Old Fogey’s Favourites

One of Lennon and McCartney’s best songs. The opening verse - if verse is what it is (chorus and verse conventions don’t always operate with Lennon and McCartney) - is a touch prosaic, like a preliminary pleading.

‘If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true and help me understand, ‘cos I’ve been in love before and found that love was more than just holding hands.’

In the Beatles’ original recording, John Lennon takes the lead vocal. It’s gritty and unsubtle - there are no dynamics, no rise and fall of emotion - he is not helped by the crude unrhythmical accompaniment of clunking guitars. Things pick up a bit when Paul McCartney takes up the harmony vocal at ‘If I give my heart….’ but overall it is too primitive to do justice to the song. The potentially heartstopping moment when the melody rises at ‘…’cos I couldn’t stand the pain’ is missed.

Musical and emotional subtlety is missing. This is one of their first adult songs, and deserved better. As the words say, we’ve moved on from the teenage puppy love of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ to something more tentative and fragile. The very insistence of that ‘If…’ is uncertainty, agony of doubt that love might be returned, knowing the real pain of rejection.

Here is Maura O’Connell’s recording of the song. She provides the vocal quality it deserves.

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Petula Clark recorded this version of the Lennon and McCartney song in 1965, a year or so after the Beatles had their massive hit with it. She sings it as a ballad. The Beatles’s version is a song sung for sixteen year olds. Clark makes it a song for grown ups. The lyrics (it was one of Lennon and McCartney’s early compositions) in the mouths of the Beatles seem naive, trivial and clumsy. It’s a teenage pop song with a good tune. In Clark’s version the song enters another dimension. The words become the faltering utterances, the humble inner yearning of someone just embarked on the first tentative steps of an adult love affair. The orchestral arrangement is lush, typical for a ballad recorded in the 60s.

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Here’s another version of a Lennon and McCartney song that I offer in confirmation of my thesis that their best versions are not by the Beatles. This is Emmy Lou Harris.

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I’m pretty much set against authenticity in music - the idea that the only way to play a piece of music is by replicating the conditions under which it was originally played. So we get whinnying valveless trumpets, catgut wailing violins and any keyboard piece before 1780 played on that instrument guaranteed (like a nail across a blackboard) to set my teeth on edge - the harpsichord. The best version of the Well Tempered Clavier is by Wilhelm Kempff, played on the piano.

By the same token the best versions of songs aren’t always by the originals. I think this is particularly so with Lennon and McCartney songs. In many cases the Beatles did them worst - naive top-of-the-voice vocalising, clanging guitars, primitive bass and Ringo’s thumping-headache drums.

Here’s an example of one done better - Maura O’Connell singing I Will. Heaps better than McCartney.

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