Sessionbånd på auksjon

Fra Omega auctions er det nå lagt ut et bånd med innspillinger av sangen «Catcall». Sangen er en tidlig komposisjon av Paul McCartney fra ca 1959, og det finnes to opptak på bootlegs av Beatles som spiller den under tittelen «Catswalk», tatt opp under øvinger i Cavern Club i 1962. Den ble aldri utgitt i Beatlesversjon men ble gitt til Chris Barber som ga den ut på single i 1967.

Båndet som nå er lagt ut inneholder 17 tagninger av Barbers første forsøk på å spille inn sangen 23. juni 1967, med McCartney i kontrollrommet.

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Mark Lewisohn skriver dette om sangen.

“A career running almost seventy years is going to have curiosities, and Catcall is a fascinating footnote in Paul McCartney’s life.

Composed around 1959 – when McCartney was seventeen and still a Liverpool Institute schoolboy – this guitar instrumental remained unused until 1967 when he gave it to jazz trombonist Chris Barber for release on Marmalade, a smart new record label launched by the larger-than-life music impresario Giorgio Gomelsky. And this was no quick giveaway: McCartney oversaw it all carefully, going first to a rehearsal session and then to two subsequent recording dates to see it done right. It might then have amused him that, in this period of the Beatles’ phenomenal commercial success, Catcall sold the proverbial three copies.

Chris Barber has a great biography, steering not only his own extensive career but also, in the 1950s, sponsoring the rise of skiffle and bringing to Britain an array of blues singers and players from rural and urban America for tours that had a lasting impact on their audiences. Since Barber’s death (aged 90 in 2021) parts of his archive have come to the marketplace, among which is a unique 10-and-a-half-inch spool of tape from the first professional session for Paul McCartney’s Catcall. It took place at Marquee Studio, off Dean Street in Soho, on 23 June 1967, the Friday before the Sunday when the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love to a worldwide TV audience reckoned at the time to be a mindblowing 400 million.

This wasn’t the first time McCartney had tried to give away the tune he sometimes called Catcall and other times Catswalk. Making their network television debut in London in December 1962, the Beatles bumped into Bert Weedon, the man who – through his Play In a Day instruction manual – helped a generation of British youth learn the guitar. Fired by the idea of making money from his old unwanted songs, McCartney keenly asked Weedon if he’d be interested in recording a tune he and John Lennon would write especially for him. As Weedon told me in 2007, ‘Paul said, “We’d love to write something for you.” It was their idea and I said yes to it – they were going to write a guitar instrumental for me.’

Catcall/Catswalk wasn’t written to order, it was already three or so years old, but it also wasn’t very convincing. When Weedon’s record producer at HMV, Wally Ridley, heard a private tape made by the Beatles in the Cavern, he turned it down without regret. Cut now to 1967 when Paul revives it again, this time excitingly jazzed up for Chris Barber … who also was given the impression it was composed expressly for him.

The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album was newly installed at number 1, dominating everywhere, when McCartney met Barber and his band in a stale-ale rehearsal space above the Tally Ho pub in Kentish Town, north London, knocked down in 2006. After teaching everyone the tune, he joined the band downstairs for a lunchtime pie and pint.

This session at Marquee Studio happened soon after, on 23 June, and the tape runs 22 minutes and has most of 17 numbered takes in varying styles, musical ideas evolving in the moment, heading somewhere but never quite arriving. McCartney is in the control room – present but not heard – while Barber plays trombone and leads his band on the studio floor. During a brief break, the tape also includes Barber’s then wife, singer Ottilie Patterson, routining Johnny Comes Marching Home. Nothing from the session was released, however, and a remake took place at Chappell Studios in New Bond Street on 20 July with McCartney thought to be playing organ on the track and adding his voice to the catcalling crowd that pays homage to Ray Charles’ What’d I Say, one of McCartney’s ever-favourite recordings. While the disc label credits Giorgio Gomelsky as the producer, the man himself volunteered to me in 2007 that he and Paul oversaw it together.

And then … nothing. Catcall came out in October 1967 and made no splash whatever, a subsequent release in France also underwhelming. The track was included on Barber’s Marmalade-label album Battersea Rain Dance … after which it skittered away, destined only for that footnote in Paul McCartney’s musical history. The cat was back in the alley, walking-talking no more.”