The Worst Cover of The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ You’ll Ever Hear

The Beatles‘ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” inspired way too many covers over the past 60 years. One of them came from a fellow British Invasion star who completely missed the song’s appeal. The cover in question almost feels like a joke.

Someone took the rock out of The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’

Let’s rewind to the early 1960s. American pop music became a lot more middle-of-the-road and left rock ‘n’ roll in the dust. Nobody remembers much of the music that came out during this time. Then, The Beatles injected new life into the radio with rock ‘n’ roll hits like “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This sets the stage for many more British acts to find success in the United States.

One of those acts was Petula Clark, most known for her hits “Downtown,” “My Love,” and “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.” Unlike most of her contemporaries, Clark did not have a rock ‘n’ roll bone in her body. That might explain why her cover of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sounds like a rancid cross between a forgotten show tune and elevator music.

1 Beatles song would work for Petula Clark

Clark’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” almost works as unintentional comedy. The Beatles brought rock back with the original song and she took out all the energy and guitars. It’s an impressively wrong-headed cover. If The Beatles’ version sounded like this, they would have been one-hit wonders if they were lucky, the British Invasion never would have happened, and nobody on this side of the pond would have heard of Clark.

Clark was made for songs that fit just as well on the Broadway stage as they did on the radio. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is not one of those songs. If she ever records another Fab Four song, it should be “The Long and Winding Road.”

How John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’

During a 1980 interview in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John discussed how he rewrote the narrative of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “We were so sick of this idea of writing and singing together, especially me, that I started this thing about, ‘We never wrote together, we were never in the same room,'” he said. “Which wasn’t true. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one-on-one, eyeball to eyeball. 

“Like in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ I remember when we got the chord that made the song,” he added. “We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar, playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u … got that something.’ And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ 

“In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that — both playing into each other’s nose,” the “Imagine” singer recalled. “We spent hours and hours and hours … We wrote in the back of vans together. We wrote ‘She Loves You’ in a van on the way to Newcastle. And ‘From Me to You.'”

Maybe “I Want to Hold Your Hand” needed the dynamics of Lennon-McCartney to work.