Interview for Top Of The Pops • Monday, March 20, 1967

Interview

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On this day, March 20, 1967, The Beatles were at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, to record “She’s Leaving Home.” They took a break to record an interview for BBC Radio 1’s “Top Of The Pops,” and to tape a speech for the Ivor Novello Awards ceremony, scheduled on March 23,

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That evening, host Brian Matthew came into the studio to interview John and Paul for the BBC program Top of the Pops. It was a welcome diversion from all the hard work we’d been doing, and I was quite surprised when I heard Lennon tell Matthew emphatically that there would be “no more “She Loves You’s” coming from the band and no more touring, ever. Paul and John also pretaped speeches for the upcoming Ivor Novello Awards show because they’d already decided that they wouldn’t be attending in person, despite the fact that, in Britain, it was almost as prestigious as the Grammies.

Geoff Emerick – From “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles“, 2006

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Q: You’ve obviously reached a stage where you don’t HAVE to write for any reason at all other than that you like doing it.

PAUL: But it’s always been like that. ‘Cuz it has been a hobby, and it still is, you know.

Q: Yeah.

PAUL: Mind you, it gets… ’round about the time when you’re doing an LP and you’ve got to start working, it gets like a job. But, you know, you do it in your time off anyway, so it is a hobby. So it’ll go on forever probably.

Q: Good. Can you, without giving away any trade secrets, tell us anything about the numbers that you’re engaged on at the moment for this new album that you’re working on?

JOHN: We’ve done about nine or ten, and there’s a couple of strange ones. A couple of happy-go-lucky northern songs.

PAUL: And a couple of whimsical… You know, folk rock.

Q: Have you, this time, augmented again? Using strange line-ups at all?

PAUL: Well, we’ve used sorts of things that aren’t us, quite a bit.

JOHN: (jokingly) We used the Monkees on a few tracks.

Q: (laughs)

PAUL: (laughs) Yeah right, but they wouldn’t go along with the TV series we had planned for them.

Q: Has George written anything this time?

PAUL: Oh yeah. He’s done a great one. A great one.

JOHN: A great Indian one. We came along one night and he had about four hundred Indian fellows playing here. And it was a great swinging evening, as they say.

PAUL: So there’s a few things going on.

Q: Is there going to be another Beatles’ film?

PAUL AND JOHN: Yes.

JOHN: As soon as we finish this LP we’ll be starting on this ‘mythical’ film that we’ve been on about for the last year.

PAUL: We want to do a TV show and a film.

Q: Is touring now completely out, everywhere?

JOHN: I reckon so. Yeah.

PAUL: (jokingly) Well the thing is, we’re working on an act where we run on in brightly colored suits and switch on five tapes.

Q: Yeah.

PAUL: And then we do a juggling act at the front of the stage while these tapes play Beatles melodies.

Q: (giggling) Why is it this microphone sends you balmy… because when I was talking to John earlier, he was quite serious and said ‘No, no more tours.’

PAUL: That’s the only possibility. You never know, you know.

JOHN: No, I mean… I said, ‘No more tours. No more She Loves You,’ you know. But I mean, going on with a million tape recorders and a brightly colored suit– well, that’s something else.

Q: No more big tours of America or the world?

JOHN: Well, no.

PAUL: I don’t think so. Not in the same kind of pattern as we’ve been doing so far. But you never know.

Q: You never know. One final bit then. There’s been reports in the last week or two about you writing this musical we’ve been hearing about for years. True or false.

PAUL: Uhh, false I think.

JOHN: False I think.

PAUL: False.

JOHN: False.

PAUL: False.

JOHN: False.

Q: You’re not going to do it.

PAUL: I don’t think so.

JOHN: Unless it’s a musical with a thousand tape recorders and brightly coloured costumes.

PAUL: All of these kinds of things, you know, we might do in the next few years. But this is the idea, to give us a chance to try other things. We don’t know what they’re going to be yet. There’s going to be a lot more other things, but we want to make them sort of different, you know.

Q: Well, thanks for giving us the facts.

Last updated on December 31, 2023