The Beatles Read Free

How I Won The War. While relaxing between shots on the beach at Almeira he began composing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, a song he conceived as a slow talking-blues. Further work on the song took place in a large house he was renting in nearby Santa Isabel.
    The song began with what would become the second verse in the recorded version. It was a meditation on the conviction he’d had since he was a child that he was somehow different from everyone else; that he saw and felt things that other people didn’t. In the earliest preserved version of his Spanish tapes he starts, “No one is on my wavelength”, later changing the line to “No one I think is in my tree”, presumably to disguise what could be seen as arrogance. He was saying that he believed that no one could tune in to his way of thinking, and that therefore he must either be a genius (‘high’) or insane (‘low’). “I seem to see things in a different way from most people,” he once said. It was only on take four of the songwriting tape that he introduced Strawberry Fields (but without the ‘forever’) and on take five he added the line ‘nothing to get mad about’ that was later altered to ‘nothing to get hung about’. He was already using the deliberately hesitant mode – “er”, “that is”, “I mean”, “I think” – to underline the truth that this was an attempt to articulate concepts that can’t actually be put into words.
    On his return to England he worked on the song at Kenwood where the final verse was added. It wasn’t until he went into the studio that he finished the song by adding the opening verse, a fact that helps to explain why the sentiment of the introduction seems out of joint with the rest of the song.
    In the completed version a place is made to represent a state of mind. Strawberry Fields (John added the ‘s’) was a Salvation Army orphanage in Beaconsfield Road, Woolton, a five-minute walk from his home in Menlove Avenue. A huge Victorian building set in wooded grounds, it was a place where John would go with his Aunt Mimi for summer fêtes but also somewhere that he would sneak into during evenings and at weekends with friends such as Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan. It became their private adventure playground.
    These illicit visits were, to John, like Alice’s escapades down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. He felt that he was entering another world, a world that more closely corresponded with his inner world, and as an adult he would associate these moments of bliss with his lost childhood and also with a feeling of drug-free psychedelia.
    In his Playboy interview of 1980 he told David Sheff that he would ‘trance out into alpha’ as a child, seeing ‘hallucinatory images’ of his face when looking into a mirror. He said it was only when he later discovered the work of artists like the surrealists that he realised that he wasn’t mad but a part of ‘an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms’.

    SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
    Success meant that the public expected the Beatles not only to deliver another artistic masterpiece but a prophetic vision. To relieve this pressure, Paul developed the personae of Sgt Pepper and his musicians, an identity that would give the band more creative freedom. They had become self-conscious as the Beatles but as the Lonely Hearts Club Band they would have nothing to live up to.
    Paul conceived the idea on a flight back to London from Nairobi on November 19th 1966. During an earlier part of this holiday when he was in France he had used a facial disguise in order to travel incognito. This had led him to consider how free the Beatles would be if they could adopt a group disguise.
    The conceit, however, wasn’t sustained beyond the opening track and the reprise although it succeeded in giving the