Since I first saw it last year, I can’t stop rewatching that minute in Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary when Paul McCartney, noodling around on his guitar in front of a yawning George and Ringo, locates the chords and words to Get Back. Accounts of McCartney’s facility for melody – waking up with Yesterday in his head – have long been parables of the creative process, but seeing, in Jackson’s film, a song that all the world is about to know take form in real time is to witness something like a casual miracle.
Speaking to Newsnight on Friday, Ed Sheeran suggested that such footage may become a legal necessity. Of his courtroom victory against claims of plagiarism in his song Shape of You brought by the grime artist Sami Switch, Sheeran noted how these days in the studio he employs a version of CCTV to ensure no hook or bass line is seen to be stolen. “I just film everything,” he said. “We’ve had claims come through on the songs and we go, ‘Well, here’s the footage… You’ll see there’s nothing there’.”
The most famous case of musical borrowing was upheld against George Harrison, whose My Sweet Lord appeared to lift the structure of the 1963 hit He’s So Fine. Sheeran, the most prolific of current melody makers, is desperate, he suggested, not to get to “the George Harrison point where he was scared to touch the piano because he might be touching someone else’s note”. Still, it seems that the kind of big bang euphoria of Get Back appearing out of the ether will be a thing of the past. Songwriters will become like Premier League strikers, waiting for the verdict of VAR before they can celebrate a goal.
The corrections
Over the course of this weekend, the centenary of TS Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land is being celebrated in a festival of music and performance at 22 London churches. Scanning the programme, one crucial component seemed to be neglected. There was no aria or ragtime segment in praise of editors. It’s always worth remembering that were it not for the red-pen interventions of Eliot’s friend, Ezra Pound, the opening line of the poem would not have been “April is the cruellest month”, but “First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place”. And the gospel voices this weekend might have been hymning something titled not The Waste Land but He Do the Police in Different Voices.
The long game
Watching Tiger Woods force himself around the Masters course after his car accident, I remembered commissioning a profile for this paper, exactly 25 years ago, just before he first sauntered out at Augusta. I dug that piece out to reread it, as a kind of before and after. The story quoted Woods’s father, Earl, the retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel: “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” he prophesied. “More than Gandhi?” his interviewer asked. “Yes, because he’s qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He’s the bridge between east and west. He’s the chosen one. The world is just getting a taste of his power.”
Watching Woods’s face a quarter of a century on, you tend, as with all sporting greats in their last act, to see not the enormous triumphs of his career, but the apparent torments of never quite living up to that impossible billing.
Those whom the gods want to destroy first give them parents who believe them to be the second coming..
•Tim Adams is an Observer colmnist
