Number 1 - Free As A Bird

Beatles involved:  

John (posthumous), Paul, George, Ringo

Listenability: 4.5 out of 5

Not quite a full Beatle reunion as the four living Beatles never did fully reunite after announcing their break-up in March 1970. The listenability of the track also suffers as John’s voice is not clear and the piano has an effect add to it to help it blend in with John’s own piano playing. George Harrison, however plays some remarkable slide guitar, Ringo’s drums are loud and crisp, and when Paul and George harmonise on the track (with some help from Jeff Lynne) they end up sounding like a 1990’s reunion of The Beatles.

What They Said About It....

Ringo Starr:

It’s great, and I’m not just saying that because I’m on it. It’s an amazing Beatle track. And for me being away from it for so long. I listened to it and I thought “It sounds just like them.” I’d taken myself away from it for so long, that it was like listening to it as an outsider. It’s brilliant. I think you could say that they could have made this in 1967.   

Q December 1995

George Harrison:

John never finished the middle, and also if you hear the original version – which has apparently been out on the radio for years – you know that John plays very different chord changes in it as well. Historically, what we’d say would be , Well hang on, I’m not sure about that chord there – why don’t we try this chord here? So we took the liberty of doing that: of beefing the song up a bit with some different chord changes and different arrangements, and we finished the lyrics and we actually produced the song and put John into it....When you say it sounds like The Beatles, people may expect it to sound like ’65 or ’68. It’s very similar in some respects to Abbey Road because it has the voicing, tha backing voices like Because. But the whole technical thing that has taken place between 1969 and 1995 is such that, you know, it sounds more like now.  

Q December 1995

Paul McCartney:

It came to the backing harmonies and George said to me 'Jeff is such a big Beatles fan, he'd love to get on this record, he'd just die! Even if he goes 'hey!' he can then say he was on it'. And I was a little bit reluctant. I'm a bit sort of precious, a bit private about who's in the Beatles and we didn't do too badly on that philosophy. Even when Billy Preston came in I was in two minds. The others were so definite that I went with their thinking, as I always did, because I knew they had right-on opinions. Well Ringo says 'You know why ELO broke up? They ran out of Beatles riffs.' One off Jeff's great prides is that he met John once - obviously a huge fan of John's - and John said 'I really like all that ELO stuff man.' That was the highspot of Jeff's life! He was vindicated. John said it was alright! So we got Jeff on Free As A Bird.

Jeff Lynne:

It was very difficult, and one of the hardest jobs I've ever had to do, because of the nature of the source material; it was very primitive sounding, to say the least. I spent about a week at my own studio cleaning up both tracks on my computer, with a friend of mine, Marc Mann, who is a great engineer, musician and computer expert... Putting fresh music to it was the easy part! Free As A Bird, however, wasn't a quarter as noisy as Real Love, and only a bit of EQ was needed to cure most problems. 

Sound on Sound, December 1995 

George Martin:

Question: When Paul, George and Ringo recorded the two new Beatles songs, Free As A Bird and Real Love, did they ask you to be involved?I kind of told them I wasn’t too happy with putting them together with the dead John. I’ve got nothing wrong with dead John but the idea of having dead John with live Paul and Ringo and George to form a group, it didn’t appeal to me too much. In the same way that I think it’s okay to find an old record of Nat King Cole’s and bring it back to life and issue it, but to have him singing with his daughter is another thing. So I don’t know, I’m not fussy about it but it didn’t appeal to me very much. I think I might have done it if they asked me, but they didn’t. 

Question: Did you enjoy Jeff Lynne’s production of Free As A Bird and Real Love?I thought what they did was terrific; it was very very good indeed. I don’t think I would have done it like that if I had produced it. 

Question: What would you have done differently?Well, you see the way they did it you must remember the material they had to deal with was very difficult. It was a cassette that John had placed on top of his piano, played and sang. The piano was louder than the voice, and the voice wasn’t very clear and the rhythm was all over the place. So they tried to separate the voice and the piano, not very successfully.
Then they tried to put it into a rigid time beat so they could overdub easily other instruments. So they stretched it and compressed it until it got to a regular waltz and then they were done. The result was, in order to conceal the bad bits, they had to plaster it fairly heavily, so what you ended up with was quite a thick homogeneous sound that hardly stops. There’s not much dynamic in it.The way I would have tackled it if I had the opportunity would have been the reverse of that. I would have looked at the song as a song and got The Beatles together and say ‘what can we do with this song?’ bearing in mind we have got John around as well somewhere. I would have actually have started to record a song and I would have dropped John into it. I wouldn't have made John the basis of it. So where possible I would have used instruments probably and we would then try and get his voice more separate and use him for the occasional voice so it would become a true partnership of voices. Whether that would be practical or not I don't know, this is just theoretically the way I would tackle it. Taken from: Rock Cellar Magazine. April 2013.

Does it hurt that you are not a producer of ‘Free As A Bird’ their new single?

...Well having heard it I wish I had been. But when I heard that they were going to do it I said to myself well it can’t be as good because I’m not producing it, you know. But then when I heard it I realised it was better than I produced. So, yeah it’s a very good record. No I’m not sorry about it, I’m quite happy. 

Dutch TV Interview with Neil Aspinall, George Martin, and Derek Taylor

Julian Lennon:

I heard the song for the first time when I was last in New York visiting Sean and Yoko. It's a great song. I love it. Although I must say I find it hard to hear Dad's vocals.

Sean Lennon (as retold by Paul McCartney):

It's going to be a bit spooky hearing a dead guy on lead vocal. But give it a try. 

Q December 1995

Other Bits and Pieces

This short video below shows Paul, George and Ringo arriving in Friar Park (George's home) in style. It was originally broadcast prior to the premier of Free As A Bird video and has been officially unavailable ever since.