Etcetera

Written by: McCartney
Recorded: 20 August 1968
Producer: George Martin
Engineer: Ken Scott

Unreleased

Paul McCartney: vocals, acoustic guitar

One of the rarest of all Beatles-era recordings, Etcetera was written by Paul McCartney with Marianne Faithfull in mind, but neither she nor The Beatles ever recorded it properly.

McCartney recorded a demo of the song in a single take during a session for Mother Nature's Son, during which he also recorded Wild Honey Pie.

This was a very beautiful song. I recall it was a ballad and had the word 'etcetera' several times in the lyric. I only heard it twice: when he recorded it and when we played it back to him. The tape was taken away and I've never heard of it since.

Paul McCartney recalled the song in his authorised biography, though in less favourable terms.

I knew Marianne so it was natural that I would be asked to write a song at some point. I did write a song but it was not a very good one. It was called Etcetera and it's a bad song. I think it's a good job that it's died a death in some tape bin. Even then I seem to remember thinking it wasn't very good. There was always the temptation to keep your better songs for yourself and then give your next-best songs to other established people, so when it was someone like Marianne, who at the time was a newcomer, those people would tend to end up with fairly dreadful offerings of mine.

I suppose, thinking back on it, after As Tears Go By maybe they were looking for more sort of a Yesterday, something more poignant, more baroque. I probably thought, well, this is really all I've got at the moment. I'll send it round and hope it's all OK, and maybe they'll put a baroque thing on it and that'll make it OK. She probably did Yesterday because they figured, Well at least it's better than Etcetera.

McCartney's uncharacteristically and emphatically harsh judgement of his own song seems curious, particularly as it is so contradictory Alan Brown's recollection. Furthermore, his wish that it ended up in a tape bin is odd given his normal willingness to embrace 1960s nostalgia.

The chronology of events in McCartney's account adds further confusion. Marianne Faithfull's version of Yesterday was recorded in October 1965, more than three years before the Etcetera demo was taped. If McCartney really didn't like the song, it seems odd to have recorded it during the White Album sessions, particularly if he disliked it.

Elsewhere in the biography, McCartney says that Faithfull and Mick Jagger requested Eleanor Rigby after they had rejected Yesterday, prior to the recording of Revolver.

"Marianne was much more interested in Eleanor Rigby but I had to say, 'No, I want that one'," he recalled in the book. If this is true, it seems likely that Etcetera was composed around early 1966.

All this suggests one of three outcomes:

• McCartney is confused and mistaken about events;
• There were two songs called Etcetera: one ("a bad song") offered to Marianne Faithfull in 1965/66, and another ("a very beautiful song") recorded by McCartney in 1968;
• McCartney knows more than he's letting on about the song, which he'd rather didn't see the light of day for personal reasons. Possibly it was a personal love song which he'd rather keep out of the public domain, although he's never been reluctant to release love songs at any point in his career.

Whatever the truth, and whether or not McCartney deliberately downplayed the song for personal reasons, it seems likely that the song will remain lost unless a demo recorded for Faithfull does one day come to light.

Related articles:

• Television: The Music Of Lennon & McCartney
• Television: The Music Of Lennon & McCartney
• Here, There And Everywhere
• Television: The Music Of Lennon & McCartney
• Wild Honey Pie