Only a Northern Song

You may be surprised to learn that this song was George Harrison's original offering for the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The other Beatles and the production team certainly were taken aback by what they considered to be a subpar composition for their masterpiece-in-the-works.  From his perspective, Harrison simply did not care.  He had been losing interest in being a Beatle even before they ceased touring in August of 1966.  And he was increasingly upset with the paltry shares that he and Ringo had been allotted in the publishing company Northern Songs Ltd., though admittedly his songwriting output was still well below that of Lennon and McCartney.

While the songs that the Beatles had been working on lately were groundbreaking - Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane, A Day in the Life - George's contributions to them were minimal, and both he and Ringo were beginning to feel as if they were session players rather than vital members of the band, as other production elements became increasingly complex.  In response to his situation, he wrote this composition expressing his ambivalence about his continuing participation in the group.

Everyone gathered on February 13th, 1967 to work on the basic track.  In his book Here, There and Everywhere, engineer Geoff Emerick relates that producer George Martin told him in the control room that he was disappointed that Harrison hadn't come up with something better for them to record.  Nine takes were laid down, with George on Hammond organ, Paul on bass and Ringo on drums.  John was present, but was not compelled to participate.  Of the nine takes, only four were even complete, making it through to the end of the song.  

On February 14th, three reduction mixes (numbered as takes 10, 11 and 12) were made of the best take from the previous day, take three.  George recorded his lead vocal onto take twelve, then double-tracked his vocal, though the lyrics differed significantly from the final version.  Anthology 2 allows us to hear how the basic track sounded at this point, before all of the additional overdubs were recorded (Paul's bass part on this Anthology track is from a later date, however).  The song never made it past this during the Sgt. Pepper sessions.

But it was not entirely forgotten.  Shortly after work on the Sgt. Pepper album was complete, the tapes of Only a Northern Song were retrieved from the EMI vaults for further work on April 20th.  For some reason, the other Beatles were now enthusiastic about working on the track.  Initially ignoring the reduction mixes from February 14th, they first wiped Paul's bass line on take three from February 13th so he could re-record it more to his liking.  They then added numerous overdubs onto this take, including Paul blaring away on a trumpet, John playing piano and glockenspiel, various odd voices from the boys, Ringo on tambourine, etc.

With all four tracks now full, George re-recorded new vocals onto take eleven.  The tricky part came on April 21st, as Martin, Emerick and second engineer Richard Lush made eleven attempts to create a mono mix by syncing up take three and take eleven.  The sixth attempt turned out to be the best.  Given the technology of the time, it was deemed impossible to make a stereo mix under those conditions. 

Soon thereafter, the song was chosen to be part of the soundtrack of the animated film Yellow Submarine.  Luckily, only a mono mix was required by the film's producers.  In late 1968, with a soundtrack album due out (well after the film was shown in theaters), engineers Geoff Emerick and Graham Kirkby created a mock stereo version of the song, by putting most of the treble in one speaker and most bass in the other - a trick that American record companies had been using for years.  The album Yellow Submarine from January of 1969 was only released in stereo in the US, so this is the version most of us know. 

In 1999, the film was reissued for home video, and a new album called the Yellow Submarine Songtrack was created to accompany it.  Studio technology had now advanced to the point that the original tapes were retrieved from the archives and a team of 5 engineers were able to produce a true stereo remix of the song.

In 2009, the box set The Beatles in Mono included a two-disc album called Mono Masters which included the original mono mix from 1967 for the first time ever.  The mono Yellow Submarine album issued in the UK in 1969 had only featured a "folded down" version of the mock stereo mix.  Confusing, no?

For a song that was much-maligned at the start, Only a Northern Song actually works quite well in the film Yellow Submarine.  It is used in what is probably the most psychedelic sequence in the movie, showing tiny versions of the animated Beatles characters flying around pictures of the actual Beatles as a soundwave reacts to the music and bright colors change repeatedly.