#1st verse

[thecoleopterawithana]

It was 1965. Things were not going so smoothly between Jane Asher and me. Everyone has mild arguments where you think, “God, I wish they could understand where I’m coming from” or “I wish they could get it.” They obviously don’t; they think I’m some kind of idiot or tyrant or something. [...] I started writing the song ['We Can Work It Out'] to try to figure my way out of feeling bad after an argument. It was really fresh in my mind. You can’t write this kind of song two weeks later. You have to do it immediately. Writing a song is a good way to get your thoughts out and to allow yourself to say things that you might not say to the other person. I wrote the first couple of verses, and then I wrote out the middle eight with John at his house. When we took it into the studio, George Harrison suggested we try the waltz pattern, with suspended triplets, that ended up giving the song a profound sense of friction and fracture. But the fracture was real, and we did “fall apart before too long”. Sadly, Jane and I did break up. And that meant breaking up with her mother too. Margaret Asher was a real mumsy type and, since I’d lost my mum, she had filled that role for me. Now I’d lost a mother for a second time.

Paul McCartney, in The Lyrics (2021).

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Paul McCartney: Inside the Songs | BBC Radio 4

Paul reads from his new book, The Lyrics (2021).

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PAUL: I read an article about a group of male models who were suing one or two photographers because they’d been abused and humiliated by them. Some of the photographers they were talking about I knew. Now, I don’t actually know what they got up to in those particular sessions, but because I’d been photographed by them, I did know that the modus operandi of these photographers was to say, “Come on, baby! Come on, give me all you got!” In other words, they tended to be extremely vulgar. It used to come with the territory. You’d say, “That’s just him.” This was the way some of those guys worked, to get you to not stand there looking boring. 

Like people in so many professions — pop stars, cops — they become caricatures of themselves. That’s why I wonder whether some of these models just didn’t understand the murky territory they’d entered. It may also be that the photographers went further and touched the models inappropriately, that I don’t know. The song is fictional.

The song starts off with the photographers saying, “Look into my lens / Give me all you got”. That’s a mild representation of how these photographers worked back in the 60′s and 70′s. Only now, they’d be ten times more vulgar. 

I was imagining a “line of bicycles for hire”, and “objects of desire”. But they’re “working for the squire”! In the magazine world, the photographers are a pretty big deal.

“There go the pretty boys / A row of cottages for rent”. I’m imagining little shed you can rent on sea fronts. I’ve come to understand that cottaging* refers to gay sex in a public toilet, but that meaning wasn’t in my mind at the time I wrote the song!

I’ve got this very simple little guitar line, just two fingers on the strings and the other notes are all open. That’s all it is. 

“You can look, but you better not touch.” This song focuses on the experience of male models, but it’s the same with female models. Models are used for selling commodities, and I suspect that they’ve also commodified themselves.

It was interesting to put “Pretty Boys” together, as it’s a perspective I don’t often write from. But that’s one of the joys of being a writer: a lot of people might have a similar thought — in this instance about the treatment of models — but don’t have an outlet for it. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to crystallize these thoughts into a song. 

The idea of a model being treated like a commodity raises interesting comparisons to The Beatles too. We were musicians, not models, but at the height of Beatlemania, people wanted to put our faces in all manner of things and it felt out of control sometimes. So that was part of the reasoning behind setting up Apple, and then later on in my case MPL. It was a liberation for us, from the men in the suits who’d been in charge before. We no longer had to “work for the squire”! Now we could take control of our own destinies.

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[*Note: “Cottaging is a gay slang term, originating from the United Kingdom, referring to anonymous sex between men in a public lavatory (a "cottage"), or cruising for sexual partners with the intention of having sex elsewhere. [...] The word "cottage", usually meaning a small, cosy, countryside home, is documented as having been in use during the Victorian era to refer to a public toilet and by the 1960s its use in this sense had become an exclusively homosexual slang term.”]

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Paul McCartney: Inside the Songs | BBC Radio 4

Paul reads from his new book, The Lyrics (2021).

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PAUL: “Why she had to go / I don’t know, she wouldn’t say”. Some people find it hard to believe I was 22 when I wrote ‘Yesterday’. I’d lost my mother about 8 years before that. It’s been suggested to me that it’s a ‘losing-my-mother’ song, to which I’ve always said, “No, I don’t believe so.” But you know, the more I think about it, I can see that might have been part of the background. The unconsciousness behind the song after all. 

It was so strange, the loss of our mother to cancer. It was simply not discussed; we barely knew what cancer was. But I’m now not surprised that the whole experience surfaced in this song, where sweetness competes with a pain you can’t quite describe. 

Another interesting thing about ‘Yesterday’ is that it was almost recorded as an electronic avant-garde song. When we were trying to work out how to record it, I was very intrigued by the work of Delia Derbyshire. She was a pioneer of electronic music, who worked for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and is probably better known for her work on Doctor Who. I went to see Delia and she took me to a hut she had in the garden — a sort of laboratory — and we talked about how she worked. But in the end we went with George [Martin]’s arrangement and the song did phenomenally well.

[thecoleopterawithana]

I miss playing soft jokes on people. I used to do it on trains, go into people's compartments and pretend to be soft, or in shops. I still feel an urge to do that, but you can't. It would be Beatles Play Tricks. This Will Give You A Laugh. We were on the way to Wembley once in the van. We wrote on a piece of paper, "Which Way to Wembley". We spoke in a foreign language and pointed to a map of Wales. Everybody went mad putting us right. We did all think of disguises once, so we could get around. George and I went through the customs in long coats and beards thinking no one would recognize us, but they all did. Paul was the best. He pretended to be a weird photographer, coming out with a lot of psychological gibberish. He even fooled Brian.

John Lennon, in Hunter Davies’ The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (1968).

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When Paul was filming Help! in the spring of 1965, the fans gathered outside the front door in such a mob that Dr Asher devised an escape route out of the back of the building from Paul's attic room. After donning his boiler suit, he climbed out of the window and reconnoitred the route himself, tapping on the windows of the startled residents. When the occupants opened their windows to him, he explained, in his impeccable upper-class accent, that he had a chap staying with him who needed a discreet method of ingress and egress to his premises and would it be all right if he occasionally climbed across their roof? Amazingly they all agreed, and Paul was able to slip out and into Browning Mews behind Wimpole Street and away. Dr Asher enjoyed it all enormously.   PAUL: I used to go out of the window of my garret bedroom, on to a little parapet. You had to be pretty careful, it wasn't that wide, it was only like a foot or so wide, so you had to have something of a head for heights. You'd go along to the right, which was to the next house in Wimpole Street, number 56, and there was a colonel living there, an old ex-army gentleman. He had this little top-floor flat, and he was very charming, it was quite amazing going through. 'Uh! Coming through, Colonel!' 'Oh, oh, okay, hush-hush and all that!' and he'd see me into the lift and I'd go right downstairs to the basement of that house. There was a young couple living down there and they'd see me out through their kitchen and into the garage. I remember I bought them a fridge later on to thank them; I'd noticed they hadn't got a fridge during a conversation with them. The couple lived above the old stable at 10 Browning Mews and Paul would leave through a street door set between the two garage doors on the cobbled mews. 'I'd do a left and then I'd be through the archway into New Cavendish Street. I'd have to watch that the fans hadn't noticed, they were just around the corner, then I'd just run down the road. It's quite funny to think now of some of the people I met doing that.'

In Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now (1997).

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July 29th, 1964 (Stockholm, Sweden): Klas Burling interviews the Beatles for the Sveriges Radio (Swedish National Radio) show Pop ’63, before their performance at Johanneshovs Isstadion. The Fab Four are in high spirits and joke around. 

KLAS: And what’s your name?

PAUL: [in Swedish] Thank you very much!

KLAS: That’s your name?

PAUL: [Swedish accent] No! 

KLAS: What’s your name?

PAUL: [Swedish accent] What’s your name? Dave Clark!

KLAS: No, you don’t look like him.

PAUL: [Swedish accent] I don’t look like him, but I am him!

[Laughter]

KLAS: Come on, Paul!

PAUL: No. Paul McCartney, how do you go?

KLAS: Oh, fine.

PAUL: Yes, hello Klas! 

JOHN: Hello Klas!

PAUL: Nice to see you again.

GEORGE: Hello Klas!

RINGO: Alright Klas, Ringo talking.

JOHN: [Scouse accent] Alright Klas, this is John Jagger! Hello!

[Laughter]

JOHN(?): Oh, no!

GEORGE: This is George Chakiris!

KLAS: Have you seen the people outside?

JOHN: Yes, they’re very manys! Manys.

KLAS: Yes.

PAUL: I love the people— I love the people outside. Don’t you, John?

RINGO: Yeah, it’s just the ones inside we don’t like.

[Laughther]

KLAS: Thank you.

RINGO: No, we’re only joking.

KLAS: Remember last time?

PAUL: Yes, of course!

RINGO: Yes, remember it well!

KLAS: A lot busier out here, though.

PAUL: Yeah, but you looked after us. Didn’t he, in Sweden?

JOHN: Oh, he did, yeah.

(?): Passport, please.

KLAS: Passport. You’ve got passport?

JOHN: I didn’t think you needed them here.

KLAS: No, just in case—

GEORGE: Since the Germans took over.

JOHN: Scrub it, scrub it. He’s all—

KLAS: John, what are you going to do out now, what is Paul doing?

[John(?) laughing]

KLAS: Hey, John’s passport... [in Swedish] This is John’s passport photo, it’s certainly a sight to behold!

(?): You’re gonna see now, see it!

PAUL: [laughing] This is great!

JOHN: That’s on the way— on the way to Germany, the first time.

KLAS: Oh!

JOHN: Just like me.

KLAS: When was that?

JOHN: Well, don’t know, think about four years ago.

KLAS: '61?

PAUL(?): [distant] ‘61.

JOHN: '60, probably.

KLAS: ‘61 it was (?)

(?): How’s Klaus(?)

GEORGE: [distant] That’s the other brother here.

KLAS: John!

JOHN: [distant] What?

KLAS: Tell me a thing, what are you going to do on stage this time?

JOHN: [distant] Sing!

KLAS: Sing what?

RINGO(?): Oh, I don’t know.

KLAS: The new ones?

RINGO(?): Yes.

(?): Mostly new ones.

KLAS: Mostly new ones?

JOHN: Well, we’ll sing some old ones and some new ones, you know. Oh, I have to go, goodbye.

KLAS: Thanks a lot, Beatles!

JOHN: [distant] Thank you.

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Here’s a picture of John’s passport at the time, which, as he accurately recounts, he got the first time they went to Hamburg, in August 1960. 

It is admittedly a very different look from their ‘63 apparel, which prompted laughs all around.

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[This transcript was particularly hard to do because they often speak over each other and at various distances from the microphone. I attempted my best, but any mistakes are my own. My gratitude goes also to @thespiritofvexation​ for helping with the Swedish bits.]

[thecoleopterawithana]

People forget that John wrote some pretty nice ballads. People tend to think of him as an acerbic wit and aggressive and abrasive, but he did have a very warm side to him really which he didn't like to show too much in case he got rejected. We wrote 'If I Fell' together but with the emphasis on John because he sang it. It was a nice harmony number, very much a ballad.

Paul McCartney, in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now (1997).

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Paul said he wanted a one-word title and was considering ‘Yesterday’, except that he thought it was perhaps too corny. I persuaded him that it was all right.

George Martin, in Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (1988).