Speaker 1: Pushkin under Milk would by Dylan Thomas.
Speaker 2: My mom would be doing the isling and she'd have
Speaker 2: a play on, play for Today or something said her
Speaker 2: with her listen, who yes, love?
Speaker 3: What are the neighbor?
Speaker 2: Paul? She puts up, never sort of mannaged. She didn't
Speaker 2: have to stay with her mother.
Speaker 4: One his mother did the ironing. Young Paul McCartney would
Speaker 4: lie in front of the radio and conjure up images
Speaker 4: in his mind.
Speaker 2: And the characters, you know, they were also well for
Speaker 2: trade love Hush, I'm a widow now.
Speaker 4: From listening to the radio came an early understanding of
Speaker 4: how to draw a character so precisely that a blind
Speaker 4: person could see him.
Speaker 2: Do you just get into it? You can see the characters.
Speaker 5: It's as if you're in the room with them.
Speaker 4: I'm Paul muldoon. I'm a poet, a lover of not
Speaker 4: only the lyric poem, but the song lyric. Over the
Speaker 4: past several years, I've got to spend time with one
Speaker 4: of the greatest songwriters of our era.
Speaker 2: And will you look at me? I'm going on to it.
Speaker 2: I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 4: That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
Speaker 4: book Looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
Speaker 4: of our conversation.
Speaker 2: She is a songwriter. My god, well that crypt homie.
Speaker 4: This is McCartney, A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 4: and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
Speaker 4: figures in popular music. In this episode, Penny Lane.
Speaker 2: I mainly remember it as being where I would I
Speaker 2: would get a boss to Penny Lane in order to
Speaker 2: go to John's house.
Speaker 6: No anonymous conurbation this but Liverpool, vital city and port
Speaker 6: on the northwest Mersey, forty three square miles of teeming life.
Speaker 4: Throughout my meetings with Paul McCartney, it's become clear to
Speaker 4: me just how important his childhood and Liverpool has been
Speaker 4: to his songwriting career.
Speaker 6: Has this Liverpool sprung from its people? I have the
Speaker 6: people sprung from Liverpool.
Speaker 2: It was a place that featured very much in my
Speaker 2: life and in John's life. It was near a church
Speaker 2: where I was at Choie Corystal.
Speaker 6: What is there in the Northwest to create this exciting atmosphere.
Speaker 2: A lot of stuff happened there. I use that terminus
Speaker 2: a lot to go to John's, for instance, and in
Speaker 2: there it's all it's the scenery. This is quite accurate.
Speaker 2: And the nice thing is writing is John knew exactly
Speaker 2: where I was talking about Penny Lane.
Speaker 7: There was a barn showing photographs of every.
Speaker 8: Head he's had the pleasure to know, and all the
Speaker 8: people back Man Stubborn sell.
Speaker 4: On one level, Penny Lane paints a picture of an
Speaker 4: ordinary suburban street with a barber, a farman, a banker,
Speaker 4: and a nurse selling flowers. But somehow, just below the surface,
Speaker 4: everything is a little strange.
Speaker 2: So I'd say, Penny Land, there's a barber showing photographs.
Speaker 2: I thought that's rather clever, because it's like a it's
Speaker 2: like a gallery showing paintings. It's an exhibition in this window.
Speaker 2: And you and I we know that. We just go
Speaker 2: by and say, I'll have one of them. I'll have
Speaker 2: a Tony Curtis, all have a crew cut or whatever.
Speaker 2: But I like the idea that he's showing photographs. So really,
Speaker 2: all I'm saying here is there's a barber shop and
Speaker 2: he's got photos of hercuts in his window. But that
Speaker 2: would be a little too mundane. But there is a
Speaker 2: barber shop still there change hands, changed hand. It was
Speaker 2: called Bioletti. The guy was Bioletti, mister Italian barber with
Speaker 2: the stripe pole outside and everything, and so we knew that.
Speaker 2: So when we evoked it later in this song, it
Speaker 2: was a pleasant thing for John and I to share again.
Speaker 4: Penny Lane was written while the Beatles were working on
Speaker 4: the Sergeant Pepper album. The band had stopped during and
Speaker 4: was putting all their energy into recording and working in
Speaker 4: the studio. John, George and Ringo had been experimenting with
Speaker 4: LSD and finally in the fall of nineteen sixty six
Speaker 4: convinced Paul to try it as well. The inner pictures
Speaker 4: and characters from the street of McCartney's childhood are projected
Speaker 4: with hallucinogenic clarity.
Speaker 2: My drive past it to this day, regularly showing everyone
Speaker 2: of the barbers, the bankers, the firemen, the church. I
Speaker 2: used to sing in and here's where the girls it
Speaker 2: with a tray of poppies as I waited for the boss.
Speaker 4: Selling puppies on Remembrance Day to honor the armed forces
Speaker 4: of the Commonwealth. It was common to see people selling poppies.
Speaker 4: The pretty nurse who sells them from a tray is
Speaker 4: drawn from real life, but she also has this strange
Speaker 4: feeling that she's in a play.
Speaker 2: Now she.
Speaker 9: Any Funnily, you're not a lot of Americans thought she
Speaker 9: was selling puppies.
Speaker 2: I say puppies. There's another interesting image, a tray full
Speaker 2: of puppies, and now she's signed poppies. I know she
Speaker 2: feels as interesting a play she is anyway. Yes, that's
Speaker 2: that's very sort the sixties.
Speaker 10: It is, and that's what they would call and polite circles,
Speaker 10: a meta text. That is, it's a description of one
Speaker 10: fact is happening in the song that she is in
Speaker 10: a plane.
Speaker 2: There's characters. There's a bunch of characters, and you know,
Speaker 2: I'm proud of the way certain lines just fell out,
Speaker 2: But in retrospect were sort of good lines, like the
Speaker 2: the fireman who's cleaning his fire engine.
Speaker 8: He likes to keep his fire and clean. It's a
Speaker 8: clean machine.
Speaker 2: It's a clean machine. I just you know, those kind
Speaker 2: of phrases sort of stick. It's a clean machine.
Speaker 10: Amusing, it's funny.
Speaker 2: It's there's something slightly ominous. So the old stuff that happened,
Speaker 2: they actually that the fire station is a little further away, right,
Speaker 2: but like any good play, you put it all in
Speaker 2: the wrong place.
Speaker 10: But one of the wonderful things here we established the
Speaker 10: barber and we leave him, but then we come.
Speaker 2: Back to him. Yeah, which is extremely.
Speaker 10: Effective in that we think, well, I know that guy.
Speaker 10: So there he is.
Speaker 7: Again another customers. We see the banks the way to
Speaker 7: be trendy.
Speaker 10: It's a way of bringing him the listener, I suppose,
Speaker 10: isn't it.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not consciously unconsciously it's it's kind of film.
Speaker 10: It is exactly.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like we are. We thought we'd forgotten
Speaker 2: him because we are now going on to the banker.
Speaker 2: Now the banker. I mean, I've never seen any children
Speaker 2: laugh at him, so's I've never seen him. I've seen
Speaker 2: his bank. I had no idea that the children laughing
Speaker 2: and the mac and the pouring rain, it's all fiction.
Speaker 7: On the corner is a banker, the moticon, the little
Speaker 7: children having him behind his man and the banking them
Speaker 7: wears a man in.
Speaker 2: The boring rain.
Speaker 4: And here perhaps a brief explanation is needed. A mac
Speaker 4: is what the British called a raincoat, after Charles Macintosh,
Speaker 4: who patented a waterproof material for raincoats. So the banker
Speaker 4: never wears a mac. It's all very strange.
Speaker 10: It's a place, it's so play.
Speaker 2: It's a little player, yes, okay.
Speaker 4: The stories of Penny Lane appear to McCartney not just
Speaker 4: visually but through sound. Penny Lane is not just in
Speaker 4: his eyes, but also in his ears. Oral storytelling had
Speaker 4: been a large influence on his songwriting ever since he
Speaker 4: was a kid and would lie on the carpet listening
Speaker 4: to the radio.
Speaker 2: You would lie on the carpet and the radio would
Speaker 2: be in front of you, and you should be in it.
Speaker 4: One of the plays a twelve year old McCartney might
Speaker 4: have listened to was a nineteen fifty four play by
Speaker 4: the poet Dylan Thomas called Under milk Wood, which portrays
Speaker 4: the fictitious time of Clarigub.
Speaker 11: It is springing, moonless night in the small town star
Speaker 11: last and bible black. The cobble street silent, and the
Speaker 11: hunch cutters and rabbits would limping invisible down to the
Speaker 11: slow bless slow black crow, blessed fishing boat, bubbing sea.
Speaker 4: As the time of Claragub slowly awakens, the narrative weaves
Speaker 4: in and out of the thoughts of its inhabitants.
Speaker 12: I must put by pajamas in the drawer marked pajamas.
Speaker 12: I must take my cold back, which is good for me.
Speaker 12: I must wear my flannel violon to ward off by attic.
Speaker 12: I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.
Speaker 12: I must blow my note.
Speaker 2: In the garden. You've already written eleanor Rigby. Oh did
Speaker 2: you feel mean?
Speaker 10: Would you have felt at all that you were maybe
Speaker 10: going back a little bit to that territory or no?
Speaker 2: I like the rise area.
Speaker 10: There's an under milkwood aspect to both eleanor Rigby and this,
Speaker 10: and to some extent, isn't there the character.
Speaker 2: Characters characters as a bunch of characters. This is the
Speaker 2: kind of thing I liked. It still is.
Speaker 13: I must take my salts, which our nature's braided.
Speaker 2: I must spoil the drinking water because the Germans.
Speaker 13: I must make my verb tea which is free from tannin.
Speaker 2: And have a charcoal biscuit, which is good for me.
Speaker 13: I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixtures in the woodshell.
Speaker 4: At the time of writing Penny Lane, Paul McCartney had
Speaker 4: become very interested in the London art scene. He was
Speaker 4: also dating the actress Jane Asher, which might have influenced
Speaker 4: the theatrical nature of the song. One of the people
Speaker 4: in their circle was the great playwright Harold Pinter, Pinter
Speaker 4: whose characters often have such complex psychologies.
Speaker 2: I think it was this ear or two in our
Speaker 2: lives when if you're going to write a play like
Speaker 2: these characters, I'd rather have it be like a Pinter
Speaker 2: play than something a bit straighter, right, you know, I
Speaker 2: like the idea that they're a bit wonky, all these characters.
Speaker 2: There's just something a little bit strange about them.
Speaker 10: And you would have seen already some Pinter.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, by the time we've written this, we've
Speaker 2: been down in London for a while and I was
Speaker 2: going out with an actress, so we would go regularly
Speaker 2: to the National Theater. How would you have met Pinter
Speaker 2: at that time? Chance he was on the social She
Speaker 2: was on the scene with Vivian merchant Is actress wife. Yes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we went to a party at third place we lived
Speaker 2: in Regis Park, and enduring image.
Speaker 9: Was the bathtub was filled with bottles of champagne. So
Speaker 9: and people like Kenneth Tyne and very luminarus like that.
Speaker 9: Would there be pinted Wesker would be there.
Speaker 2: It was very nice just talking to these sort of
Speaker 2: people on the London scene because I was one of
Speaker 2: those people on the under see me and James, She
Speaker 2: being the actress, May being the musician. It was a
Speaker 2: nice time to be around. With an invite, you would
Speaker 2: get painters, sculptors, actors, comedians, musicians, playwrights and just that
Speaker 2: all these people who just were in on your scene.
Speaker 10: Would do you think you would have been conscious as
Speaker 10: you were writing this that this is maybe something that
Speaker 10: Harold Pinter might read.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe certainly influenced by all of that. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: I think not not that specifically.
Speaker 10: No, I understand someone like someone like that, someone smart musically,
Speaker 10: someone smart.
Speaker 4: While Paul McCartney aspired to be recognized by the serious
Speaker 4: artists and writers of the day, the Beatles also nurtured
Speaker 4: a sense of playfulness in the studio which to this
Speaker 4: day seems totally original.
Speaker 2: And you're playing, you know, it's very important to play.
Speaker 2: People say to me why he works so hard to
Speaker 2: say I don't work music. I play it. And you know,
Speaker 2: whilst that is a kind of kind of clip statement,
Speaker 2: I say it because it's really true. Sure, I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously in the two meanings of playing music, playing an instrument,
Speaker 2: but playing it is really important. The ones who can
Speaker 2: play almost success.
Speaker 10: I mean playing the sense of playing playing games.
Speaker 2: Look about mucking about it. You know, it's a good
Speaker 2: thing us.
Speaker 7: Somebody could do that, you know, if they suddenly decide
Speaker 7: that it needs it.
Speaker 2: There So this idea of just playing around it's good.
Speaker 2: And in the music too, you know, we've had a
Speaker 2: very sort of cavalier attitude to a lot of things,
Speaker 2: very sort of from offhand thing. I mean, I just
Speaker 2: what came to mind that. I was just thinking when
Speaker 2: I do Petty Lane, there's this lovely solo that I
Speaker 2: knew I want to too. And I talked to George
Speaker 2: Martin about a piccolo trumpet that I'd seen in the
Speaker 2: Brandenburg Concerto the night before, and I said, what was that?
Speaker 2: And he said, and so we got the top player.
Speaker 2: I called David Mason in the studio and I just
Speaker 2: remember thinking that we didn't know what he was going
Speaker 2: to play. We hadn't written it, but he was booked
Speaker 2: and he was sitting there, so you'd better get something together. Mate.
Speaker 2: So we just I just Saidee said, wait a minute
Speaker 2: and wrote it down.
Speaker 8: I just did a little.
Speaker 2: I played a ridiculously high note, and then David Mason said, well,
Speaker 2: that's out of the range of even the piccolo trumpet,
Speaker 2: which is a high, high high trumpet, sets out of
Speaker 2: the range, and I wish we had a little play
Speaker 2: for moment. We just looked at each other and he's
Speaker 2: sort of I'm giving him a kind of yeah, but
Speaker 2: you could probably do it. Smile, and he's given me back,
Speaker 2: you passtward smile kind of yeah, I probably could.
Speaker 4: Even though the song took a lot of its inspiration
Speaker 4: from the non visual medium of radio, in early nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty seven, Penny Lane was one of the first songs
Speaker 4: ever to have been accompanied by a music video. The
Speaker 4: Swedish director Peter Goldman, using techniques from underground filmmaking, took
Speaker 4: the promotional film format.
Speaker 10: To a new level.
Speaker 4: Fast montage editing shows Lane and the band members dressed
Speaker 4: in red du licks riding horses through a dreamlike landscape.
Speaker 2: But it's the.
Speaker 4: Enduring power of radio to allow listeners to create their
Speaker 4: own images. The shimmers at the heart of Penny Lane.
Speaker 2: What I love is you get your own picture. This
Speaker 2: is why when they came to film Sergeant Pepper with
Speaker 2: the Beg's, I said, this is never gonna work because
Speaker 2: everyone has their own image from Sergeant Pepper the album,
Speaker 2: and so if you select one.
Speaker 3: Image, it's never going to be enough because your vision
Speaker 3: is different from mine. I often think this from my
Speaker 3: audience is I think every single person in those forty
Speaker 3: thousand people is having a different experience.
Speaker 2: I'm singing this song. Someone thinks it's sad, someone thinks
Speaker 2: it's dramatic, someone thinks it's funny, and fascinated by the
Speaker 2: idea that everyone's perception is completely different. Now behind the eyes.
Speaker 11: And secrets of the dreamers in the street Rocked to
Speaker 11: Sleep by the Sea, Steve tip.
Speaker 13: Bits and Topsy turveys, bobs and button tops, bags and bones,
Speaker 13: ash and grind and dender for nail perries, sliva and
Speaker 13: snowplates and bolted beads.
Speaker 2: The breed for the imagination radio was great and as
Speaker 2: I met friends like John George, we all harked back
Speaker 2: to that it was very much our period. We grew
Speaker 2: up without television.
Speaker 8: Teddy Skies, I said.
Speaker 4: A Penny Lane was released in nineteen sixty seven on
Speaker 4: a double A single along with Strawberry Fields Forever.
Speaker 14: We're so sorry, local elms. We're so sorry if we
Speaker 14: caused you anything.
Speaker 4: In the next episode, Paul McCartney pays tribute to his
Speaker 4: Liverpool origins.
Speaker 2: It was a cut up from me. It was so
Speaker 2: rich and I think a lot of what I am,
Speaker 2: a lot of what I write. What I think is that.
Speaker 4: Uncle Albert the pis artist. Next time on McCartney A
Speaker 4: Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a
Speaker 4: co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.