Beatle communication via code, music & telepathy
We met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be broken
Paul McCartney - Days We Left Behind
A lot of what we, The Beatles, did was very much in an enclosed scene. Other people found it difficult - even John's wife, Cynthia, found it very difficult - to penetrate the screen that we had around us. As a kind of safety barrier we had a lot of 'in' jokes, little signs, references to music; we had a common bond in that and it was very difficult for any 'outsider' to penetrate. That possibly wasn't good for relationships back then.
Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000
There was no point asking if they [the Beatles] really got on together. It’s obvious they do. When one makes a joke, the others roar with laughter. They have their own “inside” language when they want to keep something private. Mrs. Lennon says they tease her with it all the time. And they’ve been together so much, sometimes they don’t even have to talk in code. As Paul says, “we can just read each other’s thought waves.”
Steve Brandt, “7 DAYS and 7 NIGHTS WITH THE BEATLES.” Photoplay Magazine (July 1964)
JOHN: We have met some new people since we've become famous, but we've never been able to stand them for more than two days. Some hang on a bit longer, perhaps a few weeks, but that's all. Most people don't get across to us. We can't go around with anybody for a long time unless they are a friend, because we're so closely knit. We talk in code to each other. We always did when we had strangers around us...
PAUL: If there was someone disastrous in the dressing room (because, occasionally, someone would get in who was a right pain and we didn't have time for all of that) we would have little signs. We'd say 'Mal...' and yawn, and that would be the sign to get rid of them. It was a very 'in' scene.
Malcolm Searle would be the last to complain - he, too, had fine moments with them as the tour progressed. His is a name that stays with me, because I made it a code-word for breaking up interviews. In order to protect the visitor’s feelings and also to relieve Paul (for it was usually Paul, the most consistently willing to undertake public relationships) of all responsibility for termination of the interview, I would say: ‘Paul, I know you could go on talking for hours/till the cows come home/till goats learn to play the tenor sax - but Malcolm Searle is still waiting for the interview you promised him. He's being very patient [as indeed he always was] but he has a deadline...’
Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor (1984)
I’m a smoke-screen expert since John got shot. I lie all the time. It’s the price of fame. I used to laugh at that, but there’s a price for everything. We have code names in the family for places we own or like to go to, and you’ll never see photographs of my kids.”
Interview for Evening Standard The Gospel According to Paul
The Beatles were about humour, we had a great humour between us. There was an 'in' side to the track of humour that we would use as a protective thing.
Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now
"We've a very tight school, the Beatles. We're like a machine that goes boom, boomchick, chickboom, each of us with our own little job to do. We're just like dogs who can hear high-pitched sounds that humans can't. We can be talking to some character and, suddenly, if he becomes a drag, we can all put the shutters up, freeze him out and he would never know. It's amazing. Like radar. I can pick up Ringo's mood just by looking at him. It's our own mutual protection mechanism. If we didn't have it, we'd fall apart."
The Daily Mirror: The one that bites – Donald Zec dissects Mr J. Lennon. (March 1965)
JOHN: Well, because of the situation we’re in, and I often express myself through song, or mainly through song, somebody can have – let’s call it— Let’s say he’s a brother of mine, in the family. Now, if two brothers argue and fight, for whatever reason, or even – write, the only way they can express themselves, because they’re not artists, is either through letters or through dialogue. One brother goes away to sea, not because they had a fight, but because he was going away to sea anyway. The last thing they did was have an argument. He, the brother away at sea – let’s call that me, ‘cause I went to America – might write to his brother…
Paul, you could say, his lyrics are very sort of... non-specific – if one knows the person, one knows what is coming down. You know, you can read what’s being said—
John Lennon, April 16th, 1973 (Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles)
"Though thinking of Paul caused John pain, he could never get McCartney out of his head; Pau's music was everywhere, and it always made him jealous, even the songs he enjoyed. In Bermuda, John was listening to all kinds of things on the radio, not just the Muzak and classical he listened to in New York. "Coming Up," Paul's hit single from McCartney II, was unavoidable. Every time he tuned in the BBC or one of the local stations, there it was. It began to drive John crackers. Paul was calling for a Beatles reunion, and every word of the song was addressed directly to him. Ultimately, he came to admire it and draw inspiration from it. The small room next door to the master bedroom had been converted to a two-track recording studio complete with rhythm box. To get into gear for the demo tape, John played "Coming Up" on his guitar over and over, sometimes improvising his own words, sometimes singing Paul's words, which spoke of peace and the possibility of again playing music together."
Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon
“But it was very painful, a bad period, there was a lot of deep messages in all the stuff we did then. I was really writing a lot of songs to John.”
"I’m quite private. Why should people, know my innermost thoughts? That’s for me, their innermost. But in a song, that’s where you can do it. That’s the place to put them. You can start to reveal truths and feelings. You know, like in ‘Here Today’ where I’m saying to John “I love you”. I couldn’t have said that, really, to him. But you find, I think, that you can put these emotions and these deeper truths – and sometimes awkward truths; I was scared to say “I love you”.
Paul, BBC 4’s Mastertapes (2016)
Oh, for what it’s worth, no less than John Lennon loved the song. I spent a long time talking to [photographer] Bob Gruen once, it was great as we talked about a lot of stuff that he doesn’t usually get grilled on. One of the things that came up was the times he spent with John listening to the radio. Bob singled this song out as one he and John would listen to and how much John loved the song. John took the song quite personally, and saw it as Paul sending a message to him: ‘Yeah, I know you think I only write silly love songs, but I love you.’ Bob said John specifically mentioned the ‘I love you’ refrain as being a message from Paul to him. We can speculate all we want, but I have no reason to doubt the word or memory of a guy who sat in the Dakota bedroom with John and listened to this song with him.
gswan, c/o Steve Hoffman Music Forums. (October 28th, 2010)
JOHN: Because I’m human, and I get irritated, and I get angry. And I got so furious when I heard Ram the first time that I just wrote the song.
REPORTER: You were furious because you don’t think the level of music is—?
JOHN: No, I was furious because of – there’s messages to me and the others in it! Uh, the ‘Too Many People’—
YOKO: “You made the first mistake.”
JOHN: —“You made the first mistake”, all those lines are directly to us. It ain’t paranoia, it’s directed to us. Like, I think ‘Dear Friend’ is it… But we met the other week and we decided to stop it all, you know? Because we’d both had enough. The four of us have – I mean, including the wives. Yes, sorry?
February?, 1972: At a press conference to announce plans for a possible tour backed by Elephant’s Memory
HINDLE: What do you think about language?
JOHN: I think it’s a bit crummy, you know? It is a drag form of communication, really. We’ll get – we’ll get telepathy. I believe that.
HINDLE: You believe that?
JOHN: Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure as anything I believe. It’s too… Because now we need it so much. […] There are – there’s people everywhere of the same mind and it’s just… even amongst ourselves we can’t communicate. Which is the hard bit, you know.
HINDLE: Yeah.
JOHN: Amongst the people that sort of really agree.
HINDLE: Just ’cause of words?
JOHN: Just ’cause of words, and upbringing, and attitude, and how you express your… Well, it’s just some – you’ve got to find a mutual sort of language to express yourself, you know? And my language is that—
HINDLE: Unless you fall in love it’s impossible to communicate like that.
JOHN: I mean, I wasn’t in love last year, but I was communicating quite well with people. Not as well, or maybe not as powerfully. ’Cause now there’s two of us, doing that, brrmmm, whatever it is. Sending out a vibration or whatever. But before it was me and… or me and George, alright, or whatever it was; we weren’t in love, but. You know. There’s enough in you to shove it out. It is just that bit. If you – if somebody comes in a room and he’s uptight and that, he can make the whole room uptight.
John Lennon, interviewed by Maurice Hindle (December 1968).
JOHN: [‘How Do You Sleep’]’s not serious. Like, if Paul was really, really hurt by it, I’ll soo– I’ll know by the vibes, come round. Even if he doesn’t call, well, I’ll explain it to him. I’ll even write to him, you know. If he really really thinks it’s – thinks it’s really really serious.
September 9th, 1971 (St Regis Hotel, New York)
KANE: Do you ever have any, uh – this is another controversial question – any internal problems within The Beatles? Let’s say the four guys, you’re bound to have differences. Have any serious internal problems ever upset you?
JOHN: [pause] Um… We get plenty of—
KANE: It’s a tough question to ask.
JOHN: It isn’t tough, because we can manage them. Because we have plenty of arguments, but we’re also so attuned to each other, and we know each other so well, through the years, that an argument never reaches a climax. Or it never reaches the point where somebody goes off ‘cause they’re done talking, you know.
KANE: In other words, it’s forgotten.
JOHN: It’s not forgotten. But we know each other so well, it’s like sort of mind-reading. If an argument’s building up between Ringo and I, say, there comes to a point where we know what’s coming next and it’s all – everybody packs in. Or something – some, “Okay, he wins,” you know. So we have ordinary arguments, like other people, but we don’t – there’s no sort of conflict. All the people who have conflict in show business either get married about nineteen times, they leave the group they’re in and go solo… and nothing ever happens.
John Lennon and Ringo Starr, interviewed by Larry Kane (2 September 1964).
NEIL: I’d just rather not say anything. It’s one of those situations.
PAUL: Yeah. [pause] Well, that’s – that’s the trouble you see, there, ‘cause that’s it. It’s like, with our – heightened awareness, the answer is not to say anything, you know. But it isn’t. ‘Cause I mean, we screw each other up totally if we don’t do that. ‘Cause we’re not ready for your heightened… vows of silence. [laughs; hapless] We’re really not! Like, we don’t know what the fuck each other’s talking about, when that – we all just sort of get—
NEIL: I think it’s just between the four of you, that get it. That’s what I’d pretend.
PAUL: Oh yeah, right, yeah. But you see, that’s it, that’s why John doesn’t say anything. ‘Cause he, you know, he just… There was something the other day, when I said, “Well, what do you think?” And he just stood there and didn’t say anything. And then – and I know exactly why, you know. I mean, I wouldn’t, if… [long pause] Somehow. You know, there’s nothing really much to be said about it. You just – we all just have to do it, and all that, instead of like talking about it. But – but if one of us is talking about it, it’s a drag if the other three aren’t. Because then it sort of throws you off. [inaudible; voice marking tape slate] I mean, we’ve just been talking about it now for a few years, you know. Like this…
From the Get Back sessions (13 January 1969).
JOHN: Hey! Did you dream about me last night?
PAUL: [long pause] I can’t remember.
JOHN: Very strong dream. We both dreamt about it. It was amazing! Different dreams, you know, but I thought you must’ve been there. [inaudible] I was touching you. [inaudible]
PAUL: Nothing to worry about, though?
JOHN: Nothing to worry about, no.
PAUL: I remember when John and I were first hanging out together, I had a dream about digging in the garden with my hands. I’d dreamt that before but I’d never found anything other than an old tin can. But in this dream I found a gold coin. I kept digging and I found another. And another. The next day I told John about this amazing dream I’d had and he said, ‘That’s funny, I had the same dream’. So both of us had this dream of finding this treasure. And I suppose you could say it came true. I remember years later talking about it – ‘Remember that dream we had?’; ‘Yeah, that was far out’. So the message of that dream was: keep digging lads.
PAUL MCCARTNEY TO THE BIG ISSUE. FEBRUARY 2012.
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