(Credits: Far Out / Eva Rinaldi)
Fri 20 March 2026 19:00, UK
There are plenty of songs that were hits back in their day that absolutely wouldn’t fly in the modern world due to how attitudes have changed, and while you might think of The Beatles as having been squeaky clean in this respect, they certainly did test the limit of acceptability.
‘Run For Your Life’ is a bit gross with its insinuation that bad things are coming for the ‘little girl’ if she ends up cheating on the protagonist that John Lennon assumes the position of, but ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ is a little worse with its cringeworthy opening line of “well she was just 17, you know what I mean,” which paints Paul McCartney in perhaps the most grim fashion for the way he’s looking at a young woman.
I’m sure if you sought out their opinions on these particular instances in retrospect, they’d feel a little bit of remorse, and McCartney has certainly denounced some of the creepier instances of lyrics that he sang with the band during their unstoppable run in the 1960s.
However, that didn’t stop their former drummer, Ringo Starr, from making the ill-informed decision to cover a pretty problematic and predatory song for his 1973 album, Ringo, which is perhaps one of the most grotesque displays of lyricism that he’s ever undertaken. While with the Beatles, he was known for contributing vocals to some of the band’s more whimsical material, such as ‘Yellow Submarine’ or ‘Octopus’s Garden’, but once the spotlight was firmly placed on him after their split, he made one foul song choice that haunted him for years.
On this particular solo venture, he ended up doing a cover of ‘You’re Sixteen’ by the Sherman Brothers and released it as a single, but he probably should have noticed there and then that it wasn’t a good idea to be singing a song like this at the age of 33.
He tried to claim several years later, in 2007, that it wasn’t his suggestion, and that he regrets it now, but at the same time, he still agreed to commit to performing and recording the song, which made him somewhat complicit in its rather abhorrent message.
In the liner notes of his Photograph: The Very Best of Ringo Starr compilation, he claimed it was the decision of his then-producer that convinced him to do the song. “Richard Perry presented the idea of covering this fifties song, and it just worked really well. If you’re open, you try things. But I can’t do that song onstage anymore. I can’t stand there singing those lyrics about a girl being 16.”
While he was evidently remorseful for having made the decision, he then recounted a time when he performed it live and realised the impact of the creepy lyrics. “I did it in Texas, and part of the act is I would go up and point at a woman and sing ‘You’re Sixteen’ and then signal like, ‘Well, maybe not.’ This woman stood up like she wanted to stab me. I couldn’t look that direction the whole night.”
It’s hardly a great excuse for having seen beyond the lurid lyrical content at the time, but at least he’s gone on to realise that there’s no good time or place to be singing a song about preying on teenagers. However, the fact that he still chose to include it on his greatest hits compilation does raise a few eyebrows, as the song isn’t exactly okay in this context either.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE
