What is the worst opening lyric by The Beatles?

“It’s been a hard day’s night”; “I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me”; “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away”. In the annals of great opening lyrics, The Beatles have an absolute truckload. Sure, many of them are just restated titles, but when the titles are as good as The Beatles’ were, I can accept it. The truth is, though, that when it comes to the Fab Four, the opposite was also true.

The Scouse superstars were guilty of introducing some of their numbers with absolute clangers. This is far from befitting a band regularly considered the greatest of all time, but looking a little closer, you can see how it can happen. For one thing, the band worked like absolute maniacs.

Constantly writing, recording, and touring for the first half of their existence, when they knocked the touring part on the head, they filled the rest of their time with more writing and recording. The band released two albums in a single year more often than they released one. With that amount of vinyl to fill up, of course, they were going to mess up from time to time.

If anything, their sheer consistency is a miracle. With that in mind, the other side of it is the sheer level of creative freedom they were afforded on the records. EMI employees were literally forbidden from destroying any bit of tape that a Beatle had sneezed on, so no one was going to tell them what to do or how far they could go. They were experimenting and trying new things, so, of course, a few of them wouldn’t pan out.

What are the worst opening lyrics by the Beatles?
However, there are a few cases where their opening lyrics really make you wonder what they were thinking. It would be remiss of me to ignore ‘I Saw Her Standing There’s “Well, she was just 17 / you know what I mean”, which has just aged like milk. Of that same era, ‘She’s A Woman’ also has a genuine groaner of an opener with, “My love, don’t give me presents / I know that she’s no peasant”.

However, the worst of them all comes from Rubber Soul and, yes, it’s another McCartney joint. Turns out the guy who did ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ can sometimes be a little cringe; who knew?! The offender here is the Chet Baker tribute ‘Michelle’. A decent enough ballad, but one that you really do have to ignore the opening to enjoy uncritically.

After all, there’s lazy writing, and then there’s having the gall to open a song with “Michelle, my belle, these are words that go together well”. Now, it’s almost certainly a joke. The whole song is a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Parisian Left Bank culture, the bohemian centre of the world at the time. However, just because you’re drawing attention to how lazy a rhyme it is doesn’t make it any less lazy.

That said, the soul of The Beatles’ music came from how they embraced every aspect of themselves and weren’t afraid to demonstrate it in their songwriting. In an age where songs can’t just be expressions of the self and have to be a little bit of everything, perhaps there’s something we can learn from that.