Shortest Beatles song?
At only 23 seconds, Her Majesty is the shortest Beatles song. It was unlisted on its original vinyl release, bursting into life 14 seconds after what appears to be the end of Side 2 of Abbey Road.
This makes it one the first ‘Easter Eggs’ or hidden tracks, though this had not been the intention.
Throwaway
On the 2nd July, 1969, The Beatles returned to the recording studio to restart the Abbey Road sessions, after an eight week summer break.
Arriving before the others in the early afternoon, Paul McCartney recorded three acoustic takes of what Ian Macdonald describes as a ‘party piece’
Her Majesty had been around at least November, 1968, when Paul had played a version during a Radio Luxembourg interview. Unsure of how it might be used, he asked the engineers to experiment with inserting the fragment into the what they then called Long Medley.
In the studio
The three takes are intriguing. The throat clearing laugh in Take 2 confirms Paul was working in comedy song mode and perhaps the biggest reveal is that final chord. You also sense a slight uncertainty in how to approach the vocal.
The first verse is sung in conversational mode, an Englishman telling a funny story:
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
But she doesn't have a lot to say
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
But she changes from day to day
This then slips into the American pop idiom that Paul's father railed against.
I wanna tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
Someday I'm gonna make her mine, oh yeah
Someday I'm gonna make her mine
In isolation, the abrupt ending also seems to signal doubt, as if acknowledging a weak punchline.
Throwaway
Her Majesty was provisionally placed between Mean Mr Mustard and Polythene Pam in the Long Medley. When this was played back at the end of the month McCartney was dissatisfied:
‘Throw it away,’ he told engineer, John Kurlander. ‘It doesn’t work.’
Abbey Road engineers had been instructed to never discard anything recorded by The Beatles. So Kurlander placed discarded song to the end of the master tape: inserting fourteen seconds of the lead-out tape which creates silence between “The End” and “Her Majesty”.
Later in the month Paul listened to a playback of the Long Medley. Assuming it was finished, he was startled when the tacked-on Her Majesty burst into life.
‘Now that works!’ he declared.
