Credit: Mary McCartney
Wed 2 September 2026 16:00, UK
Saying that any Paul McCartney song is catchy is like saying that the sky is blue.
There are so many melodies that have had years to engrain themselves in everyone’s consciousness, and while there are more than a few times where they have made something strange, McCartney never sacrificed his ear for hooks for the sake of making something wacky. But when he was first hashing out his tunes with The Beatles, there were a lot more pieces that needed to be worked on with John Lennon until they sounded like the versions that we know and love to this day.
In fact, there’s a good chance that McCartney was destined to have Lennon as his conscience for a while in the band. He was always in danger of going too far into sentimental territory every now and again, and while there were moments where he could go overboard and write something that sounded a bit too saccharine, all it took was one biting line from Lennon for Macca to start rethinking what he was doing. He took his partner very seriously, but there were also tunes where he needed to follow his heart.
He was always a fan of the golden age of pop songs in the pre-rock and roll age, and while he wasn’t going to convince the rest of the band to get up and do the Charleston or anything like that, you could hear that witty streak across many of his tunes. ‘When I’m 64’ is one of the more goofy songs that McCartney ever wrote, but even with Lennon’s ridicule, it’s hard to think of a single note being out of place when listening to it.
But for all of The Beatles’ tunes that have been written into the DNA of pop culture, what happened to the songs that don’t get that same kind of treatment? There are plenty of tunes that don’t get talked about nearly enough as their greatest tunes, and while ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ remains one of the greatest tunes from their early days, there’s no reason to ignore a song as brilliant as ‘There’s A Place’.
Then again, it comes down to which songs have the best single potential, and even for a band like the Fab Four, they did have a few songs that didn’t hit the mark as they should have. Even ‘The Nerk Twins’ could admit when they wrote a ‘work job’ song that didn’t resonate with them on a personal level, but that’s usually better than songs that McCartney didn’t even remember, like ‘Tell Me What You See’.
The entire era of Help saw them progressing on nearly every song, but whereas Lennon was trying on his best Bob Dylan impression on many of his tunes around that time, McCartney felt that this meagre attempt at making a folksy tune was far from the kind of tune that most people would have been humming years down the line, even admitting, “I seem to remember it as mine…not awfully memorable.”
Further reading: From The Vault
On the other hand, that’s not really giving the song its due credit. There’s no way that every Beatles song is going to be considered one of the greatest of all time, but when you look through their catalogue of hits, ‘Tell Me What You See’ does have a bit more of an interesting angle, with McCartney playing the role of someone who’s in love with this girl that doesn’t even seem to know that he exists.
That kind of topic is the kind of thing that worked well in a song like ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ years after the fact, but it’s not like the tune hasn’t found its fans, either, with Stevie Nicks singling it out as one of her favourites on the record. So while many work jobs came and went throughout every Lennon/McCartney writing session, sometimes the best ones are the tunes that you don’t realise are classic until years after the fact.
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