The Lovely Linda

Song facts

“The Lovely Linda” is the opening track of Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, “McCartney“, released in April 1970. From Wikipedia:

Paul McCartney wrote “The Lovely Linda” in Scotland during 1969, when he and wife Linda Eastman were living at their farm, High Park, in Campbeltown. The song is dedicated to McCartney’s first wife and was a reply-of-sorts to Beatles bandmate John Lennon’s public declarations of love for his wife, Yoko Ono. “The Lovely Linda” was released as the opening track on McCartney’s eponymous debut solo album, and was the first song taped for the album. McCartney recorded the composition shortly before Christmas in December 1969, in order to test his then-new 4-track recorder, which he had installed in his home studio in London. At 42 seconds, it is the shortest song in McCartney’s catalogue. […]

When the Studer 4 track was installed at home, this was the first song I recorded, to test the machine. On the first track was vocal and guitar, second – another acoustic guitar – then overdubbed hand slaps on a book, and finally bass. Written in Scotland, the song is a trailer to the full song which will be recorded in the future.

Paul McCartney, from the press release of “McCartney”, April 1970

The full song was never released. As McCartney explained in 2001:

That was when Linda and I first got together. The record is me playing around the house. You hear her walking through the living room doorway out to the garden, and the door squeaks at the end of the tape. That’s one of the songs from my personal experience, with “the flowers in her hair.” She often used to wear flowers in her hair, so it’s a direct diary. I was always going to finish it, and I had another bit that went into a Spanish song, almost mariachi, but it just appeared as a fragment and was quite nice for that reason. It opened the “McCartney” album, so it’s evocative of it now.

Paul McCartney, interview with Billboard, 2001

In the opening track, The Lovely Linda, you can hear the door squeak as Linda came in while I was recording. It was a good take, so we left it in.

Paul McCartney in the “Wingspan” documentary, 2001

Did you feel scared when “McCartney” was released, since that was your debut and the first song was pegged at you?

Linda McCartney: No. I didn’t take it as seriously as I probably should have. I think it was good copy at the lime to slag everything. Everybody was getting slugged, the Beatles were getting slagget. I personally didn’t realize you had to explain yourself a lot once you get in the public eye. I just carried on with my normal life, like I had in New York, and I just got all this slagging. It never really brought me down much, though.

Linda McCartney – From Paul McCartney in His Own Words, by Paul Gambaccini

“The Lovely Linda” was reworked as a classical piece in 1999, and released on “Working Classical“.

In 2001, Paul McCartney improvised a version of “The Lovely Linda” on acoustic guitar which appeared on a radio show to promote the “Wingspan” compilation and on the Wingspan TV special.

On a side note: When The Beatles filmed “Magical Mystery Tour” in September 1967, John Lennon, assisted by George Harrison, directed a sequence at the hotel where Happy Nat the Rubber Man (played by Nat Jackley) chased bikini-clad women around the swimming pool. This sequence didn’t make it into the final film, except for a two-second appearance of a girl in a bikini, nicknamed “The Lovely Linda“.

The Beatles later decided to scrap John’s entire poolside footage which finished on a cutting room floor in Soho rather than on the world’s TV screens. Only one of the bikini girls, one we had nicknamed The Lovely Linda, survived the editor’s scissors to make a blink-and-you-miss-her split-second appearance elsewhere in the finished product waving from a tower window.

Tony Barrow – From “The Making of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour” by Tony Barrow, 1999

Last updated on April 25, 2023

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