The story of how The Beatles made Free As A Bird
The way that the three remaining Beatles got a handle on the strange vibe of being in a studio together again without John Lennon in 1994 was to pretend he was actually part of the session and had just nipped out. “We just pretended that he’d gone home on holiday,” Paul McCartney said in a press conference at the time, “as if he said, ‘Just finish it up, I trust you’.”
This was how McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – dubbed The Threetles – approached the making of Free As A Bird, which came out in early December, 1995. They weren’t strictly a trio making their first music as The Beatles since Lennon’s death, though. Working on a creaking old demo recorded onto a cassette by John Lennon – one of four that the remaining members were given by Yoko One – the band realised that they needed to bring in an outside influence to help them get the song to the finish line when they entered the studio in early 1994. That man was ELO’s Jeff Lynne.
“It was George who said we need a producer, it could be dangerous just to all go in the studio, it could get nasty cos you’ve got egos flying around, surprisingly,” recalled McCartney. “Jeff’s name came up and it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s good’,” said McCartney. “He’d worked with George and George was saying, ‘I think Jeff would be great’.”
“Jeff was a life-saver,” added Ringo Starr. “He put it together and had us all playing and the three of us felt comfortable with him.”
Despite being an international star and mega-selling artist in his own right, for lifelong Beatles fan Lynne, it was a daunting prospect. “It was really quite scary because I didn’t know Paul very well,” he said. “I’d only met him a couple of times before that. He was a bit worried about me because I was George’s pal and he wondered if it was going to be a little bit one-sided and not in the spirit of things, but he needn’t have worried because I was totally into the spirit of things.”
Source: Niall Doherty/yahoo.com
