

Source: the-independent.com/Jacob Stolworthy

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In the wake of his 2016 death, Prince left behind an enviable vault containing thousands of unreleased songs, most of which will likely never see the light of day. While the late musician’s estate has shared a few selections from the collection over the years, there’s one in particular that Paul McCartney is hoping they’ll come around to releasing: a cover Prince recorded of the Beatles‘ Let It Be single, “The Long and Winding Road.”

“I was with some guy couple of years ago, so it was after Prince had died, and this guy said, ‘Have you heard Prince do ‘Long and Winding Road?'” McCartney said on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years. “I said, ‘Well, no, that’s one of my songs. I don’t think he ever did it.’ He said, ‘Well, he did. He did it in rehearsal. He was rehearsing it for something.’ So, he said, ‘I’ll send it to you if you want.’ He sent it to me and it’s really great.”

The guy, McCartney believes, was a personal photographer for Prince. He described the recording as “kind of rocky,” adding, “He plays some really good guitar on it.” McCartney proposed the idea of asking the musician’s estate about what can be done with the hidden recording. “I could make it into something really good,” he said.
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While the pair didn’t know each other well, McCartney recognized an undeniable talent in Prince. “He took a lot from [Jimi] Hendrix, but he was a great player. If you watch him play, he’s got that sort of style. Bow! It’s just there’s something about it. You know he knows that instrument,” McCartney said, later adding, “He’s a special guy. It’s so sad these people, you know, suddenly he’s not here, and it always makes me wish that I’d known him better and that I could sort of say, ‘Hey, man, come on. What’s going on?’ It’s such a shame because there’s such talents.”

Source: rollingstone.com/Larisha Paul

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With Paul McCartney releasing his first solo album in over five years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and the Beatles’ four-film biopic’s main cast already announced, it seems only natural that the actor who’s transforming into Macca – Paul Mescal – had a chat with the legend about his songwriting process. And luckily for the rest of us, it was captured on camera.

“I teach some kids up in my old school in Liverpool, and that's like the first thing [they ask]. I don't know how to do this, which is not very inspiring. I haven’t got a formula,” McCartney tells Mescal.

“They used to ask me and John [Lennon], ‘How’d you do it? Who writes the music, who writes the words?’ I don’t know. To me, I think any story or song you’re gonna do, it’s gotta involve memory. With the Beatles, we always tried to write something different.”

Lennon still serves as a source of inspiration for McCartney – especially considering his upcoming album turns a lens inward and revisits the formative years that not only shaped his own life but the very foundation of the Beatles.

“I ran into this guy called John Lennon, and he was kind of fighting life,” he reminisces of his collaborator., whose first single, Love Me Do, was released in 1962.

“He'd had a lot of trouble. His dad had left home, his mom had got run over… so he was putting up a shield, so he's very witty, very biting. And then when it came to writing, that kind of relationship stayed there.

Source: guitarworld.com/Janelle Borg

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Imbuing spiritual philosophy into music was a practice George Harrison started back when he was still a mop-topped Beatle with tracks like “Within You Without You” and “I Me Mine”, so it’s no surprise that he continued this songwriting tradition into his solo career. In fact, two of his first major wins as a solo artist were spiritual numbers, one of which he later referred to as a “prayer and personal statement.”

For many folks, their minds might wander to Harrison’s first No. 1 hit post-Beatles, “My Sweet Lord”. The 1970 chart-topper sounds like a word-for-word prayer, right down to the “hallelujah” refrains. But the one Harrison felt was an even stronger impression of his spiritual state was his second No. 1: the 1973 track “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” from Living In The Material World.

Whereas “My Sweet Lord” was adoring and reverent, “Give Me Love”, as the title would suggest, was more about his hopes and immaterial desires. “Give me love, give me peace on earth, give me light, give me life,” the song begins. “Keep me from birth, give me hope, help me cope with this heavy load.”  George Harrison Called “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” His Personal Statement.

No two songs ever come into being in the same way. George Harrison sat with some songs for years, whether because he was still revising them or because his Beatles bandmates rejected them as a Fab Four tune (often a mix of both). Songs like “Isn’t It A Pity” spent years incubating before Harrison released it on All Things Must Pass, his solo debut. But “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” was notably different.

“Sometimes you open your mouth, and you don’t know what you are going to say,” Harrison wrote in I Me Mine. “And whatever comes out is the starting point. If that happens, and you are lucky, it can usually be turned into a song. This song is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it.”

Chart performance would indicate that there were plenty of folks who liked it. “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” topped the charts on the Billboard Hot 100. It also hit the Top 10 in Harrison’s native United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and Norway.

Source: americansongwriter.com/Melanie Davis

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