The Mystery Singer in All You Need Is Love

all you need is love is the quintessential Beatles song and an anthem of the 1960s but there's an interesting anomaly toward the end of the song that is one of the most confounding and hotly debated questions in Beatles history as a fair warning once I pointed out you can't unhear this the anomaly happens during the wild conclusion to the song that begins at around two minutes 45 seconds at around 3 minutes 25 seconds someone suddenly makes a call back to one of their earliest hits [Music] it's one of my favorite Beatles moments but here's the mystery who is singing that part for the longest time I thought it was Paul McCartney as it sounds a lot like him and a lot like the part he's singing just before this and some fairly authoritative sources like George Harrison seemed to confirm that theory as he recalls in this 1967 interview if you notice at the end of all you need is love there's Greensleeves and in the mood and all sorts of different tunes coming over the end I know Paul just thought of it at the time and then just started singing she loves you and in a much later interview Paul himself seems to imply the same all you need is love was John song I threw in a few ideas as did other members of the group but it was largely ad-libs like singing she loves you or Greensleeves or silly little things like that at the end and we made those up on the spot so while this evidence is fairly convincing coming from to actual Beatles who were there the problem is that it also sounds a lot like John especially during the second time around when the tone is a bit raspier [Music] it turns out I'm not alone in this confusion for many years Beatles fans have argued back and forth about who is really singing it's eerily similar to the fierce debate around the middle section of a day-in-the-life which I covered in another controversial video one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that we also have a unique piece of supporting evidence that is extremely rare for these anomalies video it may give us the definitive answer once and for all more on that in a moment but before we get to that I should set some context for what we're about to watch let's go back to the early summer of 1967 on June 1st the Beatles released sergeant pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a monumental creative achievement that the band spent months perfecting EMI studios under the noble speed guidance of their beloved producer George Martin the enormous ly successful album inaugurated the Summer of Love a brief Technicolor explosion of good feeling strong drugs and fantastic music before the global political upheaval of 1968 would shatter most of that superficial idealism and send the Beatles along with pop music more broadly in a darker in arguably more mature direction but in 1967 as the Beatles were riding high pardon the pun they were at the peak of their career and so they were invited to participate in another monumental achievement one of the first global satellite television broadcasts a two-hour BBC program called our world which would feature a lineup of live segments everything from remote interviews to an opera performance to an equestrian demonstration all shot live around the globe and beamed to hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide it could be a melon in television today we take for granted the ability to have instant global communication on platforms like the one you're using right now but 50 years ago a program like our world was cutting edge technology and so for the grand finale the organizers wanted something fittingly ocular and so they invited the most popular band in the world to perform a new song live with only a couple weeks to spare John quickly penned a new composition that per the request of the organizers had a clear message for a global audience all you need is love although the band wanted to play the song entirely live during the broadcast George Martin wisely insisted on recording a backing track in advance which was pretty common for live TV performances to avoid any major mishaps despite the tight timeline the band poured a serious effort into this backing track with the elaborate studio arrangements from sergeant Pepper's still fresh in their minds they incorporated a bunch of unusual instruments like John and a harpsichord and a banjo George Harrison added a violin part admittedly with mixed results [Music] Paul played a classical double bass Ringo added percussion and of course there was the de rigueur George Martin orchestral arrangement [Music] during the actual broadcast this track would be played live while John's vocal Paul's bass guitar George's guitar solo and a few other parts would be live and so that brings us to the actual live performance which for the most part made it onto the released version of the song albeit with a few post-production overdubs and effects the studio Abbey Road was decorated for the occasion in full flower power regalia along with some balloons and this creepy doll the room was also packed with fellow luminaries such as Mick Jagger Keith Moon and Eric Clapton and then there's some guy who looks like Keith Richards but isn't and then this totally at a place guy who looks like he was in the building for a job interview anyway there's tons of charming little moments that you can only catch in the video like Paul's reaction to his own high-pitched but let's focus on the moment in question [Music] so there it is it's John singing case closed right well not quite we only see John on camera for the second part if she loves you but what about the first part of course given Murphy's Law at the exact moment that we would have definitively revealed which Beatle starts singing she loves you the camera is as far away as possible and since this is long before High Definition television we can't really enhance anything either but let's why back a little bit earlier I'm gonna reveal something that as a fair warning you can't unsee notice how the man in the purple shirt knocks his sign into the bottom of Paul's vocal mic stand causing Paul's microphone to swing in John's direction in response Paul gets flustered he flubs a few bass notes swings his bass up and tries to kick the mic stand back into position it doesn't quite work so instead he grabs it with his hand a second later and pulls it back towards him that probably explains the we hear a second later Paul finally back on track turns to John who was already looking back at Paul probably because of the mic stand chaos from a second earlier and it looks and sounds like Paul starts to see queuing John to join but suddenly another guy hits Paul's mic stand again sending Paul's mic back towards John so for the second she loves you we can only really hear John singing why because he now has both his and halls microphones facing him so the answer to the mystery is that it's both of them singing Paul kicks it off John joins in and in both of them sing the rest together but because of the microphone incident we can only really hear John's part after the first she loves you and thanks to the video evidence a mystery solved in doing research for this episode I also found another neat snippet that reveals something else that this tongue-in-cheek reference to their own earlier work wasn't as spontaneous as it seems here's the segment of the our world broadcast that was shown on TV just before they started their official performance it features a behind-the-scenes warm-up from the perspective of the control room with a very cool calm and collected George Martin at the helm here then is final mix the track take one of a song which we offer to the whole world all you need is love as you can see John sings it during this rehearsal now I don't know if he or Paul had thought of it before this moment but it's proof that it was conceived before the final live performance so who knows perhaps Paul recovering from his mic stand incident was cueing John to start that she loves you part I don't know for sure but it's a pretty neat rarely seen moment of history in the making on a side note you'll notice that this clip is in black and white just like the original broadcast the version that I've been using is a colorized version based on photographs that was created for the Beatles Anthology series in the 1990s now that we've hopefully solved this mystery I want to reflect for a moment on what this song and his performance represents as I said earlier in June 1967 the Beatles were indomitable and although the band would continue to produce a series of fantastic albums for the next few years until their breakup in 1970 it's hard not to look at this moment as the true pinnacle or as one commenter aptly put it the inflection point of the Bands career in only 10 years they had gone from being a ragtag group of teenagers performing in dingy clubs in Liverpool to being the most influential creative entity on the planet one that we're still talking about and analyzing over 50 years later and their little call back really puts into perspective just how far the group had evolved in such a short amount of time [Music] tragically is Peaks tend to be this was also the beginning of the decline the last moment of true unity as a band just a few months after the our world broadcast they lost their longtime manager confidant and friend Brian Epstein to suicide that devastating loss plus the inevitable creative burden of following up to the smash hit of sergeant Pepper's weighed heavily on John Paul George and Ringo in early 1968 they fled to India and took a hiatus from recording eventually merging with the material that would become the excellent but disjointed White Album meanwhile resentment over creative differences began to sprout John met Yoko Paul met Linda and suddenly romantic relationships side projects and money concerns started to chip away at the foundation that had made the groups so cohesive up to that point they would try to recapture the sergeant pepper magic with magical mystery tour and try to even return to their roots with the get back project in 1969 but both ended up being rather troubled experiments but in the summer of 1967 none of that mattered yet it was for the Beatles and for the world a triumphant moment when peace didn't seem all that impossible and the only thing you really needed was as always thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this episode please check out my patreon page and subscribe to my channel for more episodes

Channel: You Can't Unhear This

Views: 577,015

Keywords: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George harrison, Ringo Starr, music, recording mistakes, 1960s, George Martin, Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper's, pop, The Beatles, You Can't Unhear THis, Podcast

Id: yTzejEpFp9E

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jotyma5]

Always sounded like John to me?

[u/Rocket_Admin_Patrick]

All of these people answering the question without watching the video smh

The answer is Paul for the first line, John and Paul (with an emphasis on John because Paul's mic got knocked towards John) for the second. John starts it with "Yesterday", Paul responds with an "oh yeah" and then sings the first "she loves you yeah yeah yeah", and then both of them sing the second.

[u/PolemosLogos]

Sounds like Paul's voice to me but hard to tell

[u/nikidmaclay]

It was John. You can see him singing it around 3:23. All You Need Is Love

[u/[deleted]]

John. Next question

[u/mdelint]

Always thought it was just join.

[u/MagicalMysterySoul]

It's John 💯%