THE TITLE CAME FROM JUST THE FIRST LINE, ‘SOMEDAYS I look’, which is followed by the repetition of ‘I look’. ‘Somedays I look / I look at you with eyes that shine / Somedays I don’t / I don’t believe that you are mine’. It’s that little trick of repeating the phrase, of reinforcing it, that makes the lyric work. It drives it like a little dynamo. My grammar school education taught me that it’s a rhetorical device apparently known as anadiplosis, but essentially, it’s repetition. You think you’re going one way, and then there’s a little surprise and it takes you another. I like playing with phrases, dancing round words, shuffling them like a deck of cards.

I often think that when I’m writing a song, I’m following a trail of bread crumbs. Someone’s thrown out these bread crumbs and I see the first few, and ‘Somedays I look’ and see the next one. I’m following the song rather than writing it. I will think of the line that’s coming and think of how to get into it, like following stepping-stones. My thinking process goes like this: I’ve got to do that to get to there, and so it continues. I quite enjoy that; it’s an interesting process. I often liken it to doing crossword puzzles. My dad was a big fan of crosswords and was a very wordy man. I think I inherited that love of words and crossword puzzles from him. That’s often what songs are – puzzles. Trying to figure how one word fits with another word. So if you put this together with that and you twist that word around, the answer is . . .

It’s then all about filling in the gaps.

George Martin called this song ‘deceivingly simple’. He would have known, because he was one of the best at making the complex seem simple. That’s why he was always my arranger of choice. I’d known him a long time – most of my professional life, in fact – since The Beatles did our artist test with him for EMI when I was a few days shy of my twentieth birthday. I’d worked with him so much that I knew if I wanted a nice arrangement on something, it would be a delight to ring him up and say, ‘Hey, George, are you interested in doing a thing together?’ He was a true gentleman, and like a second father to me, and always the grown-up in the room, with that delightfully plummy English accent of his. If I had the opportunity to work with him rather than anyone else, I always would – until it came to classical stuff, like the Liverpool Oratorio, when I worked with people who had a bit more knowledge in that field. But from that June day in 1962 when he gave us our first recording contract, right up to the last time we saw each other, George was just the most generous, intelligent and musical person I’ve had the pleasure to know.

‘Somedays’ is a good little song. For me, it’s very meaningful. Looking into a soul; it’s what you try to do in a relationship, yet don’t often succeed at. The lyric contains some contradictory ideas, but its purpose is to support the song rather than be a lyric on its own, so it’s quite liberating. I know this might sound odd, but the lyric and the song are two slightly different things.

With George Martin. AIR Studios, London, 1983

Once I’ve managed to isolate myself (in this case it was another little room while Linda was doing a cooking assignment elsewhere in the house), once I’m actually writing the song, I’m off on that trail. I really don’t know what the goal is, or even where I’m heading, but I do like to get there and find things out on the way. You can experiment as you go along, so there’s a crack between the headlong and the halting where, if you’re lucky, a few things might slip out: ‘I look at you with eyes that shine / Somedays I don’t’. That’s like a thought that could come out in a session with a psychiatrist. I follow it up with ‘I don’t believe that you are mine’, but there’s now a wonderful ambiguity there.