THE TRUTH OF IT IS THAT WE DISCOVERED POT, AND – JUST as had been promised on the label – it expanded our minds. Things opened up. We realised that it didn’t just have to be ‘thank you girl, from me to you, she loves you . . .’ It didn’t have to be that simple anymore. We were on the lookout for the kind of subject that hadn’t really been the stuff of popular song.

This realisation coincided with the fact that I was now bumping into writers on the cocktail circuit. Kingsley Amis, John Mortimer, Penelope Mortimer, Harold Pinter, to name a few. These were the very people I was reading, and the people I was reading about. When I was younger, I used to go to Philip Son & Nephew, our local bookstore in Liverpool. The London bookshops were almost as good as the guitar shops; there was so much to discover inside.

I had this idea of being an aspiring writer, and I imagined writing a letter to the publishing company to extol my own virtues and try to sell myself. That’s why the song starts ‘Dear Sir or Madam’. That was the way you opened letters then. I set that to music. I had bought a new electric guitar, an Epiphone Casino. It’s the one I still use on stage, and I plugged it into my Vox amp and turned it up nice and loud, and I got this riff. It’s quite a nice, easy riff to play. In fact, with most of my musical compositions, there’s a simple trick, because I’m not massively proficient. For example, I couldn’t always go and hit the right notes on the piano. So, there’s nearly always some sort of holding position. I just vary that. I move around a little bit on the surface, but I don’t move too far from the anchor.

The Beatles performing ‘Paperback Writer’ on Top of the Pops, 1966

The Beach Boys were an immediate influence on the sound of the song. We were particularly turned on by their harmonies. But much earlier, in fact, my dad had sat us down and taught my brother and me the basics of harmony. Long before The Beach Boys, The Everly Brothers had sung in harmony, so my brother Mike and I did too. We even performed at a Butlin’s holiday camp talent competition. I was about fifteen at the time, and we sang ‘Bye Bye Love’, which we had heard from The Everly Brothers. Didn’t win, of course. We weren’t talented enough for the Butlin’s crowd!

We may have taken a leaf or two from The Beach Boys’ harmony book, but we’d change things up like the naughty schoolboys we were. We would tell people we were singing ‘dit, dit, dit, dit’, but our little smirks should have given away the fact that we were singing ‘tit, tit, tit, tit’.

We loved puns above all forms of wordplay. We loved the absurd. We loved the nonsensical, particularly the writings of Edward Lear. That’s why he is name-checked in ‘Paperback Writer’.