@paulmccartney, @ringostarrmusic and Jeff Lynne on how The Beatles made “Free As A Bird”
The way that the three remaining Beatles got a handle on the strange vibe of being in a studio together again without John Lennon in 1994 was to pretend he was actually part of the session and had just nipped out. “We just pretended that he’d gone home on holiday,” Paul McCartney said in a press conference at the time, “as if he said, ‘Just finish it up, I trust you’.”
The band realised that they needed to bring in an outside influence to help them get the song to the finish line when they entered the studio in early 1994. That man was ELO’s Jeff Lynne.
“It was George who said we need a producer, it could be dangerous just to all go in the studio, it could get nasty cos you’ve got egos flying around, surprisingly,” recalled McCartney. “Jeff’s name came up and it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s good’,” said McCartney. “He’d worked with George and George was saying, ‘I think Jeff would be great’.”
Despite being an international star and mega-selling artist in his own right, for lifelong Beatles fan Lynne, it was a daunting prospect. “It was really quite scary because I didn’t know Paul very well,” he said. “I’d only met him a couple of times before that. He was a bit worried about me because I was George’s pal and he wondered if it was going to be a little bit one-sided and not in the spirit of things, but he needn’t have worried because I was totally into the spirit of things.”
Somehow though, they got it to the stage where it felt like The Beatles – not just McCartney, Harrison and Starr as mere mortals but The Beatles – were in the studio again. “We had the cassette of John and we just gradually built it up, put a bit of bass on, guitar, George ended up putting the slide on which was the icing on the cake, we sang,” McCartney said. “For all of us the most exciting thing was, even though John was no longer on this planet, here he was in the studio with us. All of us were like, ‘Wow!’, it was a very big moment.”
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