Beatles (51 page)

About a third of their songs are written like this, because they’ve got to write a song and can’t wait for any sort of inspiration. John and Paul can do these slog songs on their own, but mostly they do them together, starting at two in the afternoon and giving themselves a day to complete it.

The rest of their songs owe something, even if it’s very little, to inspiration of some kind. But even when an idea has suddenly come to them, they rarely sit down and work it all out. Very often they put it away at the back of their head till they need it. Even if they are in the process of doing an album, they still tend to bring out the song for the other one to hear, or bring it to the studio, still half finished. It’s due to laziness as much as anything else. They want to get the others to help.

Paul’s song ‘Eleanor Rigby’ came to him when he was looking at a shop window in Bristol and liked the name – Daisy Hawkins. Playing with the name in his head, it turned into a rhythm, and then into Eleanor Rigby. He saw the tune all through his head, but he still hadn’t finished the words by the time it was recorded. The last verse was thought of by all of them, making suggestions at the last minute in the studio.

The only song either of them can think of that came straight
out and was then recorded unaltered was John’s ‘Nowhere Man’. He’s not particularly proud of it.

‘I was just sitting, trying to think of a song, and I thought of myself sitting there, doing nothing and going nowhere. Once I’d thought of that, it was easy. It all came out. No, I remember now, I’d actually stopped trying to think of something. Nothing would come. I was cheesed off and went for a lie down, having given up. Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man – sitting in his nowhere land.’

Very little inspiration comes simply out of the air. But a lot comes out of their immediate environment, past (like ‘Penny Lane’) or present (‘Lovely Rita’). John, particularly, has taken many ideas from the media surrounding him at the time he’s been looking for a song.

‘Mr Kite was a straight lift. I had all the words staring me in the face one day when I was looking for a song.

‘It was from this old poster I’d bought at an antique shop. We’d been down in Surrey or somewhere filming a TV piece to go with ‘Strawberry Fields For Ever’. There was a break and I went into this shop and bought an old poster advertising a variety show that starred Mr Kite.

‘It said the Hendersons would also be there, late of Pablo Fanques Fair. There would be hoops and horses and someone going through a hogshead of real fire. Then there was Henry the Horse. The band would start at ten to six. All at Bishopsgate. Look, there’s the bill, with Mr Kite topping it. I hardly made up a word, just connecting the lists together. Word for word really.

‘I wasn’t very proud of that. There was no real work. I was just going through the motions because we needed a new song for
Sergeant Pepper
at that moment.’

Almost the same sort of lifted inspiration caused what many people thought was their best song on the
Sergeant Pepper
LP, ‘A Day In The Life’.

This was the one banned by the BBC on the grounds that it contained references to drugs – ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ Even John himself is quite pleased with this song.

Most of the words of the first section – the verses that begin with ‘I read the news today, oh boy’ – came from genuine pieces of news John was reading the day he wrote the song.

‘I was writing the song with the
Daily Mail
propped up in front of me on the piano. I had it open at their News in Brief, or Far and Near, whatever they call it. There was a paragraph about 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered. There was still a word missing in that verse when we came to record. I knew the line had to go “Now they know how many holes it takes to … something, the Albert Hall.” It was a nonsense verse really, but for some reason I couldn’t think of the verb. What did the holes do to the Albert Hall?

‘It was Terry who said “fill” the Albert Hall. And that was it. Perhaps I was looking for that word all the time, but couldn’t put my tongue on it. Other people don’t necessarily
give
you a word or a line, they just throw in the word you’re looking for anyway.’

The film mentioned in the song wasn’t in the newspaper, but was a reference to his own film, which he’d just finished acting in –
How I Won The War
. The film is about the English army winning the war. It was originally a book.

‘The lucky man who made the grade’ in a car accident was based, rather indirectly, on the death of a friend of John’s, and of all the Beatles – Tara Brown. Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, was a particularly close friend of his. There was a reference to his death in the paper on the day John was writing the song.

‘I didn’t copy the accident. Tara didn’t blow his mind out. But it was in my mind when I was writing that verse.’ Tara wasn’t from the House of Lords either, but he was the son of a peer, Lord Oranmore and Browne, and a member of the Guinness family, which is the next best thing.

‘Goodmorning, Goodmorning’ was sparked off by listening to a cornflakes advertisement on TV. ‘I often sit at the piano, working at songs, with the telly on low in the background. If I’m a bit low and not getting much done, then the words on the telly come through. That’s when I heard Goodmorning, Goodmorning.’

Many times the first starting point of John’s songs is a basic
piece of rhythm, then words are fitted to it so that the rhythm, which originally consisted of only three or four notes, can be gone over and over and developed, either in his head or at the piano.

One day, down at his home in Weybridge John had just heard a police car going past in the distance with its siren shrieking. This consists of two notes, up and down, repeated over and over again, like a primitive wailing. The rhythm had stayed in his head and he was playing with putting words to it.

‘
Mis-ter, Ci-ty, p’lice-man, sit-tin, pre-tty
.’

He’d got as far as trying the words in a slightly different order. ‘– Sitting pretty, like a policeman’, but hadn’t got much further. He said it would be a basis for a song, but there was no need to develop now. It could be dragged out next time he needed a song. ‘I’ve written it down on a piece of paper somewhere. I’m always sure I’ll forget it, so I write it down, but I wouldn’t.’

He’d written down another few words that day, just daft words, to put to another bit of rhythm. ‘Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come.’ I thought he said ‘van to come’, which he hadn’t, but he liked it better and said he’d use it instead.

He also had another piece of tune in his head. This had started from the phrase, ‘sitting in an English country garden’. This is what he does for at least two hours every day, sitting on the step outside his window looking at his garden. This time, thinking about himself doing it, he’d repeated the phrase over and over again, till he’d put a tune to it.

‘I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song – sitting in an English country garden, waiting for the van to come. I don’t know.’

Which is what did happen. He put all the pieces together and made ‘I Am The Walrus’. In the backing to the song can be heard the insistent rhythm of a police siren, which had sparked the song off in the first place. This very often happens. Bits of songs which have started off separately end up as the one song, when the time comes to empty his head and find a new song.

John is sparked off by rhythms, but more and more he is setting his own poetry, or often simply disconnected thoughts, to music. With Paul, the tune usually comes first. John woke up at seven o’clock one morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. He found the words ‘pools of sorrow, waves of joy’ going through his head. He got up and wrote them out, writing about ten lines in all which eventually became ‘Across the Universe’. In this first, early morning version, when he knew he was writing down some sloppy, corny phrases, just to get himself on to the next line, his handwriting got worse and more illegible, out of embarrassment, in case anyone should see lines he didn’t like. This is what he did in his poems as a boy, or in letters to Stu, trying to cover up his soft sentimental thoughts in case Mimi or anyone should read them.

He wasn’t really pleased with the song in the end. He said it didn’t come out as he’d heard it in his head. When they came back from India in April 1968 he decided to try to record it again, having thought of new ideas.

When John is talking to George Martin, on a John song, there is a lot of whooshing and wow wow wow, as he tries to let George Martin hear what he can hear in his head. He’s also not as definite as Paul, or doesn’t appear to be, asking the others what they think when they’ve just heard a track played back. Paul tends to say straight away, let’s do it again.

‘Heh Bulldog’ was another John song which began simply with a set of words to which music was put. This is probably one of the quickest post-touring songs they’ve ever recorded. It was done, in February 1968, almost in a day, from start to finish. They had to come into the studio one Sunday to be filmed for a three-minute promotional film to go with ‘Lady Madonna’, Paul’s song, the A side of their single in March 1968.

‘Paul said we should do a real song in the studio, to save wasting time. Could I whip one off? I had a few words lying around at home so I brought them in.’ Along with Neil and the others, the words were finished in the studio. John told them roughly how he heard the song and they all created the backing
between them, just by getting their instruments and playing together, while the film people filmed them.

The words changed, even as they sang them, as Paul misread John’s handwriting. One line had ‘measured out in news’, which came out as ‘measured out in you’, which they agreed sounded better. There was no reference anywhere to bulldog when they started recording the song. There was a mention of bullfrog, which made Paul, as a joke, start barking, just to make John laugh. They kept the barking in and changed the title. John said the idea of a dog fitted very well. It could be a dog that barks away, worrying at you, trying to pull you, just like the girl in the song. He then picked up a sitar and started singing the words in a Lancashire voice, strumming on the sitar like George Formby, but they couldn’t work that in.

Most of John’s composing is done at the piano, just doodling over it for hours, letting his mind wander, almost in a trance, while his fingers look for bits of tunes. ‘I’ve got another one here, a few words, I think I got them from an advert – “Cry baby cry, make your mother buy”. I’ve been playing it over on the piano. I’ve let it go now. It’ll come back if I really want it. I do get up from the piano as if I have been in a trance. Sometimes I know I’ve let a few things slip away, which I could have caught if I’d been wanting something.’

Paul tends to work on whole songs, rather than little bits. But very often songs are left unfinished. And even when they are finished, they are sometimes left around for a long time. ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ (the age is in honour of Paul’s dad) was written in the Cavern days before it popped up and was revised as being ideal for
Sergeant Pepper
.

Sometimes, when they both have a half-finished song, they meld them together, to make one new whole one. The classic example of this was ‘A Day In The Life’.

‘I’d written the first section and I let Paul hear it. I said to him what we want now is a middle eight bars. He said what about this – “Woke up, Fell out of bed, dragged a comb across
my head?” This was a song he’d written on his own, with no idea of what I was working on. I said yeh, that’s it.

‘Then we thought we needed some sort of connection bit, a growing noise to lead back into the first bit. We wanted to think of a good end and we had to decide what sort of backing and instruments would sound good. Like all our songs, they never become an entity until the very end. They are developed all the time as we go along.

‘Often the backing I think of early on never comes off. With “Tomorrow Never Knows” I’d imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical, of course, and we did something different. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing. I realize now that was what it wanted.’

Their long stay in India with Maharishi in the spring of 1968 proved an ideal environment for writing songs – and not Indian ones either. The strange, foreign environment of Hamburg produced from within themselves a Liverpool sound. (Marshall McLuhan, who fancies himself as a Beatle expert, says this proves his theory that when a new environment goes round an old environment, the old one becomes an art form). India had a similar effect, at least with Paul, making him go back to his boyhood influences, like Hollywood musicals and westerns.

Anyway, when they came back, both John and Paul had written about six or seven songs each, enough for a new LP. They even came back with an idea for its format – the LP would consist of the songs from the sound track of a non-existent musical. It was originally going to be called
Doll’s House
– Doll being a girl’s name, and her house being a house of pleasure, where all the people in the fictional musical would congregate. But they found that
Doll’s House
had already been used as a title.

Paul came back and played his songs, with Jane singing a la-la accompaniment, to all the friends who dropped in, especially when they were going to launch into some saga of the things that had gone wrong when he’d been away. ‘No, no, don’t tell me, listen to this instead.’ Then he began a song about Rocky
Racoon checking into his room and finding only a Gideon Bible. At the rhyming of ‘Bible’ with ‘rival’ he gave an apologetic grimace. He’d also written a song about junk in a junkyard. He paused in the middle of singing a line about ‘broken hearted jubilee mug’ to say wasn’t ‘jubilee’ a lovely word to sing. Then he had a song about a girl sitting in the distance with a red umbrella. It had few words but lots of la-las. He enjoyed most of all singing to everyone a mock folksy-American song about it being great to be back in the USSR. He put on a Beach Boy voice for the chorus. Mike, his brother, said why didn’t they get the Beach Boys themselves to sing the chorus, but Paul said no. Although Paul still obviously had many gaps to fill in the songs, in singing them to others he was not looking for suggestions, the way John might do, or even to show off. He was just sharing the enjoyment he was having in beginning some new songs, before he’d finished and forgotten them for ever.