John Lennon, the late frontman of The Beatles, was his own harshest critic. Whether it be his personal compositions or those of his bandmates, the Liverpudlian wasn’t afraid of tearing into past work and providing full-bodied accounts of why he thought they weren’t up to scratch.
One of the compositions for the Fab Four that Lennon announced he particularly loathed was the lesser-known ‘Run for Your Life’, a track taken from the 1965 album Rubber Soul. “‘Run for Your Life’, I always hated, you know,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he added.
Continuing to detail his problems with the song, Lennon said: “It was inspired from – this is a very vague connection – from ‘Baby Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it; I used to like specific lines from songs, ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’—so I wrote it around that, but I didn’t think it was that important.”
This naturally condemnatory tendency also extended to some of the band’s biggest hits. Despite it being a cover of a Phil Medley and Bert Berns original, one of The Beatles’ earliest and most famous tracks, ‘Twist and Shout’, stoked feelings of intense shame in the frontman. Lennon would later look back on his performance with discomfort, particularly in light of the physical duress it put him under.
Lennon’s feelings on the 1963 classic are outlined in The Beatles Anthology. In it, the band look back on recording at London’s Abbey Road studios for their debut album, Please Please Me. After putting in the hard yards for 12 hours in the studio, wherein they completed ten songs, producer George Martin wanted one last track to finish the record. Summoning all their strength, with Lennon suffering from a fever, they recorded ‘Twist and Shout’ in just two takes. Remarkably, the first effort is what they chose to release.
In Anthology, Martin concedes that he was aware that the song was a “larynx-tearer” and wanted to ensure Lennon still had a voice for the recording of it, so he saved it until last. Given that he was sick at the time of recording, retrospectively, Lennon admitted that he was “bitterly ashamed” of his performance on ‘Twist and Shout’.
He said: “My voice wasn’t the same for a long time after, every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it because I could sing it better than that, but now it doesn’t bother me. You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best. We sang for 12 hours almost non-stop. We had colds, and were concerned how it would affect the record. At the end of the day, all we wanted to do was drink pints of milk.”
In a broader sense, ‘Twist and Shout’ serves as a reminder of the enduring influence of The Beatles on the world of music. Their ability to craft songs that resonate across generations is a testament to their incredible talent and the lasting impact of their music. Revisit the track below.
