During their decade of dominance, The Beatles constantly railed against the establishment and subverted traditions whenever possible. They toyed with the definition of how a song could be delivered. These measures included experimenting with traditional Indian music and simple tactics such as producing songs that would have previously been deemed too short.
The Beatles were their own bosses after forming Apple Records in 1968, allowing room for boundary-pushing activities. At this stage, they were the biggest band on the planet and couldn’t be pushed around by anyone. Having already decided to stop touring after essentially outgrowing the venues, there simply wasn’t another act around who was operating on their level.
On Abbey Road, released in 1969, The Beatles knew the eyes of the globe would be on the album, and it would essentially sell itself. The band no longer needed to rely on hit singles to spread the word about their forthcoming releases, and the days of the Fab Four dictating their artistry to suit the interests of radio had ceased to exist. It meant that The Beatles could release a 20-minute song and it would still get played on the airwaves.
Abbey Road included their second-longest recorded song, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, and their shortest career creation, ‘Her Majesty’. The latter is effectively a solo composition courtesy of Paul McCartney and only has a run time of 23 seconds.
Initially, the ditty was planned to feature in the medley section of Abbey Road, but McCartney suffered a change of heart and demanded ‘Her Majesty’ be sent to the scrap heap.
Engineer John Kurlander explained in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: “We did all the remixes and crossfades to overlap the songs, Paul was there, and we heard it together for the first time. He said, ‘I don’t like ‘Her Majesty’, throw it away,’ so I cut it out – but I accidentally left in the last note. He said, ‘It’s only a rough mix, it doesn’t matter…’ I said to Paul, ‘What shall I do with it?’ ‘Throw it away,’ he replied.”
“I’d been told never to throw anything away, so after he left I picked it up off the floor, put about 20 seconds of red leader tape before it and stuck it onto the end of the edit tape,” he added.
Through happenstance, somehow, a shorter version of ‘Her Majesty’ survived and found its way onto a version of Abbey Road at Apple, which McCartney willingly approved. Of the incident, the Beatle said: “That was very much how things happened. Really, you know, the whole of our career was like that so it’s a fitting end.”
As McCartney explained, The Beatles largely stumbled upon these magical moments throughout their careers rather than deliberately seeking to write history. If things had gone as McCartney intended, ‘Her Majesty’ would have never been released or been a much longer piece of music, but a divine intervention turned it into a 23-second wonder.
