Secrets of Beatle Songs

            Eleanor Rigby-- that name, that resolutely plain, old fashioned English name, has become, through song, almost part of our folklore. “Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name,” Paul McCartney sang in 1966, and, conjuring images of an old lady, a sad church mouse of a woman, her only friend the equally lonely Fr McKenzie, “darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there”, we’ve been imagining her ever since.
            The subject of some of the most evocative lyrics of twentieth century song writing, who was this unknown woman whose name inspired one of the greatest of Beatle songs?
            It’s long been known that there was a gravestone bearing that name in the cemetery of St Peters Parish Church in Woolton, Liverpool, close to John Lennon’s childhood home and not far from where Paul McCartney grew up.  Yet when the record was first released on the Beatles’ Revolver album it was believed that the name “Eleanor” had been chosen because of an affair John Lennon had had with the actress Eleanor Bron while she was appearing with him in the film Help!
            That’s possibly true, though it’s more likely it was coincidental. And this week it’s emerged that Paul McCartney has donated to charity an accounts register from Liverpool City Hospital which reveals that in 1911 an “E. Rigby” worked there as a scullery maid.
            The lyric nerds love all this, but the truth probably is that even McCartney doesn’t know of there was ever a real Eleanor Rigby—or Daisy Hawkins as she was originally to be called in song.
            Whatever the truth in this instance, Lennon and McCartney certainly drew on people and images from childhood in their other songs---references which have kept people researching and guessing for over forty years.
            Just a few days ago, for instance, we were reminded of how Penny Lane described in pictures the upbringing both Lennon and McCartney had in their pleasant Liverpool suburb.  Thus the “pretty nurse selling poppies in a tray” at the roundabout in Penny Lane, which is a bus terminus on the outskirts of the city, was a girl called Beth Davidson who eventually married Lennon’s scamp of a boyhood friend, Pete Shotton.
            Then, in the same song, the barber in Penny Lane, with “photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure to know”, can be identified as James Bioletti, who used to cut the two Beatles’ schoolboy hair.
            But who was the fireman who rushed in? Could that have been a nod to Paul’s father, Jim McCartney, who’d been a firewatcher on the Liverpool docks in World War II, and for whom When I’m Sixty Four would one day be written?
            For sure firemen play a large part in the McCartney iconography, today’s fans knowing that the ex-Beatle is currently carving out a separate, new career for himself under the pseudonym of The Fireman.
            Most early Lennon and McCartney songs were about innocent girl-boy relationships like She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand---although some American disc jockeys found Please Please Me not quite so innocent, interpreting the lyrics as inducements to mutual heavy petting.  But after meeting Bob Dylan in 1964 the two became quickly conscious of the opportunities that lyrics afforded them to articulate their own culture.
            Soon John Lennon was obliquely telling the story of an affair he had had with a model who lived in a flat above him and his wife Cynthia in the song Norwegian Wood, with the lines “I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me!”  He knew what a catch he was.
            Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, who had brought him up, had instilled in him a love of books, especially of the nonsense verse of Edmund Lear and the surrealistic stories of Lewis Carroll. So it was because of her that The Walrus And The Carpenter became the inspiration for his song I Am The Walrus.
            While on the B-side of the record of Penny Lane, which had been mainly written by Paul, was the Lennon song Strawberry Fields Forever, Strawberry Fields being a children’s home, again in Woolton, which he’d visited on fete days as a little boy.
            Both Lennon and McCartney lost their mothers in their teenage years, Paul’s dying of breast cancer, and John’s being killed when she was “knocked down by an off-duty cop” outside his home. Later memories of both women were to endure in their music.
            John’s paean to his mother was the most direct. “So I sing a song of love to Julia,” he put on the White Album, before adding his lament “My mummy’s dead,” on his first solo album.
            Paul, always more cautious and often preferring to tell little stories in songs rather than reveal too much of himself, made him reflections less precise.
            “When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom,” he sings in Let It Be, lines which those who believe in the Virgin Mary’s status in the Catholic Church, might prefer to see as a prayer to her, and not a memory of his mother, Mary McCartney. His mother was, by the way, a Catholic.
            While his song Yesterday, which on the surface appears to be about a yearning for happier times after a romance has broken down, might also be interpreted as a mature reflection on the sadness which engulfed him and his father and brother after his mother died when he was fourteen. 
            “Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say, I said something wrong now I long for yesterday”, he sang. Was that a reference to the fact that his mother didn’t tell her young sons she was going into hospital for a serious operation, and that, when he was told she’d died, he said in shock something he regretted ever after?
            We don’t know, and perhaps he doesn’t either.
            In American universities research students have spent years doing Ph.Ds on the meaning behind Beatle lyrics, often forgetting that some words and phrases are used in songs because they just happened to be at hand or because they rhymed. So it can be sometimes dangerous to look too deeply.
            The “banker in a motor car,” in Penny Lane, for instance. Paul admits to simply inventing him, and never for one second was Helter Skelter an invitation for a madman like Charles Manson to murder Sharon Tate and several other people, as was pleaded at their trial.
            At the same time, as Lennon and McCartney were happy to admit when they were reshaping popular music in the late Sixties, there was definitely an autobiographical nature to some of their songs.
            John, although happily promiscuous himself, was viciously jealous if any other boy looked at Cynthia when she was his girl friend, and the lines of  You Can’t Do That would have been a familiar warning. “It’s the second time I’ve caught you talking to him…”  He even hit Cynthia once when, in fact, he had caught her talking to one of his friends at art college, while one of his post Beatle hits Jealous Guy, apologises for those feelings he couldn’t control.
            Two of John’s throwaway songs I’m Only Sleeping and I’m So Tired were about his prizewinning abilities to sleep, but he had as well a rare gift of being able to pick up ideas and lyrics from all around him. On his kitchen wall in Tittenhurst Park when he was first married to Yoko Ono there was the framed nineteenth century music hall poster which he’d used for the lyrics of Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite, a track on the Sgt Pepper album.
            Nearly all the words were there on the bill, from “the Hendersons will all be there, late of Pablo Fanques Fair,” to “Henry The Horse dances the waltz “ and a “hogs head of real fire”. It was something to see.
            John would take from just about anywhere, and, being an avid reader of newspapers, headlines often caught his attention. It was while writing A Day In The Live at the piano with a copy of the Daily Mail propped up in front of him that he spotted a headline about “Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”. It was actually a reference to the state of the roads in that town, but nevertheless it went straight into the song.
            “Now we know how many hoes it takes to fill the Albert Hall,” he sang, a nonsense line as he admitted to me later.
            The words to Good Morning Good Morning, were inspired by a TV commercial for a cereal written by Christopher Matthew, while Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds came about when his son Julian, came home from playgroup with a picture he’d drawn of a little girl called Lucy who seemed to be in the sky surrounded by diamonds. It was not, Lennon always insisted, a song about the psychedelic effects of taking the drug LSD, although many people still think it was.
            She’s Leaving Home was another song inspired by a newspaper, this time mainly written by Paul when he read about a father’s lament when a teenage girl had run away from home. “We gave her most of our lives, sacrificed most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy,” sang John ironically in the counter melody.
            There was nothing ironic, however, about the way his former guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was renamed Sexy Sadie and ridiculed in the song of that name. “Sexy Sadie, you made a fool of everyone…you’ll get yours yet.”
            Sometimes lyrics were suggested accidentally, not least by Ringo Starr, who’s, albeit accidental, contribution to the English language have been “It’s been a hard day’s night” and “We’re working eight days a week now”, both of which Lennon and McCartney turned into gold.
            So far as I know there was never actually a Sergeant Pepper who had a “lonely hearts club band”, nor was there a “Polythene Pam, she’s so good looking but she looks like a man,” (she was an archetypal Liverool “whooore”, John told me), while Hey Jude was originally called Hey Jules, as Paul sang it to himself on his way down to see Cynthia Lennon and her son Julian after John had gone off with Yoko.
            There was, though, a Martha, as in Paul’s song Martha My Dear.  It was the huge old English sheepdog that he used to take for walks on Parliament Hill near his London home. And Mother Nature’s Son is absolutely about him and his desire to get away from his busy life to simple country delights, moves he later made when he married the girl who “Came In Through The Bathroom Window…protected by a silver spoon” (Linda Eastman), and he bought his farm on the Mull of Kintyre and his country home in Sussex.
            Apparently Linda and he had agreed to meet in Los Angeles and finding the door to Paul’s bungalow locked at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she simply climbed in through the bathroom window.
            Most interesting and current of all is his song Blackbird, which he now returns to again and again. No, it wasn’t just a song about the sound of a blackbird at night. It was also a metaphor for the American Civil Rights movement of the late Sixties, and partly inspired by some of the black girl groups he was friendly with at the time, people like Diana Ross and the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. 
            Barrack Obama should have him sing it at his inauguration in January. The line “You were only waiting for this moment to be free,” has finally arrived.
            As I’ve been writing this article I’ve found myself singing along with songs which have become engrained in all our memories.
            It’s good to be reminded of them, to remember how and when and why they came to be written, and, as is in the case of Eleanor Rigby, to perhaps discover something new.

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