I said to myself: I wonder what it is, you know. I just couldn’t figure it [all out], because I’d just woken up. And I got a couple of chords to it. I got the G, then I got the nice F sharp minor seventh, that was the big waaaahhhh. That led very naturally to the B which led very naturally to the E minor. It just kept sort of tumbling out with those chords. I thought: well this is very nice, but it’s a nick … [By which he meant that the melody was so perfect he couldn’t believe it had come to him in a dream.] There was no logic to it at all. And I’d never had that. And I’ve never had it since. This was the crazy thing about this song. It was fairly mystical when I think about it, because of the circumstances. It was the only song I ever dreamed!
Paul played the tune for friends wherever he went, at the Georges V in Paris, backstage at concerts, to the extent that it became a joke within the band, George Harrison grumbling that anybody would think Paul was Ludwig van-bloody-Beethoven the way he went on about that tune. Paul was canvassing as many people as possible to see if it really was an original composition, and played the tune one evening at the home of the singer Alma Cogan. At this point there were no words. Alma’s mother came in and asked if anybody would like a snack of scrambled eggs. Paul began to play the tune over with new dummy lyrics, ‘Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/oh scrambled eggs’, and this became the working title of the song: ‘Scrambled Eggs’.
In May 1965 Paul and Jane took up a standing invitation from Bruce Welch of the Shadows to visit him at his holiday home in Portugal. The couple flew first to Lisbon, and were then chauffeur-driven the 160 miles south to the Algarve. Paul occupied himself during the long drive by fitting words to his new tune. The moment they got to the villa, Paul dashed for a guitar like somebody in need of the toilet. ‘He said straight away, “Have you got a guitar?” I could see he had been writing the lyrics on the way down; he had the paper in his hand as he arrived,’ recollects Welch. Although Paul had written reflective love songs before, notably ‘Things We Said Today’, the lyric to this new song was surprisingly mature for a man approaching his 23rd birthday, reflecting on a broken love affair.
Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.
It was a song of confusion, defeat and regret, emotions one wouldn’t imagine Paul had much experience of, from what we know of his young life, and radically different to the upbeat songs that had made the Beatles popular. Here was a lachrymose ballad more suited to artists like Frank Sinatra or Ray Charles (both would cover it). Paul’s innately musical mind had somehow conjured a classic – a mark of genius – to which he’d finally put words. The words are not brilliant, but the lyric does resonate. Paul has suggested that the song related to the death of his mother, showing how deep that loss ran.
When he got back to London, Paul performed ‘Yesterday’ for the band and George Martin at EMI where they were finishing the Help! soundtrack.
Ringo said, ‘I can’t really put any drums on – it wouldn’t make sense.’ And John and George said, ‘There’s no point in having another guitar.’ So George Martin suggested, ‘Why don’t you just try it yourself and see how it works?’ I looked at the others: ‘Oops. You mean a solo record?’ They said, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing we can add to it – do it.’
Played solo on acoustic guitar, ‘Yesterday’ sounded a little like a Dylan song. What made ‘Yesterday’ distinctively Beatlesque was George Martin’s decision to orchestrate it with strings, not in the schmaltzy style of Mantovani, but using a string quartet to lend the song a classical elegance. Unable to read or write music, Paul’s contribution to creating the string accompaniment was limited to listening to what George did and making comments, though his comments didn’t lack perspicacity. Paul made it clear, for example, that he didn’t like the way the session musicians hired for the job – two violins, cello and viola – added vibrato. Paul insisted they play the notes precisely. A little vibrato crept in, but not enough to make the recording like Muzak (though ‘Yesterday’ would be used as that). Arranging this record was a turning point for George Martin in his relationship with the band, after which he made an increasingly significant, creative contribution. ‘It was on “Yesterday”’, he said, ‘that I started to score their music.’ Partly as a result, Beatles’ records began to become more interesting. Paul knew they had done something special. He went out clubbing that night, running into a friend at the Ad Lib. ‘I just recorded this great song,’ he told Terry Doran (a car dealer friend of Brian Epstein’s, later referenced in ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as the ‘man from the motor trade’). ‘It’s so good!’ he told Terry, who thought Paul impossibly conceited.
It was at the Ad Lib around this time that John and George had their first, life-changing acid trip, long before Paul tried the drug. John and Cynthia and George and his girlfriend Pattie Boyd had been to a dinner party at the home of their dentist. After dinner the dentist slipped the drug – then unrestricted and little understood – without warning into their coffee, insisting mysteriously that they stayed where they were. John and George suspected the dentist was trying to get them and the girls into an orgy. The dentist said no, admitting rather that he’d dosed them with LSD. John was furious. George didn’t even know what LSD was. Although it had been in existence since the 1940s, lysergic acid diethylamide was only beginning to be used recreationally, its powers as yet little understood. It would come to have a considerable effect on the Beatles’ music.
Despite his warnings, the Beatles decided they would have to leave their dentist’s house. Their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann had formed a band with Paddy Chambers and Gibson Kemp, the drummer who replaced Ringo in the Hurricanes. Paddy, Klaus and Gibson were playing the Pickwick Club, and John, George and the girls wanted to see them. George drove them all in Pattie’s Mini, which seemed to be shrinking as they travelled across town. After watching Paddy, Klaus and Gibson at the Pickwick, the party moved on to the Ad Lib. ‘Suddenly I felt the most incredible feeling come over me,’ George recollected. ‘It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life.’ To reach the Ad Lib the Beatles had to enter a door on Leicester Place, next to the Prince Charles Theatre, and take an elevator to the penthouse. There was a red light in the lift. As the lift rose, the light seemed to glow like fire. As George recalled, ‘it felt as though the elevator was on fire and we were going into Hell, but at the same time we were all in hysterics and crazy. Eventually we got out at the Ad Lib, on the top floor, and sat there, probably for hours and hours.’ Ritchie was there. He listened as his friends babbled about the fire in the lift. John noticed that their table was s – t – r – e – t – c – h – i – n – g. At dawn George drove Pattie, John and Cynthia home to Surrey very, very slowly.
The boys couldn’t wait to tell Paul. John had always loved Alice in Wonderland and here was a drug that could send him down the rabbit hole any time he liked. He urged Paul to take LSD without delay. Paul’s reaction highlights an essential difference between him and his friend, one that would become more pronounced.
I really was frightened of that kind of stuff because it’s what you are taught when you’re young. “Hey, watch out for them devil drugs.” So when acid came round we’d heard that you’re never the same. It alters your life and you never think the same again, and I think John was rather excited by that prospect. I was rather frightened by that prospect. I thought, Just what I need! Some funny little thing where I can never get back home again.
So Paul declined LSD, and kept declining as John and George took more acid trips, growing closer as a result. They were in the LSD club now, and Paul wasn’t. It created a rift.
At the end of June the Beatles went on a European tour, after which was the London première of Help! ‘It looks good but becomes too tiresome to entertain,’ as film critic Leslie Halliwell wrote succinctly. Although not as enjoyable