Having disposed of part of the family silver in this careless way, the Beatles returned to EMI in April 1966 to make Revolver, a complementary album to Rubber Soul, and one in which Paul’s newfound interest in avant-garde music came to the fore, most notably on the track ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, featuring John’s spacey vocal, echoing drums, Indian tambura and tape loops which seem to make the sound of screaming seagulls or what one imagines Hieronymus Bosch’s flying monsters would sound like. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is an amazing song, a leap forward for a band that just recently had been yelling Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! at their fans, and Paul’s tape loops are a large part of what makes it one of the Beatles’ ‘heaviest’ tracks. So it is almost schizophrenic of Paul to have also recorded his first children’s song on Revolver, the nonetheless delightful ‘Yellow Submarine’, complete with nautical sound effects. Children’s songs would become an occasional, and perhaps underrated, McCartney specialty. They have proved popular with generations of children.
Another uplifting creation was Paul’s ‘Good Day Sunshine’, which again is quite a contrast to the dark ‘For No One’, with its lyric about a love that should have lasted years, providing further insight into Paul’s troubled relationship with Jane Asher. ‘I suspect it was about another argument,’ McCartney told Miles. ‘I don’t have an easy relationship with women, I never have. I talk too much truth.’ When it came time to record ‘For No One’, Paul asked George Martin to get in a French horn player. George hired Alan Civil, the best available. Unable to express what he wanted in writing, or in technical language, Paul sang the horn solo he had in mind to Martin, who wrote notation for Civil, who played the part perfectly first time. It was a mark of Paul’s inexperience that he asked Civil to do it again, as if he could do better, which exasperated producer and horn player. ‘Of course he couldn’t do it better than that,’ recalls George Martin with irritation, ‘and the way we’d already heard it is the way you hear it now.’ Aside from sheer inexperience there was a touch of arrogance in Paul’s request, not rare in young men, but nonetheless unattractive. Musician Gibson Kemp, then signed to Brian Epstein’s management, puts his finger on an aspect of Paul’s personality when he describes him at this point as: ‘Quite serious, sarcastic [and] slightly up himself’.
If we read ‘For No One’ as an insight into the sporadic problems Paul and Jane were experiencing in their relationship, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ suggests a love so nurturing that the singer hopes it will never die. Paul seems to be yearning for a settled, balanced life with a lover who would also be a home-maker, which with the previous caveat about being careful not to interpret songs too quickly as autobiography is another side of Paul’s personality. The problem here is that perfect happiness rarely makes for great art, and lovely though ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is, the song has an insipid quality that became more pronounced in Paul’s songwriting as he got older, as if he determined at some stage not to dwell on the darker side of life. In 1966, however, Paul was still willing to explore all emotions.
There is certainly nothing insipid about ‘Eleanor Rigby’, one of the best songs Paul ever wrote, where the quality of the melody is matched by the poetry of the lyric. ‘I just sat down at the piano and got the first line about Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been. That came out of the blue. I didn’t know where that came from …’ McCartney has said of the creation. He had to work hard to explain this intriguing premise to himself, deciding the tune was about a ‘lonely old lady type’. The mournful melody in E minor, with stately orchestration by George Martin, the strings arranged in the style of Bernard Herrmann, composer of the music for Psycho, is a revelation, the words evocative and moving. Too often in his songwriting Paul seems to have no original idea to convey, or particular story to tell. He just fits rhyming words to a melody, like a hack. For all its prettiness, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ sounds like that. In ‘Eleanor Rigby’ he created a poignant, original narrative reminiscent of the isolated broken figures in a play by Samuel Beckett: the story of a lonely woman who dies and is buried without mourners by a priest who seems to have lost his congregation and faith. London may have been swinging in 1966, but in the midst of the Cold War, Britain was also a place where faith in the old religions was fading, and where many feared annihilation in an atomic Third World War. There is a bleak end-times feel to ‘Eleanor Rigby’:
Father McKenzie,
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from her grave,
No one was saved.
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
It is surely more than a coincidence that an Eleanor Rigby lies buried in St Peter’s Church, Woolton. Paul had played in this graveyard as a child, and met John at the 1957 St Peter’s Church summer fête. He must have seen this grave and remembered the unusual name. Yet the musician has always resisted the suggestion that he took the name from that headstone. ‘It is possible that I saw it and subconsciously remembered it,’ he says, insisting however that the primary inspiration came from seeing the name Rigby on a shop in Bristol when he was visiting Jane.
MRS MARCOS LOVES BEADLES MUSIC
As the Beatles began to make increasingly sophisticated music with George Martin in the EMI studios they wearied of the profitable but unsatisfying business of performing to live audiences who would rather scream at them than listen to their songs. The shows the boys had played in England and Scotland prior to Christmas 1965 had been typically dispiriting in this respect, and they had no desire to repeat the experience. In fact, the Beatles never toured Britain again. Neither did they have the inclination to continue appearing on every TV show that extended an invitation to them, for surely they had outgrown the likes of Blackpool Night Out. So the Beatles decided to cut back on their live television work and produce promotional films to be broadcast in their stead. They started by miming to ‘We Can Work it Out’, ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Help!’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘I Feel Fine’, early versions of the pop video.
In the spring of 1966, the band made two further films to promote singles released in advance of Revolver, Paul’s ‘Paperback Writer’ and John’s weird, droning ‘Rain’, which in its use of saturated sound and manipulation of tape speed has more than a touch of the avant-garde, showing that Paul was certainly not alone in his musical experimentation. To make these promotional films, the Beatles worked with a New York-born television director named Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had the appearance of the average, trendy young man-about-town, but who – like many people the Beatles were mixing with now – had aristocratic roots. The great-grandson of the 1st Baronet of Rotherfield Hall, a stately pile in Sussex, Michael would eventually inherit the baronetcy, becoming Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Back in 1966, he was plain Michael, 25-year-old employee of the independent television company Rediffusion, working mostly on the pop music show Ready, Steady, Go! One day he was summoned to meet the Beatles for lunch at Abbey Road.
Mal Evans came in and said, ‘They’re coming,’ and then almost immediately in they came, and it was them. When I say it was them, in these days it’s hard to remember how famous they were. It wasn’t only that they were talented, but somehow they’d caught the temper of the times, and also they somehow inhabited their fame in a way that other people weren’t able to do.
The Beatles sat down to eat, leaving their guest standing. Finally, Paul acknowledged Lindsay-Hogg, who continues the story: ‘Paul was like the host. That is something he is very good at. Paul is famously charming when he wants to be [and] in my experience, my relationship with them, he was more the driver of certain projects.’ Over time the film-maker would come to realise something else about Paul: ‘Charm for him is like a weapon.’ Beneath the charm, ‘he is very, very tough’.
When Lindsay-Hogg shot the films for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’,