Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hi everyone, it's Paul muldoon. Before we get to this episode,
Speaker 2: I wanted to let you know that you can binge
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Speaker 3: Under Milk would by Dylan Thomas.
Speaker 1: My mom would be doing the island and you have
Speaker 1: a play on play for today, or something said to
Speaker 1: her with her listen, Oh yes.
Speaker 4: Law.
Speaker 5: The neighbor Paul, Miss Paul. She puts that never should
Speaker 5: have marriage.
Speaker 1: She didn't have to stay with her mother.
Speaker 2: One his mother did the ironing. Young Paul McCartney would
Speaker 2: lie in front of the radio and conjure up images
Speaker 2: in his mind.
Speaker 1: And the characters, you know, they were all so well
Speaker 1: for trade.
Speaker 5: Love hush, I'm a widower.
Speaker 1: Well no now.
Speaker 2: From listening to the radio came an early understanding of
Speaker 2: how to draw a character so precisely that a blind
Speaker 2: person could see him.
Speaker 1: Do you just get into it? You can see the characters.
Speaker 6: It's as if you're in the room with them.
Speaker 2: I'm Paul muldoon. I'm a poet, a lover of not
Speaker 2: only the lyric poem, but the song lyric. Over the
Speaker 2: past several years, I've got to spend time with one
Speaker 2: of the greatest songwriters of our era.
Speaker 1: And will you look at me? I'm going on too.
Speaker 1: I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 2: That is, sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
Speaker 2: book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
Speaker 2: of our conversations.
Speaker 1: Actually, I'm a songwriter, my god, well that crypt homie.
Speaker 2: This is McCartney, A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 2: and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
Speaker 2: figures in popular music. In this episode, Penny Lane.
Speaker 1: I mainly remember it as being where I would I
Speaker 1: would get a boss to Penny Lane in order to
Speaker 1: go to John's house.
Speaker 3: No anonymous collurbation this but Liverpool, vital city and pot
Speaker 3: on the Northwest Mersey, forty three square miles of teeming life.
Speaker 2: Throughout my meetings with Paul McCartney, it's become clear to
Speaker 2: me just how important his childhood and Liverpool has been
Speaker 2: to his songwriting career.
Speaker 3: Has this Liverpool sprung from its people? I have the
Speaker 3: people sprung from Liverpool.
Speaker 1: It was a place that featured very much in my
Speaker 1: life and in John's life. It was near a church
Speaker 1: where I was at Choir Chrstal.
Speaker 3: What is there in the Northwest to create this exciting atmosphere.
Speaker 1: A lot of stuff happened there. I use that terminus
Speaker 1: a lot to go to John's for instance.
Speaker 7: And the unders in there.
Speaker 1: It's all it's the scenery. This is quite accurate. And
Speaker 1: the nice thing is writing is John knew exactly where
Speaker 1: I was talking about. Penny Lane.
Speaker 8: There is a barber showing photographs of every head he's
Speaker 8: had the pleasure to know all the black man gum
Speaker 8: stop and sell.
Speaker 2: On one level, Penny Lane paints a picture of an
Speaker 2: ordinary suburban street with a barber, a farman, a banker,
Speaker 2: and a nurse selling flowers. But somehow, just below the surface,
Speaker 2: everything is a little strange.
Speaker 1: So I'd say Penny Lander's bar showing photographs. I thought
Speaker 1: that's rather clever, because it's like a it's like a
Speaker 1: gallery showing paintings. It's an exhibition in this window, and
Speaker 1: you and I we know that we just go by
Speaker 1: and say, I'll have one of them. I'll have a
Speaker 1: Tony Cursis, all have a crew cut or whatever. But
Speaker 1: I like the idea that he's showing photographs. So really,
Speaker 1: all I'm saying here is there's a barbershop and he's
Speaker 1: got photos of hercut's in his window. But that would
Speaker 1: be a little too mundane. But there is a barbershop
Speaker 1: still there. Rand's changed hand. It was called Bioletti, the
Speaker 1: guy with Bioletti, mister Italian barber with the stripe pole
Speaker 1: outside and everything, and so we knew that. So when
Speaker 1: we evoked it later in this song, it was a
Speaker 1: pleasant thing for John and I to share again.
Speaker 2: Penny Lane was written while the Beatles were working on
Speaker 2: the Sergeant Pepper album. The band had stopped during and
Speaker 2: was putting all their energy into recording and working in
Speaker 2: the studio. John, George and Ringo had been experimenting with
Speaker 2: LSD and finally in the fall of nineteen sixty six
Speaker 2: convinced Paul to try it as well. The inner pictures
Speaker 2: and characters from the street of McCartney's childhood are projected
Speaker 2: with hallucinogenic clarity.
Speaker 1: My drive Past it to this day, regularly showing everyone
Speaker 1: of the barbers, the bankers, the firemen, the church. I
Speaker 1: used to sing in and here's where the girl stood
Speaker 1: with a tray of poppies as I waited for the boss.
Speaker 2: On Remembrance Day, to honor the armed forces of the Commonwealth,
Speaker 2: it was common to see people selling poppies. The pretty
Speaker 2: nurse who sells them from a tray is drawn from
Speaker 2: real life, but she also has this strange feeling that
Speaker 2: she's in a play and now she.
Speaker 1: Did gez anywhere. Funnily enough, a lot of Americans thought
Speaker 1: she was selling puppies. I say, puppies. There's another interesting image,
Speaker 1: a trade full of puppies. But now she's selling poppies.
Speaker 1: I know she feels interesting to play she is anyway, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's that's very sort of sixties. It is.
Speaker 7: And that's what they would call polite circles, a meta text.
Speaker 7: It is, it's a description of one in fact is
Speaker 7: happening in the song that she is in a plane.
Speaker 1: There's characters as soon as a bunch of characters. And
Speaker 1: you know, I'm proud of the way certain lines just
Speaker 1: fell out, But in retrospect were sort of good lines.
Speaker 1: Like the the fireman who's cleaning his fire engine.
Speaker 8: He likes the keeper and clean. It's a clean machine.
Speaker 1: It's a clean machine. Just you know, those kind of
Speaker 1: phrases sort of stick. It's a clean machine.
Speaker 7: Amusing, it's funny.
Speaker 1: There's something slightly ominous. So the old stuff that happened.
Speaker 1: They actually that the fire station is a little further away, right,
Speaker 1: But like any good play, you put it all in
Speaker 1: the wrong place.
Speaker 7: But one of the wonderful things here we established the barber,
Speaker 7: and we leave him, but then we come back to him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is extremely.
Speaker 7: Effective in that we think, well, why I know that guy?
Speaker 7: So there he is again, the bar.
Speaker 1: Machines and the customers.
Speaker 9: We see the bank is any way to go train.
Speaker 10: Fire, And.
Speaker 7: It's a way of bringing the listener, I suppose.
Speaker 1: Isn't it. I mean, I'm it's this kind of film.
Speaker 1: It is exactly. You know, it's like we are. We
Speaker 1: thought we'd forgotten him because we are now going on
Speaker 1: to the banker. Now the banker. I mean, I've never
Speaker 1: seen any children laugh at him, so's I've never seen him.
Speaker 1: I've seen his bank. I had no idea the children laughing,
Speaker 1: and the mac and the pouring rain. It's all fiction.
Speaker 8: On the corner is a bank of the motoricon, the
Speaker 8: little children having man.
Speaker 11: And the bank, and then wes back in the boring brain.
Speaker 2: And here perhaps a brief explanation is needed. A mac
Speaker 2: is what the British called a raincoat, after Charles mac
Speaker 2: and Tosh, who patented a waterproof material for raincoats. So
Speaker 2: the banker never wears a mac. It's all very strange.
Speaker 1: It's a play. It's so clay, it's a little player. Yes.
Speaker 2: The stories of Penny Lane appear to McCartney not just
Speaker 2: visually but through sound. Penny Lane is not just in
Speaker 2: his eyes, but also in his ears. Oral storytelling had
Speaker 2: been a large influence on his songwriting ever since he
Speaker 2: was a kid and would lie on the carpet listening
Speaker 2: to the radio.
Speaker 1: You would lie on the carpet and the radio would
Speaker 1: be in front of you, and to be in it.
Speaker 2: One of the plays a twelve year old McCartney might
Speaker 2: have listened to was a nineteen fifty four play by
Speaker 2: the poet Dylan Thomas called Under milk Wood, which portrays
Speaker 2: the fictitious time of Claragub.
Speaker 4: It is springing, moonless night in the small town starlist
Speaker 4: and bible black, the cobble streets silent, and the hunch
Speaker 4: cutters and rabbits wood limping invisible down to the slow bleack,
Speaker 4: slow black crow bless fishing boat bubbing sea.
Speaker 2: As the time of Claragub slowly awakens, the narrative weaves
Speaker 2: in and out of the thoughts of its inhabitants.
Speaker 5: I was put by pajamas, in the drawn marked pajamas.
Speaker 10: I must take my cold back.
Speaker 5: Which is good for me. I must wear my flannel
Speaker 5: violon toward off by happy.
Speaker 10: I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.
Speaker 5: I must blow my note in the garden.
Speaker 1: You've already written eleanor Rigby? Oh did you feel mean?
Speaker 7: Would you have felt at all that you were maybe
Speaker 7: going back a little bit to that territory?
Speaker 1: Or No? I like the riot area.
Speaker 7: There's an under milkwood aspect to both eleanor Rigby and this,
Speaker 7: and to some extent, isn't there the character, the.
Speaker 1: Cast of characters, characters, a bunch of characters. This is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing I liked and still is.
Speaker 10: I must take my salts, which are nature's frame.
Speaker 5: I must boil the drinking water because the Germans.
Speaker 10: I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin, and.
Speaker 5: Have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.
Speaker 10: I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture in the woodshed.
Speaker 2: If at the time of writing any then Paul McCartney
Speaker 2: had become very interested in the London art scene. He
Speaker 2: was also dating the actress Jane Esher, which might have
Speaker 2: influenced the theatrical nature of the song. One of the
Speaker 2: people in their circle was the great playwright Harold Pinter.
Speaker 2: Pinter whose characters often have such complex psychologies.
Speaker 1: I think it was this era or two in our
Speaker 1: lives when if you're going to write a play like
Speaker 1: these characters, I'd rather have it be like a Pinter
Speaker 1: play than something a bit straighter, right, you know. I
Speaker 1: like the idea that they're a bit wonky, all these characters.
Speaker 1: It's something a little bit strange about them.
Speaker 7: And you would have seen already some Pinter.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, by the time we've written this, we've
Speaker 1: been down in London for a while and I was
Speaker 1: going out with an actresses, so we would go regularly
Speaker 1: to the National Theater.
Speaker 7: How would you have met Pinter at that.
Speaker 1: He was on the social She was on the scene
Speaker 1: with Vivian Merchant, his actress wife. Yeah, we went to
Speaker 1: a party at third Place. We lived in Regis Park
Speaker 1: and our enduring image was the bathtub was filled with
Speaker 1: bottles of so and people like Kenneth Tyne and various
Speaker 1: luminaries like that. Would there be pinted Wescer would be there.
Speaker 1: It was very nice just talking to these sort of
Speaker 1: people on the London scene because I was one of
Speaker 1: those people on the under see me and James, She
Speaker 1: being the actress, May being the musician. It was a
Speaker 1: nice time to be around. With an invite, you would
Speaker 1: get painters, sculptors, actors, comedians, musicians, playwrights, all these people
Speaker 1: who just were in on your scene.
Speaker 7: Would you think you would have been conscious as you
Speaker 7: were writing this that this is maybe something that Beryl
Speaker 7: Pinter might read.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe suddenly influenced by all of that. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think I'm not not that specifically.
Speaker 7: No, I understand someone someone like that, someone someone smart,
Speaker 7: basically someone smart.
Speaker 2: While Paul McCartney aspired to be recognized by the serious
Speaker 2: artists and writers of the day, the Beatles also nurtured
Speaker 2: a sense of playfulness in the studio, which to this
Speaker 2: day seems totally original, and.
Speaker 1: You're playing. You know, it's it's very important to play.
Speaker 1: People say to me why he works so hard to say,
Speaker 1: I don't work music, I play it. And you know,
Speaker 1: whilst that is a kind of kind of clib statement,
Speaker 1: I say it because it's really true. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: in the two meanings of playing music playing an instrument,
Speaker 1: but playing is really important. The ones who can play
Speaker 1: are more successful.
Speaker 7: I mean playing the sense of playing playing games.
Speaker 1: Look about mucking about it. You know, it's a good thing.
Speaker 8: Somebody could do that, you know, if they suddenly decide
Speaker 8: that it needs it there.
Speaker 1: You know, it's idea of just playing around. It's good.
Speaker 1: And any music too. You know. We've had a very
Speaker 1: sort of cavalier attitude to a lot of things, very
Speaker 1: sort of offhand thing. I mean, I just what came
Speaker 1: to mind, and I was just thinking when I did
Speaker 1: Penny Lane, there's this lovely solo that I knew I
Speaker 1: wanted to do. And I talked to George Martin about
Speaker 1: a piccolo trumpet that I'd seen in the Brandenburg Concerto
Speaker 1: the night before, and I said, what was that? And
Speaker 1: he said, and so we got the top player called
Speaker 1: David Mason in the studio, and I just remember thinking
Speaker 1: that we didn't know what he was going to play.
Speaker 1: We hadn't written it, but he was booked and he
Speaker 1: was sitting there, so you'd better get something together me.
Speaker 1: So we just I just said, George, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: and wrote it down. I just a little I played
Speaker 1: a ridiculously high note, and then David Mace said, well,
Speaker 1: that's out of the range of even the piccolo trumpet,
Speaker 1: which is a high, high high trumpet sets out of
Speaker 1: the range, and which we had a little plate. For
Speaker 1: a moment, we just looked at each other and he
Speaker 1: sort of I'm giving him a kind of yeah, but
Speaker 1: you could probably do it, smile, and he's giving me back,
Speaker 1: you pass stud smile kind of yeah, I probably could.
Speaker 2: Even though the song took a lot of its inspiration
Speaker 2: from the non visual medium of radio, in early nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty seven, Penny Lane was one of the first songs
Speaker 2: ever to have been accompanied by a music video. The
Speaker 2: Swedish director Peter Goldman, using techniques from underground filmmaking, took
Speaker 2: the promotional film format to a new level. Fast montage
Speaker 2: editing shows Penny Lane and the band members dressed in
Speaker 2: red junics riding horses through a dreamlike landscape. But it's
Speaker 2: the enduring power of radio to allow listeners to create
Speaker 2: their own images that shimmers at the heart of Penny Lane.
Speaker 1: What I love is you get your own picture. This
Speaker 1: is why when they came to film Sergeant Pepper with
Speaker 1: the Beg's, I said, this is never going to work
Speaker 1: because everyone has their own image, from Sergeant Pepper to
Speaker 1: the album, and so if you select warn image, it's
Speaker 1: never going to be enough because your vision is different
Speaker 1: from mine. I often think this with my audience is
Speaker 1: I think every single person in those forty thousand people
Speaker 1: is having a different experience. I'm seeing this song. Someone
Speaker 1: thinks it's sad, someone thinks it's dramatic, someone thinks it's funny.
Speaker 6: And I'm fascinated by that idea that everyone's perception is
Speaker 6: completely different.
Speaker 4: Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in
Speaker 4: the street, rucked to Sleep by the sea, sea tip.
Speaker 12: Bits and topsy turnys, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones,
Speaker 12: ash and grind and dender and nail perringes, samia and
Speaker 12: snowplates and molted beads are breed.
Speaker 1: For the imagination. Radio was great and as I met
Speaker 1: friends like John George, we all hawke back to that.
Speaker 1: It was very much our period. We grew up without television.
Speaker 11: Tenny Lane is in my Henny My Bible Skyes, I said,
Speaker 11: Wilde Penny Lane, Hanny My Sky Penny Lay.
Speaker 2: Penny Lane was released in nineteen sixty seven on a
Speaker 2: double A Syncle along with Strawberry Fields Forever.
Speaker 9: We're so sorry, Uncle Elber. We're so sorry if we
Speaker 9: caused you anything.
Speaker 2: In the next episode, Paul McCartney pays tribute to his
Speaker 2: Liverpool origins.
Speaker 1: It it was so rich and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of what I am, a lot of what I write about,
Speaker 1: a lot of what I think is.
Speaker 2: That Uncle Albert the pis artist. Next time on McCartney
Speaker 2: A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is
Speaker 2: a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.