All Together Now/Hey Bulldog

In 1972, the Yellow Submarine film was shown on TV in several countries across Europe. In conjunction with this, the single “All Together Now” / “Hey Bulldog” was released in these countries: France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 1976, the single was re-released in France and Italy as part of an ‘oldies’ series.

In 1999, in conjunction with the re-release of the Yellow Submarine movie, Apple’s then press officer Geoff Baker announced to the world that a new Beatles song was to be made available. He said of the song “It’s a real rocker. It’s all from the Yellow Submarine sessions. John is singing on it. It is not a ‘Free As A Bird’ job. It is something that is already there. It’s good stuff,”. He would not reveal its title.

For weeks reports persisted in the press that a previously lost Beatles track was going to be released. However Apple then issued a statement saying the single wasn’t ‘new’ at all – in fact all that had been found had been footage of The Beatles recording Hey Bulldog at Abbey Road in 1968.

Hey Bulldog, of course, has been around for a long time. After all, it’s one of the songs on the original soundtrack album “Yellow Submarine” from 1969! And, like we mentioned, it was a pan-European single in 1972.

European releases and re-releases of the “All Together Now”/”Hey Bulldog” single.

And the song wasn’t new to the film either, only to the American movie audience. You see, back when United Artists were about to release the movie for theaters in 1968, it was decided that the audience would grow tired of so many songs interrupting the action, so in US prints of the film they snipped out “Hey Bulldog” and replaced it with some shorter animated scenes. And when the movie was released on video cassette by MGM/UA around the world in 1987 they mistakenly used an American print of the film. So the 1999 video cassette and DVD reinstated “Hey Bulldog” in the movie, but also lost the footage that replaced it. Same story with the 2012 DVD and Blu-ray re-release, where the music-only soundtrack from the 1999 DVD was also sadly missing.

1999 also saw the release of a brand new music video for “Hey Bulldog”, pieced together from footage of The Beatles in the studio, recording the song. Some of this footage had previously been used for the original “Lady Madonna” promotional film from 1968, but was finally now used to accompany the actual song they were recording.