a Vox guitar amplifier. All the participants and available studio staff sang the closing choruses, augmenting the vocals recorded by the Beatles on 26 May. Evans also played a marching bass drum over this section. When the overdubs were finished, Evans led everybody in a line around the studio doing the conga dance while banging on the drum strapped to his chest. Martin later told Alan Smith of the NME that the band "loved every minute" of the session and that it was "more like the things I've done with the Goons and Peter Sellers" than a typical Beatles recording. Music critic Tim Riley characterises "Yellow Submarine" as "one big Spike Jones charade". Discarded intro The song originally opened with a 30-second section containing narration by Starr and dialogue by Harrison, McCartney and Lennon, supported by the sound of marching feet (created by blocks of coal being shaken inside a box). Written by Lennon, the narrative focused on people marching from Land's End to John o' Groats, and "from Stepney to Utrecht", and sharing the vision of a yellow submarine. Despite the time taken in developing and recording this intro, the band chose to discard the idea, and the section was cut from the track on 3 June. Everett comments that the recording of "Yellow Submarine" took twice as much studio time as the band's debut album, Please Please Me. Release The Beatles chose to break with their previous policy by allowing album tracks to be issued on a UK single. The "Yellow Submarine" single was the Beatles' thirteenth single release in the United Kingdom and the first to feature Starr as lead vocalist. It was issued there on 5 August 1966 as a double A-side with "Eleanor Rigby", and in the United States on 8 August. In both countries, Revolver was released on the same day as the single. The pairing of a novelty song and a ballad devoid of any instrumentation played by a Beatle marked a considerable departure from the content of the band's previous singles. Unusually for their post-1965 singles also, there were no promotional films made for either of the A-sides. According to a report in Melody Maker on 30 July, the reason for the Beatles breaking with precedent and releasing a single from Revolver was to thwart sales of cover recordings of "Eleanor Rigby". When Harrison was asked for the reason, he replied that