The Beatles Lyrics

by Hunter Davies

  ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light,’ sang John. Paul sang it after him and nodded that it was good. John said they could use that idea for all the verses, if they could think of some more questions on those lines.

  ‘Do you believe in love at first sight,’ sang John. ‘No,’ he said, stopping singing. ‘it hasn’t got the right number of syllables. What do you think? Can we split it up and have a pause to give it an extra syllable?’ John then sang the line, breaking it in the middle: ‘Do you believe–ugh–in love at first sight.’

  ‘How about,’ said Paul, ‘Do you believe in a love at first sight.’ John sang it over and accepted it. In singing it, he added the next line, ‘Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time.’

  They both then sang the two lines to themselves, la-la-ing all the other lines. Apart from this, all they had was the chorus: ‘I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.’ John found himself singing ‘would you believe’, which he thought was better.

  Then they changed the order, singing the two lines ‘Would you believe in a love at first sight / Yes I’m certain it happens all the time’ before going on to ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light,’ but they still had to la-la the fourth line, which they couldn’t think of.

  It was now about five o’clock. Cynthia, John’s wife, arrived wearing sunglasses, accompanied by Terry Doran, one of their (and Brian Epstein’s) old Liverpool friends. John and Paul kept on playing. Cyn picked up a paperback book and starting reading. Terry produced a magazine about horoscopes. John and Paul were singing their three lines over and over again, searching for a fourth.

  ‘What’s a rhyme for time?’ said John. ‘Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time. It’s got to rhyme with that line.’

  ‘How about “I just feel fine”,’ suggested Cyn.

  ‘No,’ said John. ‘You never use the word just. It’s meaningless. It’s a fill-in word.’

  John sang ‘I know it’s mine,’ but nobody took much notice. It didn’t make much sense, coming after ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light’. Somebody said it sounded obscene.

  Terry asked me what my birthday was. I said January seventh. Paul stopped playing, although it had looked as if he was completely concentrating on the song, and said, ‘Hey, that’s our kid’s birthday as well.’ He listened while Terry read out the horoscope. Then he went back to doodling on the piano.

  In the middle of the doodling, Paul suddenly started to play ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. John joined in, singing it very loud, laughing and shouting. Then Paul began another song on the piano, ‘Tequila’. They both joined in again, shouting and laughing even louder. Terry and Cyn went on reading.

  ‘Remember in Germany?’ said John. ‘We used to shout out anything.’ They played the song again. This time John shouted out a different thing in each pause in the music. ‘Knickers’ and ‘Duke of Edinburgh’ and ‘tit’ and ‘Hitler’.

  They both stopped all the shouting and larking around as suddenly as they’d begun it. They went back, very quietly, to the song they were supposed to be working on. ‘What do you see when you turn out the light,’ sang John, trying slightly new words to their existing line, leaving out ‘afraid’. Then he followed it with another line, ‘I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.’ By slightly rewording it, he’d made it fit in.

  Paul said yes, that would do. He wrote down the finished four lines on a sheet of exercise paper propped in front of him on his piano. They now had one whole verse, as well as the chorus. Paul got up and wandered round the room. John moved to the piano.

  ‘How about a piece of amazing cake from Basingstoke?’ said Paul, taking down a piece of rock-hard cake from a shelf. ‘It’ll do for a trifle,’ said John. Paul made a face. Terry and Cynthia were still quietly reading. Paul got a sitar from a corner and sat down and started to tune it, shushing John to keep quiet for a minute. John sat still at the piano, looking blankly out of the window. Outside in the front courtyard of Paul’s house, the eyes and foreheads of six girls could just be seen peering over the front wall. Then they dropped, exhausted, on to the pavement beyond. A few minutes later they appeared again, hanging on till their strength gave way.

  John peered vacantly into space through his round wire spectacles. Then he began to play a hymn on the piano, singing words he was making up as he went along.

  ‘Backs to the wall, if you want to see His face.’

  Then he seemed to jump in the air and started banging out a hearty rugby song. ‘Let’s write a rugby song eh?’ No one listened to him. Paul had got his sitar tuned and was playing some chords on it, the same ones over and over again. He got up again and wandered round the room. John picked up the sitar this time, but he couldn’t get comfortable with it. Paul told him that he had to sit on the floor with his legs crossed and place it in the bowl of his foot. Paul said George did it that way; it felt uncomfortable at first, but after a few centuries you got used to it. John tried it, gave up, and placed the sitar against a chair.

  Paul then went back to his guitar and started to sing and play a very slow, beautiful song about a foolish man sitting on the hill. John listened to it quietly, staring blankly out of the window, almost as if he weren’t listening. Paul sang it many times, la-la-ing words he hadn’t thought of yet. When at last he finished, John said he better write the words down or he’d forget them. Paul said it was okay. He wouldn’t forget them. It was the first time Paul had played it for John. There was no discussion.

  They then lit a marijuana cigarette, sharing it between them. It was getting near seven o’clock, almost time to go round the corner to the EMI recording studios. They decided to phone Ringo, to tell him his song was finished–which it wasn’t–and that they would do it that evening. John picked up the phone. After a lot of playing around, he finally got through, but it was busy. ‘If I hold on, does that mean I eventually get through?’

  ‘No, you have to hang up,’ said Paul.

  In my description of the writing process that evening, John criticizes Cynthia for suggesting ‘just’, which he says is a non-word, a fill-in word. In the event, he broke his own rule–which he had done anyway in the past–with the line ‘I just need someone to love’. But it’s a good rule, and shows that he did have rules when it came to vocabulary, even when he ignored them.

  They were well aware at the time of the sexual connotation of ‘I know it’s mine’ and also of the double meaning of the phrase ‘I get high with a little help from my friends’. The drug reference was deliberate, to amuse their friends, and most fans. It was a song about pot, something all four of them looked upon as a friend–but only if you wanted to read it that way. Up to you.

  I wasn’t really aware at the time how clever they had become at using their real-life dialogue: one of them saying a line, trying it out, and the other replying. They then incorporated this repartee into the lyrics. In the song, in the second verse, there is a question and answer session, with Ringo asking the questions and the others singing their response. It gives the lyric a narrative and progression, stops it from being too sad, too pathetic. Ringo could have sounded like Billy No Mates moaning on, but instead his friends are offering helpful comments.

  The manuscript is in Paul’s hand with ‘Bad Finger Boogie’, the original title, in brackets at the top. It also features a different second line: ‘would you throw a tomatoe at me’ which Ringo objected to, saying it reminded him of the days when people did throw things at him. This might have been in his Butlins holiday camp days or possibly when he first took over from Pete Best as drummer, and the Pete Best fans were very upset. Or more recently when Beatles fans threw Jelly Babies which Ringo, sitting down, found hard to avoid.

  What would you think if I sang out of tune,

  would you stand up and walk out on me?

  Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song,

  and I’ll try not to sing out of key.

  Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends,

  Mm, I
get high with a little help from my friends,

  Mm, I’m gonna try with a little help from my friends.

  What do I do when my love is away?

  (Does it worry you to be alone?)

  How do I feel by the end of the day?

  (Are you sad because you’re on your own?)

  No, I get by with a little help from my friends,

  Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends,

  Mm, I’m gonna to try with a little help from my friends.

  ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, from Sgt. Pepper, January 1967. An earlier title, ‘Bad Finger Boogie’, is in brackets and in the second line, a tomato is being thrown, which did not appeal to Ringo.

  (Do you need anybody?)

  I need somebody to love.

  (Could it be anybody?)

  Yes, I want somebody to love.

  (Would you believe in a love at first sight?)

  Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time.

  (What do you see when you turn out the light?)

  I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.

  Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends,

  Mm, I’m gonna try with a little help from my friends,

  Oh, I get high with a little help from my friends,

  Yes I get by with a little help from my friends,

  with a little help from my friends.

  Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

  I think by now most pop pickers know that it does not stand for LSD–which was the rumour back in 1967. John denied it enough times, but that did not stop the rumour-mongers. The original idea came when his son Julian, aged four, brought a drawing home and John asked him what it was, what the shapes meant. Julian said it was Lucy, a girl in his class, and she was in the sky and those were diamonds. Lucy O’Donnell, also aged four, did not discover she had been immortalized in a song until she was aged thirteen. (She died in 2009, aged forty-six, having suffered from lupus and other autoimmune system diseases.)

  That doesn’t mean to say that the images in the song were not drug-induced, as John was still taking a lot of LSD at home, but it’s equally possible that he drew on childhood memories of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice gets taken on a rowing boat by the Queen–who turns into a sheep. There is also a possible Goon Show connection. According to Spike Milligan, a friend of John’s at one time, they used to talk about ‘plasticine ties’.

  The verbal and visual images are surreal but straightforward, in the sense that you can picture them dreaming up daft or unlikely juxtapositions which would be amusing for a child, such as trees made of tangerines, marmalade skies, marshmallow pies, hee hee. Paul, on a visit to John, helped him finish off the verses and was responsible for ‘newspaper taxis’, which I used to think meant taxis carrying newspapers but was actually a reference to taxis made out of newspaper.

  The images, I assume, are also the sort of thing that flit through the minds of people on drugs, when weird things appear to happen, when you find yourselves in strange places. But they also happen to ordinary people in ordinary dreams as well. Asked about the last line, the girl waiting at a turnstile with kaleidoscope eyes, John later said it was Yoko, though he didn’t know it at the time. So the song could have been called ‘Yoko In The Sky With Diamonds’, giving us the initials YSD, which no one could have objected to.

  Three versions of the manuscript are known–with parts in the hand of both Paul and John, but with no important differences, apart from the order of the verses. One version (opposite, top left), now owned by a Californian collector, is in John’s hand and has the line ‘with plasticine porters looking-glass eyes’ with the word ties inserted above ‘eyes’. It also has a drawing, another version of the cover image of the Sergeant Pepper Band, with a trophy beside them and two rocking-horse people. At the bottom, in different handwriting, possibly Paul’s, it reads ‘Wednesday morning…’, the beginning, we now know, of a later song. The version opposite is in John’s hand but the last five lines are in Paul’s.

  Another sketch, possibly by Paul, for the Sgt. Pepper cover–but the four lines below it are John’s early handwritten lyrics for ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. ‘Wednesday morning at…’ is in Paul’s hand, plus a longer version of ‘Lucy’ by John.

  ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, from Sgt. Pepper, January 1967, in John’s hand.

  Picture yourself in a boat on a river,

  With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

  Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,

  A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

  Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,

  Towering over your head.

  Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,

  And she’s gone.

  Lucy in the sky with diamonds,

  Lucy in the sky with diamonds,

  Lucy in the sky with diamonds,

  Ah… Ah…

  Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain,

  Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.

  Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,

  That grow so incredibly high.

  Newspaper taxis appear on the shore,

  Waiting to take you away.

  Climb in the back with your head in the clouds,

  And you’re gone.

  Picture yourself on a train in a station,

  With plasticine porters with looking glass ties.

  Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile,

  The girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

  Getting Better

  ‘Getting Better’ was another song I witnessed from its early creation–and wrote about in the biography. I didn’t go into the details of John’s contribution to the lyrics, which were very important, starting with a caustic ‘can’t get much worse’. He turned an upbeat song into a confessional, admitting he had been cruel and mean to his woman and beaten her up (which was true, as Cynthia later revealed), but he was trying to do better, so in a way the song does end optimistically. In the description I didn’t mention I was there, all the time, but wrote it like a fly on the wall–which was what I was trying to be.

  Another afternoon it was the first afternoon of spring–like spring, and Paul went for a walk with his dog Martha. John still hadn’t arrived for the latest work on Sergeant Pepper.

  He pushed Martha into his Aston Martin and got in beside her and started the car, but it wouldn’t start. He gave it a few bangs, hoping that would do it, then he gave up and got out of the Aston Martin and into his black-windowed Mini Cooper. He revved up first time. His housekeeper man opened the large dark green doors and he shot through, catching all the fans by surprise. He was away before they realized he’d come out. He drove to Primrose Hill, where he parked the car and left it without locking it. He never locks his cars.

  Martha ran around and the sun came out. Paul thought it really was spring at last. ‘It’s getting better,’ he said to himself. He meant the weather, but the phrase made him smile because it was one of Jimmie Nicol’s phrases, one they used to mock all the time in Australia. When Ringo was once ill and unable to play, Jimmie Nicol deputized for him on part of their Australian tour. Every time one of them asked Jimmie how he was getting on, if he was liking it and was he managing okay, all he ever replied was ‘It’s getting better.’

  That day at two o’clock, when John came around to write a new song, Paul suggested: ‘Let’s do a song called “It’s Getting Better”.’ So they got going, both playing, singing, improvising, and messing around. When the tune was at last taking shape, Paul said, ‘You’ve got to admit, it is getting better.’

  ‘Did you say, “You’ve got to admit, it’s getting better”?’

  Then John sang that as well. So it went on till two in the morning. People came to see Paul, some by appointment. They were left waiting downstairs, reading, or were sent away. John and Paul stopped once for a meal, a quick fry-up.

  The next evening, Paul and John went to the record
ing studio. Paul played the new song on the piano, la-la-ing the accompaniment or banging in tune to his words, to give the others an idea of what it sounded like. Ringo and George said they liked it; so did George Martin.

  The first stage in the layer-cake system they now use in recording songs was to get the backing recorded on one track. They discussed what the general sound would be like and what sort of instruments to use. They also chatted about other things. When they got bored they went off and played on their own on any instruments lying around. There was an electronic piano in the corner of the studio, left over from someone else’s recording session. Someone doodled on it and the group decided to use it.

  Ringo sat at his drums and played what he thought would be a good drum backing, with Paul singing the song into his ear. Because of the noise, Paul had to shout in Ringo’s ear as he explained something. After about two hours of trying out little bits and pieces, they had the elements of a backing. George Martin and two studio technicians, who’d been sitting around just waiting, went up into their soundproof glass-front control room, where they continued to sit around and wait for the Beatles to get themselves organized.

  Neil and Mal got the instruments and microphones arranged in one corner of the studio and the four of them at last started to sing and play ‘It’s Getting Better’. Ringo looked a bit lost, sitting slightly apart on his own, surrounded by his drums. The other three had their heads together over one microphone.

  They played the song over about 10 times. All that was being recorded, up in the soundproof box, were the instruments, not the voices. From time to time Paul said, ‘Once more, let’s try it this way,’ or ‘Let’s have less bass,’ or ‘More drums.’ By midnight they had recorded the backing.