BEATLES: The George Harrison song that accurately predicted the future

one of the cleverest and funniest songs from The Beatles back catalog is not actually a London and McCartney composition it's written by George Harrison but it's a song that I believe George wrote about Lennon and McCartney that track is only a northern song which George wrote for Sergeant Pepper but was actually released a few years later on Yellow Submarine the lyrics underwent a few changes before the song was released in certain places losing some of their Edge and passive aggression but today I want to look at the lyrics taken mostly from an early version of the song which was released on the second Beatles Anthology this was I believe recorded in 1967 and is the closest lyrically speaking to how George originally wrote it but before we dive into the lyrics We need to understand the context in which they were written so that we can interpret them in a reasonably informed way so first I want to look at the story of how George Harrison felt sidelined by Lennon and McCartney Paul in particular when it came to his songwriting contributions to the Beatles let's start in the era in which this song was written 1967. according to the express Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has become the Beatles best-selling album of all time with more than 32 million copies sold worldwide however when the record was first brought to life George Harrison was not a fan of how it was going in fact he couldn't stand what the band were making a lot of the strain came from the fact that Harrison was never asked for his opinion during the songwriting process Lennon and McCartney took over most of the songwriting sessions leaving him feeling like he was being ignored Harrison's ex-wife Patty Boyd later looked back on when the Beatles star quit the band in the middle of the recording session Boyd said the Beatles made him unhappy with the constant arguments they were vicious to each other that was really upsetting the star's ex-wife who divorced Harrison in 1977 said that he was being sidelined by the rest of the band like a little brother he was pushed into the background she said he would come home from recording and be full of anger it was a very bad state that he was in the mirror develops this a little further saying George Harrison revealed Paul McCartney ruined him during his time in the Beatles the late guitarist who died in 2001 at the age of 58 shared he had no confidence in himself during an Unearthed interview he also shared that he and drummer Ringo Starr often felt overshadowed as being in the Beatles became like the John and Paul show George said in a way I always was like a bit of an observer of The Beatles even though I was with them whereas I think John and Paul were the stars of The Beatles as Paul and John Lennon's personalities came to the fore it is claimed that George had to fight to get his songs heard on albums the pair even started the official Lennon McCartney songwriting partnership to copyright their songs alone George's close friend and musical Confidant Bob Dylan publicly commented on what was really going on behind the scenes when he was in the band the 81 year old blown in the wind singer said previously George got stuck with being the beetle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney shedding light onto George's relationship with Paul Patty Boyd added George saw Paul as difficult they would tolerate each other but I think George basically didn't like Paul's personality I just think they really didn't love each other and of course it is understandable that anyone would feel in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney as songwriters especially considering they were writing songs like the one after 909 when they were barely out of their teens or even still in their teens George's first song on a Beatles record was don't bother me on their second album with the Beatles it's an okay song but it was competing with the likes of from me to you she loves you and I Want to Hold Your Hand all of which were Lennon and McCartney penned Smash Hits at the time and so by contrast it didn't really stand out it seems that the tensions between George and the two main songwriters McCartney in particular didn't really come to the fore until the second half of their career when George Harrison was really starting to flourish as a masterful songwriter in an interview with crawdaddy magazine in 1977 George said this about the White Album sessions the problem was that John and Paul had written songs for so long it was difficult first of all because they had such a lot of tunes and they automatically thought that theirs should be priority so for me I'd always have to wait through 10 of their songs before they'd even listen to one of mine that was why All Things Must Pass had so many songs because it was like I'd been constipated I had a little encouragement from time to time but it was very little and it was like they were doing me a favor I didn't have much confidence in writing songs because of that because they never said yeah that's a good song when we got into things like While My Guitar Gently Weeps we recorded it one night and there was such a lack of enthusiasm so I went home really disappointed because I knew the song was good Ringo as well we all gave as much as we could the thing was Paul and John wrote all the songs in the beginning and they did write great songs which made it more difficult to break in or get some action on the songwriting thing as a northerner myself there's a few interesting things I've noticed about Northerners just to make a few sweeping generalizations the typical English stereotype that has persisted for centuries is based a little bit more on Southern Culture and that stereotype is that the English are very polite very nice to your face but will actually take easy offense and go away and fester about it under the surface and possibly complain about it behind your back the northern stereotype however has always been that you know people from say Newcastle or Sheffield or Manchester are very very very forthright and will pretty much tell you what they think right to your face people from Liverpool however in my opinion are somewhat unique up north because generally speaking again in my experience they tend to be much less confrontational than the rest of us living up here of course there's exceptions there's no good bad right wrong in that it's just an impression that I've got but what I personally view is that non-confrontational element in liver pubians was something that really struck me when watching The Beatles get back documentary you could see all the unspoken frustrations flying to and fro between the band members but none more so than George Harrison and Paul McCartney you could see all the way through that George wanted to say to Paul you're not the boss you're not in charge I want more of my songs on the album and stop telling me what to play or we're gonna fall out but all of it seemingly just goes mostly unsaid they all seem to just sit there angry kind of lashing out in little maybe passive aggressive ways that unspoken tension between the band was really interesting to me because you could so visibly see all the frustrations and anger constantly bubbling just below the surface in the end predictably in that documentary George has a falling out with Paul a very mild one because Paul keeps asking him to play things that George doesn't want to George announces that he's leaving the band and exits but seemingly he never has a moment with Paul where he sits down and lays all his cards out on the table in the end he apparently shared his frustrations with John Lennon in private who then related them to Paul in a secret meeting that was surreptitiously recorded by the filmmakers with a microphone hidden in a flower pot in this conversation John is appealing to Paul to stop trying to change George's songs and to stop telling him what to play and in it John puts his hand up and says that he has also been responsible for giving George the impression that he is inferior here is an Abridged sample of that conversation Paul asks so where's George John replies well he didn't want to be here he just said he'll do it at home because of the compromises he has to make to be together it's a festering wound and yesterday we allowed it to go even deeper and we didn't give him any bandages we both do it to George because you're afraid that how he'll play won't be like how you want him to play and that's what we do and that's what you do to me my only regret about the past numbers meaning songs is that because I've been frightened I've allowed you to take it somewhere I didn't want if you give me your suggestions let me reject them and pinch the ones I like the same goes for the arrangements because there was a period where none of us could actually say anything about your Arrangements because you would reject it all a lot of the times you were right and a lot of the times you were wrong same as we all are you have always been the boss I've been sort of secondary boss but then Paul Cuts in and says no listen really it is going to be much better if we can actually stick together and say look George on I've got a feeling I want you to do it exactly like I play it but then he'll say I'm not you and I can't do it exactly like you do it and you can see there from that conversation between John and Paul that there really is a problem because both John and Paul are dead right in any band you can't refuse to play someone else's suggestion just because you feel it's not a true self-expression or whatever that's just pretentious egotism you have to serve the song but also you have to get that balance right you have to consider the input and the feelings of other members of the band and not just reject what they say because it doesn't automatically line up with the sound that you had in your head and part of the problem here is that at this point the band didn't have a clear official leader in the absence of Brian Epstein they don't have someone who is the chief it's a really difficult one because when I watch that video I don't see Paul being a git nor do I see George being a petulant child I honestly see something a bit more complex because whenever the Beatles rowed there was pretty much always a valid case to be had on either side the main thing I see in the breakdown of their relationships is the catastrophic loss of manager Brian Epstein who previously was able to mediate these various relationships and keep the peace between the band and sadly the Beatles as a band never did overcome their differences in this really acrimonious phase right at the end the bands split up very messily and publicly and Lennon McCartney began sniping at one another in the press and through their music and when John Lennon released his scathing song how do you sleep slagging Paul off George Harrison played lead guitar it seems that George felt entirely justified in backing up John in attacking Paul and it honestly seems to me that the relationship between George and Paul even from interviews later in life was permanently scarred by the constant sidelining of George's ideas while he was in The Beatles throughout the years Paul McCartney has always been one for hand signals while his face generally speaking remains impassive and his words always sound quite diplomatic he quite often actually communicates what he's really thinking with his body language and the footage on the screen right now is taken from a very famous YouTube clip which shows Paul subtly giving the middle finger to reporters who allegedly asking questions he doesn't like some people who watch this will I'm sure go what a load of bollocks you're reading too much into it and maybe I am but throughout my life it's always been the case for me at least that you can usually tell what someone really thinks via their body language and here in the get back documentary we see Paul doing that exact same thing to George subtly giving him the middle finger while they disagree about the direction of the song get back and from this I personally take it that the unspoken tension between them and Patty Boyd's analysis of the whole situation that they didn't really love each other at that time was quite likely true and so now we've set the scene to really understand how George was feeling in the second half of the Beatles careers so now let's look at the lyrics to Only a northern song in light of that context knowing just how frustrated George was we can make a very small leap an educated guess at the inspiration behind these lyrics in retrospect George claimed that this song was written as a joke song but I personally think that's a little bit of a deflection and a symptom of his more passive aggressive character it's easy to look at these lyrics and just write them off as nonsensical psychedelic era but my personal opinion is that this song is entirely about his contributions being sidelined by Lennon and McCartney and never given a fair hearing here's the first verse if you're listening to this song you may think the chords are going wrong but they're not I just wrote it like that the chords are going wrong let's have a look at the chords we start with four bars of a two bars of a very mushy version of B minor on an organ a bar and a half of e and then two bars of D with Ringo also putting a drum fill slap bang in the middle in a place it doesn't belong it is a bit random so it could be fair to say the chords are going wrong but I also think there's a little more to it I wonder if this was George in the lyrics of the song anticipating the criticisms that Paul and John were going to level against him I wonder if it's even quoting past examples when he says if you're listening to this song who is you who's he talking to is it addressed to the general public the listener I'm not sure because the public loved him when you see that he is anticipating criticism and attempting to defend himself against it it seems most likely that he is addressing this song to The People Patty Boyd described as his biggest critics Lennon and McCartney I think he is singing directly to them anticipating their criticisms of the song he's singing right now and responding to them within the body of the song let's look at the next verse when you listen late at night you may feel the words are not quite right but they are I just wrote them myself and the words really are kind of off because it's not a standard song It's a song singing about itself it constantly breaks the fourth wall in this strange circular way it's the musical equivalent of going Disco [Music] [Applause] [Music] and again in this second verse just like the first verse we have George anticipating the criticisms that will be made of this song in the body of the lyrics themselves and here he says that the words aren't wrong the problem is that I wrote them you guys aren't writing the songs off because they're badly written you're sidelining them simply because I wrote them and now let's go on to the chorus which seems to show the level of bitterness that George had already reached by 1967. it doesn't really matter what chords I play what words I say or time of day it is as it's only a northern song and by now you've probably picked up the theme that's pretty much whatever he's singing is also happening in the song at the same time in the first verse he talks about how the chords are going wrong and as he's saying that line George himself is on the organ mashing this crazy version of a B minor chord with loads of added notes that doesn't sound quite right and here in the first chorus as if to underscore the point of it doesn't really matter what chords I play he bounces around pirouetting through multiple key changes with the chords as if to hammer the point home and ironically the chord sequence is absolutely brilliant so for the chorus he goes E B minor G C sharp seven F sharp seven got another B minor another F sharp then d a b it doesn't really matter what chords I'd make what would I say your time [Music] the first two chords e and B minor are diatonic they're in that key then we go to a g which is in a different key then we go to a C sharp seven listen to those two chords next to each other G and the C sharp seven [Music] that's called the tritone or the devil's interval it's one of the most discordant jarring chord changes in music and there kind of showing off his chordability George uses it in a way that completely tricks the ears and you don't even notice and So within the lyrics of the song itself he says it doesn't really matter what these lyrics say there you can see that strange circular nature of this song the chords make no difference the lyrics make no difference and time doesn't seem to make any difference either one day is pretty much the same as the next he then says as it's only a northern song so what does he mean by that Northern songs was the name of the song Publishing Company set up in 1963 to manage the songs written by Lennon and McCartney George said this to billboard in 1999 about this song I realized dick James had conned me out of the copyrights for my own songs by offering to become my publisher as an 18 or 19 year old kid I thought great somebody's going to publish my songs but he never said and incidentally when you signed this document here you're assigning me the ownership of the songs which is what it is it was just a blatant theft by the time I realized what had happened when they were going public and making all this money out of this catalog I wrote only a northern song as what we call a piss take just to have a joke about it here's what Wikipedia says about that sale of the northern songs catalog in 1965. during 1965 to reduce the income tax burden it was decided to make Northern songs a public company one million two hundred and fifty thousand shares were traded on the London Stock Exchange after the offer closed Lennon and McCartney owned fifteen percent each James and Silva who served as Northern song's chairman controlling 37.5 percent with Harrison and star sharing 1.6 so presumably then George Harrison owned 0.8 percent of the song catalog in which his songs were then being published and in the song I think he's just using wordplay to say my songs are Northern songs too my songs are Beatles songs as well and yet they keep being rejected perhaps just as the song Taxman was a complaint about unfair Financial treatment by the British government of the time this could also be seen as a complaint of unfair Financial treatment in the world of music publishing the theme of I am an equal Beatle but not being treated like one continues into the next chorus it doesn't really matter what clothes I wear or how I fare or if my hair is brown when it's only a northern song George dressed like a beetle behaved like a beetle and looked like a beetle but here he seems to be saying all these things still haven't added up to me being treated equally he said the chords make no difference the lyrics make no difference time makes no difference how I dress how I behave and what I look like make no difference whatsoever my songs will be rejected and perhaps by referencing Northern songs he's pointing out that those who publish the most songs in that era were the ones who earned the most money the last verse of the song however is the most interesting one to me and for this version I'm going to switch back from the Anthology 2 version to the actual final version of the song that was published on Yellow Submarine if you think the harmony is a little dark and out of key you're correct there's nobody there and I told you there's no one there this verse is probably the most bitter and ironic one in the entire song in the first two verses we have what might be criticisms of his songs from the past you know the chords are going wrong the words are not quite right if they are quotations those might have been valid criticisms who knows but here is the third criticism the harmony is a little dark and out of key and he says yes you're correct as if he's backing down and accepting that criticism when he knows in fact there isn't even a Harmony Part being sung and of course once again this isn't represented just by the lyrics but also in the song itself there is no Harmony being sung at the time either and I can't help but wonder if this is a quite bitter self-aware line from George where he recognizes that people are making criticisms of his songs based on completely inaccurate facts and he is just going yes okay you're right and backing down when he shouldn't how can a Harmony be dark and out of key when there actually isn't even one there in the first place line by line this song anticipates what the other Beatles are probably going to say about it in George's opinion simply because it was him who wrote it and here's the hilarious part the other Beatles seem to have missed the irony because the song was of course rejected by the other Beatles and not included on Sergeant Pepper's the era in which it was written for and so here we have a George Harrison concept song Not only singing about itself in this strange circular way but also accurately predicting the future the song actually only got finished because they needed a few tracks to fill up space on the Yellow Submarine album so they trawled through their outtakes and rejected songs and only a northern song was finished and released as a Beatles track so George in the lyrics to the actual song itself accurately predicted how Lennon and McCartney would react to it and he accurately predicted that the song would get vetoed but that's not the only level of irony that the rest of the Bands seemed to have missed I believe the song was written and the backing tracks recorded in 1967. when it was finally dredged up to fill a gap in the Yellow Submarine album more time had passed and as we saw on the get back documentary George had become deeply wounded so I find it particularly interesting that the version on the Anthology is quite clean and quite sparse I know they flew in a few tracks to pad it out for the Anthology but nonetheless it's not the cacophony that it afterwards became because when they returned to it George allowed the song to scale new heights of irony as all the way through he has both Lennon and McCartney creating an ungodly racket over the top of his song pretty much from start to finish when you listen to it in that light it sounds as if George has got them doing things that actively sabotage the entire song Lennon on Glockenspiel and McCartney on trumpet it's also worth pointing out that Sergeant Peppers was a concept album initially designed to tell the story of a fictional band and to me at least it seems that George attempted to take things one step further by writing and putting forward a concept song one that told the story of his role in a very real band The Beatles I've always thought there was a hell of a lot more to George than met the eye more than he would ever openly talk about he was easily as creative and clever as Lennon and McCartney but of all the Beatles I think he was perhaps the most likely one to express himself in this way and even though what he suffered through is genuinely quite sad it did lead him to produce this insane genre busting tune that works on so many levels and seems to openly Lampoon Lennon and McCartney seemingly without them ever realizing that they were blindly participating in a song that was actually both mocking and criticizing them as they played it now I have to add don't get me wrong here I'm not standing in judgment on this I wasn't there I wasn't even born and I'm sure there was far more to the situation than what we see here I'm not team George and I'm not team poor I just see this as a fascinating diary entry from George Harrison that sums up brilliantly how he was feeling and where his head was at at that time even though it tends to fly under the radar a little bit in the Beatles Canon only a northern song to me at least remains an outstanding piece of musical genius that works on so many levels that other songs just can't touch and there's no denying it even if he was a late Comer to songwriting compared to Lennon and McCartney George Harrison was an absolute songwriting Legend

Channel: James Hargreaves Guitar

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Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023