Sunday, September 27, 2009

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl....

As a Republican and an avowed hater of men who go anywhere near a bottle of hair dye, I suppose I could have been nasty and written a title like "McCartney the Royal Toady". But that would have been uncalled for. Paul McCartney, when all's said and dyed, has, it seems, retained a wide-eyed innocence from his childhood. A laudatory essay on the Queen which he wrote when he was 10 years old has been unearthed.

It has interesting echoes with a tiny track on Abbey Road. Abbey Road has got a few interesting, very short tracks on it. One is "The End" which is part of a Medley just before the er....end of the album. It is interesting to reflect that if you listen to all the Beatles albums in the order they were recorded, "The End" is fittingly the last thing you will hear (it would be interesting to know if it was the last track they actually recorded), except for the tiny and simple track stuck on the end of "The End" called "Her Majesty". It's a wonderful little end to the album, complete with rather abrupt ending:

Her Majesty

(Lennon/McCartney)

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn't have a lot to say
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day

I want to tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl
Someday I'm going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I'm going to make her mine.

That track is so short and, I suppose, odd, that it is hardly ever played on the radio. In fact, I have only heard it played on the radio once. That was last week by the (now he's stop being silly like he was on Radio 1) excellent Chris Evans. Well done Mr Evans.

Not wishing to ride a complete coach and horses through copyright law, here's a great video by a young American lady featuring "Her Majesty" on the Ukulele (twice) plus some interesting nonsense in the middle. It's received 655,010 hits on You Tube so it must be relatively good:

(And yes - I couldn't sleep)

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