The way that the three remaining Beatles got a handle on the strange vibe of being in a studio together again without John Lennon in 1994 was to pretend he was actually part of the session and had just nipped out. “We just pretended that he’d gone home on holiday,” Paul McCartney said in a press conference at the time, “as if he said, ‘Just finish it up, I trust you’.”
This was how McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – dubbed The Threetles – approached the making of Free As A Bird, which came out in early December, 1995. They weren’t strictly a trio making their first music as The Beatles since Lennon’s death, though. Working on a creaking old demo recorded onto a cassette by John Lennon – one of four that the remaining members were given by Yoko One – the band realised that they needed to bring in an outside influence to help them get the song to the finish line when they entered the studio in early 1994. That man was ELO’s Jeff Lynne.
“It was George who said we need a producer, it could be dangerous just to all go in the studio, it could get nasty cos you’ve got egos flying around, surprisingly,” recalled McCartney. “Jeff’s name came up and it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s good’,” said McCartney. “He’d worked with George and George was saying, ‘I think Jeff would be great’.”
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“Jeff was a life-saver,” added Ringo Starr. “He put it together and had us all playing and the three of us felt comfortable with him.”
Despite being an international star and mega-selling artist in his own right, for lifelong Beatles fan Lynne, it was a daunting prospect. “It was really quite scary because I didn’t know Paul very well,” he said. “I’d only met him a couple of times before that. He was a bit worried about me because I was George’s pal and he wondered if it was going to be a little bit one-sided and not in the spirit of things, but he needn’t have worried because I was totally into the spirit of things.”
But Lynne’s role was crucial. Lennon’s original demo, played in his Dakota apartment with just piano and vocals, was all over the shop. The ELO man got it into shape so it could form the basis of a proper recording. “It was a crackly old thing, it was a cassette and you don’t use that, you normally make your demos on cassettes and then make a proper record and get rid of all the crackling and the hiss and everything,” remembered McCartney. “Jeff was very good in that respect too because he took the cassette tape and he put it in time.”
“It was so hard to do,” Lynne conceded, “laying that voice in there which has got a piano glued to it was really difficult. Virtually impossible but we got it done. Paul really helped on that because he ghosted John’s voice a little bit underneath. It came out really good in the end.”
Somehow though, they got it to the stage where it felt like The Beatles – not just McCartney, Harrison and Starr as mere mortals but The Beatles – were in the studio again. “We had the cassette of John and we just gradually built it up, put a bit of bass on, guitar, George ended up putting the slide on which was the icing on the cake, we sang,” McCartney said. “For all of us the most exciting thing was, even though John was no longer on this planet, here he was in the studio with us. All of us were like, ‘Wow!’, it was a very big moment.”
Despite that, McCartney explained, if Free As A Bird hadn’t been up to spec, it never would’ve been released. “If we didn’t like it, it didn’t matter if John Lennon wrote it or Paul McCartney wrote it or George Harrison wrote it, it would’ve been like, ‘No, forget it’,” he said. “It kept you on your mettle. But there were three that we liked, Free As A Bird, Real Love – the two that we did – and another one that we started working on but George went off it, he was like, ‘Fucking hell, this is rubbish’. ‘No George, this is John!’, ‘Oh, OK then…’. That one is still lingering around…”
Of course, that remaining song was Now & Then, which McCartney and Ringo Starr eventually did get round to completing – it was released a year ago this month.
Watch the video for Free As A Bird, with its myriad Beatles references, below:
