TRAIN SONG MYSTERY: A HARD DAY´S NIGHT

Flick and friends do not appear on one cue which has been baffling fans for decades — a brief rock-and-roll clip heard when Ringo flips on a portable radio while riding on a train. “That’s not me,” Flick states. 

So who is it? Notes Giles Martin, “My instinct says it’s not The Beatles, but more likely the session players my dad would have gotten in for the soundtrack recording.”

The track is indeed driven by Cattini and likely Weighell, the drummer tells StudioDaily. 

“That’s definitely me," Cattini says. "The guitars, I think, were ‘Big Jim’ Sullivan and Jimmy Page. They did a lot of the rock stuff together in those days, particularly on these kinds of sessions.” Bassist Herbie Flowers, who played on many such recordings, though not these, before playing for the likes of David Bowie, Lou Reed and, later, George Harrison, conjectures the 37-second cue may have simply been a library track recorded by Martin (or another producer).

“It wasn’t uncommon in those days when, if a session was booked for three hours, and musicians completed their work early, to be asked then to record bits and pieces for use as library tracks,” Flowers explains. “George Martin would no doubt have done a lot of that type of recording, where publishers ask composers for 12 short tracks. One might be ‘fear’ or ‘motivation’ or ‘mechanical’ or ‘mad rock and roll,’ like that one. Film companies would snap these things up, because they didn’t have to pay for the recording or any licensing, other than payment to the publisher.”