Hold Me Tight - History

History

"Hold Me Tight" was composed principally by Paul McCartney in 1961, and was part of the Beatles' stage act until 1963. They attempted to record it for their début Please Please Me but the thirteen takes recorded were deemed unsatisfactory, and the tape was destroyed. Seven months later, they recorded a further nine takes, and the final version is an edit of the sixth and ninth takes from the second attempt, varispeeded up a semitone to F major.

Both McCartney and John Lennon, at one time or another, shared their distaste for the song, and in a 1980s interview with Mark Lewisohn in The Beatles Recording Sessions, McCartney says, "I can't remember much about that one. Certain songs were just 'work' songs, you haven't got much memory of them. That's one of them." In Barry Miles' Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, the songwriter calls it "a failed attempt at a single which then became an acceptable album filler." Lennon in 1980 said "That was Paul's....It was a pretty poor song and I was never really interested in it."

In their book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler call it the album's poorest track, saying it "fails because McCartney's vision of the complete tune obviously sagged somewhat." They also claim that McCartney's singing was "out of tune".

However, Ian MacDonald redeems it in his book Revolution in the Head, in which he writes: "Play it loud with the bass boosted, and you have an overwhelming motoric rocker strongly redolent of the band's live sound."

McCartney wrote a different song called "Hold Me Tight" for a medley included on his 1973 solo album Red Rose Speedway.