Fact #89788

Paul McCartney : I had a piano at my bedside and I must have dreamed it because I tumbled out of bed and put my hands on the piano keys and I had a tune in my head. It was just all there, a complete thing. It came too easy … I couldn't believe it. I didn't believe I'd written it. I thought maybe I'd heard it before, it was some other tune, and I went around for weeks playing the chords of the song for people, asking them 'Is this like something? I think I've written it.' And people would say, 'No, it's not like anything else, but it's good.'

George Martin : I thought Yesterday was a super tune, and I kept saying to Paul, 'You've got to write a great lyric for this, because it's a great tune.' We'd been calling it Scrambled Eggs…

Paul McCartney : It fits. 'Scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs.' You know, if you don't have lyrics yet and you want to play someone a song, you have to kind of say something.

Dick Lester : We were shooting Help! in the studio for about four weeks. At some time during that period, we had a piano on one of the stages and he was playing his Scrambled Eggs all the time. It got to the point where I said to him, 'If you play that bloody song any longer I'll have the piano taken off the stage. Either finish it or give it up.'

Paul McCartney : The lyric took such a long time to come, but I enjoyed taking the time to get it right. Scrambled eggs was just the first thing that came to me that fitted the melody, but I knew I couldn't use that, so I had to find something that was proper and fitting but still had those syllables. So when 'Yesterday' came up, it was good, and then 'Suddenly' came out for the start of the second verse, it felt very good.

George Martin : Paul was looking for a single word that would fit the phrase … da da da … and he came up with Yesterday. I objected to it actually. I said, 'There's a pretty well-known song called Yesterdays, in the plural. It's still very vivid in my memory.' He said, ' People don't know about that, do they?' He hadn't heard of it. So he went ahead with Yesterday and, of course, nowadays you never hear the other one.

When Paul played it to the group, Ringo started tapping away on drums and we thought, 'What will we do with it?' It wasn't a three-guitars-and-drums kind of song. I said, 'Put down guitar and voice just to begin with, Paul, and then we'll see what we can do with it.' Which we did.

Paul McCartney : We tried ways of doing it with John on organ, but it sounded weird and, in the end, I was told to do it as a solo.

George Martin : I told him there was nothing else we could do, that we couldn't put heavy drums or even a heavy bass guitar on it. I said, 'What about having a string accompaniment, you know, fairly tastefully done?' Paul said, 'Yuk! I don't want any of that Mantovani rubbish. I don't want any of that syrupy stuff.' Then I thought back to my classical days, and I said, 'Well, what about a string quartet then?'

He dug that. He thought it was neat … So we sat down and together we wrote the score.

Paul McCartney : Interesting little thing, and I don't want this to be too much sour grapes, but because I wrote Yesterday without John, and I was the only Beatle to play on the record and the other guys didn't play on it … Now, I know that the older Beatle fans know I wrote it, but these days, when younger kids look to see who wrote that and the credits say words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. So a couple of years ago I actually asked Yoko if, as a favour to me, after 30 years of John having his name in front, would she mind if just on that one song, I was allowed to put words and music by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. I didn't want to take John's name off, and I figured John would have let me do that, but she wouldn't, so I'm not allowed to do that. So this is one of the reasons we don't get on too well.

George Martin : That's John playing organ on I'm Down, playing it with his elbow.