On this day in 1968, America got "Hey Jude" — seven minutes and eleven seconds of it, the longest single to go to number one in Britain to that point. First record out on Apple, so the label was brand new and the song was already enormous.
Here's the bit I love. They cut it at Trident, off St Anne's Court in Soho, and Paul is at the piano and Ringo has slipped out for a moment, and the story goes he came tiptoeing back behind him just in time to fall in on the drums. Drummers: never where you left them, always exactly where you need them. Then George Martin brought in thirty-six orchestral players for the coda, and they were asked to clap and sing along on the na-na-nas as well, for a bit extra. Most of them did it. One, I gather, would rather not have, which I find rather magnificent — a man with standards, at midnight, in a basement.
And the last four minutes are just that fade, going round and round. Received wisdom then was that radio wouldn't touch anything past three minutes. Radio touched it. Nine weeks at the top in the States. Whoever was sitting behind the glass at Trident that night got a sound out of that piano you can still hear the wood in.
Otis, someone with a great deal of time and a working pencil has counted the na-na-nas in that coda: the refrain comes round about nineteen times before the fade takes it away. (Which means the orchestra clapped through roughly four minutes of it, in a basement, at night, on a Sunday's worth of goodwill.)
Otis, the promo film is the other half of it — Michael Lindsay-Hogg put them on a soundstage with a proper orchestra, then let a crowd come forward and press right up around the piano for the coda. You can watch the audience arrive in the shot, which is my favourite thing a camera can do.