Penny Lane

Pushkin.

Hi everyone, it's Paul muldoon. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus.

Under Milk would by Dylan Thomas.

My mom would be doing the island and you have a play on play for today, or something said to her with her listen, Oh yes.

Law.

The neighbor Paul, Miss Paul. She puts that never should have marriage.

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 all so well for trade.

Love hush, I'm a widower.

Well no 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 too. 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 conversations.

Actually, I'm 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 collurbation this but Liverpool, vital city and pot 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 Choir Chrstal.

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 the unders 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 is a barber showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know all the black man gum stop and 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 Lander's bar 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 Cursis, 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 barbershop and he's got photos of hercut's in his window. But that would

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 girl stood with a tray of poppies as I waited for the boss.

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 and now she.

Did gez anywhere. Funnily enough, a lot of Americans thought she was selling puppies. I say, puppies. There's another interesting image, a trade full of puppies. But now she's selling poppies. I know she feels interesting to play she is anyway, Yes, that's that's very sort of sixties. It is.

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

There's characters as soon as 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 the keeper and clean. It's a clean machine.

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

Amusing, it's funny.

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, why I know that guy? So there he is again, the bar.

Machines and the customers.

We see the bank is any way to go train.

Fire, And.

It's a way of bringing the listener, I suppose.

Isn't it. I mean, I'm it's this 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 the children laughing, and the mac and the pouring rain. It's all fiction.

On the corner is a bank of the motoricon, the little children having man.

And the bank, and then wes back in the boring brain.

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

It's a play. It's so clay, it's a little player. Yes.

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 to 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 Claragub.

It is springing, moonless night in the small town starlist and bible black, the cobble streets silent, and the hunch cutters and rabbits wood limping invisible down to the slow bleack, slow black crow bless fishing boat bubbing sea.

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

I was put by pajamas, in the drawn marked pajamas.

I must take my cold back.

Which is good for me. I must wear my flannel violon toward off by happy.

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 riot area.

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

Cast of characters, characters, a bunch of characters. This is the kind of thing I liked and still is.

I must take my salts, which are nature's frame.

I must boil the drinking water because the Germans.

I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin, and.

Have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.

I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture in the woodshed.

If at the time of writing any then Paul McCartney had become very interested in the London art scene. He was also dating the actress Jane Esher, 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 era 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. It's 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 actresses, so we would go regularly to the National Theater.

How would you have met Pinter at that.

He was on the social She was on the scene with Vivian Merchant, his actress wife. Yeah, we went to a party at third Place. We lived in Regis Park and our enduring image was the bathtub was filled with bottles of so and people like Kenneth Tyne and various luminaries like that. Would there be pinted Wescer 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

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

Maybe maybe suddenly influenced by all of that. Yeah, And I think I'm not not that specifically.

No, I understand someone someone like that, someone someone smart, basically 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 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 clib statement, I say it because it's really true. I mean, obviously in the two meanings of playing music playing an instrument, but playing is really important. The ones who can play are more successful.

I mean playing the sense of playing playing games.

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

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

You know, it's idea of just playing around. It's good. And any music too. You know. We've had a very sort of cavalier attitude to a lot of things, very sort of offhand thing. I mean, I just what came to mind, and I was just thinking when I did Penny Lane, there's this lovely solo that I knew I wanted to do. And I talked to George Martin about a piccolo trumpet that I'd seen in the Brandenburg Concerto

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 Penny Lane and the band members dressed in

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 going to work because everyone has their own image, from Sergeant Pepper to the album, and so if you select warn image, it's never going to be enough because your vision is different from mine. I often think this with my audience is I think every single person in those forty thousand people

And I'm fascinated by that idea that everyone's perception is completely different.

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the street, rucked to Sleep by the sea, sea tip.

Bits and topsy turnys, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and grind and dender and nail perringes, samia and snowplates and molted beads are breed.

For the imagination. Radio was great and as I met friends like John George, we all hawke back to that. It was very much our period. We grew up without television.

Tenny Lane is in my Henny My Bible Skyes, I said, Wilde Penny Lane, Hanny My Sky Penny Lay.

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

We're so sorry, Uncle Elber. We're so sorry if we caused you anything.

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

It it was so rich and I think a lot of what I am, a lot of what I write about, a lot of 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.