She was a working girl

North of England way

Now she’s hit the big time

In the U. S. A.

And if she could only hear me

This is what I’d say.

Honey pie you are making me crazy

I’m in love but I’m lazy

So won’t you please come home.

Oh honey pie my position is tragic

Come and show me the magic

of your Hollywood song.

You became a legend of the silver screen

And now the thought of meeting you

Makes me weak in the knee.

Oh honey pie you are driving me frantic

Sail across the Atlantic

To be where you belong.

Will the wind that blew her boat

Across the sea

Kindly send her sailing back to me.

Honey pie you are making me crazy

I’m in love but I’m lazy

So won’t you please come home.

Savoy Truffle

The first words ‘crème tangerine’ and ‘pineapple heart’ might make you think this was John, going back to Lucy and marmalade skies–but it is George, emptying a box of chocolates, naming each one as he goes. Almost all the words are real names of choccies in a box of Mackintosh’s Good News. It started because of Eric Clapton and his love for chocolates, which George told him would lead to all his teeth falling out–and they did. When he got stuck for some bridging words, Derek Taylor suggested the phrase from of a film he had just seen, You Are What You Eat, which George turned into ‘you know that what you eat you are’. The origin of the phrase goes back to the French epicure Brillat-Savarin in 1826 when he wrote ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are’. There is a brief pause to try and make the words more meaningful, as if he might also be thinking of a girl with the line ‘I feel your taste all the time I am apart’. But so far as the lyrics go it’s a bit of a cheat and pretty pointless. It’s almost as if the Beatles at this stage, with a double album to complete and vast sales assured, are saying to themselves, We can write any old song on any old thing, just watch us–and listen. And they did.

George’s manuscript has a few changes, but all heavily scored out.

Crème tangerine and Montélimar

A ginger sling with a pineapple heart

A coffee dessert–yes you know it’s good news

But you’re going to have to have them all pulled out

After the Savoy truffle.

Cool cherry cream, nice apple tart

I feel your taste all the time we’re apart

Coconut fudge–really blows down those blues

But you’ll have to have them all pulled out

After the Savoy truffle.

You might not feel it now

But when the pain cuts through

You’re gonna know and how

The sweat is going to fill your head

When it becomes too much

You’ll shout aloud

But you’ll have to have them all pulled out

After the Savoy truffle.

You know that what you eat you are,

But what is sweet now, turns so sour—

We all know Obla-Di-Bla-Da

But can you show me, where you are?

‘Savoy Truffle’, from The White Album–George’s lyrics, all about real chocolates, but some he had second thoughts about.

Creme tangerine and Montélimar

A ginger sling with a pineapple heart

A coffee dessert–yes you know it’s good news

But you’ll have to have them all pulled out

After the Savoy truffle.

Yes, you’ll have to have them all pulled out

After the Savoy truffle.

Cry Baby Cry

This was one of the scraps of songs John told me about in 1967 while doing the biography. ‘I’ve got another song here, a few words, I think I got from an advert: “Cry baby cry, make your mother buy.” I’ve been playing it over on the piano. I’ve let it go now. It’ll come back if I really want it. I do get up from the piano as if I have been in a trance. Sometimes I know I’ve let a few things slip away.’

The title lines were taken from a TV advertisement, as John never turned the TV off, regardless of what was on. He eventually fitted lyrics to the tune while in India, relying on half-remembered childhood nursery rhymes, the kind you might sing to a baby, such as ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’: ‘The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey…’ The Duchess of Kirkcaldy appealed to him because he liked Scottish names and places. (And the Beatles did actually play in Kirkcaldy, back on 6 October 1963.) The music is rather haunting, even if the words are mainly random. John later described the song as rubbish.

Revolution 9

No lyrics, as such, so does not concern us here. In fact, I doubt if many Beatles fans have ever played it since 1968 when they first heard it–though musicologists and techies and avant-gardists have had good fun trying to work out how it was done. Putting a load of old sounds together, backwards tapes, overheard conversations, scraps from the archives–that’s how it was done. The New Musical Express, in its review on 9 November 1968, described it as ‘a pretentious piece of old codswallop’.

Before it begins, after the end of ‘Cry Baby Cry’, we hear a few seconds of Paul singing, ‘Can you take me back’. It sounds as if it could have been turned into a nice song, like ‘I Will’, but we only get a few bars. The rest was not released. Then it’s into the dreaded ‘Revolution 9’–all eight minutes of it.

The repetition of ‘Number nine, number nine’ constitutes the only words you can hear clearly, and they came from some old Abbey Road archives of a taped music examination for Royal College of Music students.

John, George and Yoko did this together while Paul was away, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the result, though he too was keen on avant-garde music. ‘Revolution 9’ was the extended ending to ‘Revolution’. Presumably it was all meant to be a revolution in music, that you should change your normal acceptance of how music should sound, rise up, open your ears. To Manson of course it all made perfect sense–and perhaps it was this track that drove him truly mad.

Good Night

I can’t say I like ‘Good Night’ any better–though I can see why it was stuck in after ‘Revolution 9’ right at the end of the album, bringing it all to a close. It is a pastiche of lush Hollywood movie music, all lush strings and over-the-top harmonies and treacly choruses, sung by the Mike Sammes Singers.

It’s a John song, surprisingly–well, I was surprised, always having assumed from its schmaltziness that it must be by Paul. John’s defence was that he wrote it as a bedtime song for Julian, his son. All it says is good night, sweet dreams, with no wit or irony or half-decent similes, and even ‘The sun turns out his light’ is corny. John gave it to Ringo to sing–not wanting his own image to be tarnished.

Ah well, it was a long album. An amazing achievement, to record in so short a time so many new songs, some of which are dreamy and beautiful and lyrical and others loud and exciting and shattering and yes, revolutionary. Especially when you know all the other things which were happening in their young lives…