Song sergeant cracked4/17/2023 ![]() ![]() Latterly gutsied up by Joe Cocker it hit UK number one and was adopted as a countercultural anthem for the Woodstock generation. Someone here’s been on something a little stronger than Woodbines. ![]() McCartney’s music hall obviousness drives the song, an honest plonking beat, a refrain that was impossible to resist, inclusive in every regard (that Ringo brays it out manfully is intrinsic to its everyman appeal a lesson learned from Yellow Submarine’s ubiquity), but subtle Lennon nuances haunt the lyric, almost covertly, hiding in plain sight: ‘ What do you see when you turn out the light, I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine’. ![]() And, appropriately enough, there’s even better to come.Īn instant standard, …Friends again utilized both sides of the Beatles’ compositional coin. It’s chalk and cheese, light and dark, fish ‘n’ chips, Morecambe and Wise. Pared to the bone, a single couplet nails their magic: ‘ It’s getting better, a little better, all the time’ sings thumbs-aloft Paul, while John’s instinctive riposte is a characteristically withering: ‘ It couldn’t get no worse’. While not the greatest of their compositions, Getting Better is a textbook example of what Lennon brought to McCartney and McCartney brought to Lennon in order to turn a pair of great songwriters into a songwriting team that was truly exceptional. His dry, nasal delivery doesn’t so much wink at the camera as sneer at it. In Lennon’s cynically self-critical hands, twee becomes decidedly dark. It’s twee, certainly, but not winningly McCartney twee. Rising to a Lennon challenge to provide ‘fairground’ accompaniment, George Martin went to town with a kitchen-sink tape collage of calliopes, steam organs, harmoniums and comb-and-paper kazoo-ing that, while clever, lacks warmth. Scoping about for ideas as Pepper’s recording schedule stretched on Lennon eyes fell upon the poster, now hanging on his home studio wall, and basically asset-stripped it for inspiration. Intrinsically steampunk in concept, … Mr Kite! found its lyrical genesis in a Victorian circus poster Lennon discovered in a junk shop. Which only made them hate them even more. However much issue the contemporary listener might take with Paul’s instinctive Tin Pan Alley-isms, whether underground press-favouring blues rock radical, hypothetical milkman-on-his-round or John Lennon himself, they simply couldn’t avoid unconsciously whistling them. Not terrible, but rather more ‘Brian Wilson’s sandpit’ than is healthy.ĭestined to split opinion, even among The Beatles themselves, because while it virtually oompahs along in its archaic music hall manner with McCartney giving it full-beam puppy eyes over an urban nursery rhyme lyric that veritably oozes fondue fromage, it irrefutably employs a bloody good tune while doing it. George Martin’s accompanying harpsichord is pleasant enough, though you can’t help feeling that the only reason they’re deploying a harpsichord here is because they can. Where we find a lightly toasted McCartney contemplating his navel, as THC fingers fumble for a coherent bass-line. A fair enough palate cleanser, but more snippet than credible contender. While not bad for a bumper (the opening title track’s reprise was knocked off at the end of recording merely as an up-beat baffle between GM²’s closing cock-crow and A Day In The Life self-conscious brilliance), Pepper’s stop-gap signature tune reprise can’t realistically compete with the fine-tuned company it’s keeping. ![]()
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