he envisaged the song as a "production number" while planning the Beatles' 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour. After the band finished recording the film's title song in May that year, the project lay dormant because John Lennon and George Harrison had little enthusiasm for it. McCartney first offered "Your Mother Should Know" as the Beatles' contribution to the Our World satellite broadcast in June, but the band favoured Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" for its social significance. Composition On the Beatles' recording, "Your Mother Should Know" is performed in the key of A minor and its time signature is 4/4. The use of piano crotchet chords is typical of McCartney's compositions of the time, starting with "Got to Get You into My Life" in 1966. The song's rhythm suggests a foxtrot, a quality it shares with "Catcall" (formerly titled "Catwalk"), a McCartney-written instrumental recorded by Chris Barber's trad jazz band in July 1967. Musicologist Walter Everett comments that the two pieces also share a "syncopated ascending octave-arpeggiation of a minor triad". The composition consists of verse-chorus sections contrasted with instrumental bridges. One of the verse-choruses includes vocalised "da-da-da"s in place of lyrics, representing the singalong tradition of music hall. According to music historian Joe Harrington, the song is an example of rock music's embrace of vaudeville in the late 1960s, which was part of the genre's development away from its rock 'n' roll roots in favour of eclecticism and a more artistic aesthetic. The song's music hall aspect recalls McCartney's "When I'm Sixty-Four" from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Its lyrical theme repeats the sympathetic portrayal of a parent offered in "She's Leaving Home" from the same album. In author Doyle Greene's view, whereas "She's Leaving Home" conveys sympathy for a teenage runaway and her parents, the generational understanding espoused in "Your Mother Should Know" is more one-sided and suggests "maternal authority and youth compliance". Recording The Beatles began recording "Your Mother Should Know" on 22 August 1967, their first session in close to two months. The recording took place at Chappell Recording Studios in central London because EMI Studios was unavailable at short notice. Although the Beatles had never worked at Chappell before, McCartney had participated in the session there for "Catcall" the previous month. Recording continued at Chappell on 23 August. The overdubs included backing vocals by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, which,