Timeline
Session July 20-22, 1971 • First rehearsals for Wings
Article Jul 23, 1971 • Northern Songs and MacLen Music sue Paul and Linda McCartney
Article Jul 24, 1971 • Blood, Sweat & Tears ask Paul McCartney to produce its next LP
Session Jul 24, 1971 • Recording "Bip Bop", "Love Is Strange", "I Am Your Singer", "Dear Friend"
Related song
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Officially appears on Another Day / Oh Woman Oh Why
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Paul McCartney fined for speeding
Feb 07, 1969
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Paul McCartney fined for careless driving
Sep 29, 1969
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The Beatles & Co. partnership is dissolved
Jan 09, 1975
On this day, Northern Songs Ltd and MacLen Music Ltd announced they were suing Paul and Linda McCartney for $1,050,000, claiming a violation of Paul’s “exclusive rights agreement” with those companies, as their recent song, “Another Day“, was credited to both Paul and Linda.
Because Linda wasn’t trained at the Guildhall, Northern Songs think it must mean she can’t write. But she knows more about music… Look, she’s a rocker from way back. She was at the Paramount Theatre watching, on the same bill, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and Chuck Berry. She knows about music.
The thing is, look at it seriously. Northern Songs has got me under contract. I start writing with someone whom they don’t have under contract – and they don’t accept it. Now we ought to have an equal share of the song. But you try to tell Sir Lew Grade that – he’s bought the company – and it doesn’t work…
Paul McCartney – From Record Mirror, December 4, 1971
There are a lot of bluebirds in songs. ‘Bluebirds Over the Mountains’. ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’. My particular ‘Bluebird’ from 1973 was written and composed with Linda. Up until then, my relationship with music publishers had been somewhat troubled thanks to things like losing control of Northern Songs, our publishing company for The Beatles, at the end of the 1960s through to the court case still happening when this song was written, where I’d had to sue my best friends from childhood to ensure we would keep control of our songs, rather than ‘other parties’ controlling them. All of that played a big part in setting up MPL, my own publishing company. But before I’d been able to get myself out of those previous contracts, even if I’d written a song by myself, I would often add, ‘and Linda’. Contractually, these ‘other parties’ couldn’t get at her, whereas they could get at me. They would sometimes say, ‘I own that song.’ To which I’d reply, ‘No, you don’t. Linda and I do.’ I also had to be careful about where a song was written, or, at least, where I said it was written. Many bands quit the UK in the early seventies due to a very high tax burden. It wasn’t quite ‘one for you, nineteen for me’, but it was close. The Stones went to the South of France to get around it. I got creative with where I wrote my songs, because it determined who you owed money to.
Paul McCartney – From “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, 2021
Court move over latest hit by Paul McCartney
A move by Northern Songs Ltd for a High Court order against Chappell and Co. Lld, in a dispute over publication rights to Beatle Paul McCartney’s current hit, “Another Day”, was adjourned today.
The hearing was to have been before a judge sitting in private at the High Court today, but the parties agreed to an adjournment. A new date for the hearing has been provisionally agreed for April 6.
Chappels claim they published the song as sole United Kingdom agent of McCartney Inc., while Paul and his wife Linda recently set up in America.
The claim is contested by Northern Songs, a subsidiary of Associated Television who seek an order to prevent Chappells publishing the song.
From Aberdeen Evening Express – March 23, 1971
