5 Worst Beatles Songs Ever

Ah, The Beatles. The mischievous, occasionally scandalous, quartet of modern pop music. A veritable One Direction for their age. But oh, I hear you cry, One Direction are terrible, and I hate every single one of their songs with a deep burning passion! And I agree, with you, dear reader — so much so that I’ve put together a list of the five worst Beatles songs of all time. Don’t argue, you know it to be true.

5. Do You Want to Know a Secret?
One of their earliest efforts, “Do You Want to Know a Secret” not only has the title of an extremely suspect tune in several, intangible ways, it also seriously isn’t that good. Picking on a band so early in their career — and especially a band like The Beatles, who went through so many changes in their lengthy, legendary lifetimes — might seem a bit unfair, but this really is pretty unforgivable. At a time when dreamy, woozy, sappy guitar ballads were all the rage, you’d expect The Beatles to be doing something at least marginally different. This is one of the few times they made the mainstream worse, with a slightly creepy, very soppy love song that kind of meshes into the rest of the bands polluting the airwaves around at the time. The problem isn’t that the song is terrible. The problem is that it sounds far too much like everything else that was around at the time.

4. Revolution 9
John Lennon was pretty well documented in hating a whole lot of the Beatle’s oeuvre. He memorably referred to “A Taste of Honey” as “a waste of money”, and hated “Ob-la-di, ob-da-la” with an absolutely burning passion. But “Revolution 9” proves that John probably didn’t know best when it came to The Beatles sound, with this giant, messy “soundscape” leading out their self-titled 1968 album. Sure, they may have pushed boundaries, but this pretentious anti-masterpiece really proved that they occasionally needed to rein it in. The Beatles sound was everything from cheeky and boyish to …cheekier and more boyish, I suppose, but the layers they worked in between those two were stunning, and proved that they could carry off a more experimental style. While there was a hint of something interesting buried deep inside this cavernous mess, it mostly stands as a testament to why Lennon wasn’t allowed to write any other “art” pieces like this.

3. Maggie Mae
We’re talking here about a song that had to go up against the magnificent “Let It Be.” It was doomed from the beginning, basically, and offers a hideous look into how wrong The Beatles could go if they were told to stick to that guitar stuff and just sing. I suppose they do earn some points back in that they didn’t actually right this number. It’s an old folk song that they stuck on the album as a bit of fun (though who’s twisted and broken idea of fun is this?). The song was popularised by the Quarrymen, and we can only assume that they did it a lot better than it’s done here. It’s certainly not the Fab Four’s finest vocal work — the often crisp edges chucked in for an “authentic” folk sound that clashes up off-tune vocals with overlapping voices and a bunch of accents thrown on for a laugh. Proof that no band ever should be left to their own devices if you want them to get anything done, this one is an instant skip on any playlist.

2. Yellow Submarine
I might just have a particular dislike for this song as it was the focus of my doomed attempts to learn to play piano, but there are scores of Beatles fans who put this tune amongst the worst the band ever put out. One listen tells you why. It’s a novelty single that doesn’t really do much after the novelty has worn off. Apart from that painfully catchy chorus, which is in the process of drilling it’s way into your brain as we speak, it’s just a very plain, very basic number that sounds as if no one in the studio was really bothering to try any more. An awful, clunky track that was forever connected with the patchy at best movie. The clumpy, clunky beat and nails-on-a-scratchboard singing did little to convince unbelievers.

1. Good Day Sunshine
I’m sure there will be a lot of frenzied water-cooler discussion the day after this article is released, with many affronted that I chose to put a McCartney number at the top of the list when I’ve already made it clear that “Revolution 9” exists. And, while I’m not defending it in the least, “Revolution 9” attempted something different. “Good Day Sunshine” actively pursues the kind of blank-eyed banality that the era was notorious for. With cringe-worthy lyrics and banal vocals, it was a song that completely failed to get any pulses racing. It fails to stir up enough substance to really get angry about, and fails dismally at any attempts to connect with the listener. The highest insult I can deliver to music: Forgettable.