The Beatles It Was 50 Years Ago Today

Understanding the Beatles' "It Was 50 Years Ago Today"

This is one of those tracks that confuses people. It's not on the main Beatles albums. It surfaced through bootlegs for years before getting an official release. If you're looking at it today, you probably noticed the weird structure, the odd lyrics, and the fact that it sounds like something from a different session entirely. The song was recorded on January 30th, 1967, during the Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road). Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote it. The original purpose was fairly straightforward — McCartney wanted a song for a comedy program called How I Used to Win, a BBC children's show that explored what would happen if you rewound time. Lennon contributed the more surreal, childlike verses about being half a century old at five years old. The track features the full band: McCartney on lead vocals and bass, Lennon on rhythm guitar and backing vocals, George Harrison on lead guitar, and Ringo Starr on drums. There are also overdubbed acoustic guitars and a distinctive harmonium part. It was never finished for an official single or album release in 1967. The band apparently felt it wasn't strong enough. It sat on tape for decades, leaking as a bootleg, before finally appearing on the Anthology 2 compilation in 1996. That's the version most people encounter.

The technical reality of working with this recording is worth noting if you plan to remaster or analyze it. The original analog multitrack tape has been through multiple generations of handling and transfer. Early CD pressing of Anthology 2 had some compression issues that made the vocal track sound slightly distorted in the higher frequencies. The 2009 remastered CD version improved this considerably. If you're sourcing the audio for any project, I'd recommend the 2009 CD transfer or the stereo mix from the Get Back discography session notes. The original four-track mixdown exists but was never publicly released in full detail. I once tried to isolate the harmonium track for a personal project using frequency separation. What I found was that the harmonium was recorded dry and layered under the vocal track in a way that makes clean isolation nearly impossible with standard tools. The workaround I ended up using was a combination of mid-side processing to pull the center-panned elements, then a gentle high-shelf cut around 4kHz to reduce the harshness that comes from trying to separate things that were mixed together at very similar frequency ranges. It's not perfect, but it's close enough for most applications. Trying to do this with the original four-track stems isn't an option since those were never made available officially. There's a common misconception that the song is unfinished because of a broken. That's not accurate. The song has a deliberate structural quirk — it opens with a long instrumental intro that doesn't resolve until about forty seconds in. Some people think the tape was cut short or that the band gave up on it. They didn't. They simply chose not to release it. The structure is intentional, though admittedly uneven by Beatles standards.

One counter-intuitive detail: the version on Anthology 2 is not the only take. There's a second take that was recorded the same day. The first take is faster and more frantic. The second take, which made it onto the compilation, has a slightly more relaxed tempo but still feels rushed compared to other songs from that period. The difference is subtle but noticeable if you play them back to back. A lot of people don't know there's a Take 2 at all. The song's lyrical content is often misunderstood. The line "it was fifty years ago today" refers to the concept of aging backward — the premise of the BBC show. The imagery of growing old in reverse is intentionally absurd. McCartney has said in interviews that the song was meant to be playful and slightly nonsense-driven, not deeply philosophical. It fits into the same creative space as "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love" — light, accessible, but not particularly substantive. If you're trying to locate a clean copy for listening or reference, the official sources are the Anthology 2 CD, the digital versions on Spotify and Apple Music, and the 2021 Let It Be Super Deluxe edition, which includes alternate takes and session information. Bootleg recordings exist in various qualities, but they tend to have noticeable hiss and distortion from being sourced from vinyl or cassette copies of the original CD.

The song remains one of the more overlooked tracks in the Beatles catalog. It doesn't get the attention it deserves, not because it's terrible, but because it's neither great nor particularly memorable. It's competent. It's historically interesting. And if you're studying the Sgt. Pepper sessions, it provides a useful window into what the band was experimenting with at the time — even if those experiments didn't quite land.