Party

The closing song on Paul McCartney’s 11th solo album Run Devil Run was a version of ‘Let’s Have A Party’.

The song was written by Jessie Mae Robinson, and recorded by Elvis Presley for the 1957 film Loving You. It was released as a UK with the title ‘Party’, and peaked at number two on the singles chart.

Whenever we used to try and get the words, we’d get stuck on the verse… ‘Never kissed a bear, never kissed a goon’. We could never get it. At the end, that’s me going ‘I’m not giving up man.’ It seemed like a good idea to end the album on that.

The Beatles played ‘Party’ during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions on 31 January 1969.

‘Party’ was recorded on 4 March 1999 at Abbey Road Studios. Also completed during the session was ‘What It Is’.

‘Let’s Have A Party’ was from, Elvis did it, I think in Loving You, the second movie. And it’s just a great song.

As kids we could never quite get the words. And there was no authority you could consult. It was just us, thankfully. It was kind of nice it was just us. But, there was, ‘I never kissed a bear.’ And we always used to think it was ‘I never kissed a goo’. We didn’t know what a goo was, but that’s what it sounded like. So we were always doing, ‘Never kissed a bear, never kissed a goo, like a chicken-chicken in the middle of the room, let’s have a party’. So when it came to it, I was, I kept singing, ‘never kissed a goo’. And all the guys went, ‘What is that?’ We looked it up and it said, ‘Never kissed a goon’, which I don’t think is a whole lot more sensible, either. ‘I never kissed a bear, I never kissed a goon’. Well, I’m not sure about the story, the derivation of that. Again, some great archivists will be able to tell us what happened there. But I just like the madness of the words, you know.