On This Day: Beatles release hit song 'Yesterday'

September 13: The Beatles song Yesterday became a surprise hit in America in 1965 –after the legendary British band refused to release the track as a single at home.

The number, which has since been covered a record 2,200 times and is repeatedly voted the best pop song of all time, topped U.S. charts for four weeks.

The EP, written solely by Paul McCartney and dismissed by the other Beatles as being too different, sold a million copies in the States within five weeks.

But just as Yesterday became an American phenomenon, Liverpool’s Fab Four received an even greater honour back in Britain – with MBEs from the Queen.

A British Pathé newsreel filmed McCartney, then aged 23, John Lennon, 25, George Harrison, 22, and Ringo Starr, 25, collecting their awards from Buckingham Palace.

The pop sensations, who went on to become the biggest-selling artists of all time, almost ground London to a halt after thousands of fans flocked outside the gates.

Throngs of screaming girls had to be held back by dozens of police officers as the floppy-haired foursome left the palace in a Rolls Royce on October 26, 1965.

They had to wait until 1976 to buy Yesterday as a UK single, although it was included on the album Help!, which was released in both the U.S. and Britain in August 1965.

The first many Britons heard of it was cover version by Matt Munro that reached the top ten just before Christmas 1965.

The band had vetoed its release in Britain because it was so unlike their other singles - and also because it was the first track to rely upon a performance of a single member.

But this same uniqueness was what spurred bosses at their American label, Capitol Records, to try it as a single in the U.S. – and they never regretted it.

With its accompanying string-quartet recording, the melancholic ballad about a break-up has become one of the most iconic tracks ever produced.

It was hailed the best 20th century pop song by BBC Radio 2 listeners and experts in 1999 – and a year later Rolling Stone magazine in the U.S. voted it the greatest ever.

Yet the track, which McCartney thought up catchy melody for in a dream, has been surprisingly controversial - and indeed hated in some quarters.

Bob Dylan, who four years later recorded his own version, initially criticised it by claiming there were “millions of songs written in Tin Pan Alley” that were better.

And shortly before his death in 1980, Lennon said he thought the lyrics did not “resolve into any sense”.
“They're good – but if you read the whole song, it doesn't say anything - you don't know what happened.”

Even McCartney - one of only two surviving Beatles, along with Starr - wasn’t sure about the melody, which he suspected he’d inadvertently stolen from someone.

It took four months before the star, who is believed to have performed a record 10,000 hours with the band between 1960 and 1964, dared write lyrics for Yesterday.

He later recalled: “So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me: ‘No, it's lovely, and I'm sure it's all yours.’

“It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim, stuck a little sign on it and said: ‘Okay, it's mine!’

“It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’.”

Indeed, his original opening verse was “Scrambled Eggs/Oh, my baby how I love your legs.”

And who knows how different the world might have been if McCartney, now aged 71 and knighted, had  stuck with those lyrics.