Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, John sang ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on the first day back at Abbey Road in late November 1966, after the longest career break the Beatles had ever taken. The original intention was that their next album would be autobiographical along the lines that ‘In My Life’ had already begun to explore. But ‘Strawberry Fields’ was of a quite different order. A stream of consciousness tone poem, it had been generated in equal parts by hallucinogenic drugs and hazy childhood memories.
But which was which? ‘No one I know is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low,’ went the lyrics. Was that a memory of a real tree, as in those in which John might once have played hide and seek with Pete Shotton while the Salvation Army band played in the background? Or just a druggy metaphor for alienation and being misunderstood?
When asked to interpret his lyrics, he could occasionally become vague, as I discovered during a discussion of the song. ‘That was where I used to go and play . . . a children’s home where they had garden parties,’ he said. But the meaning? ‘It’s about me, and I was having a hard time.’ Which he followed with stories about how he had always been different, even as a little boy. ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, is what I’m saying . . . like when I wasn’t sure if I was mad or a genius.’ Sometimes, as he would explain on another occasion, it didn’t do to investigate too closely the meaning in song lyrics.
What was more important to him was the overall dreamlike feel of the song, in the achievement of which all the Beatles and George Martin contributed. The producer arranged the trumpets and cellos, Paul provided the Mellotron flute intro, Ringo draped towels over his drums to muffle their sound and George played his new slide guitar. Normally, while in the studio, John would be in a hurry to finish recording his songs, the opposite of Paul, who would fret over every little detail of the arrangement. But on this occasion, sensing, perhaps, that this was a career-changing moment for him and the Beatles, and possibly even an epochal one for rock music, he was never quite satisfied. And when at last everyone thought the recording was finished, he virtually broke George Martin’s heart when he decided he wanted to start all over again.
Even then he was unhappy with the new take and demanded that Martin knit the two different versions together, despite them being in different keys and at different speeds. It would, Martin would say later, be the most difficult task he ever had to do, only achieved by slowing down one version of the song and speeding up the other until they miraculously came together.
Many years later, John and George Martin met in New York, and John talked teasingly about how he would like to record all the Beatles songs again, to which George Martin queried, ‘Even “Strawberry Fields”?’
‘Especially “Strawberry Fields”,’ John replied.
Once again, the Beatles had been given the whole of Abbey Road studios to use as a musical workshop, and it took a total of fifty-five hours to record ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
The next song they turned to could hardly have been more different. It was Paul’s ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and was based on a tune that he’d been playing since his Cavern days, now with new lyrics to celebrate his father’s sixty-fourth birthday. To Beatle fans it would come as a shock, in that it was a pastiche of Thirties English music hall pop, which might have been written for George Formby. Apart from adding a few odd lines, John’s input was minimal.
There were often elements of Paul’s work that he would sometimes find twee, but there was nothing twee about his next song, ‘Penny Lane’. Melodically it was all Paul, but the title had come from John months earlier when they’d been putting together a series of snapshot images to use in song. Geographically, Penny Lane is a well-known terminus on the outskirts of Liverpool, and was close to home for both of them. The words were just reliving childhood, John would say of the ‘blue suburban skies’ under which they had both grown up, although only in memory was it always a sunny day in often cloudy Liverpool. ‘The bank was there, and that was where the tram sheds were . . . and the fire engines were down there, too.’ As was the barber’s shop, while the ‘pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray’ was Pete Shotton’s girlfriend. Lyrically it was a Lennon and McCartney masterpiece, John and Paul working together at their very best, and confident enough to include a little Liverpool lads’ smut with the line ‘four of fish and finger pies’. In fact, it was so good as a song and recording that when the EMI sales department began pleading for something new from the Beatles, George Martin and Brian handed it over along with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ for a double A-side single, deciding at the same time to leave them off the new album.
In that moment, any remaining hope for a Liverpool-inspired album was lost. Instead, the Beatles began making a ‘concept album’ – a new term then, but one which meant whatever you wanted it to mean. It’s possible that the autobiographical element may never have worked, anyway. They had failed to come up with a story when, years earlier, they’d tried to write a play together. So they may well have found the same writer’s block on this project. All the same, it was a lost opportunity that it wasn’t tried.
But it was never clear why the release of ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as a single should have precluded the two tracks from also appearing on the album. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’ had both been on Revolver as well as being a single. Did the EMI sales department convince Brian and George that a couple of songs released months earlier would hurt the sales of the album when it finally came? All George Martin would tell me was that the decision was the biggest mistake of his professional life.
As recording moved into the New Year, it was already apparent that the songs, and the arrangements with which George Martin was dressing them, were different from anything the Beatles had tried before. And, as if to subconsciously marry with that, the Beatles even looked different, with all four now sporting moustaches – the other three joining Paul who had decided to grow one to cover a top lip that had been cut in a motor-cycle accident.
The new theme for the album that was evolving, mainly in Paul’s head, was that the Beatles should subsume their identities in a Victorian-style brass band, the style of which was in permanent collision with the psychedelia of 1967. With the help of a mishearing by road manager Mal Evans, who thought they’d said ‘salt and pepper’, it eventually became known as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – which was to become one of the best-selling albums ever made. With 32 million copies sold to date, it has won several Grammies and dozens of music magazine prizes and other awards.
Whether it deserves the praise it has harvested is debatable. John always had mixed feelings about it, perhaps because he felt it was Paul’s project more than his, with Paul’s songs ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Lovely Rita’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ being the obvious hits. But though he was probably right to describe his song ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ as ‘a throwaway piece of garbage’, the way he used the acts advertised on a Victorian music hall poster he’d picked up in an antiques shop to create ‘Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite!’ was quite brilliant. Who else would have thought of that, or have been able to put it to music? Who else would have written the later, much copied, ‘Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds’?
He disguised his voice again when he sang that, but with its references to Alice In Wonderland it might have been regarded as a ‘thank you’ to Mimi who had first given him the book. Unfortunately, when someone noticed that the initials of ‘Lucy’, ‘Sky’ and ‘Diamonds’ spelled LSD, it was assumed that he was urging Beatles fans to take acid.
He wasn’t. His son Julian had come home from infants’ school one day with a painting that he’d done, and, when asked to explain it, had simply said, ‘It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds’ – Lucy being a little girl in his class.
John’s reputation had, however, gone before him, and the unintentional connection with LSD became an urban myth, which must have pleased Mimi not at all. There would almost certainly have been LSD at Kenwood when John was working on the song, probably on the chemist’s mortar and pestle in which he kept his drugs. He may well have partaken during the writing of the lyrics. But there was no secret message in the song’s title, he assured me years after all the fuss had died down and when it really didn’t matter if there was or wasn’t.
No one wanted to believe that, however, when the album’s standout track, ‘A Day In The Life’, had John singing ‘I’d love to turn you on’, which was actually a line that Paul had written. This was a song about an acid trip, with its random collection of thoughts, one about a friend, Tara Browne, who had died in a car crash, possibly when he was tripping; another based on a Daily Mail headline about four thousand holes in the streets of the town of Blackburn in Lancashire; and a third about ‘the English army having won the war’, presumably a reference to the film John had just been shooting. Then, between the verses, there was Paul having a routine start to a day on a double-decker bus, until the album comes to a conclusion as a forty-one-piece orchestra goes on an ever-rising crescendo of sound before emoting into a final echoing chord. ‘Like the end of the world’, was John’s instruction to George Martin.
On hearing it and reading the lyrics the BBC had its own instruction about this song. Playing it on the radio was banned.
In many ways, ‘A Day In The Life’ was a perfect illustration of Lennon and McCartney as mutually supporting songwriters. ‘The way we wrote a lot of the time,’ John explained, ‘one of us would write the good bit, the part that was easy, like “I read the news today” or whatever it was. Then when you got stuck, or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on you’d just drop it. Then we would meet each other and I would sing half the song and Paul would be inspired to write the next bit, or vice versa.’ On this particular track it obviously helped that Paul had taken LSD too, although not with anything like the appetite that John was showing for the drug. Even he, though, prided himself on being professional enough never to take it in the studio – apart, that is, from the occasion when he took it by mistake while working on ‘Getting Better’.
‘I thought I was taking some uppers to help me stay awake, but began to feel unwell,’ he said later. ‘That’s when it dawned on me that I’d taken some LSD. I told the others, “I can’t go on, you’ll just have to do it without me and I’ll watch.”’
Not knowing the reason that John felt ill, George Martin decided that the Beatle probably needed some fresh air. ‘I was aware of their smoking pot, sometimes in breaks in the canteen, but I wasn’t aware that they did anything serious,’ he would remember. ‘In fact, I was so innocent that I took John up to the roof of the studio – there being fans waiting outside the front of Abbey Road. If I’d known he’d taken LSD, the roof would have been the last place I would have taken him. There was a small parapet about eighteen inches high, but no railing. It was a wonderful starry night and John went to the edge and looked up at the stars and said, “Aren’t they fantastic?” I suppose to him, they would have been especially fantastic, but to me they just looked like stars.’
As usual Lennon and McCartney would get the lion’s share of the credit for the album, so it was left to Ringo (who was given ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ to sing) to leaven things out. ‘George Martin had really become an integral part of it all,’ he told The Beatles Anthology. ‘We were putting in strings, brass, piano, etc., and George was the only one who could write it all down. He was also brilliant. One of them [John or Paul] would mention that he’d like the violins to go de-de-diddle, or whatever, and George would catch it and put it down. He became part of the band.’
In every way Sgt. Pepper was an extraordinary album. George Harrison was disappointed when John and Paul vetoed the inclusion of his song ‘Only A Northern Song’ after it had been recorded, but then came up with ‘Within You Without You’, which he recorded separately with a group of Indian musicians; while Ringo learned how to play chess in the long days and nights when he wasn’t needed. He may, however, have honestly summed up the opinion of some Beatles fans about the collection when he said, ‘I never know what John and Paul are on about half the time.’
Jane Asher would have known very well what Paul was going ‘on about’. She was on a tour of North America with the Bristol Old Vic at the time. But it’s unlikely that Cynthia had much of a grasp of John’s, admittedly more difficult, lyrics, and she never said that he took the time to explain them to her. Perhaps she never asked. Most of the time, however, they got on. ‘We had no problems at home. We were two people living in the best way we could under the circumstances,’ she would say. ‘We really didn’t have a cross word.’
John’s use of LSD, however, was changing things, she would later tell me, leading him ‘towards the destruction of so much that he valued. At home he would be lost in a daydream: present, but absent. I’d talk to him, but he wouldn’t hear me.’
Did she ever wonder if drugs had temporarily tilted John’s mind? ‘He was definitely on a different planet during the making of Sgt. Pepper. Although for a time the drugs were part of it . . . I think the drugs destroyed a lot of his creativity.’
As for their marriage, the gap that had been between them on the day they had married was now ever widening.