(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 12 August 2025 18:00, UK
By the end of The Beatles, none of the Fab Four were happy sharing their tunes. They had reached an impasse, and it wasn’t long they all started to see what they could do solo, but John Lennon did have some great tunes still left on the cutting room floor that would become iconic.
Granted, there’s probably a reason the band hoarded all of their best stuff for themselves. It was easy for all of them to get into the studio and pick apart each other’s songs because they felt it should go in a specific direction, but the last thing that Lennon wanted to do was make a song that would then have to have Paul McCartney’s approval or a catchier hook to sound like it was ready for radio.
He was now interested in going in new directions, and Plastic Ono Band was the first line in the sand that things would be different. The line ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’ already left us all in shock, but nothing on the record was exactly catered to being a hit single outside the song ‘Love’, with Lennon fluctuating between being incredibly blunt on ‘Working Class Hero’ or trying his best to soothe his soul on tracks like ‘Hold On’ and ‘Isolation’.
After letting out his grief, though, Imagine reintroduced people to a few Fab favourites he had kept under wraps. ‘Jealous Guy’ had already been demoed during the Let It Be sessions as the song ‘Child of Nature’, and in the Get Back documentary, you can hear both Lennon and McCartney going back and forth about the lyrics to ‘Gimme Some Truth’ before it eventually turned up on this album.
It’s a shame that we never got to hear a Beatle-fied version of those tunes, but would they have sounded the same? Probably not. After all, McCartney had already been toying with the lyrical phrasing of ‘Gimme Some Truth’ in the documentary, so he may have chucked in a few more lines for Lennon to use that wouldn’t have been as socio-political as what he originally came up with. But ‘Jealous Guy’ probably would have changed the most.
In the greater context of Lennon’s life story, ‘Jealous Guy’ is one of the bravest admissions he had ever made. He was not a man to be idolised, and he knew that it was better to be honest with his fans, but looking at the lyrics here, this could have been about his treatment of Yoko Ono, McCartney, his first wife, Cynthia, or all three of them at the same time. He wasn’t claiming to be a role model, but he knew it was better to be honest than have people worshipping a false musical god.
So, really, it was a good idea for Lennon to keep some of these tunes for himself. There were bound to be some changes made to them had they been used on Abbey Road, but since that turned into one of the biggest masterpieces of the band’s career, time worked out for the best when they started on the grand medley idea instead of throwing in the same pop ditties into the mix.
And especially when you look at the other songs that were rejected around this time, it was in everyone’s best interest to release their respective tunes on their own rather than have their bandmates sort them out. Because if the rest of the band were so far gone that they rejected a song like ‘All Things Must Pass’, it was clear that their critical analysis of their own material wasn’t working all that well.
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