The Beatles (4 page)

To escape from her parents, Melanie married at 18. The marriage didn’t last much more than a year and by the age of 21 she had moved to America to live in an ashram and tried to make it as an actress. Melanie now lives in Spain with two children and a partner, buying and selling Fifties Hollywood jewellery. “If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t choose to do it the same way,” Melanie remarks. “What I did was very dangerous but I was lucky. I suppose it is nice to be immortalised in a song but it would have been nicer if it had been for doing something other than running away from home.”

BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR KITE!

In January 1967, the Beatles went to Knole Park near Sevenoaks in Kent to make a promotional film for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. “There was an antiques shop close to the hotel we were using,” says former Apple employee Tony Bramwell. “John and I wandered in and John spotted this framed Victorian circus poster and bought it.”

Printed in 1843, the poster proudly announced that Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal would be presenting the ‘ grandest night of the season’ at Town Meadows, Rochdale, Lancashire. The production was to be ‘for the benefit of Mr Kite’ and would feature ‘Mr J. Henderson the celebrated somerset (sic) thrower’ who would ‘introduce his extraordinary trampoline leaps and somersets over men and horses, through hoops, over garters and lastly through a hogshead of real fire. In this branch of the profession Mr H challenges the world’. Messrs Kite and Henderson were said to assure the public that ‘this night’s production will be one of the most splendid ever produced in this town, having been some days in preparation’.

John began to write a song using the poster’s words. It now hung in his music room and Pete Shotton saw him squinting at the words while he picked out a tune on his piano. John changed a few facts to fit the song. On the poster, Mr Henderson offered to challenge the world, not Mr Kite: the Hendersons weren’t ‘late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair’, Kite was ‘late of Wells’s Circus’. In order to rhyme with ‘ don’t be late’, John moved events from Rochdale to Bishopsgate and to rhyme with ‘will all be there’ he changed the circus to a fair. The original horse was named Zanthus rather than Henry.

Pablo Fanque, Mr Kite and the Hendersons were never more than colourful names to John but records show that, 150 years ago,
they were stars in the circus world. Mr Kite was William Kite, son of a circus proprietor, James Kite, and an all-round performer. In 1810 he formed Kite’s Pavilion Circus and 30 years later he was with Wells’s Circus. He is believed to have worked in Pablo Fanque’s Circus from 1843 to 1845.

Pablo Fanque was a multi-talented performer, who became the first black circus proprietor in Britain. His real name was William Darby and he was born in Norwich in 1796 to John and Mary Darby. He started calling himself Pablo Fanque in the 1830s.

The Hendersons were John (wire-walker, equestrian, trampolinist and clown) and his wife Agnes, who was the daughter of circus owner Henry Hengler. The Hendersons travelled all over Europe and Russia during the 1840s and 1850s. The ‘somersets’ which Mr Henderson performed on ‘solid ground’ were somersaults, ‘garters’ were banners held between two people and a ‘trampoline’ in those days was a wooden springboard rather than stretched canvas.

At the time, John saw ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’ as a throwaway, telling Hunter Davies, “I was just going through the motions because we needed a new song for
Sgt Pepper
at that moment.” By 1980, he had radically revised his opinion. He told
Playboy
interviewer David Sheff: “It’s so cosmically beautiful… The song is pure, like a painting, a pure watercolour.”

WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU

George became interested in Eastern thought as a consequence of discovering the sitar in 1965 and, having studied the instrument under Ravi Shankar, made his first explicit statement of his new-found philosophy in ‘Within You Without You’.

Written as a recollected conversation, the song put forward the view that Western individualism – the idea that we each have our own ego – is based on an illusion that encourages separation and division. In order for us to draw closer and get rid of the ‘space between us all’, we need to give up this illusion of ego and realize that we are essentially ‘all one’. Although the view expressed in ‘Within You Without You’ was drawn from Hindu teaching, it touched a chord among those experimenting with acid at the time. Through a chemically-induced destruction of ego, acid trippers often felt as if they had been absorbed into a greater ‘cosmic consciousness’. The line about gaining the world but losing your soul is taken from a warning given by Jesus and recorded in two of the gospels (Matthew 16, v 26, Mark 8, v 36).

George began to compose the song one night after a dinner party at the home of Klaus Voormann, a German artist and musician he had first met in Hamburg and who had designed the cover for
Revolver.
Voormann was now living in London, married to former
Coronation Street
actress Christine Hargreaves and playing bass for Manfred Mann. Also present at the party were Tony King and Pattie Harrison. King had known the Beatles since they first arrived in London in 1963 and he would later work for Apple in London. “Klaus had this pedal harmonium and George went into an adjoining room and started fiddling around on it,” remembers King. “It made
these terrible groaning noises and, by the end of the evening, he’d worked something out and was starting to sing snatches of it to us. It’s interesting that the eventual recording of ‘Within You Without You’ had the same sort of groaning sound that I’d heard on the harmonium because John once told me that the instrument you compose a song on determines the tone of a song. A number originally written on the piano sounds totally different to one worked out on a guitar.”

King’s recollection of the evening is of a typical hip Sixties affair with joints being smoked and lots of cosmic ideas floating around: “We were all on about the wall of illusion and the love that flowed between us but none of us knew what we were talking about. We all developed these groovy voices. It was a bit ridiculous really. It was as if we were sages all of a sudden. We all felt as if we had glimpsed the meaning of the universe.

“When I first met George in 1963, he was Mr Fun, Mr Stay Out All Night,” King continues. “Then all of a sudden, he found LSD and Indian religion and he became very serious. Things went from rather jolly weekends, where we’d have steak and kidney pie and sit around giggling, to these rather serious weekends where everyone walked around blissed out and talked about the meaning of the universe. It was never really my cup of tea but we all got caught up in it because we were young, easily influenced, and around famous people. I
remember when the Dutch artists Simon and Marijke, who later painted the Apple shop front, were at George’s, I got fed up with it all and went down the pub. Just as I was walking down George’s drive, Simon and Marijke floated past in yards of chiffon and said in their groovy voices, ‘Ooh. Where are you going, man?’ I told them I was going for a Guinness. They said,. ‘Oh. Say something beautiful for me, will you?’”

In an interview with
International Times
in 1967, George said: “We’re all one. The realization of human love reciprocated is such a gas. It’s a good vibration which makes you feel good. These vibrations that you get through yoga, cosmic chants and things like that, I mean it’s such a buzz. It buzzes you out of everywhere. It’s nothing to do with pills. It’s just in your own head, the realization. It’s such a buzz. It buzzes you right into the astral plane.”

None of the other Beatles were present when ‘Within You Without You’ was recorded. George and Neil Aspinall played tambouras while session musicians played an assortment of instruments including dilruba, tabla, violin and cello. “The Indian musicians on the session weren’t hard to organize,” remembers George Martin. “What was difficult, though, was writing a score for the cellos and violins that the English players would be able to play like the Indians. The dilruba player, for example, was doing all kinds of swoops and so I actually had to score that for strings and instruct the players to follow.

“The laugh at the very end of the track was George Harrison. He just thought it would be a good idea to out on it,” recalls Martin.

WHEN I’M SIXTY-FOUR

Paul has said that the melody to ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was composed on the piano at Forthlin Road, Liverpool, “when I was about 15”. This places it in either 1957 or 1958, shortly after he joined John in the Quarry Men. By 1960, Paul was playing a version of it at gigs when the amplification broke down. At the time, he thought of it as “a cabaret tune”, written out of respect for the music of the Twenties and Thirties, which his father had played as a young man.

In the midst of psychedelia, the fashions of Jim McCar tney’s younger days were being revived and it made sense for Paul to dust off his teenage song. Twenties pastiche ‘Winchester Cathedral’ had been a UK hit for The New Vaudeville Band in September 1966, and
Bonnie and Clyde
, the movie that started a craze for Thirties clothing, was released in 1967.

Although the song was written with his father in mind, it was coincidental that he was 64 when it was eventually released. “My dad
was probably only 56 when I wrote it,” Paul said, “Retirement age in Britain is 65, so maybe I thought 64 was a good prelude. But probably 64 just worked well as a number.”

The song is written as a letter from a socially inept young man who seems to be trying to coax a female he hardly knows into promising him long-term devotion. The official tone of the letter (‘drop me a line, stating point of view’) paints a convincing picture of this formal young gent who wants to get it all in writing before he signs on the dotted line.

“It was a kind of pastiche,” says George Martin. “It was a send-up of the old stuff. The words are slightly mocking. It was also something of his father’s music coming out because his father had been a musician in the Twenties. Paul always had that sneaking respect for the old rooty-tooty music.”

John claimed that he wouldn’t have dreamt of writing anything like ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. “John sneered at a lot of things,” says Martin. “But that was part of the collaborative style. They tended to be rivals. They were never Rodgers and Hart. They were more like Gilbert and Sullivan. One would do one thing and the other would say, yeah, I can do better than that and go and do better than that. At the same time, he was thinking – that was bloody good. I wish I could do it.”

LOVELY RITA

An American friend was visiting Paul and, noticing a female traffic warden, a relatively new British phenomenon, commented: “I see you’ve got meter maids over here these days.” Paul was taken with this alliterative term and began experimenting with it on the piano at his father’s home. “I thought it was great,” he said. “It got to be ‘Rita meter maid’ and then ‘lovely Rita meter maid’. I was thinking it should be a hate song…but then I thought it would be better to love her.” Out of this came the idea for a song about a shy office worker who, having been issued with a parking ticket, seduces the warden in an attempt to get let off the fine. “I was imagining the kind of person I would be to fall for a meter maid,” Paul remarked.

Some years later, a traffic warden by the name of Meta Davies, who operated in the St John’s Wood area of London, claimed she had inspired the song. Not that she had been seduced by a Beatle but, in 1967, she had booked a certain P McCartney who had, apparently, asked about her unusual name. “His car was parked on a meter where the time had expired,” says Meta, “I had to make out a ticket which, at the time, carried a ten shilling fine. I’d just put it on the windscreen when Paul came along and took it off. He looked at it and read my signature that was in full, because there was another M Davies on the same unit. As he was walking away, he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, is your name really Meta?’ I told him that it was. We chatted for a few minutes and he said, ‘ That would be a good name for a song. Would you mind if I use it?’ And that was that. Off he went.”

It may be that Paul had already written ‘Lovely Rita’ and was flattering her a little, although Meta herself was 22 years his senior and the mother of a teenage daughter. “I was never a Beatles’ fan,” admits Meta. “But you couldn’t help hearing their music. My own daughter used to wait outside the Abbey Road Studios to see them.”

GOOD MORNING GOOD MORNING

Paul dominated
Sgt Pepper
because John had become a lazy Beatle. He rarely ventured far from home, paid little attention to business and was drawing inspiration, not from contemporary art but from the stuff of domestic life – newspapers, school runs, daytime TV.

‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ was an accurate summary of his situation and an admission that he had run out of things to say. It was a song about his life of indolence – the result of too many drugs, a cold marriage and days measured out in meals, sleep and television programmes such as
Meet The Wife.
“When he was at home, he spent a lot of his time lying in bed with a notepad,” remembers Cynthia of this period. “When he got up he’d sit at the piano or he’d go from one room to the other listening to music, gawping at television and reading newspapers. He was basically dropping out from everything that was happening. He was thinking about things. Everything he was involved in outside the home was pretty high-powered.”

While sitting around in this state of mind, odd sounds and scraps of conversation would trigger ideas. It was a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes that gave John the title and chorus of ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’. The black and white commercial featured nothing more than corn flakes being tipped into a bowl. The four-line jingle went: ‘Good morning, good morning, The best to you each morning, Sunshine breakfast, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Crisp and full of fun’.

The ‘walk by the old school’ was a reference to taking Julian to Heath House and it’s likely that the person he hoped would ‘turn up at a show’ was Yoko Ono who he had met in November 1966. The ‘show’ would therefore have been an art show, not a theatre performance.