The Beatles song John Lennon dismissed as a 'throwaway piece of garbage'

9 June 2026, 14:53

John Lennon was sometimes especially critical of his own material.

When he was in The Beatles and beyond, John Lennon was known to have strong opinions and a pretty sharp tongue.

And while he was happy to stick the boot in to his former bandmate Paul McCartney when he felt he deserved it, he could also be pretty self-critical on occasion too.

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So not only did he call his own 'Run For Your Life' his "least favourite Beatles song", he even dismissed one of his contributions to The Beatles' most acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

That song was 'Good Morning Good Morning'.

"'Good Morning' is mine," he confirmed of the song, credited of course to the Lennon-McCartney partnership.

"It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought," he told David Sheff in the interview that would later be published as All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Good Morning Good Morning (Remastered 2009)

"The ‘Good morning, good morning’ was from a Kellogg’s cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over and then I wrote the song."

The original Kellogg's jingle went: "Good morning, good morning / The best to you each morning / Sunshine breakfast, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes..."

Lennon later told Rolling Stone in the last interview before his death of the song: "Oh, that was just an exercise.

"I only had about a week to write songs for Pepper. 'Good Morning Good Morning' was a Kellogg's Corn Flakes ad at the time – that's how desperate I was for a song."

1967 Cornflakes Good Morning Advert

But despite Lennon's self-deprecation, Paul McCartney suggested there was a little more going on with the song than a Corn Flakes advert.

"John was feeling trapped in suburbia and was going through some problems with [his first wife] Cynthia," he is quoted as saying in Barry Miles' Many Years From Now.

"It was about his boring life at the time – there’s a reference in the lyrics to 'nothing to do' and ‘meet the wife’.

"There was an afternoon TV soap called Meet The Wife that John watched, he was that bored, but I think he was also starting to get alarm bells."

Good Morning Good Morning (Take 8)

And The Beatles cared enough to not just tape eight basic takes of the song (on February 8, 1967), with vocals and bass added on later (February 16), but also to take the time to overdub some brass from Sounds Incorporated (on March 13).

John was worried that the horns sounded too "straight", according to engineer Richard Lush, so he layered on the effects (flanging, limiting and compression) to make it sound as weird as he wanted.

Even after that, John returned to the song to re-record the vocals and Paul added a new guitar solo in a later session (on March 28).

Good Morning Good Morning (Take 1 / Instrumental Breakdown)

And the cacophony of animal noises at the end (taken from EMI sound effect tapes titled Animal and Bees and Fox-hunt) were added on March 29 and weren't nearly as random as they may have seemed.

"John said to me during one of the breaks that he wanted to have the sound of animals escaping and that each successive animal should be capable of frightening or devouring its predecessor!" said engineer Geoff Emerick, quoted in Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.

"So those are not just random effects, there was actually a lot of thought put into all that."

So much for throwaway.