TOWARDS THE END OF THE 1960S I WAS LIVING IN LONDON and, between Beatles projects, had time to produce other artists. When we started our label, Apple Records, we took on Mary Hopkin, for example, who was already famous for winning a talent show on telly called Opportunity Knocks. We also signed a band called Badfinger, some English and Welsh guys whom our road manager Mal Evans had seen and suggested to us. I think, at this time, they might still have been called The Iveys, but there was confusion with another band of the same name, so they changed it to Badfinger, after ‘Bad Finger Boogie’, which had been the working title for ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’.

I was thinking I could offer to produce them, but I wanted something to launch them with that would be a big success. I was lying in bed one night, and instead of trying to sleep I was trying to think of an idea for a song. This song started going around in my head, and then I thought, ‘Oh, this is okay; this is pretty good.’ So I got up quietly – Linda and I had just recently got married, and I didn’t want to wake her or daughter Heather – and went downstairs where I had a little reel-to-reel tape recorder. I closed all the doors so I wouldn’t make too much noise, and I wrote this. It was basically a song for Badfinger. Fairly straight-up rock and roll, very straightforward.

It’s a bit like ‘Love Me Do’ – very similar thoughts. But again, I was trying to write a hit, so I didn’t want anything too complicated. When you’re writing for an audience – as Shakespeare did, or Dickens, whose serialised chapters were read to the public – there’s that need to pull people in. But the interesting thing is that I knew exactly how I wanted this song to sound.

So I wrote it in the night, and then the very next day we had a session for the Abbey Road album, and I made a point of getting there a half hour before the session was going to start, because I knew the guys would be in on time. I said to the engineer, Phil McDonald, ‘Look, I’ve got this thing. I’m just going to go to the drums, I’m going to go to the piano, I’m going to put a bit of bass on it and I’m going to sing it, and we can do this in a quarter of an hour.’ And he was game, so that’s exactly what I did. I just played the piano thing and put the drums on that, and it was all one take. And then the guys arrived and we started the Beatles session. But by then I had this demo. I think I might’ve said, ‘D’you mind if I just quickly mix this?’ But it sort of mixed itself, you know. That was a nice thing about it – that it was so complete I could just run in and, in fifteen or twenty minutes, make a record just like that.

Afterwards, I said to Badfinger, ‘This is how you must do it.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’ll put our spin on it.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want you to. I want you to do it faithfully, because this is the hit formula. You’ve got to do it this way.’ So they balked a little bit at that, but when you listen to their recording and my demo, they’re very similar. You can hear my version on the Anthology 3 Beatles album and on the fiftieth-anniversary reissue of Abbey Road.

Recording notes from Badfinger’s album sessions for Magic Christian Music, 1970

I understood that they wouldn’t want to slavishly copy something I’d done, and I understood that they’d want to bring their own thing to it, but I was afraid that giving them that freedom could cock it up. Basically, I was saying, “This is a finished painting, and if you just do a reproduction, it’ll be yours, and I won’t bring mine out. You will have painted it.”

The song was huge – I think a number one hit for Badfinger in some countries – and the album it was on was also a hit. I also remember they did one or two other things with Apple. Their lead singer was a guy called Pete Ham, who was a terrific guy and a very good writer. With his Badfinger partner, Tom Evans, he co-wrote ‘Without You’, which was a big hit for Harry Nilsson. God, it’s such an emotional song. And I was just thinking, ‘Incredible, Pete; that’s fantastic. My God, how d’you do that?’ Then, sadly, soon after, he committed suicide.

It was such a sad end. He’d written this massive hit, and he gave it to Nilsson. Or maybe it was an album track for Badfinger and Nilsson spotted it and said, ‘This would be a great single’; I don’t quite know the story. It’s a sad irony, though, that I wrote this song for Pete Ham and he said, ‘Well . . .’ And then he wrote this other song and gave it to someone else, who had the hit. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.