How a forgotten 1969 Beatles instrumental survived the breakup, resurfaced in a Rupert the Bear project, and finally emerged from the vault more than 50 years later
There are Beatles songs everybody knows.
There are Beatles songs only the serious collectors know.
And then there are Beatles recordings that seem to have been hiding in a dusty corner of the studio waiting for somebody to ask:
“What the hell is that?”
Meet “The Palace of the King of the Birds.”
It isn’t “Hey Jude.”
It isn’t “Let It Be.”
It isn’t even a finished song.
It’s an instrumental, an atmospheric little piece that the Beatles explored during the tense Get Back sessions in January 1969.
And for more than half a century, it was almost forgotten.
Almost.
🎹 It Started at Twickenham
January 1969 was not exactly the Beatles’ happiest chapter.
The band had gathered at Twickenham Film Studios to rehearse and record material for what became the Let It Be project.
There were new songs.
Old songs.
Arguments.
Jams.
False starts.
And plenty of moments where four of the most famous musicians in the world were basically trying to figure out what they were doing next.
Somewhere in the middle of all that came “The Palace of the King of the Birds.”
The idea originated with Paul McCartney, and the Beatles explored it during sessions on January 6, 7 and 9, 1969. The January 6 performance was the monster of the bunch, running about 14 minutes as a loose instrumental jam. The Paul McCartney project
No lyrics.
No finished arrangement.
Just four Beatles following a musical idea wherever it happened to go.
🐦 A Very Beatles Kind of Title
Even the name sounds like something that wandered out of a Beatles dream.
The Palace of the King of the Birds.
The title is generally associated with McCartney’s interest in Rupert the Bear, the beloved British children’s character.
And this wasn’t just a random connection that appeared decades later.
The musical idea would eventually follow McCartney into one of his strangest post-Beatles projects.
But first…
it disappeared.
💿 Into the Beatles’ Musical Attic
The Beatles never turned the piece into a finished record.
It wasn’t released on Let It Be.
It didn’t appear on a Beatles album.
And it didn’t receive the kind of polished studio treatment that songs such as “Something,” “Come Together” or “Let It Be” received.
Instead, it became one of those fascinating pieces of unfinished Beatles history.
Collectors knew about it.
Bootlegs circulated recordings.
The January 6 jam was particularly prized because of its length and atmosphere. The Paul McCartney Project lists the performance at about 14 minutes, while shorter versions from January 7 and January 9 also survive. The Paul McCartney project
And that’s where things might have ended.
A forgotten Beatles jam.
A footnote.
A piece of musical archaeology.
Except Paul wasn’t quite finished with it.
🧸 Then Came Rupert
Nearly a decade later, McCartney returned to the idea.
In 1978, he was working on music connected with a planned Rupert the Bear animated project.
And there it was again.
“The Palace of the King of the Birds.”
Only this time, it was being revisited as a McCartney/Wings recording.
The Paul McCartney Project lists a Rupert soundtrack session in July 1978 that included the piece. The later version is also commonly referred to as “The Castle of the King of the Birds.” The Paul McCartney project
Think about that for a moment.
A musical idea that began with the Beatles in 1969…
survived nearly ten years…
and resurfaced in a completely different world.
The Beatles had broken up.
Wings existed.
McCartney was a solo artist and bandleader.
And the little bird palace was still hanging around.
🏰 But the Castle Stayed Locked
The Rupert project never became the finished animated feature McCartney had envisioned.
The music remained unreleased.
So now the song had managed to accomplish something rather remarkable:
It had been recorded by the Beatles.
It had been revisited by Wings.
And it still hadn’t received a proper commercial release.
That’s some serious commitment to staying hidden.
🎥 Then Peter Jackson Went Digging
Fast-forward to the 21st century.
Director Peter Jackson began working on The Beatles: Get Back, using mountains of film and audio material from the January 1969 sessions.
And among all those famous songs, arguments, jokes and rehearsals was something rather different.
A strange instrumental.
A piece that had been sitting there since 1969.
“The Palace of the King of the Birds.”
Jackson included it in the first episode of The Beatles: Get Back, with an excerpt playing over the end credits. It also appears briefly earlier in the episode. Kiwix Thunderforge
After more than fifty years…
the forgotten Beatles recording finally had an official place on screen.
Not as a newly discovered song.
Not as a surprise single.
Just a little musical ghost from 1969 finally stepping into the light.
🎶 And What Does It Sound Like?
That’s almost impossible to explain without simply telling you:
Go listen to it.
The piece doesn’t sound like a conventional Beatles single.
There are no lyrics.
No obvious verse-chorus structure.
Instead, there’s an almost dreamlike quality to the music.
The Paul McCartney Project cites critic Richie Unterberger’s description of McCartney’s organ playing as particularly elegiac, with flowing bluesy guitar lines. Unterberger considered it unusually close to progressive-rock jamming for the Beatles. The Paul McCartney project
And that’s part of what makes the recording so fascinating.
It’s the Beatles doing something that doesn’t sound like the Beatles we’re accustomed to hearing.
No three-minute pop song.
No clever lyric.
No giant chorus.
Just four musicians wandering into a musical landscape.
🐦 A Different Side of Paul McCartney
There’s another reason the piece is interesting.
Birds appear repeatedly in McCartney’s work.
The academic study Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being—and Sang Back to Them Ever After specifically discusses “The Palace of the King of the Birds” as part of McCartney’s continuing bird imagery. JSTOR
And of course, this wasn’t the first Beatles song with a bird in the title.
“Blackbird.”
“And Your Bird Can Sing.”
“Norwegian Wood” has its own little menagerie hiding inside the story.
McCartney’s songwriting has repeatedly returned to the natural world.
So perhaps the Palace wasn’t as random as the title first suggests.
Maybe Paul simply liked the idea of a place where birds ruled the kingdom.
And, musically speaking, he built one.
⏳ Fifty-Two Years in the Waiting Room
Here’s the part that really makes this a Rediscovery story.
The original Beatles recordings were made in 1969.
Peter Jackson’s Get Back arrived in 2021.
That’s roughly 52 years between the recording and its appearance in the documentary.
Imagine putting a tape in a drawer in 1969 and telling yourself:
“Maybe someday somebody will hear this.”
Then waiting more than half a century.
The world changes.
The band breaks up.
Members die.
Music changes completely.
Records become CDs.
CDs become downloads.
Downloads become streaming.
And somewhere in the middle of all that…
the King of the Birds is still waiting.
💿 It Was Never Really Lost
And that’s perhaps the best way to describe this story.
“The Palace of the King of the Birds” wasn’t truly lost.
It was forgotten.
There’s a difference.
The tapes existed.
Collectors knew about the recordings.
Bootlegs preserved them.
McCartney even returned to the idea years later.
What changed was the audience.
For decades, almost nobody outside serious Beatles circles had reason to hear it.
Then Peter Jackson opened the vault.
And suddenly millions of people could.
That’s rediscovery.
Not finding something that vanished.
Finding something that was waiting.
🎸 The Funk-n-Soul Takeaway
The Beatles left behind an enormous musical universe.
The famous songs get most of the attention.
That’s understandable.
But sometimes the most interesting pieces are the ones that never became songs in the traditional sense.
A jam.
A melody.
A strange little instrumental.
An idea that never quite found its home.
“The Palace of the King of the Birds” is one of those pieces.
It began during a difficult period for the Beatles.
It wandered into McCartney’s later work.
It nearly disappeared into the archives.
And then, decades later, Peter Jackson found it again.
The song didn’t become a hit.
It didn’t need to.
It simply survived.
🎵 One Last Spin
There’s something wonderfully fitting about the title.
A palace is a place built to last.
And this particular palace certainly did.
It survived the breakup of the Beatles.
It survived an abandoned Rupert project.
It survived decades of silence.
It survived the death of two Beatles.
And eventually, it found its way onto a screen in front of a new generation.
Maybe that’s what happens to music sometimes.
A song doesn’t always need to become famous.
Sometimes it just needs to wait long enough.
So here’s to the strange little instrumental that refused to completely disappear.
Recorded in 1969.
Revisited in 1978.
Rediscovered in 2021.
And still spinning.
The record is spinning. Let’s see where it takes us. 💿🎶
Sources
The Paul McCartney Project, Beatles session documentation, The Beatles: Get Back references, and scholarship discussing McCartney’s bird imagery
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