13 February 1967 was an extraordinary day in music history. The Beatles released their iconic double A-side single “Strawberry Fields Forever” / “Penny Lane”. Both songs relive the band members’ childhood in Liverpool, with John Lennon writing “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Paul McCartney writing “Penny Lane”. In this article, we will dive into the story, meaning, and legacy of the latter: “Penny Lane”.
The Story Behind “Penny Lane”
The story of The Beatles writing songs about their childhood starts with John Lennon. In 1964, he released the introspective nonsense book In His Own Write. The book was considered far more personal than Lennon’s music, which led to a suggestion by author Kenneth Allsop. “Why don’t you put some of the way you write in the book, as it were, in the songs?” He said. “Or why don’t you put something about your childhood into the songs?”
Allsop’s remark led Lennon to write “In My Life”, his self-described ‘first real major piece of work’. But the original draft of the song was much different than the now-so-well-known version of “In My Life”.
“In My Life’ started out as a bus journey from my house on 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember,” Lennon said. Those places included some of Liverpool’s landmarks like Dockers Umbrella, The Abbey Cinema, and, of course, Penny Lane.
Read more: The Story Behind “In My Life” by The Beatles
After the Beatles recorded “In My Life” in October 1965, Paul McCartney told an interviewer he wanted to write a song about “Penny Lane”. And after Lennon introduced “Strawberry Fields Forever” to the band almost a year later, McCartney started working on the song.
“The song itself was generated by a kind of ‘I can do just as well as you can, John,” Producer George Marting told Rolling Stone in 2001. “Because we’d just recorded “Strawberry Fields”…and they were both significant. And they were both about their childhood.”
McCartney wrote the song during the early sessions of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. According to McCartney, Lennon helped with the third verse.
“Penny Lane” was kind of nostalgic, but it was really [about] a place that John and I knew,” McCartney said in an interview with Clash Music. “I’d get a bus to his house and I’d have to change at Penny Lane, or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story.”
The Meaning of The Song
“Penny Lane” is a song about Paul McCartney’s childhood in Liverpool. The song discusses everyday events and locations in Penny Lane, most of which were factually accurate.
The barbershop for instance (where McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison got haircuts as kids), the bus shelter in the middle of the roundabout, and the bank on the corner (although McCartney admitted the story of the banker was made up). The only location that was factually inaccurate was the fire station, which was located half a mile from Penny Lane.
Read more: The 10 Best Beatles Songs of All Time
Both McCartney and Lennon cited writing “Penny Lane” as a pleasant experience. “We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us,” McCartney said in his biography Many Years From Now.
Iconic Piccolo Trumpet Solo
One of the highlights of “Penny Lane” is its iconic piccolo trumpet solo. McCartney was inspired to use the instrument after seeing David Mason play it during BBC’s broadcast of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto.
“The next morning I got a call and a few days later I went along to the studio,” David Mason recalled. “We spent three hours working it out, Paul sang the parts he wanted, George Martin wrote them out, I tried them. But the actual recording was done quite quickly … “I’ve spent a lifetime playing with top orchestras yet I’m most famous for playing on ‘Penny Lane’!”
The result was a beautiful uplifting piccolo trumpet solo that aligns with the atmosphere of the song.
The Song’s Legacy
“Penny Lane” was released as a double A-side single on 13 February 1967 together with “Strawberry Fields Forever”. It topped the US Billboard Hot 100 and reached number 2 on the UK singles chart.
The songs were originally meant to be part of the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s album. But because the songs were released as a single due to pressure from EMI, George Martin decided to omit the songs from the project. He called it the greatest mistake of his professional career.
“The only reason that ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ didn’t go onto the new album was a feeling that if we issued a single, it shouldn’t go onto an album,” Martin said. “That was a crazy idea, and I’m afraid I was partly responsible. It’s nonsense these days, but in those days it was an aspect that we’d try to give the public value for money.”
Instead, “Strawberry Fields Forever” / “Penny Lane” became ‘the greatest single release of all time’. two nostalgic songs about childhood from two of the greatest musicians of all time.
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