The thing about one’s personal Beatles history is this: for those of us who grew up in the Beatles years (a relatively short time, looking back), the peculiar impact of any particular song relied upon the intersection of two lines –the line of their development as a creative and imaginative band of artists; and the line of your own stage of growth and discovery as a young person… And the less certain factor is how far their own boundary pushing changes helped to inform and influence changes in teenagers like me. Hmm. Discuss, or not.
Here’s something of my own Beatles history as I recall. One early memory of them is their (second?) single getting reviewed on Juke Box Jury: some toff on the jury being patronising and sniffy about ‘Please Please Me’ and commenting on their “misspelled” name. I remember too running around on the local welfare ground and excitedly telling someone on that particular day that my parents, who had gone on the usual Saturday shopping trip to the nearby town, would be buying the new record ‘From Me To You’ –and how much I was looking forward to going home to play it. I remember one Christmas the ‘Beatles for Sale’ album (a gift for me? Or Allan?) Maybe it was the same Christmas when my auntie bought me a Beatles scrap book – lots of early merchandising for the Fab Four. And then there were subsequent Christmases where one family member or other received ‘Rubber Soul’ and then ‘Revolver’ –and by this time I was getting old enough to be impressed by both the innovative cover photography, and the clever wordplay of the titles. And by the songs, of course. (One Christmas – almost grown up now ! – it was the ‘white album’ double. That might need a blog posting of its own.) And it wasn’t just Christmases, it was summer holidays –‘Paperback Writer/Rain’ in our heads and on our tongues as we played mini golf in Scarborough; ‘All You Need Is Love’ during the summer of love, our Colwyn Bay holiday; ‘Hey Jude’, most memorably, as I returned home from a camping trip in Symonds Yat. Memorable because it was Judy, my sister, who was enthusing about it, with such fervour that she almost persuaded me that the song was in fact written about her!
So –why ‘Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane’? I’ll come to this soon, hopefully. Let me say, too, that by this time in family proceedings, we had acquired a reel to reel tape recorder, and it became a regular event for a while that we would record ‘Top Of The Pops’, the classic BBC TV chart programme to listen to it over and over by the miracle of magnetic tape. The weekly Thursday ritual would be that we would have to move the loud ticking clock from the ‘middle room’, remind everyone not to talk during the programme, and set up the microphone in front of the TV. And on one particular occasion, the Beatles chose to showcase their new double-A side single on the programme, with perhaps two of the earliest purpose made ‘video’ presentations to accompany the tracks. I wouldn’t swear to it –but I think it closed the programme –perhaps the single have gone straight to number one?
Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever played and replayed any piece of magnetic tape as I did those seven or eight minutes containing those two songs. And probably only now am I dissecting the magic they held. As a double-A side single it was perfect –because the two songs exemplified the two equally mesmerising sides of the Lennon McCartney songwriting partnership, and, really, of the Beatles Sound itself. ‘Penny Lane’ –the McCartney side of the Beatles – was very ‘pop’ in some ways of course, but with distinct ‘advancements’ and with its catchy melodic structure, it’s lyric a rather quirky jumble of observations –often surreal – ‘barber taking photographs… a nurse selling poppies.etc.’ Here was pop music perhaps attempting to uncover the lively randomness of mundane reality ‘there beneath the blue suburban skies…’
And the other side? The Lennon side of Beatlesdom –with something of a more dangerous edge. It’s even there in the opening invitation – ‘let me take you down..’ The sound and the language are much less amusingly suburban: instead there’s a skewing and questioning –‘nothing is real..’ I knew, of course, nothing about drugs then -but I suppose I couldn’t help picking up hints of consciousness-altering possibilities in the sound and the lyric ; ‘And nothing to get hung about… Strawberry fields forever..’
For some reason, I particularly enjoyed playing this piece of tape, with the two songs, the perfect double-A side single, in our ‘front room’ early in the morning in the semi darkness, with the curtains still closed. Ah youth.