Written by George Harrison, it was the first of four songs the band provided for the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, to meet their contractual obligations to United Artists.

The lyrics and music convey his disenchantment at how the company retained the copyright for the songs it published, and at how, following its public listing in 1965, the major shareholders profited more from his compositions than he did.

The song has received a varied response from reviewers; while Ian MacDonald dismisses the track as a "self-indulgent dirge",[1] the website Ultimate Classic Rock identifies it as one of the Beatles' best works in the psychedelic genre.

[4] The company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in February 1965,[5][6] as a means of saving John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the Beatles' principal songwriters, the tax liability generated through the international success of their catalogue.

[10] Among the four Beatles, Lennon and McCartney were major shareholders in Northern Songs, each owning 15 per cent of the public company's shares,[5] and the pair earned considerable wealth over the first year of the flotation.

[16][19][nb 1] With reference to the Rutles' 1978 parody of the Beatles' history, All You Need Is Cash,[22] he also told White: "I think [the message behind 'Only a Northern Song'] was put better in the make-believe TV documentary … where it said, 'Dick Jaws, an out-of-work music publisher of no fixed ability' signed them up for the rest of their lives.

"[15] In author Ian MacDonald's estimation, "Only a Northern Song" suggests that Harrison "had yet to recover his enthusiasm for being a Beatle" after he had threatened to leave the group following their final concert tour, in August 1966.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harrison spent six weeks in India with his sitar teacher, Ravi Shankar,[25] a visit that heightened his lack of interest in the Beatles' project.

[46] Musicologist Alan Pollack considers the song's music and lyrical message to be "uncannily in tune" with one another, and that this effect is accentuated by surprising and irregular phrase-lengths in the verses.

[63][64] Described by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn as a "myth",[55] a story later circulated that Harrison had rush-written the composition for United Artists in early 1968, after Al Brodax, the film's producer, approached the band for a final song.

[35] Tom Maginnis of AllMusic describes the completed track as "heavily steeped in the psychedelic sounds of the period, using liberal amounts of loose instrumentation", particularly "chaotic bursts of trumpet".

[68][nb 5] According to Pollack, these additions constitute a "noise track", which further heightens the theme of discordance, and is used to fill the song's instrumental sections, becoming especially prominent during the outro.

[78] While the project's art design was carried out by a team led by Heinz Edelmann, sequences such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "Only a Northern Song" were created by outside animators, ensuring stylistic variation across the film.

[83] "Only a Northern Song" plays over a scene when the yellow submarine travels through the Sea of Science,[35][84] during the Beatles' quest to free Pepperland and the imprisoned Sgt.

[57] Referring to the psychedelic imagery in the animation, author Stephen Glynn says that this segment "only 'makes sense' when read as attempting an audio-visual recreation of the hallucinogenic state".

[86] Jeremiah Massengale, an academic in the field of visual communication, highlights the sequence as one of many technical innovations introduced by the 1968 film, saying: "accompanying multi-colored, square portrait paintings of the Beatles during 'Only a Northern Song', there's a creative use of an oscillator picking out the sound waves of the track.

"[87][nb 7] In his book The Beatles Movies, Bob Neaverson says that the segment arguably represents the best example of the film's adoption of the psychedelic iconography typical of 1960s underground poster art.

[91] Produced by Tony Palmer and including portions of the stage play based on Lennon's book In His Own Write, the show was broadcast on BBC1[91] two days after the film's world premiere in London, on 19 July 1968.

"[100] In March 1969, having become wary of the disharmony within the band and the problems affecting their Apple Corps business empire,[101] James sold his majority shareholding in Northern Songs to Lew Grade's ATV Music,[102] thereby selling on the ownership of the Beatles catalogue.

[103][104][nb 8] In a contemporary review of Yellow Submarine, Beat Instrumental lamented that it offered little new material by the band, but described "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much" as "superb pieces" that "redeem" side one.

[108] In January 1996, the song was issued as the B-side to "It's All Too Much" on a blue-vinyl jukebox single,[109] as part of a series of Beatles releases by Capitol Records' CEMA Special Markets division.

[111] That year, a stereo version became available when the track was remixed for inclusion on the album Yellow Submarine Songtrack, which accompanied the DVD re-release of the animated film.

[116] Mark Lewisohn describes the group's 20 April overdubs on "Only a Northern Song" as "a curious session" and writes that their work over this period "display[s] a startling lack of cohesion and enthusiasm".

[119] In his book Psychedelia and Other Colours, Rob Chapman says that "Only a Northern Song" is one of the "most misunderstood and maligned" Beatles tracks, and that analyses such as MacDonald's miss "vital nuances", including a transcendent quality beyond Harrison's sarcasm over his publishing concerns, such that the lyrics reveal as much about the "illusory nature of existence" as Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows".

[120] Among more recent reviews of Yellow Submarine, Peter Doggett, writing for Mojo, credits Harrison's two compositions with "[doing] much to rescue the album from oblivion", and he describes "Only a Northern Song" as "gloriously ironic".

[121][nb 10] Alex Young of Consequence of Sound views it as "lyrically the quintessential track", since "it perfectly defines Yellow Submarine in two verses alone, while coming out sonically like a Pink Floyd b-side from the Obscured by Clouds sessions ..."[123] By contrast, Mark Kemp of Paste dismisses the song as a "meandering bore".

[125] Writing for Ultimate Classic Rock in 2013, Dave Swanson ranked the track third on his list of the "Top 10 Beatles Psychedelic Songs" (following "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "I Am the Walrus").

[132][nb 11] Coinciding with the popularity of "It's All Too Much" among acid-rock bands of the early 1990s,[74] Sun Dial released a cover of "Only a Northern Song" as the B-side of their 1991 single "Fireball".