Lady Madonna / The Inner Light

“Lady Madonna / The Inner Light” was the seventeenth UK single from The Beatles.

From Wikipedia:

“Lady Madonna” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. In March 1968 it was released as a mono non-album single, backed with “The Inner Light“. The song was recorded on 3 and 6 February 1968, before the Beatles left for India, and its boogie-woogie style signalled a more conventional approach to writing and recording for the group following the psychedelic experimentation of the previous two years.

This single was the last release by the band on Parlophone in the United Kingdom, where it reached number 1 for the two weeks beginning 27 March, and Capitol Records in the United States, where it debuted at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending 23 March and reached number 4 from the week ending 20 April through the week ending 4 May. Subsequent releases, starting with “Hey Jude” in August 1968, were released on their own label, Apple Records, under EMI distribution, until the late 1970s, when Capitol and Parlophone re-released old material. The song’s first album appearance in stereo was on the 1970 collection Hey Jude. […]

In Britain, Parlophone issued “Lady Madonna” backed by “The Inner Light” on 15 March 1968, with the catalogue number R 5675. The single was released three days later in the United States, as Capitol 2138. One of the promo clips was aired by the BBC on the 14 March edition of Top of the Pops and then on Alan Freeman’s All Systems Freeman the following day, and in the US on ABC-TV’s The Hollywood Palace on 30 March. In Everett’s description, the single was “at the forefront of a spring–summer 1968 rock-and-roll revival in the United Kingdom”, which included UK-exclusive reissues of singles by Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Little Richard.

Among contemporary reviews of the single, Billboard magazine described “Lady Madonna” as a “powerful blues rocker” while Cash Box‘s reviewer wrote: “Take one step back, the Beatles ease their progressive pace with this knocking rhythm side that features Ringo Starr in a rare vocal showing with hard-rock and kazoo orking and lyrics that view working class hardship with a pinch of salt.” Record World said it “is terrific rock and roll and pungent social comment.” Chris Welch of Melody Maker expressed doubts about the song, saying: “Best bit is the piano intro, then you can have fun wondering why Paul[‘s singing] sounds like Ringo … then go out and buy another record.” Welch concluded: “I can’t really see this being a hit, not when there’s competition from the likes of Four Jacks and a Jill and Kay Starr.” Time magazine recognised the Beatles as the leaders of an “upsurge” of renewed interest in 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and said that the band had re-engaged with the “simple hard-driving style they left behind in Liverpool”. Author Bernard Gendron, paraphrasing a contention of the Time writers – who he says were ahead of the US rock press in recognising this trend – writes that by preceding the Rolling Stones’ “similarly retrospective ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash'”, “Lady Madonna” was possibly “the first single by an elite rock band to signal the ‘return to roots'”.

“Lady Madonna” topped the Record Retailer chart (subsequently adopted as the UK Singles Chart) for two weeks, although on the national chart compiled by Melody Maker it peaked at number 2. It was the first single by the Beatles not to make number 1 on Melody Maker‘s chart since the band’s 1962 debut, “Love Me Do“. In America, “Lady Madonna” peaked at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the first Beatles single not to top that chart since “Eleanor Rigby” in 1966, and number 2 on the Cash Box Top 100. Ian MacDonald considers this relative lack of success to be significant, and he described the song as “a moderately entertaining let-down after the psychedelic heights of early 1967”. In Jonathan Gould’s opinion, the song is a “witty, powerful, yet willfully inconsequential track” with “all the makings of a classic Beatle B-side”, whereas ideally the lead side of the single should have been a Lennon composition. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone considers that, at this stage in their career, “the Beatles didn’t need to push – they could have hit #1 with a tape of themselves blowing their noses”, which, he suggests, “would have been catchier” than “Lady Madonna” and the band’s previous single, “Hello, Goodbye“. Music critic Tim Riley has similarly dismissed the song as a “trifle” and “something they could do with their left hand”.

Writing in 1988, Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn described “Lady Madonna” as a “terrific” single that was “curiously overlooked today by those analysing the group’s output”. In his song review for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger attributes its standing as one of the band’s less-celebrated singles partly to its failure to match the chart success usually associated with the Beatles, but he considers it an “excellent song”. He adds that the lyrics, in their implication of the protagonist as a prostitute, are “more intriguing than anything Fats Domino was likely to come up with”, while the Beatles’ imitation of brass instruments was done “effectively and wittily”. Writing for Mojo in 2003, John Harris bemoaned that the song was overlooked as a key recording in the Beatles’ development and “one of the foundation stones” for the late 1960s “roots-rock revival”. He identified it as the precedent for the Rolling Stones’ return to form on Beggars Banquet, for Eric Clapton to exchange Cream’s “virtuoso head-rock” for a musical path that resulted in the formation of Derek and the Dominos, and for Chuck Berry and Little Richard to assume “the rarified pedestals where the British Invasion groups had originally placed them”. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked “Lady Madonna” at number 86 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Beatles Songs”. […]

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