Penny Lane

Pushkin under Milk would by Dylan Thomas.

My mom would be doing the isling and she'd have a play on, play for Today or something said her with her listen, who yes, love?

What are the neighbor?

Paul? She puts up, never sort of mannaged. She didn't have to stay with her mother.

One his mother did the ironing. Young Paul McCartney would lie in front of the radio and conjure up images in his mind.

And the characters, you know, they were also well for trade love Hush, I'm a widow now.

From listening to the radio came an early understanding of how to draw a character so precisely that a blind person could see him.

Do you just get into it? You can see the characters.

It's as if you're in the room with them.

I'm Paul muldoon. I'm a poet, a lover of not only the lyric poem, but the song lyric. Over the past several years, I've got to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era.

And will you look at me? I'm going on to it. I'm actually a performer.

That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book Looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversation.

She is a songwriter. My god, well that crypt homie.

This is McCartney, A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, Penny Lane.

I mainly remember it as being where I would I would get a boss to Penny Lane in order to go to John's house.

No anonymous conurbation this but Liverpool, vital city and port on the northwest Mersey, forty three square miles of teeming life.

Throughout my meetings with Paul McCartney, it's become clear to me just how important his childhood and Liverpool has been to his songwriting career.

Has this Liverpool sprung from its people? I have the people sprung from Liverpool.

It was a place that featured very much in my life and in John's life. It was near a church where I was at Choie Corystal.

What is there in the Northwest to create this exciting atmosphere.

A lot of stuff happened there. I use that terminus a lot to go to John's, for instance, and in there it's all it's the scenery. This is quite accurate. And the nice thing is writing is John knew exactly where I was talking about Penny Lane.

There was a barn showing photographs of every.

Head he's had the pleasure to know, and all the people back Man Stubborn sell.

On one level, Penny Lane paints a picture of an ordinary suburban street with a barber, a farman, a banker, and a nurse selling flowers. But somehow, just below the surface, everything is a little strange.

So I'd say, Penny Land, there's a barber showing photographs. I thought that's rather clever, because it's like a it's like a gallery showing paintings. It's an exhibition in this window. And you and I we know that. We just go by and say, I'll have one of them. I'll have a Tony Curtis, all have a crew cut or whatever. But I like the idea that he's showing photographs. So really, all I'm saying here is there's a barber shop and he's got photos of hercuts in his window. But that

Penny Lane was written while the Beatles were working on the Sergeant Pepper album. The band had stopped during and was putting all their energy into recording and working in the studio. John, George and Ringo had been experimenting with LSD and finally in the fall of nineteen sixty six convinced Paul to try it as well. The inner pictures and characters from the street of McCartney's childhood are projected with hallucinogenic clarity.

My drive past it to this day, regularly showing everyone of the barbers, the bankers, the firemen, the church. I used to sing in and here's where the girls it with a tray of poppies as I waited for the boss.

Selling puppies on Remembrance Day to honor the armed forces of the Commonwealth. It was common to see people selling poppies. The pretty nurse who sells them from a tray is drawn from real life, but she also has this strange feeling that she's in a play.

Now she.

Any Funnily, you're not a lot of Americans thought she was selling puppies.

I say puppies. There's another interesting image, a tray full of puppies, and now she's signed poppies. I know she feels as interesting a play she is anyway. Yes, that's that's very sort the sixties.

It is, and that's what they would call and polite circles, a meta text. That is, it's a description of one fact is happening in the song that she is in a plane.

There's characters. There's a bunch of characters, and you know, I'm proud of the way certain lines just fell out, But in retrospect were sort of good lines, like the the fireman who's cleaning his fire engine.

He likes to keep his fire and clean. It's a clean machine.

It's a clean machine. I just you know, those kind of phrases sort of stick. It's a clean machine.

Amusing, it's funny.

It's there's something slightly ominous. So the old stuff that happened, they actually that the fire station is a little further away, right, but like any good play, you put it all in the wrong place.

But one of the wonderful things here we established the barber and we leave him, but then we come.

Back to him. Yeah, which is extremely.

Effective in that we think, well, I know that guy. So there he is.

Again another customers. We see the banks the way to be trendy.

It's a way of bringing him the listener, I suppose, isn't it.

I mean, I'm not consciously unconsciously it's it's kind of film.

It is exactly.

You know, it's like we are. We thought we'd forgotten him because we are now going on to the banker. Now the banker. I mean, I've never seen any children laugh at him, so's I've never seen him. I've seen his bank. I had no idea that the children laughing and the mac and the pouring rain, it's all fiction.

On the corner is a banker, the moticon, the little children having him behind his man and the banking them wears a man in.

The boring rain.

And here perhaps a brief explanation is needed. A mac is what the British called a raincoat, after Charles Macintosh, who patented a waterproof material for raincoats. So the banker never wears a mac. It's all very strange.

It's a place, it's so play.

It's a little player, yes, okay.

The stories of Penny Lane appear to McCartney not just visually but through sound. Penny Lane is not just in his eyes, but also in his ears. Oral storytelling had been a large influence on his songwriting ever since he was a kid and would lie on the carpet listening to the radio.

You would lie on the carpet and the radio would be in front of you, and you should be in it.

One of the plays a twelve year old McCartney might have listened to was a nineteen fifty four play by the poet Dylan Thomas called Under milk Wood, which portrays the fictitious time of Clarigub.

It is springing, moonless night in the small town star last and bible black. The cobble street silent, and the hunch cutters and rabbits would limping invisible down to the slow bless slow black crow, blessed fishing boat, bubbing sea.

As the time of Claragub slowly awakens, the narrative weaves in and out of the thoughts of its inhabitants.

I must put by pajamas in the drawer marked pajamas. I must take my cold back, which is good for me. I must wear my flannel violon to ward off by attic. I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron. I must blow my note.

In the garden. You've already written eleanor Rigby. Oh did you feel mean?

Would you have felt at all that you were maybe going back a little bit to that territory or no?

I like the rise area.

There's an under milkwood aspect to both eleanor Rigby and this, and to some extent, isn't there the character.

Characters characters as a bunch of characters. This is the kind of thing I liked. It still is.

I must take my salts, which our nature's braided.

I must spoil the drinking water because the Germans.

I must make my verb tea which is free from tannin.

And have a charcoal biscuit, which is good for me.

I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixtures in the woodshell.

At the time of writing Penny Lane, Paul McCartney had become very interested in the London art scene. He was also dating the actress Jane Asher, which might have influenced the theatrical nature of the song. One of the people in their circle was the great playwright Harold Pinter, Pinter whose characters often have such complex psychologies.

I think it was this ear or two in our lives when if you're going to write a play like these characters, I'd rather have it be like a Pinter play than something a bit straighter, right, you know, I like the idea that they're a bit wonky, all these characters. There's just something a little bit strange about them.

And you would have seen already some Pinter.

Well, you know, by the time we've written this, we've been down in London for a while and I was going out with an actress, so we would go regularly to the National Theater. How would you have met Pinter at that time? Chance he was on the social She was on the scene with Vivian merchant Is actress wife. Yes. Yeah, we went to a party at third place we lived in Regis Park, and enduring image.

Was the bathtub was filled with bottles of champagne. So and people like Kenneth Tyne and very luminarus like that. Would there be pinted Wesker would be there.

It was very nice just talking to these sort of people on the London scene because I was one of those people on the under see me and James, She being the actress, May being the musician. It was a nice time to be around. With an invite, you would get painters, sculptors, actors, comedians, musicians, playwrights and just that all these people who just were in on your scene.

Would do you think you would have been conscious as you were writing this that this is maybe something that Harold Pinter might read.

Maybe maybe certainly influenced by all of that. Yeah, and I think not not that specifically.

No, I understand someone like someone like that, someone smart musically, someone smart.

While Paul McCartney aspired to be recognized by the serious artists and writers of the day, the Beatles also nurtured a sense of playfulness in the studio which to this day seems totally original.

And you're playing, you know, it's very important to play. People say to me why he works so hard to say I don't work music. I play it. And you know, whilst that is a kind of kind of clip statement, I say it because it's really true. Sure, I mean, obviously in the two meanings of playing music, playing an instrument, but playing it is really important. The ones who can play almost success.

I mean playing the sense of playing playing games.

Look about mucking about it. You know, it's a good thing us.

Somebody could do that, you know, if they suddenly decide that it needs it.

There So this idea of just playing around it's good. And in the music too, you know, we've had a very sort of cavalier attitude to a lot of things, very sort of from offhand thing. I mean, I just what came to mind that. I was just thinking when I do Petty Lane, there's this lovely solo that I knew I want to too. And I talked to George Martin about a piccolo trumpet that I'd seen in the Brandenburg Concerto the night before, and I said, what was that? And he said, and so we got the top player.

I just did a little.

I played a ridiculously high note, and then David Mason said, well, that's out of the range of even the piccolo trumpet, which is a high, high high trumpet, sets out of the range, and I wish we had a little play for moment. We just looked at each other and he's sort of I'm giving him a kind of yeah, but you could probably do it. Smile, and he's given me back, you passtward smile kind of yeah, I probably could.

Even though the song took a lot of its inspiration from the non visual medium of radio, in early nineteen sixty seven, Penny Lane was one of the first songs ever to have been accompanied by a music video. The Swedish director Peter Goldman, using techniques from underground filmmaking, took the promotional film format.

To a new level.

Fast montage editing shows Lane and the band members dressed in red du licks riding horses through a dreamlike landscape.

But it's the.

Enduring power of radio to allow listeners to create their own images. The shimmers at the heart of Penny Lane.

What I love is you get your own picture. This is why when they came to film Sergeant Pepper with the Beg's, I said, this is never gonna work because everyone has their own image from Sergeant Pepper the album, and so if you select one.

Image, it's never going to be enough because your vision is different from mine. I often think this from my audience is I think every single person in those forty thousand people is having a different experience.

I'm singing this song. Someone thinks it's sad, someone thinks it's dramatic, someone thinks it's funny, and fascinated by the idea that everyone's perception is completely different. Now behind the eyes.

And secrets of the dreamers in the street Rocked to Sleep by the Sea, Steve tip.

Bits and Topsy turveys, bobs and button tops, bags and bones, ash and grind and dender for nail perries, sliva and snowplates and bolted beads.

The breed for the imagination radio was great and as I met friends like John George, we all harked back to that it was very much our period. We grew up without television.

Teddy Skies, I said.

A Penny Lane was released in nineteen sixty seven on a double A single along with Strawberry Fields Forever.

We're so sorry, local elms. We're so sorry if we caused you anything.

In the next episode, Paul McCartney pays tribute to his Liverpool origins.

It was a cut up from me. It was so rich and I think a lot of what I am, a lot of what I write. What I think is that.

Uncle Albert the pis artist. Next time on McCartney A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.