Graph showing singles UK sales figures up to including Paperback Writer. Shows how easy it is to reach different interpretations of figures. While it is indeed their worst selling single since Please Please Me, it's not dramatically less than many other singles (AHDN for instance). It would be just as easy to tag it as an average (by Beatle standards) performance. We also made a deal of it not entering at #1. It in fact entered at #2, kept off the top spot by Sinatra's Strangers In The Night, but went to #1 the next week. (though it fell away far quicker than any preceeding single).
I'm liking the graph. Thanks for that.
Do you have one that includes all their UK singles - could you maybe post it in a new thread?
It would be interesting to discuss the sales of singles relative to each other and I don't want to hijack this thread by starting it here!
Getting back to the PW thread ....
I think it is too much of a generalisation to say that McCartney was the "third-party" writer while Lennon was always first-person.
I do think Macca is capable of writing very personal songs just like John - I find "Here Today" is as touching and personal as anything on Plastic Ono Band, for example. There probably aren't too many songs where one man says "I love you" to another man like that.
And he is criticised for writing "Silly Love Songs" yet surely it doesn't get much more personal than telling someone you love them. Lennon said he didn't like writing love songs in the Beatlemania years and he would just churn them out, which is maybe why McCartney's love songs are more enduring - there was more of himself in them.
I don't really see how we learn anything about either John or Paul from PW or Rain. Neither of them strikes me as a personal song.
