The further they travelled, the more they looked back. They were Pied Pipers, leading their generation in a conga along untrodden paths; but they were also the little boys at the end of the line, filled with longing for the world they had left behind.
After the Beatles finished playing the Liverpool Empire in December 1963, John went to his Aunt Harrie’s house, and rootled through his old bits and pieces. His school friend Pete Shotton looked on in amazement as John sorted through old books and drawings: ‘It seemed to me that John, at a glittering crossroads of his life and career, was grasping instinctively for the mementoes of his childhood – as if these reassuringly familiar objects might somehow ease his transition into an unknowable future.’
At the age of twenty-four, John was perplexed by the complexities of adulthood, and yearning for days gone by. ‘When I was younger, so much younger than today’. Aged twenty-five, he sang wistfully of the ‘places I’ll remember all my life’. At twenty-six, his great eulogy to childhood, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, juxtaposed the hallucinogenic and the nostalgic, like an acid trip in a nursery. Paul has described the Salvation Army garden on which it was based as a form of utopia, John’s ‘secret garden … there was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. The bit he went into was a secret garden like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he thought of it like that, it was a little hideaway for him where he could maybe have a smoke, living his dreams a little, a getaway. It was an escape.’
Some of Lennon and McCartney’s darkest songs exhibit the ruthlessly jaunty quality of nursery rhymes. Bungalow Bill goes into the jungle with his gun and kills animals; Maxwell murders his victims with a silver hammer. John’s solo song ‘My Mummy’s Dead’ has the same tune as ‘Three Blind Mice’, whose tails are chopped off with a carving knife.
When Kenneth Tynan was working on the stage version of two of John’s books for the National Theatre, he set himself the tricky task of trying to explain what they meant to a bemused Laurence Olivier. ‘John’s poems are all about the beginning of things,’ he said. ‘The first awareness of cinema, of books, or poetry. Through that, we get a whole picture of his childhood in Liverpool.’ He then remembered something the Maharishi had said about ‘that absorption that comes when children are playing and they’re nowhere else’.
For his part, Paul had been brought up on family sing-songs. It gave him pleasure to write music that his father might have played ‘a long, long time ago’. The Beatles’ surreal TV film Magical Mystery Tour was regarded as almost incomprehensibly adult by most viewers at the time, but it was largely formed of random memories of childhood. ‘I’ve had this idea,’ Paul told his assistant Alistair Taylor when he was wondering what to film. ‘Do they still do mystery tours on buses?’ For all its progressive wackiness, it was a trip into the past, dotted with scenes from the Beatles’ childhoods – brass bands, sing-songs on coaches, Busby Berkeley dance routines, men with knotted hankies on their heads, tug-of-wars at village fêtes – all viewed through the distorting mirrors of dreams or LSD or both. The Beatles embarked on the filming with the capriciousness of children. Paul once phoned Taylor at two in the morning saying, ‘I want a dozen midget wrestlers by tomorrow.’ The film looks ramshackle because that’s what it was: ideas that had occurred overnight would be filmed the next day. One morning John said to Paul, ‘God, I had the strangest dream.’ ‘Come on, then,’ replied Paul. ‘Remember it and we’ll film it.’ John said he had turned into a waiter and had been shovelling spaghetti over someone. ‘Fantastic!’ said Paul. ‘That’s on!’
On its release in May 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was hailed as a vision from the future. Timothy Leary, allergic to understatement, declared, ‘John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are mutants. Evolutionary agents sent by gods, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species.’ Even the more nuanced Kenneth Tynan considered it ‘a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation’.
But it is as much an exercise in playing about with the past: a wallow in nostalgia, embroidered with quaint brass bands and fairground paraphernalia. Hippies loved to spot references to dope and LSD in the album, but Paul’s grandfather Joe, the tuba-player in his workplace1 company band, would have spotted just as many allusions to Edwardian circuses and music halls. The title track looks back twenty years to when ‘Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play’; ‘Getting Better’ is set in school; in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, the runaway girl’s parents ‘sacrificed most of our lives’; ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ celebrates the good old days, when a splendid time was guaranteed for all; in ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, John decides to ‘take a walk by the old school’, and finds ‘nothing has changed it’s still the same’. Even in the most outwardly progressive of the tracks, ‘A Day in the Life’, John sees a film in which ‘the English army had just won the war’; and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ extends the reach of nostalgia into the future, with Paul looking forward to the time when he can look back on a golden past.
1 Cope Bros & Co. They manufactured tobacco products – snuff, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, cigars.