It came out of resistance to piano lessons he was taking. For fear of educating himself out of his way of working, he was ‘vamping’ an E-minor chord and let the melody suspend itself over that. Then came some nonsense words – “Ola Na Tungee/Blowing his mind in the dark/With a pipeful of clay/No-one can say”. Later the first actual line came out of some stream-of-consciousness – “picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been”. This suggested two things: a cleaner, or an old spinster of the parish. He went with the latter for the poignancy, carried it on a bit with his own experiences of helping old people as a kid (‘Father Mackenzie’ was originally ‘Father McCartney’!), and John filled in the gaps. Eleanor came from a girl from the movie Help!, and Rigby from a shop in Bristol – and maybe from a subconscious memory of a gravestone in a churchyard where he’d played as a lad in Liverpool.

I happened to have reached that page last night, I haven’t gone to town on the research or anything! It’s a fabulous book, I don’t understand why it isn’t better-known. Paul seems like a top, top bloke.

Eddie’s Service
by Rudyard Kipling

Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
For such as cared to attend.
But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
Though Eddi rang the bell.

Yellow Submaine, meanwhile, was and remains one for the kids and there really isn’t anything much wrong with that.

I’m not usually inclined to pigeonhole stuff, but when the Fab Four have provided such a diverse array of music and styles, it almost seems too much of a temptation to regard this alongside the works of Phillip Glass and Michael Nyman.

Eleanor Rigby however, is a masterpiece. A brooding, minor-keyed, autumnal song, which can start the hairs twitching at the nape of your neck if you let it. It manages to conjure up an entire lifetime of loneliness in under five minutes. A superb example of minimilistic writing, we have centuries of loneliness, shyness, stoicism, heartache, unrequited love, and death. You can almost feel the dampness of the autumn leaves… its bleak, its a wonderful song.

Why they tied it up with Yellow Submarine is beyond me though.

I don’t want to break the rules or anything, but this immediately set me thinking about the greatest of all the Beatles singles – which, curiously, only made it to Number 2 (as I’m sure you’re aware).

Couldn’t you make an exception for Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields? There are parallels with Eleanor Rigby / Yellow Submarine. I’m not sure which piece of rubbish kept it off the top spot (Humperdinck?) but I don’t think we’d miss very much if you muddled the numbers just for the one week…

I like “Yellow Submarine” as a nonsense song, though I was so scared by the Blue Meanies in the movie as a kid that I was relieved by the (necessary) jolly seaside hoedown and don’t/didn’t see it as too mindless.

Welcome back Tom!

Even then Aretha’s version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ >>>> original.

(The longest Number 1 is Oasis’ apalling “All Around The World”.)

I never had a bad time at a Berni inn. I have a really vivid memory of Dad’s birthday falling on a Sunday one year and listening to the Top 40 in the back of the car on the way to one. “A View To A Kill” went straight in at number 2 I believe.

Thanks for the comments, I will reply to some a bit later I hope.

In retrospect they seem unbelievably naff but it would be unfair to mock them. They were very much of their time.

Tom, this is a stunning review, and I’m not going to try to improve on it. Glad to see you back in such fine form!

I’ll admit that I’d never seen the connection between the two sides of the single which, on the surface, seem as unalike as could be. But yes–what you say is true.

“Yellow Submarine” was the party we all wanted to go to–and “Eleanor Rigby” contains our fear that we aren’t invited.

It just so happens that I bought the Sandbrook book myself last month for use in my ongoing research. I think you’re right that most people were a mix of the two sides of the dichtomy he attempts to create–and dichotomies are generally just a template for sorting out the phenomena of existence, rarely an accurate description of the realities of life. The two sides of the record would seem to see how the two sides of this paradigm are connected.

A perfect 10.

But hey – I spent the 1960s divided almost exactly between Greasby, on the Wirral, and Welwyn Garden City. Neither place exactly the hub of the univers. But I don’t feel at all that the canonical 1960s passed me by. To be young was very heaven!

Also, Tom this was terrific. More writing about the Beatles like this please!