The Fool On The Hill

This was the song I heard Paul playing to John while they were working on ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Paul has since said he might have been thinking of a maharishi–but he could not have been thinking of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as they did not meet him until August 1967 and the song, with most of the words, had been written in March. So it was a guru figure in general that had come into his mind, a foolish savant, the sort who sits on a hill or in a cave and people think he is either very wise or very foolish. Paul, looking back, remembered that he enjoyed singing ‘perfectly still’. Another example of how composers, like novelists, are often sparked off or fall in love with a particular word or phrase.

Alistair Taylor, a friend of theirs who worked at NEMS, remembers walking with Paul one morning at daybreak on Primrose Hill and coming across a man who one minute seemed to be there and the next disappeared–which fascinated Paul, making him wonder who the man had been. The music, complete with flutes and fairground roundabout noises, does have a spinning, ethereal quality to it.

The lyrics are well worked–the idea of a man with a thousand voices whom nobody hears, with eyes in his head that see the world spinning round. But he gives us no clue to the fool’s identity.

‘The Fool On The Hill’, from Magical Mystery Tour, with the reverse side (left) containing a line-up for Sgt. Pepper, and other notes and lists. The orange handwriting appears to be John’s and the blue Paul’s.

In the first manuscript (one of mine, now in the British Library), there are only the first few lines, but on the reverse are some interesting notes, such as a list of Sgt. Pepper titles. I shalll leave the experts to work out the rest. In the second–on Hotel Negresco notepaper–the fool is sitting perfectly still, then gets changed to ‘keeping perfectly still’.