An early years performance from The Beatles revealed a “badly kept secret” about one band member, Paul McCartney confirmed.
The bassist and songwriter shared how the Fab Four’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show let some fans down as producers displayed a fact about John Lennon during the performance. While his marriage to Cynthia Lennon had been a poorly guarded secret for some years, fans were not in the loop on Lennon’s personal life. That all changed during the band’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. McCartney confirmed as much when breaking down the lyrics to each of his songs, with a segment on All My Loving from his book, The Lyrics, sharing the detail which slipped through about Lennon’s marriage.
McCartney wrote: “During our second song, Till There Was You, they cut to shots of each of us and put our names up on the screen. When they got to John, they added, ‘Sorry girls, he’s married’ – which had been a badly kept secret up until that point.”
Despite this, The Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show is regarded as one of the most important moments of their career, and McCartney believes critics of the time didn’t know what they had on their hands. Later on in his breakdown of All My Loving, McCartney suggested it was a selection of newspaper editors who did not like The Beatles’ work that were sent off to write hit pieces on the band.
McCartney wrote: “Some of the press the next day were a bit mean, though. The New York Herald Tribune – who, I might add, are no longer with us – wrote that The Beatles were ‘75% publicity, 20% haircut, and 5% lilting lament’. But then the mop top became a whole new trend in the way that teenage boys started to wear their hair. At that point, the fringe – or bangs, as they’re called in the US – wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near the eyebrows. That all changed. You could even buy Beatles wigs.”
The song itself is one of the earliest hits from the band, and McCartney believes a last-minute guitar addition from Lennon made all the difference. He wrote: “The thing that strikes me about the All My Loving recording is John’s guitar part; he’s playing the chords as triplets.
“That was a last-minute idea, and it transforms the whole thing, giving it momentum. The song is obviously about someone leaving to go on a trip, and that driving rhythm of John’s echoes the feeling of travel and motion. It sounds like a car’s wheels on the motorway, which, if you can believe it, had only really become a thing in the UK at the end of the fifties.”
All My Loving is a historic release from The Beatles, with it being the first song the band played on American television. Their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show saw the Fab Four play the McCartney-penned track. McCartney would suggest it was the song which catapulted The Beatles into their global success.
He added: “So to illustrate how quickly things were moving for us in those days, All My Loving helped us go from the Moss Empire circuit to conquering America in a little over six months. And a few months later I turned twenty-two.”
