Among the numerous songs the Beatles put on their 1960s releases that had been written by others, “A Taste of Honey” is one of the most obscure, and perhaps among the most underappreciated. Appearing on their first album, Please Please Me (and then on Introducing the Beatles and The Early Beatles in the US), it perhaps isn’t as accorded as much respect as their most famous cover versions because it isn’t a rock song. The primal importance of artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly—all of whom the Beatles interpreted on their early albums—is both unquestioned and justly considered eternally hip. Not so much “A Taste of Honey,” although it’s a very good Beatles track, with a haunting melody, superb Paul McCartney vocals, and fine backup harmonies.
One reason “A Taste of Honey” is relatively seldom discussed, and sometimes even denigrated, seems to be its origins as a show tune, far from the world of rock and roll. Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow wrote it as an instrumental song for a 1960 Broadway play, itself an adaptation of a 1958 British play. The narration of one documentary I’ve seen declared that while the Beatles had put two show tunes on their early albums (“A Taste of Honey” and, on their second album in late 1963, “Till There Was You”), the Rolling Stones would have never considered performing something so sentimental. Never mind that one of the first songs Mick Jagger and Keith Richards actually wrote was the quite sentimental “As Tears Go By”; that their first US hit was the fairly sentimental Jagger-Richards ballad “Tell Me”; and that they sometimes covered sentimental American soul songs like “You Better Move On” in their early recordings. The point seemed to be that the Beatles, and particularly McCartney, could be sentimentally soft, and that this wasn’t a virtue.
Certainly McCartney was the Beatle principally behind choosing to cover “A Taste of Honey,” as well as “Till There Was You” and another show/movie tune they’d play on the BBC in 1963, “The Honeymoon Song.” Possibly John Lennon wasn’t so enthusiastic about this corner of the group’s repertoire, as he’s heard semi-mocking the lyrics of “Till There Was You” on December 1962 versions of the song taped at the Star-Club in Hamburg, though he plays it straight on all the other numerous surviving versions from live/BBC/Decca demo tapes. Such show tunes likely had an influence on his songwriting too; he’d later recall that “Do You Want to Know a Secret” was influenced by “I’m Wishing” from the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Still, on a different Star-Club version of “A Taste of Honey” than the one that’s been issued on the numerous albums taken from their December 1962 tapes, Paul introduces it as “a Lied [German for ‘song’] which John’s gonna hate.” As the Beatles were deciding what to include on their first album, “A Taste of Honey” was likely not among Lennon’s top choices. But it wasn’t as though the Beatles’ interpretation wasn’t liked by their audiences and admired by at least one of their peers. According to Merseybeats bassist Billy Kinsley, he played a part in convincing the band to put it on Please Please Me.
“We played a gig with the Beatles at Liverpool University [on October 11, 1962] when they’d just entered the charts with ‘Love Me Do,’” he told Spencer Leigh for the liner notes of the 1982 Merseybeats compilation Beat…and Ballads. “It was the first time Paul had sung ‘A Taste of Honey’ and the others didn’t particularly like it. Paul said, ‘What did you think of it’ and I said, ‘I was knocked out by it. Superb.’ Paul grabbed hold of me and said, ‘Go and tell the others that.’ He took me into their dressing room and John said, ‘Go on then. What do you think of it?’ I was sixteen years old and very nervous. There was Big J.L. asking me what I thought of a song that he didn’t like. I said, ‘I thought “A Taste of Honey” was great.’ Paul said, ‘Ha, ha, John, told you so.’ They decided that night that they’d put ‘A Taste of Honey’ onto their first album.” A very similar quote appears in Leigh’s book It’s Love That Really Counts: The Billy Kinsley Story, where Kinsley also states, “Maybe they took other soundings, but I like to think I was partly responsible for it going on their first album.”
For what it’s worth, it’s unlikely the Beatles decided to put the song on their first album at the October 11 show Kinsley saw. According to the expanded edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, his detailed history of the Beatles through 1962, George Martin’s decision to make a full LP with the group wasn’t relayed to the group until a meeting on November 16. It’s also possible the October 11 gig wasn’t the first occasion on which they’d performed “A Taste of Honey,” as Lewisohn refers to it as “one of the first times the Beatles played it.” More important than the chronological sequence, of course, is the main point that McCartney and Lennon disagreed about the song’s merits and suitability for their set.
Mark Lewisohn gives a full page or so to how “A Taste of Honey” entered their repertoire in the expanded edition of Tune In. The gist of it is: “There was resistance, most vociferously from John, that it was soft, not the sort of thing they should be doing. It would become a sustained point of contention between them…Confronted by his opposition, Paul said ‘A Taste of Honey’ was just another in the vein of ‘Wooden Heart,’ ‘Over the Rainbow,’ ‘The Honeymoon Song,’ and ‘Till There Was You,’ all of which were obviously popular. Didn’t the Beatles always embrace diversity, something for everyone? John still hated it, and it was probably with ‘A Taste of Honey’ in mind that he remarked [in a February 24, 1971 affidavit when McCartney was suing the other Beatles to get out of his official partnership with them], “From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred ‘pop type’ music and we preferred what is now called ‘underground.’”
Adds Lewisohn, “It went into the set, not every night but often. John was pragmatic—he sang a bit of the backing vocal, played the rhythm guitar lines, and made his feelings felt. But it was no stretch for Beatles audiences, who got out-and-out rock, Tamla R&B, bluesy harmonica songs, quality pop, country numbers, love ballads and three-part harmonies in every show.”
The origins of “A Taste of Honey,” and how it came to the attention of the Beatles (and likely through McCartney), are more complex and uncertain than they are for most of their covers. One thing to clarify at the outset: though the 1960 Broadway play, also titled A Taste of Honey, for which it was written was based on the 1958 British play A Taste of Honey—and although that play was made into a fairly popular 1961 British movie starring Rita Tushingham—the song is not heard in that film. And as noted, when the song was first used in the 1960 play, it was instrumental, without lyrics.
The first vocal version, with lyrics, was recorded the following year by a very famous guy—but not one famous for his singing. It was on the 1961 album Let’s Misbehave by Billy Dee Williams, the same man who’d become a star actor in the early 1970s with one of the most popular television movies of all time, Brian’s Song, and then with major roles in early Star Wars films. However, he’d been acting on stage and in films since the late 1950s, and one of his stage roles was indeed in a Broadway production of A Taste of Honey, which could well have been where he first became aware of the song. Let’s Misbehave is a vocal jazz album that’s not close to rock, and Williams’s unspectacular version is not the one the Beatles heard. In fact, it seems likely that to this day, Paul McCartney might well be unaware of Williams’s version.
The source for the Beatles’ version is the 1962 recording by Lenny Welch, a US pop singer with some mild soul influence. Welch is mostly known for his big 1963 hit “Since I Fell for You,” but he put “A Taste of Honey” on a 1962 single. How the Beatles found that 45 is one of many testimonies into their deep record collective dives, as it didn’t even chart in the US let alone the UK. But this was certainly version they found, as the arrangement, particularly the backing vocals, is quite different than what Williams recorded, and quite similar to how the Beatles performed it. Tellingly, it also has a switch into double-time in the bridge—also missing from Williams’s version, and also featured in the Beatles’ adaptation. Roy Carr and Tony Tyler were likely unaware of Welch’s version when they wrote in their 1975 book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record that “the imaginative creak into 4/4 time for the middle eight was a masterstroke,” though that doesn’t take away from how well the Beatles did it.
They certainly started playing it live quickly after discovering it. Welch’s single was issued simultaneously in the US and UK in late September, and Billy Kinsley’s account confirms they were already putting it into their set, or at least trying it out given some reservations within the band, by October 11 a couple of weeks later. What’s more, they performed it on the BBC on October 25, along with both sides of their debut 45 “Love Me Do”/“P.S. I Love You,” at a time when “Love Me Do” was just a small UK hit and no other records by the Beatles were available.
Maybe “A Taste of Honey” was selected for broadcast to demonstrate the Beatles’ broad range and as an attempt to appeal to mainstream pop tastes. McCartney even introduced it as “a lovely tune, great favorite of me Auntie Gin’s” on the Beatles’ BBC session on April 1, 1963. But its inclusion as the only song on their October 25 session they hadn’t released indicates it was already something the group were serious about featuring. They also did it on Granada TV four days later on October 29, and a mediocre-fidelity recording of the last minute and seventeen seconds of that performance is in circulation.
Not too long ago, however, the full October 25 BBC session got into unofficial circulation as an off-air recording whose fidelity’s fair but listenable. “A Taste of Honey” offers a notable difference from the familiar Please Please Me track, as Paul sings a verse about clinging lips not heard in the studio version. He’d also sing this full version, following the lyrics of what Lenny Welch sang in the arrangement upon which the Beatles modeled their cover, on the unreleased version taped in late December at the Star-Club in Hamburg—not the same as the Star-Club one that’s long been available on official releases, if you’re keeping track. Paul’s vocal on this initial BBC version might have just a bit more trace of tremulous slight Elvis Presley-isms than subsequent ones, but otherwise this is quite similar to the Please Please Me take, and quite polished.
In his intro, incidentally, BBC emcee Ray Peters mentions the American pop-jazz vocal group the Hi-Lo’s having done a version, which indeed came out on a July 1962 single. It’s evident, however, that the Beatles must have learned the song from Lenny Welch’s slightly later version, whose arrangement is far more similar to what the Beatles employed.
Also, iIn his introduction to the song (possibly one of the last times it was performed) at a show in Bournemouth, England on August 23, 1963, McCartney mentions it also having been recorded by Acker Bilk. The clarinetist had scored a #1 hit in both the UK and US with “Stranger on the Shore” in 1962. His rather unremarkable easy listening-ish version of “A Taste of Honey” came out on a January 1963 single, which made #16 in the UK. While the Beatles wouldn’t record the song until February, their Welch-based arrangement had already been performed in concert for months, and clearly wasn’t influenced by Bilk’s.
And while Herb Alpert’s swinging instrumental jazz-pop take on the song would be the most popular version, making #7 in the US in late 1965, and the Hollies did a respectable vocal version (possibly influenced by Alpert’s, with its similar jazzy tempo) in early 1966, the one by the Beatles remains the best.
