Only A Northern Song

George Harrison wrote this. He called it, "A joke relating to Liverpool, the Holy City in the North of England." Liverpool is north of London. Harrison used some real wit and humor in composing this (remember, out of all the Beatles, he was closest with Monty Python and Python alumnus Terry Gilliam, to the point of composing the closing theme to Time Bandits). In this song, he picks out a haphazard series of chords when he starts singing "it really doesn't matter...", with a B-melody note, E chord, B minor 7th, G chord, C-sharp 7th, F-sharp 7th. It sounds chaotic at first, but there's order underneath, expressing that he felt that he was buried brilliance over-shadowed by the Lennon-McCartney dominance. The above intricate joke is even lampshaded by the lyric: "You may think the chords are going wrong. But they're not; He just wrote it like that."

Northern Songs was The Beatles publishing company, so they were in charge of paying royalties to the songwriters. Harrison had a bad deal and didn't always get a fair share of the publishing royalties. He took out those frustrations in this song.

Rumor has it that George wrote this song in about an hour in the middle of the night while an orchestra was waiting for him. The producer of the Yellow Submarine film needed one more song as filler and George volunteered to go write one. The song, however, was written in February of 1967 when they were working on Sgt. Pepper. To quote Steve Turner in his book A Hard Day's Write, "The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles. Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30% of whose shares belonged to John and Paul with Ringo and George owning only 1.6% each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the groups main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was merely a contracted writer." So, as far as George was concerned, it didn't matter what he wrote because the bulk of the money was going into other people's pockets. In the beginning, this didn't bother him, but when he started to feel that his songs were actually good, that's when he started feeling screwed.