Daily Times

One of the most revered rock bands in musical history, The Beatles, had found themselves in quite a predicament with their notoriously-known track, Get Out.

Originally titled as No Pakistanis, the single had ensued furor all across Britain over its supposed anti-immigrant sentiments on one hand and won over neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront and oblivious white supremacist bands such as Battlecry, on the other.

According to a piece by Salon, this was something the British group—known as the flag-bearers for spreading social and political awareness through music—had hardly predicted since the song was always meant to be satire, as insisted by co-lead vocalist and bassist of The Beatles, Paul McCartney.

The fiasco ascended courtesy of the bootleg versions of the track with the original title circulating all around in 1986, at a time when racial, political and social mayhem was rampant.

McCartney recapped the public about the song’s tongue-in-cheek nature as he told the Rolling Stones back in 1986: “When we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to ‘Get Back’ which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist.”

The fiasco ascended courtesy of the bootleg versions of the track with the original title circulating all around in 1986, at a time when racial, political and social mayhem was rampant

“There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of ‘Get Back’, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about ‘too many Pakistanis living in a council flat’ – that’s the line,” he had explained further.

“Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favourite people were always black. We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown,” McCartney said.

The report further solidified the band’s pro-immigrant stance through their blatant condemnation towards former British MP Enoch Powell who became the target of a number of their songs for venting his rage on the ‘influx of immigration’, from time to time.

These are some of the lyrics of the song titled Back to the Commonwealth aka The Commonwealth Song, featuring McCartney harking back to his voyages across the old British empire from West Indies to Pakistan, along with bandmates, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.