Paul – lead
vocals
John – harmony and backing vocals
George – harmony and backing vocals
Session musicians – four violins, two violas, two cellos
‘Eleanor Rigby’ is one of the most remarkable of all the songs produced by the Beatles. It is succinct, revolutionary, dramatic, sympathetic – and just a fraction over two minutes long. Although this was only the second time that strings, or in fact any orchestral instrumentation, had been used by the group, the use of a double string quartet shows far greater commitment to the “classical” genre than the combination of quartet and guitar on ‘Yesterday’. For the earlier song, the strings provided little more than a relatively simple but highly effective backing. Here, they give the song much of its power and drama, and are as prominent as the vocals themselves.
The fact that the song appears early on the Revolver LP is also significant, as it paves the way for immense musical progression on this and future LPs. In fact, the two McCartney tracks coming second and second-last on Revolver show, in their separate ways, exponential musical development, notable additions to the output of a group going through its most experimental period. Opening the album with songs about corruption and isolation paint a singularly bleak picture, akin to the opening tracks of Beatles For Sale.
The simplicity and completeness of the song masks a rather complex conception, which has since been further clouded by rumour and the counter-claims of those involved. Paul has often repeated that before settling on the name of Eleanor Rigby, he had originally thought of (Miss) Daisy Hawkins, who became Daisy Mackenzie, and then, courtesy of a name seen over a wine shop in Bristol (Rigby & Evens), Daisy Rigby.
He has said that he settled on Eleanor after Eleanor Bron, his co-star in Help! On the other hand, there is a gravestone bearing the name of Eleanor Rigby (“the beloved wife of Thomas Woods”) in St Peter’s church cemetery – the church at which the fete was held where the young Lennon first met the young McCartney – near Menlove Avenue where John lived with his Aunt Mimi.
Also, Father Mackenzie was originally Father McCartney, which scanned perfectly but Paul felt would have been unfair to his father. (“Dad’s a happy lad.”) Hunter Davies describes in The Beatles how Paul took the name Mackenzie from looking up McCartney in a telephone book. Some time later, “Father” Tom McKenzie, a compere at a number of the Beatles shows in 1962 and 1963, recalled telling the group that he would keep awake while on air raid duty during the war by darning his socks at night. “And I think when they wrote ‘Eleanor Rigby’ they had not forgotten me.”
Donovan remembers being visited by Paul with the song as a work in progress:
Ola Na Tungee
Blowing his mind in the dark
With a pipe full of clay
No one can say
This soon developed into “‘Dazzie-de-da-zu picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been …’. This idea of someone picking up rice after a wedding took it in that poignant direction, into a ‘lonely people’ direction.” Paul explained the song’s evolution to Melvyn Bragg:
“I just sat down at the piano and got the first line about ‘picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been’. That came out of the blue, I just didn’t know where that came from … So then I had to explain myself – what’s she doing? What do those words say? ‘Picks up the rice in the church …’ – oh, good, so she’s a lonely old lady type, and continued it from there. And I remember walking around Bristol one night looking for a name that … sounded different enough and wasn’t just ‘Valerie Higgins’, was a little bit more evocative. And I saw a shop, which was Rigby’s, and I thought, that’s a great name, Rigby.
What is clear, however, is the reason why, of all Lennon-McCartney songs, both men should be keen to be associated with ‘Eleanor Rigby’. While much of the credit for the instrumental arrangement of the song must go to George Martin, the lyrical imagery of the song is very powerful too. John (among others) claims to have “helped” with most of verses two and three – “I wrote a good lot of the lyrics, around 70%”, he said in 1972. In his Playboy interview in September 1980, John was still annoyed at Paul’s attitude to their collaboration at that time. He remembered how Paul had the start of the song and then threw out a general invitation for the assembled company to help finish the lyrics –
“Now I was there with Mal [Evans], a telephone installer who was our road manager, and Neil [Aspinall], who was a student accountant, and I was insulted and hurt that Paul had just thrown it out in the air. He actually meant he wanted me to do it, and of course there isn’t a line of theirs in the song because I finally went off to a room with Paul and we finished the song. But … that’s the kind of insensitivity he would have, which upset me in later years.”
In early interviews, Paul acknowledged that, having started the song, he went round to John’s to finish it off. However, Paul later commented “I saw somewhere John said he helped me write it. Yeah, about half a line.” According to Hunter Davies’s biography, the last verse was actually finished in the studio (indeed, it is not on Paul’s original lyric sheet), and according to Pete Shotton, it was his idea to bring the two characters together for the funeral in this last verse, “two lonely people coming together in the end – but too late”. George Martin also remembers that in the studio Paul was missing some lyrics and “going round asking people ‘What can we put in here?’ and Neil and Mal and I were coming up with suggestions”. Whatever John’s contribution in actual words may have been, it is important to remember the vital contribution he made to all of Paul’s music just by being there. John inspired Paul to strive to do better, whether to compete with him, or to impress him, or simply to please him. As George Martin observed, “But for meeting John, I doubt if Paul could have written ‘Eleanor Rigby’.”
But the power of the song lies in the perfect combination of words and music. The abrupt and confident “Ah!” of the first line is at once mocking, sympathetic and resigned. It is underscored by three syncopated rising notes from the cellos, followed by the stress on “look at all the lonely people” and a highly effective use of the Alberti figure (the moving arpeggio treatment) from the violins. Originally, George Martin scored these parts with slurs (as illustrated here), but the decision to use a far less fussy staccato style was undoubtedly the right one. The strings’ restless activity gives the song impetus and immediately defines its character.
Paul’s economical use of words is extraordinary. Eleanor Rigby herself is an intriguing character, and stark imagery is built out of a few concise phrases – waiting at the window, dying in the church, and the face kept in a jar by the door, that she wears inside the house as well as out. Who is it for? “Waits at the window” is underpinned with double-tempo violins conjuring up a breathless haste which accentuates Eleanor Rigby’s wintry desperation and growing realisation that time is passing for her. The lyric gives the impression given that she is older than her years, and dies before her time. Her being buried “along with her name” emphasises her solitude even more than the fact that “nobody came”. Her only companion at the end of her life was her name, it was all she had to be buried with, and at the same time her name was the only thing she had to leave to the world. But she couldn’t even leave that behind her – because there was simply no-one for her to leave it to. And so the name was buried figuratively, along with the physical burial of her body. “No-one was saved” is a universal observation, referring not only to her – or to Father Mackenzie – or indeed just to all the lonely people, but to mankind and an uncaring society. Where do they all belong?
Father Mackenzie is an equally pathetic but less tragic character, who at least has his vocation, which ultimately helps him to outlive her. He has his sermon to write, although no-one hears it, and his socks to darn, although no-one is there. Although he is as lonely as her – he even has to bury the dead himself – there is a touching optimism in the line “What does he care?” He doesn’t. While Eleanor Rigby seems doomed to disappointment and rejection, Father Mackenzie’s expectations are low, and they are achievable. It’s a pitiless world and he is content.
The second verse gives Father Mackenzie a rising cello scale to the minor 6th and octave, and an unhurried, syncopated viola to contrast with Eleanor Rigby’s dejection. Her reappearance in the last verse is marked by a sustained violin octave, which gives way to strident crotchets as Father Mackenzie walks from the grave, leaving the melody in his wake, echoed by the cellos but an octave lower.
Even one of the familiar Beatles trademarks is intensified in this song – the octave ascent (to E) on the first “where do they all belong” is extended to a tenth (G) the second time around, starkly and without harmony, redoubling the emphasis.
For the recording of the song, the first task was to tape the strings. The double quartet was recorded in 14 takes during a three-hour session, which implies that there was a degree of experimentation in the studio, despite George Martin’s precise scoring. This is presumably where those slurred quavers were rejected. One viola player, Stephen Shingles, remembers that the players chipped in with ideas without any kind of reward, overstating it somewhat: “it made billions of pounds, and like idiots we gave them all our ideas for free”.
Geoff Emerick arranged the microphones to be positioned very close to the strings of the instruments (“almost touching … no-one had really done that before”), which was rather disconcerting for the players themselves, but gives a dramatic, clear and positive sound. Although the song is simple and even repetitive – the entire piece alternates between the related keys of Em and C – the scoring for it is immaculate. The inevitable chromatic descent on the violas (D–Db–C–B) through the chorus produces a lovely sequence of E minor-related chords, Em7–Em6–Emaug–Em, that evoke genuine pathos. The scoring includes a number of memorable motifs, including the insistent crotchets in thirds and minor fifths throughout the song (at times set against syncopated descending scales), Father Mackenzie’s rising cello and the series of sustained perfect fifths, minor sixths and octaves.
The simple parts also develop in a fascinating way – for example, the violas’ verses are continually developing until the final verse has wonderfully expectant triple arpeggios instead of the straightforward crotchets and quavers that have gone before.
George Martin has consistently credited Bernard Herrmann as an inspiration for his arrangement of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and the audacious string sound is indeed reminiscent of the work of the Oscar-winning American composer. But oddly he also consistently cites Fahrenheit 451 as a particular influence. From an interview in Melody Maker in 1971 through to his own memoir Playback from 2003, he singled out the film – “He’d written for a film called Fahrenheit 451, and the string writing in that was great. That was my model for ‘Eleanor Rigby’.” And yet he must have been thinking of a different film, almost certainly Psycho or possibly Vertigo, because Fahrenheit 451 was not released until September 1966.
Although the strings were originally taped over all four tracks of the tape, they were then mixed down to a single track to free up space for the vocals. Strange to think, from today’s perspective of stereo recording, that the essence of the track would be reduced to a single track and therefore could not be spread over any part of the stereo range when the final mix was carried out. But such was the view of stereo in 1966 – sound balance was the key and painting a sound image across the stereo spectrum was not seriously considered. Of course, subsequent CD releases of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, such as on the Yellow Submarine Songtrack and Love albums, have gone back to the source tapes and reproduced the sweep of the string section in full magnificent stereo.
Paul recorded the vocal the following day, with John and George providing harmony and backing vocals. Hard to imagine now, but after this, according to notes on the tape box by second engineer Phil McDonald, the group recorded a backing of conga drums and finger cymbals, and the track was mixed for the album. A little over a month later, Paul evidently thought better of this, and recorded a second vocal, wiping out this percussion track.
The neat overlaying of bridge and chorus at the end comes courtesy of the experience, imagination, and brilliance of George Martin. He noticed that harmonically, “Ah, look at all the lonely people” could be sung against “All the lonely people, where do they all come from”, which would also work especially well because of the repetition of the words. So he suggested an overdub. “They were knocked out with the result. ‘How did you know that would work there?’ Paul asked.” Although John and Paul had woven tunes together – such as in ‘Help!’, for example – they had done so instinctively without appreciating the musical technique. Paul needed little further prompting from George Martin to produce beautiful examples of the art, such as ‘She’s Leaving Home’. Paul recorded the counterpoint vocal at the end of his new vocal track.
And with that, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was complete. The track is easily the most satisfactory of the Beatles’ three “chamber music” songs, the scoring being far stronger, and contributing far more to the track than is the case in either ‘Yesterday’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home’.
As with ‘Taxman’, the mixing of the stereo track is surprisingly sloppy. There is a lingering “Elean—” due to late fading out of the second vocal track in the left channel at the start of the first verse, and also a late fading in of the same track in the chorus. Either George Martin had intended using the two vocal tracks that Paul had recorded for double-tracking in the verses, in the same way as he did with the chorus, or it was decided that the original vocal was superior to the second track, and so the new vocal would be simply mixed out of the verse. Certainly, the single-tracked verse gives the string arrangement greater prominence.
What remains is therefore three different textures of the extraordinary McCartney voice – the bold opening lines with harmonies from John and George, the double-tracked chorus, and the straightforward vocal of the verse, the first two (this time without John and George) blending perfectly for the final two lines of the song.
‘Eleanor Rigby’ was issued, with ‘Yellow Submarine’, as a double A-sided single on the same day as Revolver. Three days later, both records were released in the US. Although the label of the UK single treated the two songs equally, the Capitol’s label gave ‘Eleanor Rigby’ the higher catalogue number.
The 1966 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance went to Paul McCartney for ‘Eleanor Rigby’, echoing those early releases of the single ‘Yesterday’, which were credited as a solo effort by Paul McCartney.