For 61 years, Jim McCartney’s birthday had been marked by nothing more extravagant than a family tea-party, a cake with candles in petal-shaped holders, perhaps a little extra flutter on his beloved ‘nags’ if the Liverpool Echo’s racing tipster named a specially hot prospect.
But Jim’s sixty-second–or, anyway, its eve–found him at the royal film premiere of A Hard Day’s Night at the plushy London Pavilion cinema. He enjoyed the film hugely, even though its script unwittingly rubbed raw the heartbreak he and his sons had suffered eight years earlier. In the opening sequence, aboard the train, Alun Owen’s script had John asking Paul why he’d been given the job of looking after his troublesome grandfather, played by Wilfrid Brambell. ‘My mother asked me to,’ he had to reply.
After the show there was a glittering reception at the Dorchester hotel, attended by Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, a royal couple as glamorous and popular in 1964 as William and Kate would be 50 years later. Jim was offered the chance to be presented to them but, with typical reticence, decided he’d rather not as he wouldn’t know what to say.
As midnight signalled the official start of his birthday, Paul handed him a brown paper parcel which he unwrapped to reveal an oil painting of a racehorse. ‘I said, “Very nice,”’ he later recalled, ‘but I’m thinking “What do I want with a picture of a horse?” Paul said, “It’s not just a picture… I’ve bought the bloody horse. It’s yours and it’s running at Chester on Saturday.”’
The horse was a gelding of impressive lineage named Drake’s Drum. Paul had paid £1050 (£15,000 by today’s values) for it and placed it with a leading Yorkshire trainer, Lieut. Col. Wilfred Lyde. The following Saturday, Jim and his two sons watched it run its first race at Chester–and finish second.
This very public display of Paul’s affection for his father had a particular–and uncomfortable–resonance for John Lennon. For it happened that, actually during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night, John had been reunited with his own father, Alfred Lennon, whom he hadn’t seen since he was aged six. Alf, now known as Freddie and long out of the Merchant Navy, was leading a semi-itinerant life as an hotel kitchen-worker when colleagues pointed out that one of the Beatles had his surname.
In reality, despite his present lowly employment, Freddie was not the incorrigible wastrel his son had been brought up to believe. Nor had he simply absconded without a qualm just after the Second World War, leaving toddler John to be passed like a parcel around the family, ending up with his controlling Aunt Mimi. But Mimi’s myth-making was too strong for John ever to feel easy in his long-lost father’s company, or banish the suspicion that Freddie’s only motive for resurfacing was a cut of the Beatles’ riches.
By contrast, since Paul became famous Jim had never demanded anything in recompense for all his years of selfless single-parenthood. Drake’s Drum therefore wasn’t just a casual demonstration of a young millionaire’s new wealth; it was payback beyond anything his dad would ever have asked, or dreamed.
A further sixty-second birthday present from Paul (which, Jim would always say, meant even more) was the leisure to enjoy his new life as a racehorse-owner to the full. Nineteen sixty-four had found him still employed by A. Hannay & Co., the cotton brokers he’d joined as a 14-year-old during the Great War, and at a weekly wage still hovering at only around £10. Now Paul said he should stop work three years before official retirement age, and he’d provide for him for the rest of his life. Attached though Jim was to the Cotton Exchange and Liverpool’s dwindling commercial heart, he needed no persuasion.
He never envisaged spending his retirement anywhere but at 20 Forthlin Road, the tiny council house behind the police academy where he’d brought up his two boys–even though nowadays the police were now more usually out front, controlling mobs of hysterical young women.
Like all the other Beatles’ families, Jim and Paul’s brother Mike, who still lived with him, were unfailingly nice to the fans who besieged their home and deluged it with letters and gifts from all over the world. If the besiegers came from very far away, or looked specially weather-blown or forlorn, Jim would invite them inside and let them make a cup of tea in the tiny kitchen lined with Mike’s pictures of John taking the battered tin kettle off the gas, or the master of the house himself, loading Paul’s undies into the washing-machine.
But by 1964, the crowd situation at Forthlin Road was such that Paul could no longer come home, as he still liked to do. So he set about finding a new house for Jim in more secluded surroundings, which he himself could use as a base in the north-west whenever he needed one.
To any traditional Liverpudlian, the retirement dream was to move ‘over the water’–i.e. the Mersey–to the leafy purlieus of Cheshire’s Wirral peninsula. Paul found the ideal location in Heswall, a village at the Wirral’s westerly tip, which he’d first got to know when the Quarrymen used to play at the Women’s Institute hall. For the then sizeable sum of £8750, he bought his father a four-bedroom detached house with spectacular views across the River Dee to Wales.
The house had a name, ‘Rembrandt’, and was mock-Tudor in style–both features recalling John’s childhood home in Woolton, which Paul used to consider so ‘posh’. Though provided with only one bathroom, it had half an acre of garden, including good-sized greenhouses, where Jim could indulge the lifelong passion hitherto confined to little squares of grass behind council houses.
Paul paid for the house’s renovation and for central heating and fitted carpets to be installed. As Jim’s stepdaughter, Ruth McCartney, recalls, ‘It was the first time he’d ever lived in a place where the carpet touched the walls.’
‘Rembrandt’ was also to be a home for Mike McCartney, who by now had also come into pop music albeit by a more roundabout route than the older brother he always called ‘our kid’. After a period as a trainee ladies’ hairdresser, Mike became an organiser of Merseyside’s first arts festival, in 1962, and also took part in a sketch with the Liverpool poets Roger McGough and John Gorman. As a result, the three formed a vocal trio, specialising in old music-hall songs and children’s playground chants and named, with Scouse gallows-humour, the Scaffold.
To avoid any accusation of piggybacking on ‘our kid’, Mike adopted the surname McGear–‘gear’ in Liverpool slang being a noun for fashionable clothes or an adjective meaning cool. While the Scaffold were getting established, he received what he preferred to call a weekly covenant of £10 from Paul.
Jim himself could draw on a bank account held jointly with Paul, which at that time received a substantial part of his son’s Beatle earnings. Having such wealth at his disposal went to Jim’s head in only one respect: he became a wildly extravagant tipper. At the little tea room in Heswall, he would leave £1 extra on a bill for less than £2. On car journeys to and from Liverpool via the Mersey Tunnel, he’d even tip the man in the tollbooth.
In the eight years since Mary’s death, what with the combined pressures of cotton and raising two sons, Jim had never shown any interest in women outside his circle of supportive sisters. His one innocent flirtation was with the Beatles’ fan club organiser, Frieda Kelly, who called him ‘Uncle Jim’ and whom he’d take to Liverpool’s Basnett oyster bar–a favourite haunt of Brian’s–to teach her to appreciate wines and French cheeses she’d previously regarded as just ‘smelly’.
After moving across the water, Jim seemed set on remaining a confirmed bachelor, with his sisters Millie and Gin still coming once a week to clean the house for him as they had since Mary’s death. The only difference now was that he could send them home in a taxi.
He’d barely settled into ‘Rembrandt’, however, when romance struck him as suddenly as it first had with Mary in his mother’s air-raid shelter. Through his niece, Bett Robbins, he met Angela Williams, a tiny 35-year-old in a modish beehive coiffure and spectacles with flyaway frames. Born in Hoylake, Angie had grown up in Norris Green (coincidentally where Jim met Mary) and had chummed up with Bett at a Butlin’s holiday camp when they both entered a Holiday Princess beauty contest. Now she was recently widowed, with a four-year-old daughter named Ruth, living in a tiny flat on the Kirkby industrial estate and working for the Pure Chemical company.
If Jim was initially dismayed by the 27-year age gap between them, it never bothered Angie for a moment. ‘The first time I went to the house and saw Jim standing at the front door,’ she says, ‘I knew I was going to marry him.’ She was attractive, warm, lively and–the clincher for Jim–an accomplished pianist. On only her fourth or fifth visit to ‘Rembrandt’, he came up behind her while she was playing and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘He said, “I want to ask you something,”’ she recalls. ‘Before he could go on, I said, “The answer’s yes.”’
The terms of the proposal indicated how the changing times had affected even ‘Gentleman Jim’. Angie was offered the choice of becoming his resident housekeeper, living with him or marrying him. For the sake of her daughter, Ruth, she said it had better be marriage.
Jim went straight off to telephone Paul, whom Angie hadn’t yet met but with whom, it became clear, he had already discussed the matter. ‘I heard him say, “Yes, she is… yes, I have… yes, we are.” Then he put me on to speak to Paul, who said, “Well, you sound very nice.”’
Paul at the time was in London, but dropped everything and drove straight up to Cheshire in his Aston Martin. Following already established routine, his father opened the garage doors so he could drive in and enter the house through the kitchen, so avoiding any fans lurking around the front gate. Angie’s daughter, Ruth, recalls being got out of bed and brought downstairs in her pyjamas to meet her future stepbrother. By then, the Beatles’ faces were familiar even to four-year-olds. ‘I remember the first thing I said to him–“my cousin’s got you on the wallpaper in her Wendy house!”’
Always good with children, Paul sat her on his knee and took trouble to get acquainted with her. ‘I’d had an operation to have a kidney removed not long before, so I lifted up my pyjama-jacket and showed him the scar. He told me Ringo had a big scar on his tummy [from childhood peritonitis] but not as good a one as mine.’
Next day, Angie summoned her elderly mother, Edie, to stay with her at ‘Rembrandt’ as a chaperone until the wedding. Paul had to drive back to London, so Edie–totally undaunted by his celebrity–offered to make him cheese sandwiches and a flask of tea for the journey. In Jim’s unfamiliar fridge she found what she took to be cheese but in fact was a block of marzipan. ‘A couple of hours after Paul left, we got a phone call from him somewhere in the Midlands,’ Angie recalls. ‘He was laughing over his marzipan sandwiches.’
Jim and Angie were married on 24 November, at a tiny chapel in Carrog, North Wales. TV commitments for the Beatles kept Paul in London and Mike was on tour with the Scaffold. The village gravedigger acted as Jim’s best man, and the minister’s wife as both matron-of-honour and organist. Paul’s congratulatory telegram read ‘Wishing you long life and happiness and lots of marzipan butties.’
Becoming stepmother to a deceased wife’s sons can be full of problems but with Paul and Michael Angie seemed to avoid them all. The more likely source of tension was Michael, who returned from his Scaffold tour to the fait accompli of a new wife sharing ‘Rembrandt’ with his father and himself. However, both brothers were equally glad Jim had found such a vivacious companion for what might otherwise have been a lonely retirement. And Mike and Angie soon became as close as any real mother and son.
Paul seemed thrilled with this new extension to his family, so much so that at Christmas he invited Jim to bring Angie and Ruth down to London, stay in an hotel and join him for Christmas lunch with Jane’s family at 57 Wimpole Street. To Angie and Ruth, the Ashers’ home was ‘like a dream’ with its enormous Christmas tree and gold-wrapped presents. Also there for the festivities were Peter and Gordon and Peter Asher’s latest girlfriend Betsy Doster, a publicist for the American group Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. The McCartneys were made to feel thoroughly at home, Jim getting on especially well with Jane’s father, who–primed by Paul–gave him the perfect gift of an Oxford English Dictionary.
On Boxing Day, Paul had a special treat for Ruth alone. Picking her up from the hotel in his Aston Martin, he took her to Kensington to meet a wide-smiling woman with a mass of curly hair whom he introduced as ‘Alma’. She was Alma Cogan, Britain’s biggest singing star of the pre-rock ‘n’ roll Fifties, known as ‘the girl with the laugh in her voice’ and for a gaggle of novelty numbers like ‘20 Tiny Fingers’ and ‘Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo’. Now in professional eclipse, she remained a hugely popular figure inside show business, and one of the most legendarily hospitable. All four Beatles–and Brian–were regular visitors to the mansion flat where she lived with her mother and kept open house literally around the clock for A-list celebrities up to Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr.
Her sister, Sandra Caron, remembers how at Alma’s gatherings Paul took the chance to meet every big star he could and learn what they could teach him. ‘One time, he and George were in the kitchen and I went in and told them Noël Coward was in the next room. “Who’s he?” George said. I said he was only one of the most famous playwrights and wits of the century. When I went into the sitting-room later, Paul was sitting at Noël Coward’s feet.’
In those days, it was taken for granted that Angie looked after Jim and ran the house although, from long habit, he still did a large share of the cooking. Paul made them an annual allowance of £7000, from which Angie received £60 per week for housekeeping. Detailed accounts had to be kept and submitted to Paul’s office of everything she spent (‘Piano-tuner £3, TV aerial £7, Ruth dress £4’), right down to face-flannels and sweets.
Jim had never previously been able to afford a car, so had never learned to drive, and said it was too late now. Angie therefore became his chauffeur in the small car Paul provided, diligently noting down every gallon of petrol bought and every toll paid through the Mersey Tunnel on Jim’s weekly trips into Liverpool to pay his bookmaker’s account.
She also did her best to rein in his chronic overtipping. Early in 1965, they went on a belated honeymoon to the Bahamas where (for tax reasons) the Beatles were filming the climactic scenes of Help! One night at an open-air restaurant, a group of musicians came to the newly-weds’ table and serenaded them with ‘Yellow Bird’. Jim’s tip was so munificent that for the rest of their stay the musicians pursued them with recitals of ‘Yellow Bird’, even following Angie to the toilet and playing it outside.
At home, he was forever distributing cash among his large family circle in Liverpool, who needed something or other but didn’t like to ask Paul directly for it. He even tipped his doctor in Heswall £300 every Christmas. ‘One year, this doctor said he wanted to buy a colour TV and so could he please have double the amount,’ Angie recalls. ‘So Jim just gave it to him.’
As Paul McCartney’s stepmother, Angie had to get used to groups of excited figures waiting at the end of the drive at all hours of the day and night and in all weathers, nocturnal voices and scufflings in the garden and torchlight shining inquisitively up at her bedroom window. From time to time, the press would have to be let into the house, the furniture drastically rearranged to accommodate TV cameras and lights and endless relays of tea and refreshments served by her. Once, while she was in the kitchen, preparing yet another laden tray, an amorous hack sidled up and propositioned her.
Though ‘Rembrandt’ had been intended as a secret hideaway, fanmail for Paul soon began pouring through the letterbox. Among the piles stacked on the living-room table, Angie noticed several from the same person, with postmarks showing that the sender was getting nearer and nearer. Finally, one night, the Liverpool dock police contacted Jim to say they were holding a young woman who’d arrived as a stowaway on a freighter and claimed to have been ‘invited to Paul McCartney’s house’. Paul, who happened to be there, spoke to the stowaway, who, with typical McCartney hospitality, was then invited for tea and afterwards put up at an hotel in Liverpool until she could arrange her passage home.
It might well have caused tension with Paul and Mike when their father decided to adopt Angie’s little daughter, Ruth, becoming ‘Daddy’ to her after half a lifetime of being ‘Dad’ to them. But both brothers saw it as a further happy sign of Jim going against the grain of retirement: growing younger rather than older. To Ruth, he appeared much as he had to them for all those years at 20 Forthlin Road–a quiet, methodical figure who never appeared at breakfast without a collar and tie, yet whose ‘bubbling, underground sense of fun’ ensured that in any tongue-pulling contest he always triumphed. Like Paul and Mike before her, Ruth would be sent to Chambers’ dictionary to check the spelling of any arcane word in his crossword puzzle; like them, she learned his treasury of Scouse wisdom: ‘Do it now’; ‘The two most important “-ations” in life are “toler-” and “moder-”’; ‘There’s no hair on a seagull’s chest’; ‘Put it there if it weighs a ton’.
Paul always devoted time to Ruth on his visits, playing games with her in the garden, or showing her books about his favourite contemporary artists. It delighted him when she treated the surreal fantasies of Salvador Dalí as quite normal, remarking casually, ‘Oh, look… a soft watch.’
Though never quite as close to his stepmother as Mike was, he liked Angie for her good humour and tireless hospitality to any friends he brought home; at whatever hour of the day or night, ‘Ange’ would go and put the kettle on. Her love of music and abilities as a pianist created a further bond, and her worship of Frank Sinatra became a family joke. Some time later, during a solo visit to America, Paul was offered a short-haul ride on Sinatra’s private plane, not realising that Sinatra himself would also be aboard. During the trip, he couldn’t help blurting out, ‘Wait till my stepmother hears I’ve met you.’
Such gaucheness was completely untypical and he apologised at once. ‘Don’t worry,’ Sinatra replied. ‘I did exactly the same thing when I first met John Wayne.’
Other Beatles had been dismayed to find their parents and close relations treating them with reverence once they became household names. But when Paul came to stay, Jim treated him in the same way as always, never failing to ask if he was eating properly and his bowels were in good order, nor to suggest, with a twinkle, that his Beatle haircut must have served its purpose by now and might be changed to something a little less extreme.
Under Angie’s influence, Jim had put aside his old, double-breasted pinstripe business suits and begun to wear more stylish leisure clothes, including trousers with the ‘drainie’ style he’d so detested in the late Fifties, when Paul was besotted by them. ‘By this time, Paul and every other young bloke had taken to wearing flares,’ Ruth McCartney says. ‘So Daddy used to criticise those.’
Paul would often be accompanied by John or George, minus their respective wives, for a few days’ relaxation very much in the spirit of the old Quarrymen. George loved Jim’s cooking, especially his custard which was smooth, creamy and without any wrinkled skin on top. ‘He was always asking for the recipe,’ Angie remembers. ‘But Jim wouldn’t give it to him.’
John became a frequent house guest, developing a healthy respect for Angie when–with a touch of his Aunt Mimi–she reprimanded him for not saying ‘Please’. He particularly enjoyed spending time with Ruth, in whom he showed an absorption that his own son, Julian, sadly never received. ‘He taught me to ride a bicycle,’ Ruth remembers. ‘And he’d read to me, and make up stories about my Teddy bear.’
Once when John was visiting, he and Paul went on a shopping trip to nearby Chester by bus, disguised in old raincoats from Jim’s greenhouse, plus trilby hats and dark glasses. Their purchases had to be delivered later by truck: for John, a large crucifix, a Bible, some candlesticks and books; for Paul, a pine-framed bed that turned out to be riddled with woodworm. On top of driving, shopping, cooking and endlessly putting the kettle on, his good-natured stepmother volunteered to get it fumigated for him.
John happened to be staying when Brian Epstein phoned ‘Rembrandt’ to tell Paul that the Beatles occupied all five top places in Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. ‘They were chuffed,’ Angie recalls.
Britain in 1965 as yet had nothing like America’s burgeoning rock culture. The mark of the Beatles’ success in their homeland was their acceptance into a catch-all showbiz world which hosted annual awards at formal luncheons regulated by scarlet-clad toastmasters, whose zenith was the annual Royal Variety Show and whose innermost in-crowd met at Alma Cogan’s Sunday-night parties.
On 1 August, the band were to top the bill in a television spectacular called Blackpool Night Out, hosted by the comedians Mike and Bernie Winters. A few days beforehand, Paul telephoned his ex-girlfriend Iris Caldwell, with whom he’d remained on friendly terms. Iris knew how sensitive he could be, under that angelic smile. Yet she never dreamed how her mother Vi’s half-playful jibe, ‘You’ve got no heart, Paul’, had been gnawing at him. ‘Paul told me “Watch Blackpool Night Out and tell me if I’ve still got no heart…” It was the first time he ever sang “Yesterday” on television.’
During the filming of Help!, he’d exasperated his fellow Beatles, not to mention their director, Richard Lester, by calling for a piano and continually tinkering with a little melody he said he’d dreamed one night in his unshared single bed in the attic of 57 Wimpole Street.
When he’d awoken, the melody was so complete in his head that he could play it almost instantaneously on his cabaret piano. So complete, indeed, that at first he couldn’t believe it was original, but thought he must unconsciously be plagiarising some well-known song whose title and words he’d forgotten. For weeks afterwards, he kept trying it out on other people–John, George, Ringo, George Martin, Alma Cogan, passing grips on the Help! set–but the expected cry of recognition never came. ‘It was like handing something in to the police,’ he would recall. ‘If no one claims it, I can have it.’ This was long before pop’s first great plagiarism case (against, fellow Beatle George) and few other songwriters would have been as scrupulous.
Meanwhile, he gave it only the jokey working title of ‘Scrambled Eggs’, to fit its three-note opening. ‘Scrambled eggs’, he took to singing in those endless demos, ‘Oh my baby, how I love your legs’: a very McCartney marriage of lechery with the cosiest of hot snacks.
In May, he and Jane went on holiday to Albufeira, on Portugal’s Algarve coast, staying at a holiday villa owned by Bruce Welch of the Shadows. In those days, the Algarve’s nearest international airport was at Lisbon, a five-hour drive away. In the back of their chauffeured car, while Jane slept, Paul started getting a lyric with the same scansion as ‘Scrambled Eggs’.
‘When the car arrived at my place, he jumped out and said, “Have you got a guitar?”’ Bruce Welch remembers. They spent their first evening at the nearby villa of Muriel Young, a children’s TV presenter who partnered an owl puppet named Ollie Beak. ‘Paul had finished the song on my Martin guitar in the afternoon and he played it for us after dinner,’ Welch says. ‘We were the first to hear “Yesterday”.’
By the time the Beatles met to record their Help! soundtrack album, a new anxiety was gnawing at Paul. The title ‘Yesterday’ sounded so familiar that maybe he’d unconsciously plagiarised that. But the nearest to it George Martin could call to mind was a Peggy Lee track from the 1950s called ‘Yesterdays’. Stylistically there was an echo of Ray Charles’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’, while Nat King Cole’s 1954 hit ‘Answer Me, My Love’ had a similarly remorseful mood, similar line lengths, even the couplet ‘You were mine yesterday/ I believed that love was here to stay’. Nonetheless, even the super-scrupulous Martin felt Paul was on safe ground.
How to record it was another matter. More like an Elizabethan love song than anything, it clearly wasn’t suited to Ringo’s drumming, George’s lead guitar or John’s acidic harmony, as all three readily conceded. Martin’s initial idea was to release it under Paul’s name only, but Brian Epstein wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Whatever we do,’ he said, ‘we are not splitting up the Beatles.’
To Martin, the setting Paul’s vocal cried out for was a classical string quartet. He himself initially favoured something more experimental and toyed with the idea of using the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, a pre-computer sound laboratory which created the effects for its sci-fi series Doctor Who. Strange to imagine that saddest and sweetest of elegies coming from the same dimension as a Dalek.
On 14 June 1965, four days before his twenty-third birthday, he recorded the vocal for ‘Yesterday’ at Abbey Road studios. Three days later, an all-male string quartet recorded the accompaniment to be overdubbed on the voice. As a trained classical musician, George Martin naturally did the arrangement, but so that all connection with the modern world shouldn’t be lost, Paul asked that a seventh–what jazzers call a blue note–be inserted into the score. ‘Bach would never have done that,’ Martin demurred, but to no avail.
On the Help! album, ‘Yesterday’ was listed as by Lennon–McCartney and as having been performed by the Beatles. It was not used in the film–in fact, it was virtually buried in the home market. John, George and Ringo vetoed its release as a single by Parlophone lest it should damage their credibility as a rock band. Their American label, Capitol, could not be leaned on in the same way, and on 5 October (credited solely to Paul McCartney) it reached number one in Billboard’s Hot 100, staying there for four weeks.
Among the Beatles’ British peers, it was viewed as a disastrous step out of character that no one else wanted to follow by recording a cover version. It was offered to Billy J. Kramer, from Brian’s NEMS stable, and to the R&B singer Chris Farlowe, but both turned it down as ‘too soft’. Three months elapsed before it was covered by Matt Monro, a Sinatra-style crooner (and long-time associate of George Martin), and finally entered the UK Top 10, even then getting no higher than number eight.
The classiest cover was performed on British TV by Marianne Faithfull, accompanied by Paul himself. He admired Marianne’s singing and virginal beauty but, more importantly, she was about to marry Peter Asher’s friend John Dunbar, a Cambridge fine arts student, whose child she was already carrying. Paul began the song, strumming an acoustic guitar, then Marianne took it up with an orchestra and choir, and camera angles carefully designed to hide her pregnancy.
The song became part of the Beatles’ stage act, for the short time they were still to have one. George would usually announce it, with a faintly snide parody of Britain’s most famous amateur talent show–‘And now, for Paul McCartney of Liverpool… opportunity knocks’–and John would hand him a floral bouquet afterwards. When he performed it on America’s Ed Sullivan Show, the audience was estimated at 73 million; as many as had watched the Beatles’ legendary debut on the Sullivan Show in February 1964.
A Novello Award as ‘the best song of 1965’ was just the beginning of the superlatives destined to be heaped on ‘Yesterday’ tomorrow and tomorrow. By the end of the twentieth century, it would be calculated to have been played seven million times and to have inspired more than 2000 cover versions, challenging the record held for decades by Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’. A poll of BBC radio listeners in 1999 would vote it ‘the best song of the century’, and Rolling Stone magazine and the MTV channel later jointly named it ‘number one pop song of all time’.
Not bad for a 22-year-old remembering a dream.