Monocled Alchemist

Article published in London Life, 1965

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter | Their separate personalities are as clearly defined as characters in a fairy tale: John the clever one, Paul the sweet one, George the quiet one and Ringo the holy fool. As these public images are rooted in a private reality, there seems little point in meeting the Beatles; social confrontation can only confirm the known and simple truth.

Yet I was curious to talk to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, because it is as songwriters rather than as performers that the Beatles interest me most. When I met them both together, however, they gave an impenetrable performance — a double act, with John facetiously punning on clichés and Paul obligingly feeding him.

The jokes were good, but no better than Beatle jokes on the cinema or television screens. Later, I had the chance of spending two hours alone with Paul at Brian Epstein’s office. He was ready to talk about his music, and did so with the minimum of suspicion or self-consciousness. The sweet, in their desire to please, can be even more articulate than the clever.

John and I don’t work on the Rodgers and Hart pattern, one doing music and one doing lyrics. He writes a whole song on his own, or I write a whole song on my own, or if we do a song together either he might do the words and I the music, or the other way round.

John wrote “I Feel Fine” on his own, and “Please Please Me” and a lot more. What did I write on my own? Oh, “World Without Love”, “Yesterday”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “All My Loving”, and quite a few others. Mine are normally a bit soppier than John’s. That’s because I am a bit soppier than John.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

“When I first met John he’d written the words to a skiffle song. It still had a skiffley sound, but he’d changed the words to ‘Come and go with me, Down at the Penitentiaree’ or something like that.

Then I did one, ‘When I Lost My Little Girl’, with the three chords I knew at the time. John was playing left-handed banjo then. We got out of that stage and worked out chords together. We used to play truant (tut-tut, what a bad example to the younger generation) and go to his house or to mine and mess about all afternoon.

It was a great feeling of escape – we’d smoke, you see, and if we didn’t have cigarettes we’d smoke tea in my Dad’s pipe. It tasted terrible, but we felt manly doing it. I wrote a couple of songs. One was “Love Me Do”. It wasn’t good but it was only a little bit worse than the kind of thing on the hit parade then.

“At that time all the people we really liked were American. Buddy Holly was the main one. And Elvis – in those days we were fantastic fans, but he’s gone off a lot since and we don’t much like his later stuff. (We took him up on that matter when we met him at Los Angeles.)

Influences

And then we started latching on to most of the American hits of the time. Chuck Berry was a ridiculous favourite. Liverpool has always been a great place for the folksy thing Ringo is ridiculously keen on Country and Western. Somebody you could say was Country and Western gone pop was Carl Perkins, who we really loved.

“Well, this big batch of songs the summer holidays and truant batch – was our first. Then we started to write better songs. Instead of ‘Love me Do, I’ll Always be True’, we started on lyrics like ‘Lock me Away’ . . But everything we’ve done we get sick of. We’ve got some comedy songs on our new LP.

There’s one called “Norwegian Wood” it goes ‘She showed me a room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood . . . I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine, and then she said, it’s time for bed . . . So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood’. It’s something new for us. It’s just we’re a bit sick so we thought we’d write something funny.

I feel as though it’s an interesting time just now. Because something’s got to happen. There’s got to be some kind of change. It probably won’t be drastic. But I think it’s a good thing about us that we keep contradicting ourselves. I saw some-one on TV asked what he wanted out of life, and he said ‘a cosy rut’.

To be in a cosy rut is about the sickest thing ever, I think. You can enjoy it, but what’s the point of living in a cosy rut? We could stay in one now for ever, repeating our early hits, and if we did come up with something exciting we’d have to scrap it.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

When we played at the Cavern we wore leather jackets and we were rockers – and it was good. Then we got a manager and did melodic songs and put suits on. When we came back from Germany with suits on people said ‘Oh, you’ve gone posh’, and we lost a lot of people. But we gained more than we lost. The others didn’t realise they would have got very sick of us. We’d never have lasted. You can’t be singing 15-year-old songs at 20 because you don’t think 15-year-old thoughts at 20- a fact that escapes a lot of people.

Then we got sick of suits and changed again. Oh, I don’t mean ‘This week the Beatles with the Philharmonic Orchestra’ – it won’t happen. We’ll never be that big. Basically we’re the same whatever happens- we just get influenced outwardly.

I am a great believer in influencability (is that a word? Better look it up . . .) “For example, John and I would like to do songs with just one note – the hardest things of all to write. You know what people used to say about abstract painting—that it was done by chimpanzees?

Melodic songs are easy to write

Well, we used to think that about songs that weren’t melodic. But melodic songs are in fact quite easy to write. To write a good song with just one note in it—like “Long Tall Sally” is really very hard. It’s the kind of thing we’ve wanted to do for some time.

We get near it in “The Word”. That’s a number on our new LP – another example of being bored by doing the same thing. This could be a Salvation Army song. The word is love, but it could be Jesus (it isn’t, mind you, but it could be). ‘It’s so fine, it’s sun-shine, it’s the word’.

It’s about nothing really, but it’s about love. It’s much more original than our old stuff, less obvious. ‘Give the word a chance to say That the word is just the way’ – and the organ comes in, just like the Sally Army.

“We use an organ too on the B side of our new single, “We Can Work It Out”. The middle
eight is the best it changes the beat to a waltz in the middle. The original arrangement was terrible, very skiffley. Then at the session George had the idea of splitting the beat completely – the words go on at double speed against the slow waltz music. You’ve got to excuse me because I haven’t heard these new songs enough yet and they’re still knocking me out. It sounds big-headed but I don’t care.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

“Listen to this one, “Girl”. John’s been reading a book about pain and pleasure, about the idea behind Christianity – that to have pleasure you have to have pain. The book says that’s all rubbish, it often happens that pain leads to pleasure but you don’t have to have it, all that’s a drag.

So we’ve written a song about it, with I suppose a little bit of protest – though really we don’t protest. Listen to John’s breath on the word “girl”: we asked the engineer to put it on treble, so you get this huge intake of breath and it sounds just like a percussion instrument.

We had to write 14 songs for this new LP, plus two for the single. It’s a question of value for money more than anything else – we want to do what we would have liked when we were record-buyers ourselves. A 14 track LP and a separate single is unheard of in the States there you’d have 12 tracks, and the single would just be two numbers from the LP.

Kids in America

They’re not the same as English record people. It’s not quite that they’re unscrupulous, but they’ll put the singles on the LP just to fill up. It’s cheating anyhow, but the scene is different there. The kids in America can afford to buy an LP just for a few new tracks, but here they’re more choosy.

“Did you see Robert Graves and Malcolm Muggeridge on TV? Graves said this thing about his poetry. He said he has to write it. In fact, he said it was a drag, but he has to. And I know what he means. But John and I want to go on writing songs. Writing a song which you think great is a great satisfaction.

It’s one of the principles of life, I think, doing something that you think satisfying. We started writing songs as a hobby, and we still do it as a hobby. It’s become a very lucrative one, I know but it’s still a hobby.

“We’d be up at John’s house, we’d just sit clown, and if we’d done a song it was a fantastic feeling, just like a day’s work, like you’d been to the office for a bit. This is why John and I want to get ourselves a bit more organized. If we wrote a song a day our rate of development would be so much more.

If we have a day off now, we only do it if we’ve got to. A famous painter has got to paint but he’s still knocking himself out doing it. We’ve reached that stage. We both want to do a million more things.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

You find out about a lot of instruments you didn’t know already. A lot of people are doing it now – The Animals, Manfred Mann. We could have done “Yesterday” with a Philharmonic Orchestra and a lot of people would have come with us.

Say we did a song a day, then we’d have too many. If we had more than we could handle we could put 14 of our best songs on one LP. We could go in any direction then. George Martin has done an orchestral arrangement of our songs. Some of them definitely grow by being played on different instruments.

The best recording of one of our songs was Esther Phillips singing “And I Love Him”. Do you like coloured voices? Well, listen to that. She sings it, you see, that’s the difference. I tried to sing that on the LP and couldn’t for the life of me.

Eric Burdon of The Animals said he never realised this was a good song till he heard Esther Phillips sing it. John and I could do an LP, say, with other people – just an orchestra playing them, new songs I mean. All these ideas which are just ideas at the moment could be great when we can put them into practice.

Donald Zec

People like Donald Zec are stupid about our songs when they say they won’t last. We’ve reached the point now that whether people like it or not they’ll by played in ten years’ time. I always feel silly saying our songs will last. What I’m trying to say is that they may not be marvellous but they’re part of what’s around at the moment.

Zec belongs to the bigoted generation – the kind of person who’d have said to my Dad: ‘Don’t play jazz’. “People like Leonard Bernstein have come up to us and said: ‘Some of your songs are good’. I’d rather he liked them than Donald Zec.

But it’s no good trying to please everybody. Had we been frightened of what people said we’d never have put in something like that change of beat I mentioned – we’ve always followed our noses in things like that. And we do identify ourselves with our music. I don’t mean exactly – some of the tragic songs about love are written when we’re at our happiest. But they’re still us.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

I’m sure Francis Bacon isn’t like what his paintings look like – he’d be having a rough time if he was! It’s generally what we feel that’s gone into the songs – it doesn’t have to be the words, it could be the beat or the melody – but it’s what’s happening at the moment.

“We’re the world’s biggest pinchers. But when you look at people like Handel and see what he pinched, there’s nothing wrong in that. We pinch a sound here, a rhythm there – one day we wrote that Welsh song called There’s a Welcome in the Hillside, actually wrote it! So we had to scrap that.

For years John has been trying to write “Moonlight in Vermont”. On our first LP there’s a complete pinch from an American song – I’d better not tell you which one. And the riff in “I Feel Fine” is also a complete pinch from somewhere. Then people hear the original song and say ‘Oh, what a pinch from the Beatles!’

The Stones

This is what the Stones do a number of times. I don’t see the harm in it. There’s only a certain permutation of notes, and they’ve got to clash. We’ve got a sort of running game with the Stones to spot where we’ve each pinched things from. But you get pinching everywhere – in painting, in writing (you pinch things in your articles, don’t you?), even in business probably: some fellow in an office will take a tip or two from The Plane-Makers . . . .

“Just because our records are played quite a lot, people think we started all these trends. We’d be the last to say we started the Dylan trend. We followed it. Like Beatle haircuts – we didn’t start that. It just happened, and we were the first people to become well known with that haircut.

“England exploded, didn’t it? I don’t know when . . . In the old days, pop stars didn’t smoke or swear, they wore gold lame suits. And before John Osborne, nobody could say royalty was rubbish. Now it’s all so down to earth it’s getting stupid.

And fashion, too. For a place like Woollands to do a great big exhibition “Made in England” – it couldn’t have happened. England started to change and we were part of it, that’s all. And the whole embarrassed thing about being a provincial is different now.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

We always felt funny when we first came to London about the North Country accent. In the old days we might have learnt to say ‘funny’, but we could go on saying ‘foony’. It was the same with people like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. Now it has to happen in America. People in America are so like English people used to be. They liked us in America, but that’s different – America has always been built up of phenomenons anyhow.

Anything that’s a great success, America has always taken to – unless it’s Russian. Here you have to prove yourself more first.

“I’ll be glad when it does level out completely. In a small way this kind of thing is almost as good as the industrial revolution. Things were probably a bit better for the industrial revolution in the long run. But this has been a bloodless revolution a painless change.

The Who

Nobody seems to have got hurt – except for the woman who wants to keep TV clean, and she’s got to go anyhow. If it’s bad, it will stop. At least it’s happened. If it’s wrong, I believe it never could have happened.

“Of course you get people now saying it’s gone too far, they don’t know where to go from here. But people who don’t know what to do now are the ones who never did. So when there was a big sort of orgasm with one lot of people who wanted to get out of the rut, they went along with them.

Then when the people who know what’s happening (what a terrible expression, but you know what I mean), have a period of inactivity, they all do. But it’s all still happening. Dylan has started so much. And The Who.

They are the two great influences of 1965. They definitely started us thinking again – Dylan about lyrics, and The Who about backings, bigger feedback, that sort of thing. We had that feedback idea in “I Feel Fine” but The Who went further and made all kinds of weird new sounds.

I suppose Donald Zec would say ‘What would they do without amplifiers?’ But that’s as silly as saying ‘If God wanted us to smoke, he’d have given us chimneys’. We haven’t got chimneys, but we smoke – so what? What would the theatre be without a stage and make-up, or movies without the camera?

“We enjoyed making “Help!” more than “Hard Day’s Night”, but looking back on the two I think “Hard Day’s Night” was the better film. We knew we couldn’t have another “Hard Day’s Night” – and with the next one we want to do something even more different.

Close-Up: Paul McCartney As Songwriter

“Help!” was great but it wasn’t our film – we were sort of guest stars. I think everybody thought a little bit too grandly about “Help!” – all those glamorous locations. It was fun, but basically as an idea for a film it was a bit wrong.

I don’t read as much as John does. My main thing is, I’ve got to be settled to read. The times I would read are on a holiday, or in bed at night. The other day I took John to the Times Bookshop. I’d been there before and bought a copy of The Emperor Jones signed by Eugene O’Neill which really knocked me out, and the fellow there showed me the original manuscript of Under Milk Wood.

The great thing about the Times Bookshop is that nobody’s going to bother about who you are. Well, John spent an hour there, and £150. It was a good day for the Times Bookshop and a good day for John.

Rubber Soul

And painting, too: I keep meaning to get hold of someone good and commission them. It’s the obvious thing to do at this stage. But there’s a lot of things in life I want to sort out first, and then when I’ve got something different going I’d like to do something like that.

“Writing songs and performing are equally rewarding – that is, when it goes well. But the songwriting thing looks like being the only thing you could do at 60. I wouldn’t mind being a white-haired old man writing songs, but I’d hate to be a white-haired old Beatle at the Empress Stadium, playing for people.

The new Beatles LP, ‘Rubber Soul’, will be released on 10 December. It contains 12 numbers written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and 2 by George Harrison. The Beatles are appearing at the Odeon, Hammersmith, on 10 December and at the Astoria, Finsbury Park, on 11 December.

More Beatles articles on the Monocled Alchemist