Yesterday

‘Yesterday’ written by Paul McCartney, holds the record as the most covered song in history, according to the Guinness Book of Records.

McCartney is said to have composed the melody in a dream while staying at the family home of Jane Asher (his girlfriend) in Wimpole Street, London.

“I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune – or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.”

(Paul McCartney)

Upon being convinced that he had not copied the melody, McCartney began writing lyrics to suit it. As Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, a substitute working lyric, titled “Scrambled Eggs” (the working opening verse was “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs”), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. The original song, “Scrambled Eggs”, was written to hold the music and phrasing in place.

During the shooting of Help!, a piano was placed on one of the stages where filming was being conducted and McCartney took advantage of this opportunity to tinker with the song.

Richard Lester, the director, was eventually greatly annoyed by this and lost his temper, telling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed.

“We were shooting Help! in the studio for about four weeks. At some point during that period, we had a piano on one of the stages and he was playing this ‘Scrambled Eggs’ all the time. It got to the point where I said to him, ‘If you play that bloody song any longer have the piano taken off stage. Either finish it or give up!”

(Richard Lester
A Hard Day’s Write, Steve Turner)

The Shadows’ guitarist Bruce Welch recalled McCartney completing the lyrics in June 1965. McCartney took a holiday at Welch’s Portuguese villa, where he is said to have settled on the title ‘Yesterday’.

“I was packing to leave and Paul asked me if I had a guitar. He’d apparently been working on the lyrics as he drove to Albufeira from the airport at Lisbon. He borrowed my guitar and started playing the song we all now know as ‘Yesterday’.”

(Bruce Welch
A Hard Day’s Write, Steve Turner)

Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for a while before:

The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it. Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us. We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.

Once the song was taped that Monday in June 1965, The Beatles and their producer, George Martin, began to wonder what to do with it. Martin remembers saying to Paul, “‘The only thing I can think of is adding strings, but I know what you think about that.’ And Paul said, ‘I don’t want Mantovani (an Anglo-Italian conductor).’ I said, ‘What about a very small number of string players, a quartet?’ He thought that was interesting.” Paul’s own version differs slightly, in that he claims he was initially against the idea, that they were a rock’n’roll band. But he trusted Martin, and the pair worked on the arrangement together at Martin’s house.

With their string quartet arrangement recorded in an afternoon session on 17 June 1965, ‘Yesterday’ was complete. This was the first time that a Beatles song had been augmented by such an ensemble, but it wouldn’t be the last.

“I brought the song into the studio for the first time and played it on the guitar,” Paul would recall. “But soon Ringo said, ‘I can’t really put any drums on – it wouldn’t make sense.’ And John and George said, ‘There’s no point in having another guitar.’ So George Martin suggested, ‘Why don’t you just try it by yourself and see how it works?’ I looked at all the others: ‘Oops. You mean a solo record?’ They said, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing we can add to it – do it.’” And so he did.

‘Yesterday’ was included on the Help! album in the UK, in summer 1965, and given a US single release on 13 September that year. Spending four weeks at No.1, it would go on to be The Beatles’ most famous song.

So much so, that John Lennon remarked in a 1980 interview,

“I go to restaurants and the groups always play ‘Yesterday’. Yoko and I even signed a guy’s violin in Spain after he played us ‘Yesterday’. He couldn’t understand that I didn’t write the song. But I guess he couldn’t have gone from table to table playing ‘I Am The Walrus’.”

“Yesterday” is one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music. Its entry in Guinness World Records states that, by January 1986, 1,600 cover versions had been made.

“Yesterday” was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 Pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year. In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.

In 2012, the BBC reported that “Yesterday” remained the fourth most successful song of all-time in terms of royalties paid, having amassed a total of £19.5 million in payments.