CLUB SANDWICH 76

            Was doing Tree As A Bird' cathartic?

            'Free As A Bird' was good to do, yes. It was the nearest I was ever going to get to writing with John again. A lot of pundits have got the wrong idea, they think it's just the three of us, I don't know where they've been for the last year, but they appear to think it's just three of us on it. I went off the idea of the three of us together, it seemed like we needed John and the more we thought of that the more exciting it became.

            Didn't that frighten you, though, didn't that perturb you?

            No, not really. The only thing I had to do was to get this scenario, that I've talked about in a number of places, of "How would we deal with this? Would it be the sacred memory of our dear friend who's virtually become a martyr?" or would it just be "Our mate John". And to make it "Our mate John" we got this scenario going of "He's asked us to finish a tape". And the key words for me were, I imagined him saying, "I trust you. Just do your thing, I trust you." And the trust was what I needed to know. So I made up a fiction and believed it and it was fine. I went in there - I think we all did - fully believing that this is something John would have wanted us to do.

            But that's on one level, that's about working with John. What about putting out the first Beatles single in 25 years. Didn't that perturb you?

            I swear to God, the backwards stuff says, "Made by John Lennon". None of us had heard it when we compiled it ... we could not in a million years have known what that phrase would be backwards. It's impossible. So there is real magic going on.
            Nah. It never really perturbed us to put any Beatles stuff out, and it still doesn't. It's the Beatles. And, to me, when I work with the Beatles it's very special. When I work with George Martin again it's very special. The whole thing becomes bathed in a special light. I've think you've found this, you two guys: working on this project is a little more special than most of the stuff we work on. It has its own magic. The Beatles is the Beatles.
            By the way, have you heard: it really is true, the Beatles are magic! It's official: on the end of 'Free As A Bird', just for a joke - in case people were thinking, "God, they really mean it, this is so serious, this isn't like all their other records, this is serious homage" - we re-entered with the drums, then George did his George Formby stuff on the ukulele and then, to even take it one stage further, we put in something backwards. We got the guys at the film production office to find a clip of John talking - we gave them a certain phrase to look for, which I'm not giving away - and then we put it in backwards, just as little joke, a bit of fun that ties in with the ending. Anyway, the incredible thing is, the other day Eddie [Klein, Paul's studio manager] was working on the tape and he said, "Paul, listen to this" and he played it to me and, I swear to God, the backwards stuff says, "Made by John Lennon". None of us had heard it when we compiled it, but when I spoke to the others and said "You'll never guess..." they said, "We know, we've just heard it too". They'd heard it, independently. And I swear to God, he definitely says it! We could not in a million years have known "what that phrase would be backwards. It's impossible. So there is real magic going on. Hare Krishna!

            Tell us about the 'Free As A Bird' sessions.

            We agreed to do it at my studio because this is really the only studio that was up and running. I'd been working here regularly so it was all cleaned and ready to go and in full working order. Also, because my studio is slightly off the beaten track - off the Beatle track! - it meant that we'd have privacy. And the press were doing a lot of talk at the time - "It'll be in Abbey Road" - and we figured they'd be watching places like that. So this became the perfect place to do it and we were very lucky both the times we did it: we didn't have anybody notice that the guys were here, and I accommodated them all locally so the word didn't get out too much.
            So they came down here and we just started listening to the cassette, which, as you know, was just a mono cassette with John's voice and his piano locked in. Anyone who knows anything about recording knows that, for a mix, you try to isolate the voice and the piano on separate tracks to give yourself a bit of control. But we had a fixed tape. First of all, George and I tried to put some acoustics on, and play along with it as it stood, because we wanted to be as faithful as possible to the original. But because he was doing a demo John went out of time a bit. Unless you're working to a click track you don't concentrate on tempo when you're doing demos. And because he was trying to find the song on the demo the middle-eights weren't filled out, lyrically. His vocal quality was nice and he'd put a funny phasing effect on, which there was no getting rid of, but it was a nice effect actually, very Sixties, very evocative. I think it's one of the things that gives the record a nostalgic feel. But eventually, because George and I had to keep looking at each other and giving signs through our eyes, like "he slows down here, he speeds up here", it became difficult. It became quite annoying to try and keep up with the speed changes.
            So it was decided that we had to take another approach. We had to isolate John's voice as best we could and then lay it back in on the tape to a click track that would not be heard on the record but would be strict tempo. Jeff Lynne and the engineers did that. (Even though he's credited as co-producer Jeff was the producer, in effect, of 'Free As A Bird' and 'Real Love'.) Once that had been done we were able to play with it because John was now perfectly in time and there were just little gaps where he'd sped up or gone out a bit.
            After that we did acoustic guitars and I learned John's piano part. I'd been studying it a little bit the week before we did the session, and Jeff Lynne had studied it very hard and showed me one or two interesting little variations that John had put in there, that I hadn't picked up. Then I played it - John and I had very similar piano styles because we learned together - which meant that we now had a voice and a piano separate and could get control over them.
            Then I put the bass on, which I kept very, very simple: I didn't want to do any of my trademark swoops or get it too melodic, I just