News flash: lots of artists have covered the Beatles. I don’t have the exact number, but I figure it’s somewhere north of three trillion. Some have been fabulously successful, like Elton John’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which went to number one in the USA in 1974. Others have been fabulously laughable, like William Shatner’s version of the same song from 1968.
Then there is “Stars on 45” by Stars on 45, which was both fabulously successful and fabulously laughable at the same time.
So if we want to talk about Beatles covers, we have to narrow the focus a bit. Today, we’re looking at a very small subset of Beatles songs. Each was a contemporaneous cover, coming out shortly after the Fab Four released the original version on the album. And each reached number one on the British pop charts, something the Beatles did not achieve.
It’s an intimate little group of tunes. Just three songs.
1960s artists that outdid the Beatles with Beatles’ covers
OK, let’s clean up the fine print first. There were no officially agreed-upon pop charts in Britain until 1969. But today, we recognize the charts recorded by NME and Record Retailer as pseudo-official.
On those charts, the Beatles had 17 number one hits, beginning with “From Me To You” in May 1963 and ending with “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in June 1969. You can arrive at different numbers if you count the double-sided hits as two distinct songs or double-count “She Loves You” since it hit the top in non-consecutive weeks.
But we’ll stick with 17.
If you really want to stretch that number, you can throw in several other Beatle-adjacent songs. The first is Peter and Gordon’s “World Without Love,” which knocked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” off the throne in April 1964. That song was written by Paul McCartney and given to Peter Asher and Gordon Waller when, at least the way I’ve heard the story, John Lennon considered it too sappy to be a Beatles record.
Then there are the three true covers. Marmalade did a pretty dull version of “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da,” which nonetheless spent three non-consecutive weeks at number one in early 1969.
Less than two months earlier, Joe Cocker did a freakin’ awesome version of “With a Little Help From My Friends,” which held number one for a single week before giving way to Ennio Morricone’s theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
But the first true Beatles cover to hit number one in the UK may be the most interesting.
The Overlanders, a five-person harmony band who tried to keep up with the rapidly changing music world of the mid-‘60s, scored their only number-one hit at the beginning of 1966 with their recording of “Michelle.” Rubber Soul, the album that introduced “Michelle” to the world, had been out less than a month when the Overlanders recorded their version.
Less than two months after the world first heard Paul McCartney singing in French, the Overlanders had the number one song in the UK.
The Overlanders had formed a few years earlier as a harmony group, built around the trio of Paul Arnold, Laurie Mason, and Peter Bartholomew. They began with a folk vibe, but they were far from Peter, Paul, and Laurie, which could have been their name if they wanted to copy American folk.
Coming of age in the early – mid-1960s, they were heavily influenced by Merseybeat. They signed with Tony Hatch and Pye Records and began following in the footsteps of Hatch’s popular Searchers, who had a string of U.K. hits in the first half of the decade.
Despite recording some fine songs, that early incarnation of the Overlanders never hit big. The first minor success actually came in the USA, with “Yesterday’s Gone, “ a cover of Chad Stuart (of Chad & Jeremy fame). To my ears, it is clearly the weakest single they released during the early ‘60s, but there’s no accounting for American tastes.
Several other songs, including the original compositions “Summer Skies and Golden Sands” and “Movin’,” are much better, blending those harmonies with more lively arrangements.
By late 1965, Peter, Paul, and Laurie (sorry – that’s the last time I’ll make that joke) decided they would benefit from their own rhythm section and so hired David Walsh and Terry Widlake to join on drums and bass.
One of their first recordings, rushed so that Hatch could release it while his band was out on tour, was “Michelle.” Despite the pretty harmonies, the Overlanders’ take strikes my ears as having a little more life than the Beatles’ very pretty version. I wouldn’t call it better, but it is certainly a worthy companion piece.
The really interesting part of the “Michelle” story is that another group – a duo comprised of Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, who obviously went by the name David and Jonathan – put out a very successful cover at the exact same time.
This one was produced by the Beatles' own George Martin. It hit number 11 at the same time the Overlanders were at number one (and if you go by the NME chart, it was top ten).
The David and Jonathan cover is virtually unlistenable today. At least, it is to me. It is far too treacly. Cook and Greenaway were exceptional songwriters. They weren’t nearly as good as performers. Their version just goes to point out how good that Overlanders version actually is. Because, as we have seen time and time again, misguided artists can take a quality Beatles song and do a terrible job with it.
Or they can get it right, as the Overlanders did for a brief moment sixty years ago. It was their only major hit, and they would all go their separate ways within a few years. That’s a story for another day.