Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

• 1. Introduction

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  "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is a song the Beatles nearly tore themselves apart making. Paul McCartney wrote it in Rishikesh, India, in early 1968, while he and his bandmates were studying Transcendental Meditation. Prudence Farrow, a fellow student who had become so absorbed in meditation she had retreated to her room, recalled McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison playing the song outside her door, trying to lure her out.

  What emerged from that gentle, breezy beginning became one of the most contentious recordings in the Beatles' history. A recording engineer quit his job over it. Lennon called it "granny music shit." Harrison embedded his contempt for it inside the lyrics of another song on the same album. And yet it topped charts across multiple countries, inspired a rush of cover versions, and decades later McCartney was still playing it at Glastonbury.

  How did a cheerful ska tune, built around a borrowed phrase from a Nigerian conga player, become so divisive? And why, despite everything, has it refused to go away?

• 2. A Phrase Not His Own

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  Jimmy Scott-Emuakpor was a London-based Nigerian musician who worked as a conga player and fronted his own band, which he named Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. In his stage act, Scott would call out "Ob la di", the audience would respond "Ob la da", and he would then conclude: "Life goes on." Scott was an acquaintance of McCartney, and the phrase passed between them in conversation.

  McCartney used it as the title and chorus of the song he was writing, describing it as "just an expression." Scott disagreed. According to Scott's widow, he argued the phrase was not a common expression at all but was used exclusively by the Scott-Emuakpor family. After the album's release in November 1968, Scott tried to claim a composing credit.

  The dispute dragged on painfully. McCartney complained bitterly about it to his bandmates during filmed rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969, saying Scott had accused him of stealing the phrase. He was also angry that the British press sided with Scott. Later that year, Scott wrote to the Beatles from Brixton Prison, where he was awaiting trial for failing to pay maintenance to his ex-wife, asking them to cover his legal bills. McCartney agreed to pay, on the condition that Scott drop his claim to a co-writer's credit.

  The character Desmond in the lyrics had his own source: reggae singer Desmond Dekker, who had recently toured the United Kingdom and whose name McCartney borrowed for the opening line, "Desmond has a barrow in the market-place."

• 3. Studio in Pieces

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  The Beatles recorded demos at George Harrison's Esher home in Surrey in May 1968, after returning from India. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" was one of 27 songs taped there, with McCartney performing alone on acoustic guitar, double-tracking his vocal in a way that created an unintentional echo.

  Formal sessions began in July and stretched across several days. The first completed version, recorded between the 3rd and the 5th of July, featured Scott on congas alongside a trio of saxophonists. McCartney rejected it and insisted the band start over. Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn noted that in doing so, the group had created what he described as a first: the first time they had deliberately recruited session musicians and then abandoned the recording entirely.

  Work on a new version began on the 8th of July. Lennon, who openly declared he detested the song, arrived back at the studio that day under the influence of marijuana after having left earlier. Frustrated at being asked to keep working on the same track, he sat down at the piano and hammered out the opening chords louder and faster than before. Ian MacDonald, in his analysis of the Beatles' recordings, describes this as a "mock music-hall" attack on the keys. Lennon insisted this was the correct way to play the song. It stuck, and became the version the Beatles actually released.

  McCartney still wasn't satisfied. During the afternoon session on the 9th of July, the band cut another basic track, which Lewisohn suggests may have featured McCartney on drums rather than Ringo Starr. McCartney then reversed course and accepted the previous day's take as the foundation, returning to it for overdubs that evening.

  The tension broke openly the following day. McCartney rebuffed producer George Martin when Martin offered suggestions for the vocal part, telling him: "Well you come down and sing it." Geoff Emerick, the band's recording engineer, recalled Martin, usually composed under pressure, shouting back: "Then bloody sing it again! I give up. I just don't know any better how to help you." Emerick quit his job with the Beatles the next day. He later cited that exchange, and the toxic atmosphere that had surrounded the White Album sessions generally, as among his reasons for leaving.

  One error survived into the final version. In the last verse, McCartney accidentally sang "Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face" instead of "Molly", and gave Molly a line that belonged to the children. The other Beatles found the mistake charming and insisted it stay. Harrison and Lennon can be heard calling out "arm" and "leg" between two of those lines.

• 4. Harrison's Rebuttal

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  George Harrison had made his feelings about the song known throughout the sessions. He found another outlet for them inside the White Album itself. His track "Savoy Truffle" contains the lines: "We all know Ob-la-di-bla-da / But can you show me where you are?" Music journalist Robert Fontenot has described this as Harrison's way of embedding his low opinion of McCartney's song directly into the album that contained it.

  The reference was not accidental and not affectionate. Lennon and Harrison were united in dismissing the song, even as McCartney poured days of studio time into perfecting it. The friction between McCartney's pop sensibility and Lennon's avant-garde ambitions ran through the entire White Album. Lennon's insistence on including his eight-minute piece "Revolution 9" was the pull in one direction; McCartney's ska-inflected singalongs were the pull in the other. Ian Fortnam, writing in Classic Rock magazine, grouped "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" with "Martha My Dear", "Rocky Raccoon" and "Honey Pie" as the sweetening McCartney offered in response to that tension.

• 5. Charts and Covers

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  "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" was released on The Beatles on the 22nd of November 1968. It topped singles charts in West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Japan over 1968-69. In Australia it was part of a double A-side single backed by Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and it sold over 50,000 copies there, qualifying for a Gold Disc. In 1969, Lennon and McCartney received an Ivor Novello Award for the song.

  The Beatles chose not to release the song as a single in the United Kingdom or the United States. McCartney had wanted to, but his bandmates vetoed it. That gap in the market triggered a scramble. Several acts rushed to record the song, hoping to claim a hit in those large commercial territories.

  The most successful was the Scottish pop band The Marmalade, whose version reached number one on the UK Singles Chart in January 1969. It was the first time a Scottish artist had topped that chart. Their recording sold around half a million copies in the UK and reached a million globally by April 1969. During a TV appearance on BBC One's Top of the Pops, four of the five members wore kilts; the English-born drummer dressed as a redcoat instead. Comedian Benny Hill later name-checked the Marmalade alongside other bands in a sketch about an over-requested radio disc jockey.

  Two other acts found success in Europe. The Bedrocks, a West Indian band from Leeds, reached number 20 on the Record Retailer chart in 1968. At Twickenham Studios in January 1969, McCartney and his then-girlfriend Linda Eastman both said they preferred the Bedrocks' version to any of the others, including a recent recording by Arthur Conley. The Spectrum reached number 19 on the German singles chart that same year.

  When Capitol Records finally issued the song as a single in the United States in November 1976, it peaked at number 49 on the Billboard Hot 100. The sleeves were white and individually numbered, echoing the original White Album packaging. The B-side was "Julia".

  A discarded early version of the track, with Scott on congas, was scheduled to appear as the B-side of a "Leave My Kitten Alone" single planned for January 1985. That release was canceled when the broader Sessions album project was shelved. The take sat in the vaults for eleven more years before appearing on the Anthology 3 compilation in 1996.

• 6. Ridicule and Resilience

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  Critical opinion on the song has always split sharply. Jann Wenner, reviewing the White Album for Rolling Stone, called it "fun music for a fun song about fun" and asked, "Who needs answers?" A reviewer in Record Mirror praised it as the album's most pleasant and best-recorded track, admiring the piano and drum sound. The NME's Alan Smith called it a "great personal favourite" and predicted it would be a hit for someone.

  Nik Cohn, writing in The New York Times, saw it differently. His review of the White Album was unfavourable generally, and he singled out "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "mock-West Indies" that lost out to its originals and sounded stale. Ian MacDonald, whose writing on the Beatles remains influential, called it one of the most spontaneous-sounding tracks on the album and also the most commercial, while also describing it as filled with "desperate levity" and "trite by McCartney's standards."

  By 2004, the ridicule had become formalised. Blender magazine included the song in a list it titled "50 Worst Songs Ever!" An online poll run by Mars voted it the worst song of all time. In 2012, the NME's website editor Luke Lewis called it "the least convincing cod-reggae skanking this side of the QI theme tune." That same year, a poll run by The Daily Telegraph to find the worst Beatles song placed it second, behind only "Revolution 9".

  McCartney's response to all of this was to keep playing it. The first live performance of the song by any of the Beatles came on the 2nd of December 2009, when McCartney opened a European tour in Hamburg, the city where the Beatles had built their act in the early 1960s. Author Howard Sounes notes that despite Lennon's long history of contempt for the track, it went down well there. McCartney kept it in his set lists through 2012, performed it outside Buckingham Palace for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and played it at San Francisco's Outside Lands festival on the 9th of August 2013. He brought it back for his 2013-15 Out There! tour, his 2016-17 One on One tour, a concert at Grand Central Terminal on the 7th of September 2018, and his headline set at Glastonbury in 2022.