Posted on 06/28/2019 1:58:54 PM PDT by beaversmom
In Danny Boyle’s new movie, Yesterday, a failed indie rocker (Himesh Patel) gets hit by a bus and wakes up in an alternate reality where nobody but him remembers the Beatles, so he plagiarizes “She Loves You,” “Hey Jude,” and other Lennon-McCartney standards and unseats Ed Sheeran as the world’s biggest pop star. The film, written by Richard Curtis, is obviously fictional. But 55 years ago, a similar thing, or at least pretty similar thing—minus the bus accident and the interdimensional copyright infringement—really happened to Peter Asher.
On Feb. 28, 1964, British folk duo Peter and Gordon released their debut single, “A World Without Love.” It didn’t matter that the song was an adequately harmonized, extremely melodramatic ballad about doomed teenage romance. (“Please lock me away,” it starts, “and don’t allow the day here inside, where I hide with my loneliness.”) It didn’t matter that neither Asher nor his performing partner, Gordon Waller, 20 and 19 at the time, were natural heartthrobs; indeed, Asher’s glasses, haircut, and teeth would later give Mike Myers the visual inspiration for Austin Powers. All that mattered at that precise instant in history was that “A World Without Love” was written for Peter and Gordon by Paul McCartney (and credited to Lennon-McCartney, like all of McCartney and John Lennon’s songs were then, no matter who wrote what) and therefore infused with the magic of the Beatles, which meant Peter and Gordon had been handed musical plutonium.
That sounds modest, but in the spring of 1964, the demand for Beatles substitutes was through the roof. The Beatles themselves had come to New York and performed on The Ed Sullivan Show for three consecutive Sundays that February, but then disappeared for most of March and April to shoot A Hard Day’s Night. By this point, McCartney...
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks.
Agreed. That’s a good song.
Later on McCartney wrote another song. It may have been “Woman” that Peter and Gordon also recorded and released as a single.
In an effort to determine if it was all hype because the Lennon/McCartney name was attached, the writing credits were attributed to “Bernard Webb.”
The song was a hit, but not the smash World Without Love was.
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