Michelle
This is one of Paul’s oldest tunes, written when he was still at school, the Liverpool Institute, in 1959 aged seventeen. He used to go to art college parties, through his friend John, and one of his party pieces was to pretend to be French, playing his guitar and singing in pretend French to look exotic and interesting and, so he hoped, pick up girls. French existential culture was big amongst students in the late fifties and French singers like Juliet Greco and Sacha Distel were much admired.
Six years later, in 1965, trying to get together enough new songs to fill up the Rubber Soul album, John reminded Paul of that tune he used to play at parties, which never had any words, not proper ones. He worked on it again, realized it must be a love ballad about a French girl, and so wanted some words that sounded, well, French.
Ivan Vaughan, one of Paul’s oldest friends from school–the one who first introduced Paul to John–was visiting with his wife Jan, a French teacher, and Paul asked her for a rhyme in French for Michelle–she said Ma Belle. He then asked her to translate ‘these words go together so well’ into French. He later sent her a cheque, for having contributed.
When he had first played it to John, with only the chorus written, it was John who suggested the ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ bit, with the accent on the word love, having been impressed by a Nina Simone song ‘I Put a Spell on You’ where the phrase is repeated three times–but then it’s a phrase that has been used trillions of times, before and since. Listening to it again now, the roundabout rhythm of the music made me think of La Ronde, a French film of the fifties, very popular with students and young lovers
The use of French in an English pop lyric was most unusual, and funny in a way. It could well have ended up as a pastiche of a French accordion song, sung by a joke Frenchman with a beret and a string of onions, but Paul keeps a straight face, sticks to a simple tune, with a clear sweet voice and some great harmonies. After ‘Yesterday’, it is up there with his best loved, most played, most copied melodies.
The words are not memorable, they get nowhere, do little, no situation, no story, except a boy trying to woo a girl in a foreign language.
The manuscript, in Paul’s hand, looks to be an early draft, before the ‘I love you’ middle eight and the introduction of the French words.
Incidentally, I went on the internet, accessed Dictionary.com and put in ‘these are words that go together well’ and in seconds the French translation came back as ‘ce sont des mots cela vont ensemble bien’. So not quite the same as Jan’s. But then French people themselves can never agree on what is correct French. Think how today, thanks to computers, Paul could have immediately turned any old lines into any old language. Would he have gone on to use a lot more in his lyrics? I doubt it. Once was enough of an amusement.
’Michelle’, from Rubber Soul, December 1965, in Paul’s hand, but without the French bits.
Michelle, ma belle
These are words that go together well
My Michelle
Michelle, ma belle
Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble
Tres bien ensemble
I love you, I love you, I love you
That’s all I want to say
Until I find a way
I will say the only words I know that you’ll understand
Michelle, ma belle
Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble
Tres bien ensemble
I need to, I need to, I need to
I need to make you see
Oh, what you mean to me
Until I do, I’m hoping you will know what I mean
I love you…
I want you, I want you, I want you
I think you know by now
I’ll get to you somehow
Until I do, I’m telling you so you’ll understand
Michelle, ma belle
Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble
Tres bien ensemble
And I will say the only words I know that you’ll understand
My Michelle
What Goes On
Another old tune resurrected at the last moment and polished up to fill the album and give Ringo a song. It had been written some years earlier by John and played to George Martin in March 1963 when they were thinking of a possible follow-up to ‘Please Please Me’–but Martin declined it.
John decided to dig it out again and both Paul and Ringo helped to polish up the lyrics. Ringo, modestly, takes credit for only five words–but they include the nice phrase ‘waiting for the tides of time’. The first two lines are also quite good: ‘What goes on in your heart, what goes on in your mind.’ But there is no development.
It is the first Beatles song in which Ringo gets a credit. On the sleeve the composer is named as Lennon–McCartney–Starkey.
It has a rockabilly feeling, which rather suits Ringo’s limited singing range. In fact he sounds a bit flat, all the way through, but that adds to the charm. His pronunciation of ‘tearing me apart’ comes out like ‘tayrin’, betraying his Scouse origins.
Another example of how the Beatles, unless doing a parody or a cover version, sang in their own accents, their own voices.
Girl
‘Girl’ is possibly their strongest, deepest writing so far, in that it is complex, philosophical, with religious and existential overtones. John himself was rather proud of it. It was his original idea, but Paul helped out on some of the words.
At first, he appears to be leaving the girl: ‘The kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry.’ Then he complains that she ‘puts him down when friends are there’. He suspects she is the sort who takes pleasure from being cruel, causing pain. And finally the pay-off: ‘Will she still believe it when he’s dead?’
He is clearly writing about a tortured relationship, but again, he always denied he had any one girl in mind–though Cynthia later maintained that the first verse, about a girl he wants so much, was probably about her. Wishful thinking?
John explained later that, deep down, he was always waiting for an upmarket, arty intellectual sort of girl to come along–‘not someone buying Beatles records’. Which was rather cruel to Beatles fans. It turned out he was waiting for Yoko, though he didn’t know it then.
‘I was trying to say something or other about Christianity, which I was opposed to at the time… the Catholic Christian concept: be tortured and then it’ll be all right… you’ll attain heaven.’
The music is rich, with overtones of the Zorba the Greek soundtrack, George’s sitar sounding a bit like a mandolin. John’s voice is strong and direct, but also playful–you can hear a loud and suggestive intake of breath, magnified so it sounds like an instrument. There is also some close harmony in the background from Paul and George in which they are repeating tit tit tit tit tit, nicely mocking all the serious, intellectual sentiments.
Four months later, John returned to the theme of Christianity in his interview with Maureen Cleave, giving rise to that remark about the Beatles and Jesus…
I’m Looking Through You
Another Paul song inspired by Jane, who had by this time departed to Bristol to pursue her acting career, leaving him wailing and wondering and rather self-obsessed, only seeing things from his point of view–but don’t we all?
‘It caused a few rows,’ he told me in 1967. ‘Jane went off and I said, OK then, leave. I’ll find someone else. It was shattering to be without her. That was when I wrote, “I’m Looking Through You”.’
It has some of Paul’s best lines so far: simple and direct, conjuring up a situation most people have found themselves in, yet without resorting either to cliché or philosophizing. ‘I’m looking through you, where did you go. I thought I knew you, what did I know.’ Having dreamt up this ironic juxtaposition, he then keeps it going, aware of her lips moving, and then her voice, but nothing is clear. I can imagine him, sucking his pencil, listing other ways of supposed communication, all of them failing. Then he delivers the best line: ‘Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight.’ Sung so succinctly and clearly, enunciating every syllable.
You don’t have to ponder too much about the words, or the sentiments, just move your feet. It’s one I used to dance to a lot, in the old old days, when I could still move my feet…
In My Life
This originated with a long poem by John about his life–which is what Kenneth Allsop had suggested he should try. John wrote it at home at Kenwood and then put it to music, recording it on tape, then playing it back to see what it sounded like, if it was worth taking further. Fairly decent cassette recorders had come on the market and John owned about ten, which he had been messing around with for a year or two.
The lyrics describe a long bus ride through Liverpool, from his home in Menlove Avenue down to the docks, listing all the sights and sounds. It grew a bit long and boring and John went off it, thinking it was too clunky and clumsy, a bit like writing about what I did on my hols, but he liked the idea of looking back on his life, so he tightened it up, made it more universal, about someone looking back generally: the loss of childhood, the loss of close friends–presumably thinking of Stu Sutcliffe, though without naming anyone.
John was writing this at twenty-four, so on the surface it seems a bit premature to look back at a life that had hardly begun. But if you read the letter he wrote to Stu Sutcliffe in 1961, when only twenty, it’s clear that even then he was somewhat philosophical and maudlin in his personal writings and ramblings, if not yet in his songs, discussing the nature of life and the universe and all that.
But then the song changes slightly, and you realize it’s not some old git down memory lane, about to tell us things were better then; it is in fact a love song, about someone he loves now. He will never lose affection for people and things from the past, but he loves her more. So the song is positive, affirmative–which again is very mature.
While the words are indisputably by John, it is one of only two Beatles songs where John and Paul came into conflict over the credit. Usually, when they looked back on the Lennon–McCartney songs, there was no disagreement over what proportion they had each contributed. But in this case, Paul has a clear memory of being given John’s words and then going to a Mellotron keyboard and setting it to music, inspired by the style of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. John, however, maintained he wrote most of the music, with Paul only contributing the melody of the middle eight and some of the harmony.