How Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison inspired the "lost" Beatles songs

20 November 2025, 12:12 | Updated: 20 November 2025, 15:20

Elvis and The Big O inspired The Beatles from beyond the grave.

Despite being one of the most groundbreaking bands of all time, The Beatles were certainly influenced by what came before.

"Before Elvis, there was nothing," said John Lennon, and The King was certainly a crucial part of what made the Fab Four what they were. A little later on, Roy Orbison was also a key influence.

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While The Beatles only met Elvis Presley one time, they toured the UK with Roy Orbison in 1963, racking up 21 shows together.

Years after the split, George Harrison and Roy Orbison were both members of The Traveling Wilburys supergroup, alongside Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty.

And when the three surviving Beatles reunited in the mid-1990s for the Anthology project, it was a bit of recent Wilburys history that inspired one of the most shocking bits of the Fab Four story.

Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Star (aka "the Threetles") were originally planning on putting together some incidental music for the Anthology TV series.

Watch the trailer for The Beatles Anthology

But they ended up doing something much more ambitious: working with some old John Lennon demos to reunite all four Beatles.

'Free As A Bird' was based on an unreleased Lennon demo from 1977 and 'Real Love' built around a 1980 demo. Both songs were produced by the band with Harrison's pal Lynne.

The band couldn't finish off 'Now and Then', but eventually combined Lennon's tape from 1977 with their own work in 1995 and eventual finishing touches in 2021 and 2022.

In the newly produced Episode 9 of Anthology – a meta bonus episode about the reunion tacked on to the original series for its Disney+ remaster and re-release – we found out how Orbison and Presley played a role in inspiring the "new" songs.

It turns out that after Orbison's sad death in 1988, aged just 52, they toyed with the idea of making up for his loss by using a bit of Elvis Presley vocals on one of the track.

In the end, the Wilburys (including Harrison and Lynne), released The Traveling Wilburys Vol 3 (their second album) as a four-piece..

"[We] talked to his estate," Harrison said of the Presley idea in 1995, with the quote resurfacing in Anthology Episode 9.

"They loved the idea of Elvis being in the Wilburys, so they gave us the rights to a song. The idea was to put Elvis onto a multitrack machine and take away the backing.

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"We’d all sing this song and when it came to the chorus, we’d bring up the voice of 'Aaron Wilbury'."

He added: "We were going to do that, but we never did because at that point I thought it seemed a bit too gimmicky.

"I was talking to Yoko, however, and telling her this idea, and she said, 'I think I’ve got a tape of John'.

"And I said, 'We'll do that with John and make a new song'. So later she dug around and brought this tape, and, really, that’s how it got done."

The Beatles - Free As A Bird (Official Video)

"She was there with Sean," Paul later told Q magazine. "She played us a couple of tracks.

"There were two newies on mono cassettes which he did at home... I checked it out with Sean, because I didn't want him to have a problem with it.

"He said, 'Well, it'll be weird hearing a dead guy on lead vocal. But give it a try'."

'Free As A Bird' was released in December 1995 and reached number two in the UK singles charts, only kept off the top by Michael Jackson's 'Earth Song'. 'Real Love' got to number four, and nearly 30 years later, 'Now and Then' got to number one.

The Beatles Anthology comes to Disney+ on November 26, with episode 9 available to stream from November 28.