The Beatnix - It's Four You (1998)

I'm a huge fan of the Beatles. They're my favorite musical artist, by far. So I think it's a tragedy that there are a bunch of songs they wrote in the 1960s that they never properly recorded.

Luckily, there have been several different musical attempts to rectify this. The most famous is the 2003 album "Lost Songs of Lennon and McCartney." A group of musicians led by Graham Parker and Kate Pierson (of the B-52's) perform 17 of the songs that the Beatles gave to other artists.

I like that one, but my favorite album along those lines is this one, "It's Four You," by the Beatnix. They're an Australian band that's existed since 1980 and does nothing but Beatles covers. Apparently, they're still going strong as a Beatles tribute band. What I like about this album is that they try to do the songs as close to the Beatles style as they can manage. So it's a bit like discovering a lost Beatles album (the vast majority of it in their early style). It's long out of print and goes for big bucks on eBay, so I think it's okay to post it here.

Regarding the songs, John Lennon and Paul McCartney liked giving some of their songs to other artists for various reasons. Generally speaking, they wanted to help other struggling artists make it. For instance, McCartney was seriously romantically involved with a woman named Jane Asher for a few years, and her brother Peter Asher was part of the vocal duo Peter and Gordon. Plus, they were managed by Brian Epstein, who also managed the Beatles. So McCartney gave that duo the songs "A World Without Love," "Nobody I Know," "Woman," and "I Don't Want to See You Again." The first one was a number one hit, and the next two were top 20 hits. Other artists like Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas or Cilla Black or the Fourmost were also managed by Epstein, the same man who managed the Beatles, and they were given songs to help their careers too.

In a way, these songs were considered the Beatles' rejects, but that's not really the case. In my opinion, nearly all of them are really good songs, worthy of being on Beatles albums. Nearly all of them were hits, with the exceptions of "One and One Is Two," "I Don't Want to See You Again," "Tip of My Tongue," and "I'll Be on My Way." In fact, McCartney wondered if it was just the fact that the songs had "Lennon-McCartney" in the credits that made them hits, so he had the songwriting credit for "Woman" go to the pseudonym "Bernard Webb," and it was a hit anyway.

Out of the 19 Beatles songs on this album, a bunch of them actually were recorded by the Beatles at some point:
If You've Got Trouble
Hello Little Girl
Like Dreamers Do
Step Inside Love
I'll Be on My Way
Love of the Loved

In addition, either Lennon or McCartney made solo demos of these songs that have been officially released or widely bootlegged:
I'm in Love
One and One Is Two
Bad to Me
Goodbye

Furthermore, McCartney made demos of "It's for You" and "A World without Love," but only snippets of less than 30 seconds have been publicly released so far.

So that means 13 of the 19 Beatles songs here either were never done by the Beatles at all or were only done in a very different solo demo form. The odds are that hearing the Beatnix doing them in Beatles style is as close as we'll ever get to hearing the Beatles do these songs.

Note that there are at least another 20 songs the Beatles wrote between 1956 and 1962 that are even more obscure. Some of these include "I Lost My Little Girl," "You'll Be Mine," "In Spite of All the Danger," "Cayenne," "Cry for a Shadow," and "Thinking of Linking." There are still other songs the Beatles gave away or cowrote, such as "Come and Get It" (a big hit for Badfinger), "Catswalk," "Badge" (cowritten by George Harrision and done by Cream), "My Dark Hour" (cowritten by McCartney and done by the Steve Miller Band), and others. On top of that, there are still more songs written after 1962 but never released, such as "Carnival of Light," "Etcetera," "Watching Rainbows," and so on.

By the way, I've added one extra bonus song. As far as I know, the only album the Beatnix ever recorded was this one, but they have one other song that's been officially released. It's a version of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," but it's done in the style of the Beatles circa 1963! It's quite amusing. This was part of a 1992 project in Australia by a wide variety of musicians to record "Stairway to Heaven" in vastly different styles. An album was made of it called "The Money or the Gun: Stairways to Heaven," and this extra song comes from that. The whole album is amusing and entertaining, though extremely obscure.

01 I'm in Love (Beatnix)
02 Nobody I Know (Beatnix)
03 If You've Got Trouble (Beatnix)
04 It's for You (Beatnix)
05 Hello Little Girl (Beatnix)
06 Like Dreamers Do (Beatnix)
07 Step Inside Love (Beatnix)
08 Woman (Beatnix)
09 That Means a Lot (Beatnix)
10 I Don't Want to See You Again (Beatnix)
11 One and One Is Two (Beatnix)
12 Bad to Me (Beatnix)
13 Tip of My Tongue (Beatnix)
14 I'll Be on My Way (Beatnix)
15 A World without Love (Beatnix)
16 From a Window (Beatnix)
17 I'll Keep You Satisfied (Beatnix)
18 Love of the Loved (Beatnix)
19 Goodbye (Beatnix)
20 Stairway to Heaven (Beatnix)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15124400/Beatnx_1998_ItsFurYou_atse.zip.html

This cover is the exact cover of the album.