The word ‘failure’ is not typically associated with The Beatles, the most successful musical act of all time.
Therefore, their definition of failure is different from most bands. For the majority of groups, failure would be an unlistenable mess that they’d be embarrassed to share as a B-side. However, for the Fab Four, this meant not topping the charts.
Even during the early days of The Beatles, before the international acclaim, they had ambitions to reach the sky. They put in the hours in Hamburg at mastering their craft by playing club shows, and were ready to achieve their dreams. However, they knew that a hit single was necessary for any of that to happen.
At this stage, recording studios were still new to The Beatles, and their talent was raw rather than honed. It would be years until they refined their gift to become a hit machine that collected number ones like they were going out of business. Most of their most beloved songs weren’t designed to be bestsellers, and when they did attempt to do that, it backfired in one case.
The song in question, which they wrote to be a number one, was ‘Hold Me Tight’. It was penned at Paul McCartney’s family home on Forthlin Road in Liverpool, where he’d spend his days with John Lennon creating tracks which would later make them a global phenomenon.
During this period, the pair also wrote ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, and ‘Love Me Do’ at the address. The National Trust has since preserved the property due to its rich cultural history.
With ‘Hold Me Tight’, neither Lennon nor McCartney felt particularly strongly about the track. However, when the band became chart sensations, they needed to release as much music as possible to appease the appetite of their increasingly hungry fanbase and ‘Hold Me Tight’ was included on their second album, With The Beatles. However, if everything had gone to plan, it would have seen the light of day earlier.
The band originally recorded ‘Hold Me Tight’ for their first album, Please Please Me, and carried out 13 takes during the sessions for the LP. After being unhappy with all of the recordings, they decided to scrap the track from their debut. Then, in a moment of desperation, they returned to the material for their next album. If The Beatles weren’t in such a rush to provide their sophomore record, ‘Hold Me Tight’ would have stayed in the vaults for years to come.
McCartney later denounced the track, admitting in the biography Many Years From Now: “When we first started it was all singles and we were always trying to write singles, that’s why you get lots of these two-minute 30-second songs; they all came out the same length. ‘Hold Me Tight’ was a failed attempt at a single which then became an acceptable album filler.”
On another occasion, McCartney spoke about ‘Hold Me Tight’ in an unfavourable manner during an interview with Mark Lewisohn. He said, “I can’t remember much about that one. Certain songs were just ‘work’ songs, you haven’t got much memory of them. That’s one of them.”
Lennon felt even more ambivalent about the song and told David Sheff in 1980: “That was Paul’s. Maybe I stuck some bits in there – I don’t remember. It was a pretty poor song and I was never really interested in it either way.”
While ‘Hold Me Tight’ isn’t a composition that can be found on a greatest hits compilation, it also does an adequate job as a filler track on With The Beatles, and is nothing to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, when standards are as high as they were in the Fab Four, their version of an abject failure would still be a career highlight for many.
