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   CLUB SANDWICH 76

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Club Sandwich 76

            Many people had said that you shouldn't do it. Did this affect you?

            Before the first session there were a couple of pieces in the newspaper that I noticed. Both of them said, "They shouldn't do it" - I think, to give them the benefit of the doubt, on the understanding that there was only going to be three of us. We had the newspapers in the studio when the three of us got together, and they got us fired up, they got me fired up anyway, I don't know about the others. I thought, "Right! We'll show you! How dare you say what we should do. If you'd have been there when we did 'A Day In The Life' would you have said 'They shouldn't do a funny orchestra bit in the middle', or would you have said 'They shouldn't do a song like "Why Don't We Do It In The Road'" because it's not of enough consequence for the Beatles?'" It annoyed me when my Dad told me what to do, so when a pundit I've never met tells me what to do that is really quite annoying.
            There's been a bit of that reappearing now - "Why are they doing it?" "Oh, I hate these songs with dead guys" and so on. My answer to that is "Look, do you think we're stupid enough not to have checked all these angles out, that you, as some casual pundit, throw out? You don't think that we, as the professionals who are engaged in this, check that out a hundred times more than you ever would?" Because we did, we checked it out amongst ourselves, we made sure that we were happy to do it. We checked it out with Yoko, or else we couldn't have had the cassette. We checked it out with Sean, who said, "It's going to be a little spooky hearing a dead guy on lead vocal" and I said to him, "So you mean we shouldn't do it?" and he said, "No, no, you should try it." We checked it out on every conceivable level.
            We told ourselves that we'd try it but that if it was no good we wouldn't release it, it will have just been a project that sucked, end of story. If, however, it works, it will have been worth it.
            I'm really very glad we did it, for a million reasons. For my own personal satisfaction I think it's a damn good track, I'm really very proud of it and I'm proud of the emotion that's on it, because I need something like that with John. I think it's been good for all of us, and I think it's good for Sean - it was important to me that he liked it.

            Did the sessions for 'Free As A Bird' and "Real Love' go entirely without a hitch?

            No, not really. The biggest hitch for me was when we came to the middle-eight of 'Free As A Bird', which John had blocked out. He had a little germ of an idea but hadn't finished it, so we decided that we would have to write some lyrics of our own.
            What happened was: Ringo, having done all his stuff, left me and George to it, and Ringo is a very good balance, he's a very good pivot for us. When he's there the atmosphere is more complete. But it was fine, you sometimes need a little tension. Anyway, I brought in some words that I thought might do the trick but when I went and sang them I was having a little trouble and didn't think they were that good. And so, rightly enough, George and Jeff Lynne said this and then George started hacking them to pieces. I must admit, as a pride thing, that got a little difficult. I had to live with it, though, and I say now that he was absolutely right to do it and I'm glad he did it, but whilst it was going on it was a little bit hairy. It was like: here's George savaging my lyrics, am I happy about this? And I had to keep saying, "Yeah, sure, sure, he's right, he's right, he's right", and he was.

Club Sandwich 76

            Certain people have not yet been given credit for the work they did on the new Beatles recordings. Here in Club Sandwich we would like to rectify this.
            The main producer on 'Free As A Bird' was Jeff Lynne. The song was engineered by Geoff Emerick and Jon Jacobs (whose name was unfortunately missed off the album credits). Special thanks should also go to Studio Manager Eddie Klein, and Personal Assistants John Hammel and Keith Smith. We are also grateful to Patrick Moore, Louise Morris, Marie Moore, Pat Greenough and Sherrie Ennis for their contribution, and to our security man for the week, Mark Hamilton, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank the non-MPL people involved in the project - in particular, Bill Harrison (Ringo's drum roadie), Alan Rogan (George's guitar roadie) and Phil Hatton (who works for Jeff Lynne).
            These credits also apply to 'Real Love' with an additional mention for Jamie Kirkham in place of Patrick Moore, and for the computer programmer Marc Mann.
            We would like to thank all the above, and the staff of MPL in London, for the wonderful work they put in on the project.