Cayenne (song)

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Album This song officially appears on the Anthology 1 Official album.

Timeline This song has been officially released in 1995

Cavendish Parade

Celebration

Related sessions

This song has been recorded during the following studio sessions

Home recordings, aka "The Kirchherr Tape"

circa April 1960

Other songs from the Kirchherr Tape

Well, Darling

Unreleased song

I Don't Know

Unreleased song

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Song facts

From Wikipedia:

“Cayenne” is an instrumental track by the Beatles. It was recorded in 1960, when they were still known as the Quarrymen, and was not officially released until its inclusion on the 1995 album Anthology 1.

According to Paul McCartney, the recordings were made in the McCartney family bathroom in April 1960. The song is not credited to Lennon–McCartney but to McCartney alone, indicating that at this stage Lennon and McCartney had not agreed on the joint writing credit that they used for all of the band’s professional recording career. The track is an instrumental jam similar in style to that of The Shadows. Stuart Sutcliffe plays bass with what critic Richie Unterberger described as an “artless thump”. “Cayenne” is a 12-bar blues composition in the key of d-minor.

“Cayenne” and two other homemade Quarrymen recordings, “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” and “You’ll Be Mine“, were included in Anthology 1, a collection of Beatles rarities and alternate tracks from 1958 to 1964. They are the only officially released Beatles recordings to feature Stuart Sutcliffe on bass. Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s close friend from art college, joined the band in 1960 as the bass player and played with them in Hamburg in 1960 and 1961 before leaving to concentrate on his art studies. Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.

From the Anthology1 liner notes:

Cayenne is an instrumental composed by Paul McCartney. A good number of the earliest titles written by either Lennon or McCartney, or both, were instrumentals, written in the late 1950s when tunes without a lyric were prevalent.

From Beatles Bible:

The tune had existed on bootlegs for some time prior to its official release, in a version lasting 2’30”. The Anthology 1 version was slightly sped up and faded out prematurely, with a running time of just 1’14”.