Number 24 - Beautiful Night

Beatles Involved:

Paul and Ringo

Listenability: 3 out of 5.

A Paul piano ballad from the 1980's that he dug out and rerecorded in 1996 for his Flaming Pie album. Ringo plays drums on the track and other highlights include George Martin's orchestration at the end with Ringo adding some lead vocals for the extended coda. The song's chords are nice and the melody is passable. The lyrics go nowhere and detract from the overall quality of the song.

What They Said About It:

Paul:

For years I’ve been saying to Ringo, ‘cause we’d never really done much work outside The Beatles, oh it’d be great to do something you know. Because we got our friendship going again with The Anthology. And I’d had a song called Beautiful Night which I wrote quite a long time ago. And I’d always liked it, and people who’d heard it had liked it. But I never felt it was the right version of it. I just felt I just hadn’t quite pulled it off.

And so I got Beautiful Night out, sorted it out, got the chords and stuff and all that. It goes really nice, I sat down, I sat on the piano and he just started and it was just like old days and I realised we haven’t done this for so long, you know. And it was so comfortable, because you know, it is that thing, if you’ve know each other that long and done so much work with them, unless you both completely lose the plot it’s sort of still there you know. So it very much was and it was lovely to work with him again. And as we’re coming away from the...into the control room, Ringo sort of [said] ‘Come on, on your way.’ He was doing like a doorman so we left that on the end of the track.

Ringo:

He invited me to play on the track ‘Beautiful Night’ so I said ‘Sure’. ‘Cause I think it’s a beautiful track and we found the time when I was in England and we spent the day with him and Linda and record, Barbara and I. I still feel really comfortable playing with his bass playing. Well playing with him really, but you know, the drums and bass. It’s, I think you know we have all that history and it comes into play when we play together. You just can’t dismiss that.

Other Bits and Pieces 

• The following video shows Paul recording the track and includes some footage of Ringo and George Martin.

• Vocal group 'Blake' recorded a cover version of Beautiful Night and released the following video clip in early  2013.