In the early 1960s, The Beatles were writing so many songs that they couldn’t record them all. Even though they were responsible for roughly two albums a year owed to their label EMI, John Lennon and Paul McCartney still found time to give away songs that later became hits.
Most prominently, McCartney worked as a songwriter for the pop duo Peter and Gordon, a relationship that arose because McCartney was dating Peter Asher’s sister, Jane Asher, at the time. Their number one hit ‘A World Without Love’ was a McCartney composition that Lennon had rejected for The Beatles. Artists like Cilla Black and Tommy Quickly also managed to get their hands on material that didn’t pass The Beatles quality test. But if anyone benefited from the deluge of Lennon-McCartney material, it was Billy J. Kramer.
Kramer was another one of the acts managed by The Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Signed to the same label and working with producer George Martin meant that Kramer and his backing group, The Dakotas, had incredibly close access to The Beatles’ inner circle. When a song was rejected by the Fab Four, Kramer was often there to grab it. That’s how he managed to record ‘I’ll Be On My Way’, a McCartney song that Lennon wasn’t fond of.
“That’s Paul, through and through,” John Lennon told David Sheff during one of his final interviews in 1980. “Doesn’t it sound like him? Tra la la la la [laughs]. Yeah, that’s Paul on the voids of driving through the country.”
The Beatles themselves never recorded ‘I’ll Be On My Way’ in the studio, only trying it out a single time for a 1963 radio session with the BBC. The song was likely written in 1961, and even though it was played on a regular basis before the band was signed to a record label, ‘I’ll Be On My Way’ wasn’t performed at either The Beatles’ audition at Decca or their first EMI session, making it a relic of the past when Kramer dusted it off in 1963.
“It’s a little bit too June-moon for me, but these were very early songs and they worked out quite good,” Paul McCartney said in Barry Miles’ book Many Years From Now. The BBC version was later released in 1994 on the Live At The BBC compilation. Kramer’s version went all the way to number two in the UK as the B-side to their debut single, a version of The Beatles’ ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’. The track was prevented from hitting number one by The Beatles’ ‘From Me To You’.
