by Steve Turner
The song began with what would become the second verse in the recorded version. It was a meditation on the conviction he’d had since he was a child that he was somehow different from everyone else; that he saw and felt things that other people didn’t. In the earliest preserved version of his Spanish tapes he starts, “No one is on my wavelength”, later changing the line to “No one I think is in my tree”, presumably to disguise what could be seen as arrogance. He was saying that he believed that no one could tune in to his way of thinking, and that therefore he must either be a genius (‘high’) or insane (‘low’). “I seem to see things in a different way from most people,” he once said. It was only on take four of the songwriting tape that he introduced Strawberry Fields (but without the ‘forever’) and on take five he added the line ‘nothing to get mad about’ that was later altered to ‘nothing to get hung about’. He was already using the deliberately hesitant mode – “er”, “that is”, “I mean”, “I think” – to underline the truth that this was an attempt to articulate concepts that can’t actually be put into words.
On his return to England he worked on the song at Kenwood where the final verse was added. It wasn’t until he went into the studio that he finished the song by adding the opening verse, a fact that helps to explain why the sentiment of the introduction seems out of joint with the rest of the song.
In the completed version a place is made to represent a state of mind. Strawberry Fields (John added the ‘s’) was a Salvation Army orphanage in Beaconsfield Road, Woolton, a five-minute walk from his home in Menlove Avenue. A huge Victorian building set in wooded grounds, it was a place where John would go with his Aunt Mimi for summer fêtes but also somewhere that he would sneak into during evenings and at weekends with friends such as Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan. It became their private adventure playground.
These illicit visits were, to John, like Alice’s escapades down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. He felt that he was entering another world, a world that more closely corresponded with his inner world, and as an adult he would associate these moments of bliss with his lost childhood and also with a feeling of drug-free psychedelia.
In his Playboy interview of 1980 he told David Sheff that he would ‘trance out into alpha’ as a child, seeing ‘hallucinatory images’ of his face when looking into a mirror. He said it was only when he later discovered the work of artists like the surrealists that he realised that he wasn’t mad but a part of ‘an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms’.
SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
Success meant that the public expected the Beatles not only to deliver another artistic masterpiece but a prophetic vision. To relieve this pressure, Paul developed the personae of Sgt Pepper and his musicians, an identity that would give the band more creative freedom. They had become self-conscious as the Beatles but as the Lonely Hearts Club Band they would have nothing to live up to.
Paul conceived the idea on a flight back to London from Nairobi on November 19th 1966. During an earlier part of this holiday when he was in France he had used a facial disguise in order to travel incognito. This had led him to consider how free the Beatles would be if they could adopt a group disguise.
The conceit, however, wasn’t sustained beyond the opening track and the reprise although it succeeded in giving the impression to many people that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a ‘concept album’. “The songs, if you listen to them, have no connection at all,” George Martin admits. “Paul said, ‘Why don’t we make the band ‘Pepper’ and Ringo ‘Billy Shears’ because it gives a nice beginning to the thing? It wasn’t really a concept album at all. It was just a question of me trying to make something coherent by doing segues as much as possible.” Later on, Martin came up with the idea for the reprise, which helped to wrap it all up.
Sgt Pepper and his band achieved the feat of being very West Coast 1967 (you could picture their name on a psychedelic poster for the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco) at the same time as remaining quintessentially English (you could imagine them playing on an Edwardian summer lawn). Paul had intended to play it both ways, writing old-fashioned lyrics delivered with a satirical psychedelic intensity, and using a title that appealed to the late Sixties vogue for long and surreal band names – Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Incredible String Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. “They’re a bit of a brass band in a way,” Paul said at the time, “but they’re also a rock band because they’ve got that San Francisco thing.”
The origin of the name Sgt Pepper is disputed. The Beatles’ former road manager Mal Evans is sometimes cited as having created it as a jokey substitute for ‘salt ‘n’ pepper’. Others suggest that the name was derived from the popular American soft drink ‘Dr Pepper’.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Journalist Hunter Davies was granted a unique insight into the Beatles’ writing methods while working on their eponymous 1968 authorised biography. On the afternoon of March 29, 1967, Davies went to Paul’s house in Cavendish Avenue and watched as Paul and John worked on ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. It was one of the first times a journalist had witnessed Lennon and McCartney composing. “They wanted to do a Ringo-type song,” remembers Davies. “They knew it would have to be for the kids, a sing-along type of song. That was what they thought was missing on the album so far. I recorded them trying to get all the rhymes right and somewhere I’ve got a list of all the ones they didn’t use.”
At the beginning of the afternoon, all the writers had was a chorus line and a bit of a melody. For the first two hours, they thrashed away on guitars, neither of them getting very far. It was John who eventually suggested starting each verse with a question. The line, ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ didn’t have the right number of syllables and so it became ‘a love at first sight’. John answer to this was ‘Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time’. This was then followed by ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light?’ but rephrased to ‘What do you see when…’.
Cynthia Lennon then came in and suggested ‘I’m just fine’ as an answer, but John dismissed it saying that ‘just’ was either a filler or a meaningless word. Instead, he tried ‘I know it’s mine’, eventually coming up with the more substantial ‘I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine’.
After a few hours of playing around with words, their minds began to wander. They began fooling around, singing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and playing ‘Tequila’ (a 1958 hit for the Champs) on the piano. “When they got stuck, they would go back and do a rock’n’roll song,” remembers Davies. “Sometimes they would sing an Englebert Humperdinck song and just bugger around and then get back to the job in hand.”
A recording session was due to begin at seven o’clock and they called Ringo to tell him that his song was ready, even though the lyrics weren’t quite there yet. The lyrics were completed in the studio, where ten takes of the song were recorded that night. As John had an injured finger at the time it was initially known as ‘Bad Finger Boogie’ but was later changed to the rather apt ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS
One afternoon early in 1967, Julian Lennon came home from his nursery school with a coloured drawing that he said was of his classmate, four-year-old Lucy O’Donnell. Explaining his artwork to his father, Julian said it was Lucy – ‘in the sky with diamonds’.
This phrase struck John and triggered off the associations that led to the writing of the dream-like ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, one of three tracks on the Sgt Pepper album that were supposed to be ‘about drugs’. Although it’s unlikely that John would have written such a piece of reverie without ever having experimented with hallucinogenics, this song was equally affected by his love of surrealism, word play and the works of Lewis Carroll.
That the song was a description of an LSD trip seemed to be proved when it was noted that the initials in the title spelt L
SD. Yet John consistently denied this both in public and in private, although he was never hesitant to discuss songs that did refer to drugs. He insisted that the title was taken from what Julian had said about his painting. Julian himself recalls, “I don’t know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings but I obviously had an affection for Lucy at that age. I used to show dad everything I’d built or painted at school and this one sparked off the idea for a song about Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
Lucy O’Donnell (who now works as a teacher with special needs’ children) lived near the Lennon family in Weybridge and she and Julian were pupils at Heath House, a nursery school run by two old ladies in a rambling Edwardian house. “I can remember Julian at school,” says Lucy, who didn’t discover that she’d been immortalized in a Beatles’ song until she was 13. “I can remember him very well. I can see his face clearly… we used to sit alongside each other at proper old-fashioned desks. The house was enormous and they had heavy curtains to divide the classrooms. Julian and I were a couple of little menaces from what I’ve been told.”
John claimed that the hallucinatory images in the song were inspired by the ‘Wool And Water’ chapter in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass, where Alice is taken down a river in a rowing boat by the Queen, who has suddenly changed into a sheep.
As a child, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass were two of John’s favourite books. They’d been given to him as birthday presents and in a 1965 interview he claimed that he read both books once a year. In a later interview he claimed that it was partly through reading them that he realized the images in his own mind weren’t indications of insanity. “Surrealism to me is reality,” he said. “Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.”
For similar reasons, John was attracted to The Goon Show, the British radio comedy show featuring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers which was broadcast by the BBC between June 1952 and January 1960. The Goon Show scripts, principally written by Milligan, lampooned establishment figures, attacked post-war stuffiness and popularized surreal humour. The celebrated Beatle ‘wackiness’ owed a lot to the Goons, as did John’s poetry and writing. He told Spike Milligan that ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and several other songs had been partly inspired by his love of Goon Show dialogue.
“We used to talk about ‘plasticine ties’ in The Goon Show and this crept up in Lucy as ‘plasticine porters with looking glass ties’,” says Milligan who, as a friend of George Martin, sat in on some of the Sgt Pepper sessions. “I knew Lennon quite well. He used to talk a lot about comedy. He was a Goon Show freak. It all stopped when he married Yoko Ono. Everything stopped. He never asked for me again.”
When Paul arrived at Weybridge to work on the song John had only completed the first verse and the chorus. For the rest of the writing they traded lines and images; Paul coming up with ‘newspaper taxis’ and ‘cellophane flowers’, John with ‘kaleidoscope eyes’.
GETTING BETTER
Much of Sgt Pepper was written as the album was being recorded, with John and Paul grabbing inspiration from whatever was happening around them. Hunter Davies was with Paul on one such occasion – when he was struck by the phrase which became the basis of ‘Getting Better’. “I was walking around Primrose Hill with Paul and his dog Martha,” he says. “It was bright and sunny – the first springlike morning we’d had that year. Thinking about the weather Paul said, ‘It’s getting better’. He was meaning that spring was here but he started laughing and, when I asked him why, he told me that it reminded him of something.”
The phrase took Paul’s mind back to drummer Jimmy Nicol, who briefly became a Beatle in June 1964, substituting on tour for a sick Ringo. Nicol was an experienced musician who had worked with the Spotnicks and Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, but he had to learn to be a Beatle overnight. Called in by George Martin on June 3, he met John, Paul and George that afternoon and was on stage with them in Copenhagen the following night. A week later in Adelaide, after playing just five dates, Nicol was given his fee, together with a jokey ‘retirement present’, a gold watch. “After every concert, John and Paul would go up to Jimmy Nicol and ask him how he was getting on,” says Hunter Davies. “All that Jimmy would ever say was, ‘It’s getting better’. That was the only comment they could get out of him. It ended up becoming a joke phrase and whenever the boys thought of Jimmy they’d think of ‘it’s getting better’.”
After the walk on Primrose Hill, Paul drove back to his home in St John’s Wood and sang the phrase over and over, while picking out a tune on his guitar. Then he worked it out on the piano in his music room which had a strange tone that sounded almost out of tune. “That evening John came round,” remembers Davies. “Paul suggested writing a song called ‘It’s Getting Better’. Now and again, they’d write whole songs individually, but mostly one of them had half a song and the other one would finish it off. That’s how it was with this one. Paul played what he’d come up with to John and together they finished it.”
‘Getting Better’ proved an interesting example of how they curbed each other’s excesses when they worked together. The optimism of Paul’s chorus, where everything is improving because of love, is counterbalanced by John’s confession that he was once a schoolboy rebel, an angry young man and a wife beater. When Paul sings that things are getting better all the time, John chimes in with ‘it couldn’t get much worse’.
Asked about the song years later, John admitted it referred to his aggressive tendencies, “I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.”
FIXING A HOLE
‘Fixing A Hole’ was another Sgt Pepper song assumed to refer to drugs. People assumed that Paul was talking about ‘fixing’ with heroin. But the song really was about renovating his life, allowing himself the freedom to close up the cracks and holes that allowed the enemies of his imagination to leak in. “It’s the hole in your make up which lets the rain in and stops your mind from going where it will,” as he put it.
Although it wasn’t about DIY, Paul may have drawn the images from his Scottish hideaway, High Park, that he had bought in June 1966 on the advice of his accountants. The house, which had 400 acres of grazing land, hadn’t been lived in for five years and was in poor condition from the regular battering of rain and sea winds. The brown walls were dark with damp, the only furniture consisted of potato boxes and there was no bath.
Paul decorated this property ‘in a colourful way’ as remembered by Alistair Taylor, Brian Epstein’s assistant who accompanied Paul and Jane on their first visit to High Park. “The brown paint made the farmhouse look like the inside of an Aero bar,” he wrote in his book Yesterday: My Life With The Beatles. “Paul decided he’d had enough of it so he went into Campbeltown and bought lots of packets of coloured pens. The three of us spent the next few hours just doodling in all these colours, spreading them all over the wall and trying to relieve the gloom.”
In 1967, in an interview with artist Alan Aldridge, Paul was probed on the drug associations: “If you’re a junky sitting in a room and fixing a hole then that’s what it will mean to you, but when I wrote it I meant if there’s a crack, or the room is uncolourful, then I’ll paint it.”
SHE’S LEAVING HOME
In February 1967, Paul came across a newspaper article about a 17-year-old London schoolgirl studying for her A GCE level exams who’d been missing from home for over a week. Her distressed father was quoted as saying, “I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here.”
The subject of teenage runaways was topical in 1967. As part of the creation of an alternative society, counter-culture guru Timothy Leary had urged his followers to ‘drop out’, to abandon education and ‘straight’ employment. As a result, streams of young people headed for San Francisco, centre of Flower Power. The FBI announced 90,000 runaways that year – a record.
With only the new
spaper story to go on, Paul created a moving song about a young girl sneaking away from her claustrophobically respectable home in search of fun and romance in the swinging Sixties. What he didn’t know at the time was how accurate his speculation was. He also had no idea that he had met the girl in question just three years before.
The runaway in the story was Melanie Coe, the daughter of John and Elsie Coe, who lived in Stamford Hill, north London. The only differences between her story and the story told in the song are that she met a man from a gambling casino rather than from ‘the motor trade’ , and that she walked out in the afternoon while her parents were at work, rather than in the morning while they were asleep. “The amazing thing about the song was how much it got right about my life,” says Melanie. “It quoted the parents as saying ‘we gave her everything money could buy’, which was true in my case. I had two diamond rings, a mink coat, hand-made clothes in silk and cashmere and even my own car.
“Then there was the line ‘after living alone for so many years’, which really struck home to me because I was an only child and I always felt alone,” Melanie continues. “I never communicated with either of my parents. It was a constant battle. I left because I couldn’t face them any longer. I heard the song when it came out and thought it was about someone like me but never dreamed it was actually about me. I can remember thinking that I didn’t run off with a man from the motor trade, so it couldn’t have been me! I must have been in my twenties when my mother said she’d seen Paul on television and he’d said that the song was based on a story in a newspaper. That’s when I started telling my friends it was about me.”