It can be a strange old relationship between artist and producer. Many of the rap songs over the last 10 years or so can have up 40 producers listed, Christ knows what each one does! This was unheard of when bands recorded proper songs in proper studios rather that assembled something on a laptop at your own leisure. Can you imagine so many producers crammed into any studio and the endless arguments and rows over who does what and who has the final say. A perfect example of a one on one act who have complete trust and faith in each other would be someone like David Bowie and Tony Visconti or George Martin and the Beatles. Then, for whatever reason, there is a change of producer and one doesn’t like something the other one does and tensions build and massive fall outs can occur. This week’s suggestion is one such case.

Paul McCartney bought himself a farmhouse on the isle of Mull in Scotland as a retreat and subsequently told everyone about it in the 1977 nine-week Christmas number one. This is where he found inspiration to write The Long and Winding Road. Not that there is such a road running through the island, but there is nearby. On that very same day, Paul also wrote Let It Be. That’s a good day’s work.

Paul once said, “I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles. I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration.” Soon after, Alistair Taylor, the general manager at Apple Records, saw Paul McCartney sitting at a piano at three in the morning in the Abbey Road studios: “He was picking out a melody and I said, ‘I like that, it’s a fabulous melody, and he said, ‘It’s just an idea’. He told the engineer to switch on the tape and he recorded The Long And Winding Road then and there: it was full of la-la’s as he’d only written a few lines, but it was quite fantastic.” The road in question is the B842 that stretches from Kintyre, down the east coast to Campbeltown. Once the demo was done it was sent to various prospective candidates including Tom Jones and, Cilla Black. Thank God she didn’t. The McCartney demo featured only Paul on piano and John Lennon fumbling about, badly on bass. Tom said no because his then-current single Without Love was riding the top 10, but he did eventually record it and, speaking with Media Wales in 2012, Jones said, “I saw him Paul McCartney in a club called Scotts Of St. James on Jermyn Street in London. I said to him when are you going to write me a song then Paul? He said, OK, I will then. Within a couple of weeks he sent a song around to my house, which was The Long And Winding Road, but the condition was that I could do it but it had to be my next single.”

Every Beatles album was produced by George Martin with the exception of Let It Be which was originally going to be called Get Back. Although he was initially offered the chance, Martin turned it down because, a) he was fed up with the Beatles’ constant squabbling and, b) they seem to be rejecting his advice and ideas which they had always welcomes. So Glyn Johns was given the job initially but things didn’t work out at all and so Phil Spector was drafted in.

Paul recorded the song during the filming of Let It Be and once finished they were given to Spector. Spector was known for his ‘Wall of Sound’ which can all be heard on songs by the Crystals, the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers to name a few. He created that sound by adding instruments and backing singers as well as layering the tracks to give them a much fuller, dense sound. Once he was in possession of Paul’s song, he brought in the Mike Sammes singers and gave it an orchestral backing. It wasn’t, as many people think, ‘Spectorised’ because it didn’t sound like what you would hear on a Crystals or Ronettes song. But, Paul did not like it one bit. He called it ‘tasteless’ and still, to this day, believes Spector butchered his simple ballad. He refused to have it released as a single in the UK and tried to get Glyn Johns’ original produced recording released, but in the time Paul wanted this all done, the label said it was impractical. He couldn’t, however, stop it being released in the States where it went on to top the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks and became their biggest-selling single, topping six million copies.

The song certainly became a standard and with Macca blocking it’s release in the UK, the field was open for all and sundry to cover and they did; Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Ritchie Havens, George Benson, Diana Ross, Leo Sayer, Peter Frampton, George Michael, Olivia Newton-John and Billy Ocean have all given it a good go, but, astonishingly, only two versions have ever charted, one in 1970 that only just scraped into the top 40 for a little known singer called Ray Morgan, then, 32 years later during the later stages of Pop Idol, Will Young and Gareth Gates sang The Long And Winding Road together, and the reception meant that it was always likely to be a single. The chart also listed Gareth Gates’ version of Elvis Presley’s 1969 hit, Suspicious Minds. The third track on the CD single was Will Young’s version of Jackie Wilson’s I Get The Sweetest Feeling, but it was not listed on the chart, although it was one of his strongest performances on Pop Idol.

The Gates/Young version went to number one and spent two weeks there. The track appeared on Young’s album, From Now On, which also topped the UK album charts and, amongst other things, included a new composition What’s In Goodbye’ by Burt Bacharach and Cathy Dennis. It was surprising that Bacharach should be writing for someone who was unknown a year earlier, but he enjoyed the Pop Idol concept and participated in the US version, American Idol.