Paul – lead
vocals, bass
John – harmony vocals, rhythm guitar
George – harmony vocals, lead guitar
Ringo – drums
A Taste Of Honey was the first play by Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney, written when she was 17. The largely plotless piece is the story of a girl abandoned by her black lover, who raises her baby with the help of a gay friend, at constant odds with her mother. Alan Brien in the Spectator called it “a boozed, exaggerated, late-night anecdote of a play which slithers unsteadily between truth and fantasy, between farce and tragedy, between aphrodisiac and emetic.” It was staged in 1958 by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, and filmed in 1961 by Tony Richardson, with Liverpudlian Rita Tushingham as Jo.
However, the song ‘A Taste Of Honey’ had nothing to do with the film, as many a commentator has since asserted. American composers Ric Marlow and Bobby Scott wrote a suite of incidental music for the 1960 Broadway production of the play, which featured Angela Lansbury and Joan Plowright, and was produced by David Merrick and directed by Tony Richardson. The production ran for 376 performances. The theme song won Marlow and Scott a Grammy Award for 1962 in the category Best Instrumental Theme, for the version performed by pianist Eddie Cano. Among Scott’s later compositions was the music for ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ for the Hollies.
‘A Taste Of Honey’ is the only cover version on Please Please Me that had already been a top 30 hit in the UK, and the only one not to have originally been performed by a black artist.
In fact, the single by Mr Acker Bilk (with the Leon Young String Chorale) was still at its peak position of 16 as the Beatles were recording their version of the song. However, the Beatles’ version was based on a different adaptation, a minor hit from the previous autumn by the American Lenny Welch. This featured similar guitar and vocal arrangements to the Beatles’ track (with female backing singers), and an extra final verse:
Though other
lips may cling to mine
I know they’ll never bring to mind
A taste of honey, a taste much sweeter than wine
Paul’s version has slightly different words to the original – and, it must be said, his subtle changes certainly improve the lyric. Whereas Welch merely thinks of her first kiss, Paul adds a layer of emotion by dreaming of it. And in singing “tasting much sweeter” instead “a taste much sweeter”, Paul’s instinctive delivery is far more natural, the cadence of the words having a much better match to the rhythm of the music. Once accustomed to the Beatles’ version, the stressed indefinite article of “a taste” sounds curiously clunky.
In fact, Welch’s was the first recording of ‘A Taste Of Honey’ to have a lyric – his version co-credits Lee Morris as a writer, though it’s not clear whether Morris actually wrote the lyric. What is clear is that the words have little in common with the song’s inspiration – thematically, the play and Welch’s lyric are oceans apart.
A version of the song with a completely different lyric was also recorded by a number of artists – including Sarah Vaughan and Barbra Streisand in 1963, Bobby Darin in 1965 and Esther Philips in 1966:
Cold winds may
blow over the icy seas
I’ll take with me the warmth of thee
A taste of honey, a taste much sweeter than wine
I’ll leave
behind my heart to wear
And may it ever remind you of
A taste of honey, a taste much sweeter than wine
He never came
back to his love so fair
And so she died dreaming of his kiss
His kiss was honey, a taste more bitter than wine
An instrumental version by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass won the song a further four Grammy Awards in 1965.
The Beatles perform their version of the song in as polished a way as any track on the album. Paul’s vocal is accomplished, he reaches the high notes with confidence and ease. His sincerity is tempered with dark earnestness by John, whose backing vocals are delivered with his tongue firmly and intently planted in his cheek – particularly for the final, solemn “he’ll come back … for the honey …”. During the bridge, a wistful, echoing quality is achieved when Paul doubles up on his own voice. Double-tracking of vocals was soon to become a key part of the Beatles sound, but got off to a tentative start. The natural instinct would presumably have been to have John join Paul in unison for the bridge. Maybe the temptation of hearing his voice double-tracked was too great for Paul to resist, had he been able to influence the decision – certainly the bridge benefits from the exclusive use of Paul’s gentler delivery. And for now, we have to make do with this one instance of double-tracking – it is not used anywhere else on the entire album. That would soon change, of course, and the technique would be used for ten out of the fourteen With The Beatles tracks. As John later remarked, “we double-tracked ourselves off the album”.
While most of ‘A Taste Of Honey’ moves around an A–E–F#m–B (IV–I–ii–V) progression, the verse starts with an F#m–F#mmaj7–F#m7–B (ii–ii∆7–ii7–V) movement of the type that would later feature in the bridge of ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ and that George would adopt so convincingly for ‘Something’. The Beatles’ thumbprint on the song comes with the final chord. Whereas the original fades out, the Beatles’ version ends on a final chord – but that chord shifts against the minor tone of the rest of the song, being F# major. This final major chord in place of an expected minor chord (as had been repeated for the preceding three bars) is classically named a Picardy third, and its use was common practice until the eighteenth century. (The first book of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, composed in 1722, uses the Picardy third in twenty-three out of the twenty-four minor movements.) The traditional use of the Picardy third was possibly due to the feeling that ending a piece on a minor chord was too sombre. The Beatles were evidently of the same opinion when it came to the performance of this melancholy piece, and introduced their own bitter-sweet attempt at introducing a reinforcing smile of hope through the tears of longing. Paul used the same trick to great effect, throwing in an unexpected D major, at the end of ‘And I Love Her’.
And, for later consumption, the E–F#m (bVII–i) chord change on “much sweeter than wine” is an Aoelian cadence, cryptically thrown into the equation by William Mann of The Times in his review of With The Beatles.
The song was a feature of the Beatles’ live shows throughout the latter part of 1962 and 1963, but was seemingly not as popular with the group as ‘Till There Was You’, which was part of their act between 1961 and 1964. They also performed ‘A Taste Of Honey’ regularly on their BBC radio shows, including three editions of Pop Go The Beatles (one appearing on the Live At The BBC double-CD and the other two released in 2013 as part of the disparate The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963 collection).