5 Beatles Songs the Band Never Performed Live
The Beatles had an extensive catalog and a relatively brief touring career; as a result, there were a number of songs they never performed live as a band. In his solo career, Paul McCartney has dusted off some previously unplayed songs in concerts, but many have still gone unperformed. Here are five songs The Beatles never performed live.
‘And Your Bird Can Sing’
John Lennon wrote the Revolver song “And Your Bird Can Sing” in 1966, and it has puzzled listeners since. People have speculated that the song is about anyone from McCartney to Frank Sinatra to Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. Lennon did little to clear it up. When reflecting on the song, Lennon rolled his eyes at it.
“Another of my throwaways,” he said, per The Beatles’ official website. “Fancy paper around an empty box.”
Because The Beatles stopped touring in 1966, they didn’t perform many songs from Revolver. Per NME, this was one that never saw the light of day during concerts.
‘Norwegian Wood’
“Norwegian Wood” is a recognizable Beatles song, so it might come as a surprise that they didn’t perform it live. It took clear influences from Bob Dylan, and George Harrison played the sitar on it for the first time.
“‘Norwegian Wood’ is my song completely,” Lennon said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “It was about an affair I was having. I was very careful and paranoid because I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of the household. I’d always had some kind of affairs going, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair. But in such a smoke-screen way that you couldn’t tell. But I can’t remember any specific woman it had to do with.”
Perhaps Lennon felt that performing the song live would make the infidelity seem more obvious to his wife.
‘Don’t Bother Me’
The first Beatles song Harrison ever wrote, “Don’t Bother Me,” never made it to the stage. He likely didn’t mind, though. While he often felt his bandmates overlooked his musical contributions, he didn’t like the song very much.
“I forgot all about it till we came to record the next LP,” he said of the 1963 song in The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “It was a fairly crappy song. I forgot about it completely once it was on the album.”
‘I Me Mine’
Several years later, Harrison wrote the song “I Me Mine” for Let It Be. At this point, the band hadn’t played a live show in several years. Because they didn’t play the song during their rooftop concert at Apple Corps, the band never had the chance to play it live.
Harrison ultimately named his 1980 memoir I Me Mine, so the song received at least a little recognition after the band broke up.
‘I Am the Walrus’
Another one of The Beatles’ more recognizable songs, “I Am the Walrus,” never made it on a concert setlist. The band achieved the orchestral backing in the studio, which might have made it more difficult to arrange for a stage performance in their solo careers. Lennon, who wrote it, even seemed to recognize that it would be a difficult song to perform live.
“Yoko and I even signed a guy’s violin in Spain after he played us ‘Yesterday,’” he said. “He couldn’t understand that I didn’t write the song. But I guess he couldn’t have gone from table to table playing ‘I Am the Walrus.’”
