"Only a Northern Song" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 soundtrack album Yellow Submarine. Written by George Harrison, it was the first of four songs the band provided for the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, to meet their contractual obligations to United Artists. The song was recorded mainly in February 1967, during the sessions for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but the Beatles chose not to include it on that album. The group completed the recording two months later, straight after finishing work on Sgt. Pepper.
Harrison wrote "Only a Northern Song" out of dissatisfaction with his status as a junior songwriter with the Beatles' publishing company, Northern Songs. The lyrics and music convey his disenchantment at how the company retained the copyright for the songs it published, and at how, following its public listing in 1965, the major shareholders profited more from his compositions than he did. The recording features a Hammond organ, played by Harrison, and an overdubbed montage of assorted sounds including trumpet blasts and spoken voices, anticipating John Lennon's 1968 sound collage "Revolution 9". Due to the difficulty in assembling the completed track from two tape sources, "Only a Northern Song" remained a rare song from the Beatles' post-1963 catalogue that was unavailable in true stereo until 1999. That year, it was remixed for inclusion on the album Yellow Submarine Songtrack.
The song has received a varied response from reviewers; while Ian MacDonald dismisses the track as a "self-indulgent dirge", the website Ultimate Classic Rock identifies it as one of the Beatles' best works in the psychedelic genre. A version of the song with a different vocal part, and omitting the sound collage overdubs, was issued on the Beatles' 1996 outtakes compilation Anthology 2. Gravenhurst and Yonder Mountain String Band are among the artists who have covered "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. Author Brian Southall describes the song as Harrison's "personal denunciation of the Beatles' music publishing business", given his disadvantageous position with 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.
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 lack of interest in the Beatles' project. Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required). 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, each consisting of two verses and a chorus, 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 sarcasm and musical dissonance to express his dissatisfaction with the company. In musicologist Walter Everett's description, this is achieved musically through the use of "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 Bm7/11 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, and that this effect is accentuated by surprising and irregular phrase-lengths in the verses.
In contrast to the minimal chord changes over the verses, the choruses present a fast progression of chords – specifically, E, Bm7, G, C7 and F7. 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.
Production Recording
The Beatles taped the basic track for "Only a Northern Song" at EMI Studios (now 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 referred to as "Not Known". The line-up on the track was 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, the studio engineers carried out three reduction mixes of this performance onto fresh 4-track tapes. On what was now called take 12 (the third of the reduction mixes), Harrison filled the two available tracks with his lead vocals.
The song was disliked by the Beatles' producer, George Martin, who later said it was his least favourite song of Harrison's. The band were similarly unenthusiastic and it was decided to omit the song 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 supplied for the soundtrack to the Yellow Submarine animated film, in line with their contractual obligation to United Artists to provide 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 take 3 of "Only a Northern Song" on 20 April, a day when members of the Yellow Submarine production team visited them in the studio. The band started working on the song less than 45 minutes after completing the final mixing on Sgt. Pepper, demonstrating what Lewisohn terms a "tremendous appetite" to continue recording.
Retaining the organ and drum tracks, they overdubbed a new bass guitar part and, on a separate track, trumpet, glockenspiel and vocalised sounds. A second 4-track tape recorder was used, so allowing the various instrumental parts and studio effects to be spread across eight available channels. On this machine, the band worked on the second reduction-mix tape from 14 February, known as take 11, from which they wiped all the previously recorded tracks except the Hammond organ part. Harrison then recorded two tracks of vocal, one of which included more trumpet from McCartney and further vocalised sounds, while the final track was filled with timpani, Mellotron, piano and more organ. The presence of Harrison's original Hammond part on both of the tapes ensured that the instrument had a more substantial sound in the mix.
The Beatles performed many of the overdubs in a haphazard manner. Tom Maginnis of AllMusic describes the completed track as "heavily steeped in the psychedelic sounds of the period, using liberal amounts of loose instrumentation", particularly "chaotic bursts of trumpet". According to Pollack, these 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 random sounds and spoken voices, Inglis cites the sound collage effect as a precedent for Lennon's 1968 avant-garde track "Revolution 9" and an early example of electronic music.
Mixing On 21 April, the Beatles completed a mono mix of the song for its inclusion in Yellow Submarine. Due to the difficulty in getting the two 4-track machines to play at exactly the same time, attempts at creating a stereo equivalent were abandoned.
In October 1968, while preparing the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album for release, EMI's engineers created a duophonic (or mock-stereo) mix of "Only a Northern Song" from the mono mix. The monaural version of the album, which was originally available only in the UK, similarly used a suboptimal version of the recording. In this case, as with the three other new songs presented to United Artists, the engineers combined the two channels from the duophonic mix, rather than use the true mono mix from April 1967.
Appearance in Yellow Submarine film