Each day just goes so fast
I turn around–it’s past
You don’t get time to hang a sign on me
Love me while you can
Before I’m a dead old man
A lifetime is so short
A new one can’t be bought
But what you’ve got means such a lot to me
Make love all day long
Make love singing songs
There’s people standing round
Who screw you in the ground
They’ll fill you in with all their sins you’ll see
I’ll make love to you
If you want me to
Arguably Paul’s best love song. Personally, I prefer it to ‘Yesterday’. It was one that he himself was very pleased with–and perhaps even more pleased that John should like it as well. He remembers how, when they were filming Help! the previous year, after a hard day skiing, they happened to put on a cassette of all their recent songs and when it came to ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, John said, ‘I probably like that better than any of my songs on that tape.’ That was high praise, coming from John. He could be very caustic about most things, and people, including himself.
Paul wrote it at Kenwood, John’s house, when he had gone down one summer day to work, only to find that John was still asleep. So he got a cup of tea and went to sit by the pool, playing his guitar. According to some very clever experts, i.e. Ian MacDonald, he was influenced by a recent Beach Boys song, and was trying to create a similar melody.
By the time John woke up, Paul had as good as finished the tune and most of the words, but John helped finish it, making it a roughly 80–20 composition, according to Paul’s estimation.
The title is a common English phrase, used many times, in many places, perhaps the best known being from the 1903 play and novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, which Paul probably learned at school, or heard someone reciting. ‘They seek him there, they seek him there / Those Frenchies seek him everywhere / Is he in heaven, Is he in hell / That damned elusive Pimpernel.’
In 1948, Tommy Trinder, the English comedian, starred in a new comedy musical at the London Palladium which was called Here, There and Everywhere. Paul was aged six at the time, so is unlikely to have been aware of it in Liverpool.
Mr MacDonald, alas, didn’t think much of the lyrics; in his opinion, they ‘failed to avoid sentimentality’ and are ‘chintzy and rather cloying’. Hmm.
It is easy to miss how clever the lyrics are. They take the three adverbs in the title, one by one, structuring the verses around Here, then There, and then Everywhere. He finishes the first line on ‘here’ and then begins the next line with the same word, and then repeats the same trick for the fourth and fifth lines with ‘there’. This might look a bit sloppy and repetitious on paper, the sort of thing a school teacher would tell you not to do, but when sung, with all the pauses, it works well.
As for the content, despite some soppy lines, such as ‘knowing that love is to share’, there are some interesting expressions, for example ‘to love her is to meet her everywhere’. Something lovers will understand. He presumably had Jane in mind, at a time when their romance was apparently going well, but there is also an underlying fear that this is not true love, he is only hoping for that, knowing how good it can be.
The manuscript, in Paul’s hand, has various changes: ‘And if she’s beside me’ was originally ‘As long as she’s beside me’. ‘Hoping I’m always there’ was originally ‘hoping she’s always here’ or possibly ‘Near’ or ‘There’. He has stressed the first two adverbs, putting them on separate lines, underlining Here and There, indicating how he was singing those words, what the structure was in his mind.