John Lennon Said 1 of His Major Songwriting Achievements Sounded ‘Strange’
In 1967, John Lennon’s songwriting was broadcast live around the world. “All You Need Is Love” appeared on the broadcast Our World, the first live program to reach multiple countries. Lennon’s Beatles bandmates saw “All You Need Is Love” as a fitting song for the program. Though Lennon did not disagree, he thought the finished song sounded a bit “strange.”
John Lennon said one of his songwriting achievements sounded strange when recorded
In 1967, The Beatles welcomed many of their contemporaries into the studio to sing “All You Need Is Love” for Our World. They were a global sensation at this point, but they were treading new ground with the live broadcast.
“The Our World broadcast was great, going out to hundreds of millions of people around the world,” Ringo Starr said in The Beatles Anthology. “It was the first worldwide satellite broadcast ever. It’s a standard thing that people do now; but then, when we did it, it was a first. That was exciting; we were doing a lot of firsts. They were exciting times.”
It was a particularly momentous moment for Lennon, who wrote “All You Need Is Love.” He shared what it was like to put music to his words.
“We just put a track down. Because I knew the chords I played it on whatever it was, harpsichord. George played a violin because we felt like doing it like that and Paul played a double bass,” he recalled. “And they can’t play them, so we got some nice little noises coming out. It sounded like an orchestra, but it’s just them two playing the violin and that. So then we thought, ‘Ah, well, we’ll have some more orchestra around this little freaky orchestra that we’ve got.’”
In Lennon’s opinion, the resulting sound was a bit odd.
“But there was no perception of how it sounded at the end until they did it that day, until the rehearsal,” he said. “It still sounded a bit strange then.”
The Beatles’ manager thought John Lennon’s songwriting was inspired
Lennon wrote the song just ahead of the program, but Beatles manager Brian Epstein didn’t think his procrastination came through in the finished product.
“I’ve never had a moment’s worry that they wouldn’t come up with something marvelous,” he said. “The commitment for the TV program was arranged some months ago. The time got nearer and nearer, and they still hadn’t written anything. Then, about three weeks before the program, they sat down to write. The record was completed in ten days.”
He believed the song was a great achievement for Lennon. It fit the message of the Our World program perfectly.
“This is an inspired song, because they wrote it for a worldwide program and they really wanted to give the world a message,” Epstein said. “It could hardly have been a better message. It is a wonderful, beautiful, spine-chilling record.”
The Beatles were not initially interested in the ‘Our World’ program
Our World made history by bringing The Beatles to millions of television screens across the globe. It was a significant opportunity for them, but they initially had little interest in it.
Epstein excitedly announced to the band that they would be appearing on the program, and The Beatles yawned in his face.
“Well, Brian,” Lennon said, per the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by engineer Geoff Emerick. “That’s what you get for committing us to do something without asking us first.”
According to Emerick, their lack of interest devastated Epstein.
“Epstein looked close to tears,” he wrote. “At a loss for words, he stomped out the studio in a snit.”
