THERE’S A DOCUMENTARY ASPECT TO ‘PENNY LANE’, though it’s best viewed perhaps as a docudrama. Which is not so strange, since, when I was going to John’s house in Liverpool, I would change buses at the Penny Lane roundabout, where Church Road meets Smithdown Road. As well as being a bus terminal, and a place that featured very much in my life and in John’s life – we would often meet there – it was near St Barnabas Church, where I was a choirboy. So it resonates in several ways; it’s still ‘in my ears and in my eyes’.

The line about ‘a barber showing photographs’ is still amusing to me, because it’s as if the barbershop is a gallery that shows paintings. There’s an exhibition in his window. You’d look at the photos in the barber’s window and then go in and say, ‘I’ll have a Tony Curtis’ or ‘I’ll have a crew cut.’ I thought ‘showing photographs’ was a good choice of words. All I’m saying is there’s a barbershop and the barber has photos of haircuts in his window, but that would be too mundane.

The shop in Penny Lane was owned by Harry Bioletti. It was an Italian barbershop complete with the striped pole outside it. All the members of The Beatles had our hair cut there at one time or another. ‘Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know’ is a line that uses a device my old English teacher would refer to as ‘free indirect speech’. You can hear the barber say, ‘It’s been a pleasure to know you’ or something like that. So it’s a wonderfully succinct way of delivering information. It crams a lot in.

I’m certain Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood was a big influence too. It was a radio drama, a portrait of a Welsh town through a cast of characters. It was first done in 1953, but there had been a new radio version of it in 1963 and a television version in 1964. So it was very much in the air.

The characters in ‘Penny Lane’ are still very real to me. I drive past it to this day, showing people the barbershop, the bank, the fire station, the church I used to sing in, and where the girl stood with the tray of poppies as I waited for the bus. That pretty nurse. I remember her vividly. It was Remembrance Day, and she had a tray full of paper poppies and badges. Funnily enough, a lot of Americans thought she was selling puppies, which is another interesting image, a tray full of puppies. But no, she’s selling poppies, and ‘she feels as if she’s in a play / She is anyway’.

The ‘She is anyway’ is very sixties – it’s a commentary on its own method. If I were going to write a play about these characters, I’d rather have it be like a Harold Pinter play than something a bit straighter. I like the idea that they’re a bit wonky, all these characters. There’s something a bit strange about them. And, of course, I’d not only seen Pinter on stage but had been to his house in Regent’s Park. We went round once for a party, and the bathtub was filled with bottles of champagne.