The Beatles 'forgot' dozens of songs

The Beatles may have written “dozens” of songs that were never released … because Paul McCartney and John Lennon forgot them.

McCartney claims that the absence of portable recording devices during the band’s heyday meant that songs he co-wrote with Lennon were frequently forgotten the morning after. Talking to the London Evening Standard, he said: “Things have changed quite a bit. You’ve got recording devices now which change the songwriting process. For instance, John and I didn’t have them when we first started writing, we would write a song and just have to remember it. And there was always the risk that we’d just forget it. If the next morning you couldn’t remember it – it was gone. There must have been dozens lost this way.”

He continued: “We didn’t have tape recorders. Now you can do it on your phone. So you would have to form the thing, have it all finished, remember it all, go in pretty quickly and record it. Now, because you can get things down on a device, I’ve got millions of things I want to record and do.”

Beatles fans should not be too disheartened at the thought of entire albums of lost material. According to McCartney, the lack of technology might have been a boon that forced the band to write better songs. He said: “You had to write songs that were memorable, because you had to remember them or they were lost!”

McCartney was recently in the news for speaking out against the British government’s proposals to bring back fox hunting. The longtime vegetarian and animal rights activist said: “The people of Britain are behind this Tory government on many things, but the vast majority of us will be against them if hunting is reintroduced. It is cruel and unnecessary and will lose them support from ordinary people and animal lovers like myself.”

In the end, David Cameron dropped plans to relax the ban.