mostly david ephgrave

The emotional weight of this lesser-known Beatles b-side far surpasses its familiarity. When summarising all of his songs many years later, John Lennon dismissed this as a poor man's rewrite of This Boy, but to say that is to do the number a massive discredit. I'd say it knocks that song out of the park, and where This Boy's a twee slice of early-Sixties' teenage doo-wop, Yes it Is is a mournful, adult reflection of frustration and loss; the suggestion it could be about John's mum (who died following a road accident when he was a teenager) is more than likely. Whatever you think of the song, the vocal performance is outstanding, with John, Paul and George's voices blending as no-one else could. How they managed to get such a wonderful sound while standing around one mic is extraordinary. This is even more striking when you consider how early in their recording career it was and is proof that talent can't be masked by primitive technology; I dread to th...

It’s testament to Paul McCartney’s extraordinary talent that a song like Mama’s Little Girl could remain unreleased for nearly twenty years, to turn up as a b-side that’s little more than a career footnote and yet still be so hauntingly pretty with it. Mama’s Little Girl’s like the coy younger sister to the White Album’s Mother Nature’s Son that kept herself out of the limelight; these “sitting with an acoustic in the countryside on a beautiful summer’s day” finger-picking ditties are peppered throughout his career and have always been something he does with such ease. It’s strange in retrospect that it took him so long to decamp to the farm he bought in Scotland in the mid-sixties when the lifestyle fits him so perfectly; I guess he was just to busy being a Beatle to make the most of it. There’s a whole subsection to Macca's songwriting that full of this stuff - from Heart of the Country to I Lie Around to Calico Skies - that all sound so effortless; they just seem to f...