Paul – lead
vocals, acoustic guitar
Session musicians – two violins, viola, cello
John would often talk of some of his songs having been given to him, he being merely the medium by which they manifested themselves, originating from who-knows-where. This seems to have happened principally with middle or later songs, most notably ‘In My Life’, ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘Across The Universe’. For Paul, this appears to have happened only once, with ‘Yesterday’. Although he spoke about “all the best little bits of melody” coming to him “from out of the blue”, ‘Yesterday’ seems to have been the most complete example of a melody having been given to him. He woke up one morning, with the song in his head.
“It depends how far you want to go with this; if you’re very spiritual then God sent me a melody, I’m a mere vehicle. If you wanna be a bit more cynical then I was loading my computer for millions of years listening to all the stuff I listened through my Dad and through my musical tastes, including people like Fred Astaire, Gershwin, and finally my computer printed out one morning what it thought was a good tune.”
For a long time the song had no words, Paul famously improvised until he had worked out a lyric – “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs”. He hit upon two words that scanned perfectly – “yesterday” and “suddenly” – and the song grew from there. He was initially reluctant to use the title ‘Yesterday’ as he felt it sounded corny and trite (to no avail – Charlie Gillett calls it “a tritely sentimental ballad”). George Martin persuaded him that the title was all right, but felt it was “not really a Beatles song”. Paul was also unsure how the Beatles could contribute to the track. John suggested that they didn’t. “Just sing it yourself with the guitar.”
The chronology of the song’s conception is a little confused. A number of people have written or spoken about their recollection of the song’s development, aspects of which are contradictory.
– In Ray Coleman’s Yesterday & Today (“written with the cooperation of Paul McCartney”), Paul woke up with the song in his head in late 1963.
– George Martin recalls hearing the song in Paris in January 1964: “They were staying at the Georges V hotel … They got an upright piano moved in so that Paul could play a bit. In fact this was the first time that I heard ‘Yesterday’.” He spoke to Paul when they were recording ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, when Paul was considering ‘Yesterday’ as a title, but that it seemed corny.
– John spoke of the song being around for months and months before Paul hit upon a title.
– Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now talks of the song being dreamt up in May 1965.
– Director Richard Lester remembers being driven to distraction by Paul playing the song between scenes at Twickenham Studios, in April/May 1965.
– Paul settled on the title and finalised the lyric while on holiday in Portugal at the end of May 1965.
It would seem incredible that it took Paul nearly eighteen months to come up with words for the song – in fact, he is on record as saying that the lyric took about two months to finalise. We can guess that Paul came up with the tune some time in late 1963, and finished the lyric in May 1965 before recording it the following month.
Paul later told Mark Lewisohn that songs such as ‘Yesterday’ were not released as singles as they “didn’t fit our image” – it was certainly a huge departure from the normal recording arrangements of a group that thought of themselves as “a little R&B combo”. It should be borne in mind that until that point, the Beatles were quite definitely a group – four individuals, but a musical entity. The idea that one member should record a track without the others was radical. It is conceivable (but unlikely) that the full complement of Beatles had not appeared on a couple of previous tracks. ‘Not A Second Time’ sounds as though it features just John and Ringo, with George Martin on piano, but close attention reveals that there seems to be a bass and an acoustic guitar in there as well. In any event, the group recorded four other songs that day, and so Paul and George’s contribution to ‘Not A Second Time’ could be thought of as low-key, rather than non-existent. Similarly, Ringo seems to be absent from ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’, but is apparently contributing slapped thighs (his own, it must be pointed out) to the recording. But not until ‘Yesterday’ were the other members of the group so conspicuously absent. It is rather ironic that surveys have shown that ‘Yesterday’ has become the single most covered Beatles song, and won the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song of 1965. (Chris Farlowe was offered the song before the Beatles recorded it, but felt it was not in keeping with his image. His rejection of ‘Yesterday’ ranks alongside the rejection of the group themselves by Decca’s Dick Rowe in the annals of Great Beatle Bum Decisions.) Nevertheless, the song set a precedent, and within a few years all four Beatles had recorded a track without any of the others – Paul recorded several including ‘Eleanor Rigby’, George recorded ‘Within You Without You’, John ‘Julia’, and even Ringo, with John’s composition ‘Good Night’.
The Beatles also broke new ground by featuring a string quartet so prominently on a rock album track. In August 1964, Marianne Faithfull’s debut single, the folksy ‘As Tears Go By’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, had entered the chart, but that could not really be said to have set a precedent. However, four months after the release of Help!, the Rolling Stones recorded their version of ‘As Tears Go By’, complete with neo-classical string accompaniment. For the Beatles also, the effect paved the way for the ground-breaking tracks ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’, all recorded and released before the end of 1967.
Paul was a little cagey about George Martin’s suggestion of strings for ‘Yesterday’, being understandably reluctant to be involved within anything that might be akin to Mantovani. He was encouraged by the suggestion of a quartet, and, thinking it would reduce the saccharine quality, he asked that the players play it pure with no vibrato on the notes. As George Martin points out, this is something it is difficult for a trained string player to do. “They did cut down the vibrato [but] they couldn’t do it pure because they would have sounded like schoolboys.” Naturally, Paul need have had no worries about George Martin writing anything that would denigrate his compositions because he made a commendably unobtrusive start for his first Beatles score. It was so effective that it set the standard for the subsequent work he did for the group. All his scoring, from ‘Yesterday’ to ‘Let It Be’, carries his hallmark of subtlety and restraint, his contributions being perfectly matched and excellently judged, virtually without exception.
The entrance of the strings on ‘Yesterday’ – the first on a Beatles record, remember – is elegant and simple, with sustained notes from violins and viola and a hesitant fall from the cello, which gives the players the opportunity for maximum expression, providing the listener with something interesting but without self-promotion. The violins are allowed a little activity at the end of the first phrase, but scarcely more than the activity of the vocals over them. They know their place, being still scored as backing instruments.
The violins follow the pattern of the melody during the bridge, with falling counterpoint from the cello, and neatly anticipate Paul’s vocal ad-lib in the repeat of the bridge by walking down the octave at the end of the phrase to the start of the verse.
During the repeat of the bridge, the cello gently breaks loose with an appealing figure after “she wouldn’t say”, giving vent to the frustration resulting from unaccountable loss.
The Eb, a flattened seventh against the home key of F, was apparently included at Paul’s behest, and gives a late, uncharacteristically bluesy edge to the song. The final verse has a sustained A on a violin, insistent but dynamically uneven, throughout the whole verse, until suddenly the hummed ending is upon us, with the final Bb–F major (IV–I) chords.
The original pencilled manuscript of the score hangs framed on a wall in George Martin’s house. The title is followed, in Paul’s handwriting, by the words “By Paul McCartney, John Lennon + George Martin Esq. – and Mozart”. George Martin Esq. sums up his contribution: “It’s pretty naïve, but it does work”.
The structure of ‘Yesterday’ has been carefully analysed, most cogently by Deryck Cooke in The Listener. The appeal to musicologists lies in the easy, unforced seven-bar first section that flies in the face of all the steadfastly traditional eight-bar pop songs and opens up a fluidity within a song that sounds so remarkably structured. (Cooke points out a parallel circumstance in the song ‘Stormy Weather’, which has “a genuine seven-bar first section, spoiled by Harold Arlen’s mechanical addition of an unnecessary instrumental bar to make up the eight”.) The first section appears to miss an initial bar – although the feeling of missing a bar is satisfied with the immediate repeat, except that the “missing” bar is the first bar of the repeated section. After the repeat, the middle eight would seem to bring stability, being of standard length. But its first bar effectively supplies the need of the bar missing from the verse.
So, although we have at last had a full eight bars, we are still owed one, and so still seem a bar short. And at the end of the last repeat, the missing bar still has not appeared. “Bars have been loaned backwards and forwards, but one is continually and finally lost, like the obsessive ‘yesterday’ of the lyric.”
Two takes were recorded, the first, which is available on Anthology 2, is preceded by Paul’s instruction to John or George (“I’m in G, but it’ll be in F [for you] … it goes E minor, to A seven, to D minor”), indicating that a solo performance had apparently not been decided upon at this point. This first take is noteworthy due to the slightly different – decidedly Dylanesque – strumming pattern of the introduction, which sounds rather unsophisticated when heard against the acutely familiar released version.
After Paul had recorded his guitar and vocal parts, and the string quartet had also been taped, there was still one track of the four-track tape unused, and so George Martin asked Paul to have another go at the vocal (this time without guitar) to see if he could give a better performance. The second vocal track was no improvement on the first, except, George Martin felt, on the second half of the first middle eight (“I said something wrong…”). When mixing the song, he therefore used the alternative vocal take for this section. This accounts for the texture of that phrase of the vocal being different from the rest of the song, because some of the original vocal was picked up either by the microphone used for the acoustic guitar, or by the vocal microphone of the second take (which was done without headphones as was the norm for overdubbing at the time, the track being played to Paul over the studio speakers).
Either way, George Martin rediscovered this when he re-mixed the song for compact disc in the mid-1980s. “During the past twenty years I’ve forgotten about it and have always thought that is where I decided to double-track the voice. But it’s not double-tracked, because in fact it’s voice with leakage from a speaker.”
A second version of the song appears on Anthology 2, which puts the song into perspective somewhat. It is a live version from the group’s performance on the ABC TV programme Blackpool Night Out, which was broadcast live and hosted by comedians Mike and Bernie Winters. It is rather unnerving to hear George introduce Paul, and “this song’s called ‘Yesterday’” … to a deafening silence. It was the first time the song had been performed live, and, as the LP wouldn’t be released until the following week, the title clearly meant nothing to the studio audience.
In spite of, or maybe because of, their relative simplicity, the lyrics of ‘Yesterday’ have a beauty and poignancy, almost a definition of nostalgia.
The song has been taken to indicate a moment from Paul’s own past that is uniquely painful. On 31 October 1956, when Paul was just 14, his mother Mary died of breast cancer. According to Paul’s father, the realisation of their mother’s death came upon Paul and his brother Michael slowly. When interviewed by Hunter Davies, Michael couldn’t remember details. “All I can remember is one of us, I don’t remember who, making a silly joke. For months we both regretted it.” But Paul could remember who it was. “It was me. The first thing I said was, ‘What are we going to do without her money?’”
The memory was obviously desperately painful for Paul, and ‘Yesterday’ along with songs such as ‘Let It Be’ and having his own family, including daughter Mary, must have gone some way to help him come to terms with it.
It has been suggested that “Yesterday came suddenly” does not make sense, and that the line should read “Oh yes, today came suddenly”. But the line is key to the song. Yesterday – the realisation of what he had, which has suddenly gone because of something he said – all at once becomes tangible and takes on its own significance.