“Dozens” of Beatles songs were “lost”

Paul McCartney: “Things have changed quite a bit. You’ve got recording devices now which change the songwriting process.”

Paul McCartney has said that “dozens” of potential Beatles songs co-written by himself and John Lennon were lost to memory

aul McCartney said there were “dozens” of songs he co-wrote with John Lennon that were lost due to a lack of recording equipment, and the need for him and Lennon to simply remember them. Speaking to The London Evening Standard, McCartney said: “Things have changed quite a bit. You’ve got recording devices now which change the songwriting process. For instance, John and I didn’t have them when we first started writing, we would write a song and just have to remember it.”

He continued: “There was always the risk that we’d just forget it. If the next morning you couldn’t remember it – it was gone. In actual fact you had to write songs that were memorable, because you had to remember them or they were lost! There must have been dozens lost this way. We didn’t have tape recorders; now you can do it on your phone. So you would have to form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it. Now, because you can get things down on a device, I’ve got millions of things I want to record, and do.”

It begs the question of what today’s technology might have brought to The Beatles? Could their back catalogue have been swelled with even greater hits? Unfortunately we’ll never know, but then their canon isn’t all that bad even as it stands…

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