Paul McCartney and John Lennon made up classic Beatles track on the spot so they could catch a film

A classic song by the legendary band The Beatles was written and recorded so John Lennon and Paul McCartney could catch a film.

The pair’s writing produced countless classics, and one such collaboration, which features on The White Album, was created out of a desire to leave the studio and watch a movie. Birthday was written by the pair and thrown out there as fast as they could so they could watch the Little Richard and Fats Domino-featuring movie, The Girl Can’t Help It. Recalling why they wrote the song, McCartney confirmed the pair had rushed out the track so they could make head back to his house to watch a film. The pair did return to the studio after their movie break to finish the song off, but Lennon and McCartney decided to give themselves a break midway through the recording session to watch The Girl Can’t Help It.

McCartney recalled: “What happened was The Girl Can’t Help It was on television. That’s an old rock film with Little Richard and Fats Domino and Eddie Cochran and a few others. We wanted to see it, so we started recording at five o’clock.

“And we said, ‘We’ll do something, We’ll make up a backing track.’ So we kept it very simple—twelve-bar blues kind of thing. And we stuck in a few bits here and there in it, with no idea what the song was or what was gonna go on top of it. We just said, ‘Okay. Twelve bars in A, and we’ll change to D, and I’m gonna do a few beats in C.’ And we really just did it like that… random thing.

“And we came back here to my house and watched ‘The Girl Can’t Help It.’ Then we went back to the studio again and made up some words to go with it all. So this song was just made up in an evening. Umm, you know. We hadn’t ever thought of it before then. And it’s one of my favourites because of that.”

Lennon would later reflect on what McCartney wanted out of the song, and says the end result was a “piece of garbage”. Lennon said: “Birthday was written in the studio. Just made up on the spot.

“I think Paul wanted to write a song like ‘Happy Birthday Baby,’ the old fifties hit. But it was sort of made up in the studio. It was a piece of garbage.” Despite not liking the song, Lennon did contribute much to the track, as McCartney would reveal in 1994.

He said: “We thought, ‘Why not make something up?’ So we got a riff going and arranged it around this riff. So that is 50-50 John and me, made up on the spot and recorded all in the same evening.”