Only a Northern Song

Background and inspiration

George Harrison said that the subject matter for "Only a Northern Song" related to both his city of birth, Liverpool, in Merseyside, and the fact that the copyright for the composition belonged to the Beatles' publishing company, Northern Songs. The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in February 1965, as a means of saving John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the Beatles' principal songwriters, the tax liability generated through the international success of their catalogue. Harrison had formed his own publishing company, Harrisongs, in late 1964; despite the financial advantages offered by his 80 per cent stake in that company, he agreed to remain with Northern Songs, to aid the flotation scheme. Among the four Beatles, Lennon and McCartney were major shareholders in Northern Songs, each owning 15 per cent of the public company's shares, and the pair earned considerable wealth over the first year of the flotation. Harrison and Ringo Starr, as contracted songwriters, owned 0.8 per cent each. This arrangement ensured that, in addition to the company retaining the copyright of all its published songs, Lennon and McCartney profited more from Harrison's compositions than he did.

Author Brian Southall describes "Only a Northern Song" as Harrison's "personal denunciation of the Beatles' music publishing business". When discussing the song in two late 1990s interviews with Billboard editor-in-chief Timothy White, Harrison commented that the main target of his complaints was Dick James, the managing director of Northern Songs. Having been signed by James in 1963, at the age of twenty, Harrison said that the publisher had failed to explain that by signing the contract, he was also signing away the ownership of his compositions. Harrison added that he only understood the consequences after the 1965 flotation, when the major shareholders were "making all this money out of this catalog". With reference to the Rutles' 1978 parody of the Beatles' history, All You Need Is Cash, he also told White: "I think [the message behind 'Only a Northern Song'] was put better in the make-believe TV documentary … where it said, 'Dick Jaws, an out-of-work music publisher of no fixed ability' signed them up for the rest of their lives."

In author Ian MacDonald's estimation, "Only a Northern Song" suggests that Harrison "had yet to recover his enthusiasm for being a Beatle" after he had threatened to leave the group following their final concert tour, in August 1966. Before the band regrouped in November that year to begin recording their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harrison spent six weeks in India with his sitar teacher, Ravi Shankar, a visit that heightened his disinterest in the Beatles' project. MacDonald considers that Harrison's link with northern England in "Only a Northern Song" was influenced by the Beatles working on songs about growing up in Liverpool, which was the concept under consideration at the start of the Sgt. Pepper sessions.

Composition and musical structure

Harrison wrote "Only a Northern Song" on a Hammond organ, which became his preferred instrument for songwriting during 1967, replacing the guitar. The song is in the key of A major, although MacDonald gives B minor as a secondary key. The opening organ part ends with a preview of the melody over which the song title appears in the song proper. After this short introduction, the composition is structured into two portions consisting of two verses and a chorus each, which are followed by a single verse, a final chorus and an outro, with some of these sections rendered as instrumental passages.

The composition is a meta-song, in that its subject is the work itself. While commenting on the pointlessness of writing for Northern Songs, Harrison employs musical dissonance to express his dissatisfaction with the company, through the use of what musicologist Walter Everett terms "ill-behaved tones" and "wrong-mode" chords.

From the verse's opening A major chord, the melody moves to a ii minor voicing, rendered as B minor 7/11 through the inclusion of a low-register E note. In his lyrics, Harrison acknowledges the apparent awkwardness of such a change, singing "You may think the chords are going wrong" and, in the final verse, that the harmony might be "a little dark and out of key". Musicologist Alan Pollack considers the song's music and lyrical message to be "uncannily in tune" with one another, a combination that is accentuated by surprising and irregular phrase-lengths in the verses.

Contrasting with the drawn-out melody over the verses, the choruses present a fast progression of chords – specifically, E major, B minor 7, G major, C♯7 and F♯7. In the first chorus, Harrison comments that, given the inadequacy of his publishing arrangement, "It doesn't really matter what chords I play". Author Ian Inglis interprets this line as mirroring the singer's complaint to Beatles biographer Hunter Davies in the late 1960s, regarding the futility of the band's live performances when their screaming fans never listened to the music the Beatles were playing. Harrison biographer Simon Leng describes "Only a Northern Song" as the first example of its composer "pushing back at the Beatles as an organization he found wanting", a theme Harrison returned to in 1968 with "Not Guilty", with his comments on the group's internal discord.

Recording

The Beatles taped the basic track for "Only a Northern Song" at EMI's Abbey Road Studios on 13 February 1967, during the sessions for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. As was typical with his new compositions, Harrison had yet to give the song a title, so it was instead referred to as "Not Known". The line-up on the track comprised Harrison on organ, Lennon on tambourine, McCartney on bass and Starr on drums. The band recorded nine takes of the song before selecting take 3 for further work. The following day, after the studio engineers had carried out a reduction mix, Harrison added two tracks of lead vocals.

The song was disliked by the Beatles' producer, George Martin, and the band elected to omit it from the album. As his sole writing contribution to Sgt. Pepper, Harrison instead offered the Indian-styled "Within You Without You", which, in Martin's recollection, was welcomed with "a bit of a relief all round". "Only a Northern Song" then became the first track the group provided for the soundtrack to the Yellow Submarine animated film (1968), in line with their contractual obligation to United Artists to supply four new songs. Described by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn as a "myth", a story later circulated that Harrison had rush-written the composition for United Artists in early 1968, after Al Brodax, the film's producer, approached the band for a final song.

Overdubbing

The group returned to "Only a Northern Song" on 20 April 1967, within an hour of completing the final mixing on Sgt. Pepper. In addition to replacing the original bass guitar and vocal parts, the overdubs carried out that day included trumpet and piano, played by McCartney and Lennon, respectively, together with glockenspiel and percussion. A second 4-track tape recorder was used for the song, so allowing the various instrumental parts and studio effects to be spread across eight available channels.

The Beatles performed much of the overdubs in a seemingly haphazard manner; MacDonald describes the result as "a consciously slovenly piece of work". Tom Maginnis of AllMusic finds the recording "heavily steeped in the psychedelic sounds of the period, using liberal amounts of loose instrumentation", particularly "chaotic bursts of trumpet". In Pollack's description, these later additions constitute a "noise track", which further heightens the theme of discordance and is used to fill the song's instrumental sections, becoming especially prominent during the outro. With its inclusion of reversed tape loops and spoken voices, Inglis has cited the sound collage effect as a precedent for Lennon's 1968 avant-garde track "Revolution 9" and an early example of the electronic music genre.

Mixing

The Beatles completed a final mix of the song on 21 April 1967. Due to the difficulty in getting the two 4-track machines to play at exactly the same time, only a mono mix was attempted. In October 1968, while preparing the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album for release, EMI's engineers created a mock-stereo (duophonic) mix from this mono mix, instead of returning to the master tapes. For the monaural version of the album, originally available only in the UK, the engineers combined the two channels from the duophonic mix, rather than using the April 1967 mono mix.

Appearance in Yellow Submarine film

In the Yellow Submarine film, the song appears during a scene when the submarine carrying the Beatles travels through the Sea of Science, one of the seven seas around Pepperland. Referring to the psychedelic imagery in the animation, author Stephen Glynn considers that this segment "only 'makes sense' when read as attempting an audio-visual recreation of the hallucinogenic state". Jeremiah Massengale, an academic in the field of visual communication, highlights the sequence as one of many technical innovations introduced by the 1968 film, saying: "accompanying multi-colored, square portrait paintings of the Beatles during 'Only a Northern Song', there's a creative use of an oscillator picking out the sound waves of the track." Glynn cites the drug-inspired imagery of this and two other song sequences as the true reason that Rank pulled Yellow Submarine from its UK cinema run, rather than the company's official reasoning that the film had performed poorly at the box office.

The "Only a Northern Song" segment was the only clip shown in a feature about Yellow Submarine on the television show How It Is. Produced by Tony Palmer and including portions of the stage play based on Lennon's book In His Own Write, the show was broadcast on BBC1 two days after the film's world premiere in London, on 19 July 1968.

Release

In January 1969, "Only a Northern Song" was issued as the second track on side one of the Yellow Submarine LP, with George Martin's orchestral score for the film occupying the whole of side two. The soundtrack was viewed as a secondary release by the Beatles, who delayed its release to allow for their 1968 self-titled double album, also known as "the White Album". Although Harrison's contract with James had expired in March 1968, the copyright for "Only a Northern Song" and his second contribution to the film, "It's All Too Much", remained with Northern Songs rather than being assigned to Harrisongs as his four White Album compositions had been. The song's release coincided with a period of acrimony between James and the Beatles, particularly Lennon and McCartney, about whom Lewisohn writes: "If John and Paul still thought they owned their songs [following the flotation of Northern Songs] they were deluding themselves." In March 1969, wary of the disharmony within the band and the problems affecting their Apple Corps business empire, James sold his majority shareholding in Northern Songs to Lew Grade's ATV Music, thereby selling on the ownership of the Beatles catalogue.

In a contemporary review of Yellow Submarine, Beat Instrumental lamented that it offered little new material by the band, but described "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much" as "superb pieces" that "redeem" side one. Recalling the release in his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, however, Nicholas Schaffner dismissed the track as one of the "trifling baubles" the Beatles provided for a film project they had little interest in originally. While adhering to Brodax's account of the song's creation, NME critic Bob Woffinden found "considerable merit" in "Only a Northern Song", and suggested that Harrison's divergence from his usual, methodical approach to songwriting was one he should pursue more often.

In January 1996, the song was issued as the B-side to "It's All Too Much" on a blue-vinyl jukebox single, as part of a series of Beatles releases by Capitol Records' CEMA Special Markets division. By 1999, "Only a Northern Song" remained one of only two post-1963 Beatles songs not to have been made available in true stereo (the other being "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"). That year, a stereo version became available when the track was remixed for inclusion on the album Yellow Submarine Songtrack.

Retrospective assessment and legacy

Among more recent reviews of the Yellow Submarine album, David Gassman of PopMatters admires the song for its "mordant humor" and interprets the lyrics as a possible "dig" at Lennon and McCartney. Gassman adds, with reference to the superior "It's All Too Much": "as long as songs like this were being relegated to throwaway projects, George could be excused for sniping at John and Paul in 'Only a Northern Song'." Discussing the same two tracks, Pitchfork Media's Mark Richardson writes that they offer little of interest aside from their "swirling" psychedelic effects, although he considers that "Only a Northern Song" "at least has a good joke going for it, simultaneously alluding to the North of England and the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney-dominated publishing company". Mark Kemp of Paste dismisses the song as a "meandering bore".

As with most of the Beatles' post-Sgt. Pepper 1967 recordings, their contributions to Yellow Submarine have traditionally been held in low regard by the band's biographers. Lewisohn describes the group's 20 April overdubs on "Only a Northern Song" as "a curious session" and writes that their work over this period "display[s] a startling lack of cohesion and enthusiasm". Mark Hertsgaard considers that "Only a Northern Song" was "understandably … rejected as not good enough for Sgt Pepper", while MacDonald views it as "dismal" and a "self-indulgent dirge".

More impressed, Alex Young of Consequence of Sound identifies the song as "lyrically the [album's] quintessential track, as it perfectly defines Yellow Submarine in two verses alone, while coming out sonically like a Pink Floyd b-side from the Obscured By Clouds sessions". In a 2003 review, in Mojo, Peter Doggett said that Harrison's two contributions "did much to rescue the album from oblivion", and he described "Only a Northern Song" as "gloriously ironic". Writing for Ultimate Classic Rock in 2013, Dave Swanson ranked the track third on his list of the "Top 10 Beatles Psychedelic Songs" (following "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "I Am the Walrus") and concluded: "Would 'Sgt. Pepper' have been even greater had this mind-melter been included in favor of, say, 'When I'm Sixty Four?' All signs point to a positive affirmation." In 2006, "Only a Northern Song" was ranked 75th in Mojo's list "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs", where Glenn Tilbrook described it as "a wonderfully unexpected tune" and suggested that Harrison's "lovely and sardonic lyric … could be the inspiration for a thousand Rutles songs".

While noting Yellow Submarine's status as the Beatles' only "inessential" album, Bruce Eder of AllMusic describes "Only a Northern Song" as "an odd piece of psychedelic ersatz, mixing trippiness and some personal comments". Referring to the revelations offered in the song, Eder adds: "they present Harrison's vision of how music and recording sounded, from the inside-out and the outside-in, during the psychedelic era – the song thus provided a rare glimpse inside the doors of perception of being a Beatle (or, at least, one aspect of being this particular Beatle) circa 1967." Writing for Billboard in 2001, Bill Holland grouped "Only a Northern Song" with the Byrds' "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" and early-1970s releases by the Kinks and Joni Mitchell, as songs that constitute the first wave of musical statements in which artists "accuse or indict their industry's business policies". Inglis views "Only a Northern Song" as the Beatles' "first 'postmodern' song", due to the "deliberate ironic intent" evident in the subject matter and in the use of tape effects and scattered conversation.

Other versions

An alternative edit of the song appeared on the Beatles' Anthology 2 out-takes compilation in 1996. Slightly sped up, and mixed in stereo, this version comprises the song's basic track without most of the April 1967 overdubs, and with a vocal take that contains some changes to the lyrics.

Coinciding with the popularity of "It's All Too Much" among acid-rock bands of the early 1990s, Sun Dial released a cover of "Only a Northern Song" as the B-side of their 1991 single "Fireball". In 2009, Greg Davis and jazz singer-songwriter Chris Weisman named their psychedelic folk partnership, Northern Songs, after the Beatles track. Their 2010 album Northern Songs similarly honoured the song, as well as including a cover version of "It's All Too Much".

When Mojo released the CD Yellow Submarine Resurfaces in July 2012, "Only a Northern Song" was covered by Gravenhurst. Yonder Mountain String Band included the song in their live performances during 2013 and 2015.

Personnel

According to Ian MacDonald: