The Beatles on the bill with Helen Shapiro in 1963.

In dealing with Beatles songs and Beatles facts that concern the letter F, the first thing that comes to my mind, unsurprisingly, is the name of my radio show, which provided a home for The Beatles from A to Zed in the first place. So let us stop for a while to consider a great Beatles F song, the title I chose for my very own show, “From Me to You.”

It turns out that I was not the first person to think that this title made good sense in connection with a radio show. Early on, the Beatles had a radio show of their own on the BBC, playing various pop records, including their own. They recorded a jingle for that show using “From Me to You” as a theme, changing the lyrics to “From Us to You.” It is very short and can be found online.

“From Me to You” was one of several songs John and Paul wrote while they were on the road in 1963 on the Helen Shapiro tour. The Beatles were not headlining; this was very early in their career, and Helen Shapiro was already a very big deal at the age of only sixteen. She had several huge hits, like “Walkin’ Back to Happiness” (her best record, in my view) and “You Don’t Know,” and she was the main attraction—the Beatles were billed fourth out of eleven acts! Apparently, the Beatles played some of their new songs for Helen and asked her which one she thought should be their next single, and she chose “From Me to You.” So to some extent I guess we have Helen to thank for the fact that “From Me to You” became such a huge hit, as indeed it did.

Let’s move forward to a time after the Beatles had become the headliners themselves—indeed, a time when they got so big they did not even need to tour anymore. There are two brilliant F tracks that they created to be part of their movie Magical Mystery Tour. I remember Paul telling me all his ideas for the expedition, the movie, and the accompanying music. The first F song was an instrumental called “Flying,” written specifically to accompany an aerial shot of the landscape of Iceland. Paul wrote the main melody; the structure is a simple twelve-bar blues and (as an instrumental with wordless vocals) the writing credit was divided equally among all four Beatles. Cool tremolo-effected guitar opens the track, and the main melody is played on a mellotron. I think it is on the trombone setting—even though to me it sounds more like a cor anglais. Yes, this track is an instrumental, but it is more accurately a piece of movie score. It is not as if the Beatles were trying to make an instrumental hit to rival, say, Cliff Richard’s backup band the Shadows, who had a string of big instrumental hits, all of which the Beatles knew well, but rather that they wanted to create an evocative moody piece to match the cinematic moment. In that I think they were very successful.

“Flying” is a good track from Magical Mystery Tour. “The Fool on the Hill” is a great track. It shows Paul McCartney at his most creative, imaginative, and brilliant. I distinctly remember when Paul wrote that song, because he then played it to the whole of our family. We were in the sitting room on what we would call the first floor, and Americans would call the second floor, where there was a big grand piano in the drawing room, which also served as my father’s office and consulting room. We stood around the piano as he played “The Fool on the Hill” just after he had written it. He explained to us (and sang) some of the flute parts and recorder parts that he already had in mind, and he had the whole arrangement already bubbling around in his head, as genius musicians do. We were all very impressed. A truly lovely song.

George Harrison was responsible for another great Beatles F song: “For You Blue,” featuring John Lennon on the slide guitar. The song is a traditional twelve-bar blues in format, and you might notice that in the middle of the song, John is playing a cool slide solo, and George says, “Elmore James got nothing on this baby.” I wonder how many of you know who Elmore James was. I hope you do. He was a classic blues slide guitar player whom we all admired very much. Again, there was this whole movement in England; everyone wanted to play the blues. We learned from the blues records we could get hold of in jazz record shops and from swapping records among ourselves. There was this collective desire to learn all that we could about the blues and its inventors, proponents, and disciples. Everyone was an Elmore James fan, and everyone who picked up a slide tried to play like Elmore James. And that is still the case. Bonnie Raitt (such a great singer who is sometimes overlooked as a remarkable guitarist) and all the great slide players of today began by admiring Elmore James and his seemingly effortless playing.

Does Elmore James really have nothing on John Lennon? Not so sure about that but it was a valiant effort on his part, and he was certainly an Elmore James fan. Paul was also playing, by the way, “prepared piano” on that track. Prepared piano is what they call it when you mess with the sound of the piano physically by putting things in it or on the strings or whatever. The technique is widely used in avant-garde music. John Cage used prepared pianos. So did John Cale in the Velvet Underground. And Paul was interested in and listened to a lot of that stuff. So maybe that had something to do with it. But he fiddled about with the piano, adding something to the strings until it had just the sound he wanted for that particular track.

Now, I have a confession to make. When I was poking around looking for interesting songs that began with the letter F, I found one that I had never heard before. This is a Ringo song called “Free Drinks.” I listened to it and I really liked it. It’s got twangy Ennio Morricone–style guitars on it. It was written by Ringo, Mark Hudson, Steve Dudas, Dean Grakal, and another friend of mine, Gary Burr, who is a great Nashville songwriter. I am delighted to have found it. It’s worth your seeking it out, too.

John Lennon wrote a cool F song, addressed to Yoko, called “(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess.” It was recorded in New York with a great New York band—Hugh McCracken (one of my favourite guitarists), Earl Slick, Tony Levin, and Andy Newmark. A lot of great musicians. This song was released, sadly, after John’s death.

With that same band, John recorded a great double F album, Double Fantasy. Two especially significant tracks off that album are “Woman” and “Dear Yoko.” John referred to “Woman” as a “grown-up version” of his song “Girl,” so perhaps it can provide some insight as to how his songwriting had changed over the years. He was also, of course, madly in love. He begins the track with a whispered recitation, “For the other half of the sky,” a reference to Mao Zedong’s pronouncement that “women hold up half the sky.”

“Dear Yoko” (not to be confused with “Oh Yoko!” which is on the Imagine album) is a nice bouncy, happy track reflecting, I suppose, that side of his love for Yoko. John was always fond of old-fashioned slap-back reverb on a lead vocal and has sometimes been guilty of overdoing it, but it fits this song perfectly. Also, we were just talking about slide guitar, and there is some terrific slide work on this track—must have been Hugh McCracken, I think.

Let’s circle back to Paul. One of his solo F titles, though on the obscure side, is an interesting song. He recorded it with Wings, and it is called “Famous Groupies.” I confess that I did wonder whether there was some fascinating (or even lascivious?) story behind the title or the concept, and so I emailed my friend Denny Laine, who was in Wings at the time, and asked what he remembered. His response was not necessarily as enlightening as I could have wished. He wrote back, “Famous Groupies? Don’t remind me—I have kids with two of them but that’s another story.” I think we should rely on our fertile imaginations.

Alan Civil and his French horn.

The Beatles at the peak of their fame succeeded in making some words famous. One of those words, of course, was the abbreviation for fabulous, fab. The Beatles were (and forever will be) the Fab Four. I’m not sure who originated the term, whether it was a Beatle or Beatles fans or a journalist or a publicist, but suddenly everything was fab, if you liked it enough. There was a magazine called Fabulous that was abbreviated as Fab, and the term was widely applied to the Beatles, and to their music and clothes and style in general. George Harrison considerably later wrote a song with Jeff Lynne reflecting on that fact, which qualifies as an F song, called “When We Was Fab.” A cool record with some strings, a sitar, some psychedelic sounds, Ringo on drums, and all the proper ’60s accoutrements!

We now come to a double F. The first F of this pair is the French horn, an instrument that does not usually feature in rock and roll or R&B arrangements and is more commonly heard as part of a symphony orchestra or as a solo instrument. Based on the original hunting horn, it has a beautiful tone all its own and has become a mainstay of classical music and film music in particular. Paul loved the sound of the French horn, and apparently he imagined it specifically on his song “For No One”—the second of this pair of Fs. He talked to George Martin about it. George wrote out the solo, and Paul said, “Who should we get?” George Martin knew and said, “We will get this new guy who’s supposed to be amazing. He’s the best. He’s played in all the orchestras. He is the premier horn soloist.”

His name was Alan Civil, and he was the leading French horn player in the whole of London. He came and did the session, and for a while, the musicians’ world in London was abuzz with the fact that apparently, instead of nine pounds, which was regular session scale, he had asked for and received a recital fee of fifty pounds, which made people gasp. But now, of course, it’s become one of the most famous solos in any Beatles record, and a brilliant piece of playing it is.

The story goes that Paul wrote a note in the French horn solo that is not officially part of the instrument’s range; it’s too high. But if you’re a great horn player, the way you find notes is a combination of where the valves are set with your fingers but also what your embouchure can get out of the instrument. Alan Civil decided to go for it, and he played this officially unplayable note at the very peak of his horn solo.

“For No One” has been covered many times by many people, but to my ear the best non-Beatles version is by the terrific singer Emmylou Harris, one of Linda Ronstadt’s favourite singers, one of my favourite singers, and also one of the favourite singers of someone I work with a lot, Albert Lee, who led Emmy’s band, the Hot Band, for many years. Emmy is accompanied on her version by a wonderful group of musicians including Amos Garrett, Herb Pedersen, and one of my favourite pianists, Bill Payne from Little Feat, a band I had the privilege of managing for many years. One tends to think of Bill at his funky best playing “Oh, Atlanta” or “Dixie Chicken,” but if you listen to Emmy’s “For No One,” you will hear exceptionally nuanced piano playing of perfect subtlety and precision. The Beatles did “For No One” in B major but Emmy moves it up to F, and she and the band even make a chord substitution, adding an A minor on the second bar which makes the song even more emotionally intense somehow—and Emmy’s vocal will tear your heart out.

An F song which I really love, if we can keep our minds from wandering long enough to pay attention, is the remarkable “Fixing a Hole,” another work of collective arranging of great brilliance. Every part merits a close listen. No one plays a shuffle better than Ringo, and this song is a very slow shuffle that could feel soggy in less skilled hands—listen to the unequalled groove of Ringo’s hi-hat part. A lot of harpsichord, including the intro—I think both Paul and George Martin added harpsichord elements to this record. And some elegant yet rock-solid lead guitar work from George. One tends to take the excellence of some of these tracks for granted (so great is one’s familiarity with the finished record), but the more I explore anew the nature of the arrangements, the more my admiration grows. And, of course, “Fixing a Hole” is a wonderfully original song to start with. And no, nothing to do with heroin or about that kind of “fix”—or even about fixing a roof in Scotland. I think it is more about Paul simply enjoying his recently acquired (and very beautiful) house in Cavendish Avenue and about the pleasures of sitting back in one’s own home, smoking a joint, and allowing one’s mind to wander.

There is no better way for us to end our journey through the letter F than with the last record the Beatles ever released, “Free as a Bird,” which came out in 1995, along with “Real Love,” as part of The Beatles Anthology. The song began life as a cassette from John Lennon which my friend Jeff Lynne organized and produced into a really good record, with contributions from the three other Beatles. George Harrison plays ukulele, among other things. If there had to be a “last Beatles record” at all (unavoidable I suppose), “Free as a Bird” is a good concept on which to end the chapter as we continue our exploration of the music of the best band there ever was.