Penny Lane is a Liverpool street but also the name given to the area that surrounds its junction with Smithdown Road. None of the places mentioned in ‘Penny Lane’ exists in the lane itself. But to Paul and John, who had spent their early years in the area, it represented a time in their lives when everyone appeared to be friendly and the sun shone for ever in a clear blue sky.
Living in the bubble of fame their memories of childhood were more gilded. As John had observed in ‘She Said, She Said’, ‘When I was a boy, everything was right.’ John had incorporated Penny Lane into an early draft of ‘In My Life’, but it was Paul who made it work. He created a Liverpool street scene that could have been taken from a children’s picture book with a pretty nurse, a jolly barber, an eccentric banker, a patriotic fireman and some friendly passers by.
“It’s part fact,” he admitted. “It’s part nostalgia.”
At first it sounds as though a summer scene is being described (‘blue suburban skies’) but then rain is mentioned as well as someone selling poppies. The point is that the song is a series of snapshots, not all of them necessarily taken on the same day.
There was a barber’s shop in Penny Lane, run by a Mr Bioletti who claimed to have cut hair for John, Paul and George as children; there were two banks (Barclays and Lloyds), a fire station in Allerton Road and, in the middle of the roundabout, a shelter. The banker without a mac and fireman with a portrait of the Queen in his pocket were Paul’s embellishments:
“I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he’d had the pleasure of knowing,” said Paul. “Actually he just had photos of different hairstyles. But all the people who come and go do stop and say hello.”
Finger pie was a Liverpudlian sexual reference included in the song to amuse the locals.
“It was just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut,” said Paul. “For months afterwards, girls serving in local chip shops had to put up with requests for ‘fish and finger pie’.”
Liverpool poet Roger McGough, who was in the music and satire group Scaf- fold with Paul’s brother Mike, believes that ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ were significant because, for the first time, British rather than American landmarks were being celebrated in rock’n’roll.
“The Beatles were starting to write songs about home,” McGough says. “They began to draw on things like the rhymes we used to sing in the streets and old songs our parents remembered from the days of the music halls. Liverpool didn’t have a mythology until they created one.”
Today, because of the song, Penny Lane is a Liverpool tourist attraction and this itself has altered the area. The original street signs were stolen years ago and their replacements have had to be screwed to walls and placed beyond easy reach. The barber’s shop has become a unisex salon with a picture of the Beatles displayed in the window. The shelter on the roundabout has been renovated and re-opened as Sgt Pepper’s Bistro. The Penny Lane Wine Bar has the song’s lyrics painted above its windows.
- The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970 by Steve Turner
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