Reuniting The Beatles
Before the Anthology project, the closest the Beatles had come to reuniting on record (while all four members were still alive) was for Starr's 1973 Ringo album, upon which all appeared — with Lennon, Harrison, and Starr appearing on "I'm the Greatest" — though Lennon and McCartney did not work together. While Starr's Ringo album is the last album that all four ex-Beatles perform on, they all contributed either in performance or in song composition to 1976's Ringo's Rotogravure (Harrison contributed one song, "I'll Still Love You", but does not perform on the album).
The idea of re-doing some of Lennon's old songs apparently was inspired by former Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall and Harrison, who first requested some old demos from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono. Then, in January 1994, McCartney went to New York City for Lennon's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While there, he received at least four songs from Ono. According to Aspinall, it was "two cassettes" which "might have been five or six tracks." Ono said of the occasion: "It was all settled before then, I just used that occasion to hand over the tapes personally to Paul. I did not break up the Beatles, but I was there at the time, you know? Now I'm in a position where I could bring them back together and I would not want to hinder that. It was kind of a situation given to me by fate."
In an interview, McCartney remarked:
| “ | Yoko said 'I've got a couple of tracks I'll play you, you might be interested'. I'd never heard them before but she explained that they're quite well known to Lennon fans as bootlegs. I said to Yoko, 'Don't impose too many conditions on us, it's really difficult to do this, spiritually. We don't know, we may hate each other after two hours in the studio and just walk out. So don't put any conditions, it's tough enough. If it doesn't work out, you can veto it.' When I told George and Ringo I'd agreed to that, they were going, 'What? What if we love it?' It didn't come to that, luckily. | ” |
The remaining band members focused their attention on four songs: "Free as a Bird", "Real Love", "Grow Old with Me", and "Now and Then". Of these, they liked "Free as a Bird" the most, and worked hard on it. McCartney said, "Ringo was very up for it, George was very up for it, I was very up for it." Eventually the song saw release as the first new Beatles single since 1970. The remaining Beatles then turned their attention to "Real Love". Co-producer Jeff Lynne said, "...we thought, we'd work on 'Real Love' which had a complete set of words."
Read more about this topic: Real Love (The Beatles Song)
Famous quotes containing the word beatles:
“It’s like the Beatles coming together again—let’s hope they don’t go on a world tour.”
—Matt Frei, British journalist. Quoted in Listener (London, June 21, 1990)