Some 14 seconds after the ‘The End’ has placed a complete stop at the finale of The Beatles’ recording career as a collective to complete their 1969 album Abbey Road, a cacophonous guitar, piano, and bass chord arrives seemingly from nowhere. We then hear Paul McCartney singing an understated, throwaway 23-second ditty, accompanied only by a fingerpicked acoustic guitar.
The song ‘Her Majesty’ sounds throwaway because it was literally thrown away, extracted from the continuous medley of half-songs on side two of Abbey Road and left for a technician to dispose of. Instead, as per the policy of EMI Studios at the time, he tacked it onto the end of the album’s master tape. It was meant to be removed in the final cut, but the band liked the off-kilter spontaneity of the result, and so it stayed.
At just 23 seconds, the track is the shortest single piece of music The Beatles ever released, and it wasn’t the first time the band had added an unexpected surprise for fans at the end of an album. Both the single ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band finish with pieces of musique concrète made with tape loops, which appear sometime after the final song proper has ended. They were added as a joke by the group to give those who’d left their record player running a jolt.
Unlike those pieces, however, ‘Her Majesty’ was originally supposed to sit in the middle of the album. The chord at the beginning of the track is the final moment of the song that initially preceded it, ‘Mean Mr Mustard’, while the final note at the end of the track is missing. These quirks are the result of roughly how the piece was cut out of the album’s original running order.
But who is the song about?
A winsome vignette in homage to its titular character, ‘Her Majesty’ doesn’t explicitly name who it’s talking about in nine brief lines of music hall patter. We only know that Her Majesty is “a pretty nice girl” who “doesn’t have a lot to say” and “changes from day to day”.
But at the time of its release, there was only one person in Britain referred to as Her Majesty. That was Queen Elizabeth II, the monarch of the United Kingdom and the realms of the Commonwealth. And so, most listeners would naturally have identified the Queen as the subject of the song, despite its irreverent depiction of her and McCartney’s bold suggestion, “Someday I’m gonna make her mine”.
In an interview with Beatles biographer Barry Miles for his book Many Years from Now, McCartney confirmed that the song was indeed about the Queen. “It was quite funny because it’s basically monarchist, with a mildly disrespectful tone,” he told Miles. “But it’s very tongue in cheek. It’s almost like a love song to the Queen.”
On his website, McCartney says of the British monarchy, “I have been a fan for a long time”. It’s not surprising, then, that he was especially enamoured with its figurehead during most of his lifetime, even if not in the way he jokingly portrays in ‘Her Majesty’. McCartney met the Queen a total of nine times throughout her lifetime, but only one of these meetings came before he’d penned the song.
That meeting was on the occasion that The Beatles received their MBE medals from Britain’s head of state in 1965. John Lennon later returned his MBE in protest against the UK’s involvement in the Nigerian Civil War and support of the United States military in Vietnam. However, his songwriting partner was clearly predisposed to more pro-monarchy sentiments and kept hold of his medal before being knighted in 1997.
On the other hand, the lyric “she doesn’t have a lot to say” can be viewed as a cheeky dig at the monarchy, based on a real observation McCartney had about meeting the Queen for the first time. He remembered that he and his fellow Beatles were instructed “not to talk to her unless she talks to us.”
Quite the challenge for the Fab Four in particular, given that they always seemed to have a verbal quip to divulge during their public appearances at the height of Beatlemania. They made it through the ceremony without incident, though, regardless of their respective views on the Crown. Perhaps a belly full of wine would have led to a different outcome.
