Penny Lane

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Penny Lane is a road in a south Liverpool suburb, and it is also one of the most celebrated songs the Beatles ever made. Released in February 1967 as a double A-side single alongside "Strawberry Fields Forever", it arrived at a moment when the band had stopped touring and the press was speculating that they might be finished. What listeners got instead was a piccolo trumpet cutting through a mock-Baroque arrangement, a barber and a banker and a fireman on a horse, and a song that managed to feel simultaneously sunny and surreal. Behind that apparently breezy surface sat years of shared memory, deliberate compositional invention, and a recording process involving session musician David Mason being paid twenty-seven pounds and ten shillings for one of the most celebrated instrumental passages in rock history. How a stretch of south Liverpool road became one of pop music's most potent pieces of geography is a story that winds through childhood bus journeys, a BBC broadcast of Johann Sebastian Bach, and a chart protocol that held the record at number two despite selling more copies than the song that beat it.

• 2. The Road They Both Knew

  ›

  Penny Lane the road sits in the suburb of Mossley Hill, and its name extends beyond the street itself to the surrounding junction of Smithdown Road and Allerton Road, and to the roundabout at Smithdown Place that once served as a major bus terminus. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison each stopped there routinely during their years as schoolchildren and students, catching buses and changing routes. McCartney recalled in 2009 that he would get a bus to Lennon's house and change at Penny Lane, or Lennon would do the same in the other direction, so they "often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout."

  Lennon had already written a reference to Penny Lane into his original lyrics for "In My Life" before that song was recorded in October 1965. McCartney told an interviewer not long after that session that he wanted to write a song specifically about the place. He was finally pushed to do it a year later, when Lennon showed him "Strawberry Fields Forever". McCartney also named Dylan Thomas's nostalgic poem "Fern Hill" as an influence on what he was reaching for.

  Lennon helped write the third verse when McCartney came to put it together, and in a 1970 interview Lennon described what they were trying to capture: "It was reliving childhood." McCartney, writing in Barry Miles's book Many Years From Now, put it plainly: "We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us."

  Beeatles biographer Ian MacDonald suggested that the lyrical imagery points to McCartney first taking LSD in late 1966, and that the line "And though she feels as if she's in a play / She is anyway" was among the more hallucinatory phrases in the Beatles' catalogue. Music critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler described the subject matter as "essentially 'Liverpool-on-a-sunny-hallucinogenic-afternoon'". The fire station in the lyrics was based on memories of the station at Mather Avenue, and the barber shop was Bioletti's, where McCartney, Harrison and Lennon had each had their hair cut as children.

• 3. Architecture of the Song

  ›

  Recording began in Studio 2 at EMI Studios on the 29th of December 1966, with piano as the central instrument. McCartney wanted a "clean" sound modelled on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, and engineer Geoff Emerick recalled him playing that record repeatedly during breaks. McCartney recorded four separate keyboard parts onto a four-track tape in the first session: a basic piano rhythm, a second piano run through a Vox guitar amplifier with reverb, a prepared piano producing a "honky-tonk" sound, and percussion and harmonium fed through the same amplifier. Those four tracks were mixed down to a single new track on the 30th of December.

  On the 4th of January 1967, Lennon overdubbed piano and Harrison added lead guitar, while McCartney recorded a lead vocal he then replaced the following day. Further overdubs on the 6th of January brought in Ringo Starr's drums, McCartney's bass, Lennon's rhythm guitar, handclaps, congas, harmony vocals and more piano. Brass and woodwind instruments, including four flutes, were added on the 9th and the 12th of January from an orchestral score by George Martin, built around melody lines McCartney had suggested.

  Musicologist Dominic Pedler describes the song's harmonic structure as a profound and surprising innovation. It begins in B major and runs through a double tonic structure, with a B major verse and an A major chorus connected by pivot chords. McCartney uses an E chord to move from the verse back into the chorus, and an F7 chord to return to the verse. Pedler notes that the song abandons, mid-cycle, what initially appears to be a standard doo-wop chord progression.

  Lyrically, musicologist Wilfrid Mellers noted in his 1973 book Twilight of the Gods that the song achieves something childishly merry and dreamily wild at the same time. The imagery is kaleidoscopic in a specific way: it is simultaneously sunny and rainy, summer and winter. The line "A four of fish and finger pies" carries British slang, with "a four of fish" meaning fourpennyworth of fish and chips.

• 4. Twenty-Seven Pounds and Ten Shillings

  ›

  McCartney was unhappy with the instrumental fill the song initially had. He found his solution watching a BBC television broadcast of the second Brandenburg Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach, during which trumpeter David Mason played the piccolo trumpet. On the 17th of January 1967, Mason came to the studio and recorded the solo used in the final single mix.

  George Martin later wrote that the result was "unique, something which had never been done in rock music before." The piccolo trumpet, built roughly one octave higher than a standard instrument, carries what author Jonathan Gould called a sound that was "impossibly high and bright", a "neo-Baroque pastiche of every fanfare ever blown". Classical music scholar Barry Millington described it as "surreal, unearthly... a fusion of classical and rock", and said that "so high does the part go" it was mistakenly assumed to have been sped up after recording. Author Mark Hertsgaard called it the recording's "pièce de résistance", evoking a "sense of freedom, energy, and sheer happiness".

  According to Emerick, Mason nailed the take, and when McCartney tried to get another pass out of him, Martin intervened, sensing Mason's fatigue and trusting the take they had. Mason later said he was impressed that Lennon, Harrison and Starr were all present for the session, though he was startled by their new look of moustaches and psychedelic clothing. For the session he was paid twenty-seven pounds and ten shillings, and he achieved international renown for it.

  The original US promotional single had an additional flourish of piccolo trumpet notes at the end of the song. That mix was quickly replaced, but not before copies had been pressed and sent to radio stations. By the late 1980s, those discs were among the rarest and most valuable Beatles collectibles.

• 5. Charts, Rivals, and a Famous Defeat

  ›

  The double A-side of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" was released in the United States on the 13th of February 1967, and in the United Kingdom four days later, on the 17th. It was the first Beatles single to be sold with a picture sleeve in Britain, a practice rarely used there at the time.

  In the United States, "Penny Lane" became the band's 13th single to reach number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, holding that position for a week before the Turtles' "Happy Together" displaced it. The single was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America on the 20th of March 1967. The song also reached number 1 in Australia for five weeks, in West Germany for four weeks, and in the Netherlands and New Zealand for three weeks each, as well as in Canada, Denmark and Malaysia. It peaked at number 4 in France.

  In Britain, the outcome was more complicated. The single was held at number 2 on the Record Retailer chart behind Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me", even though the Beatles' record actually outsold it. The reason was a chart protocol under which only the better-selling side of a double A-side was counted, effectively halving the record's total sales figure. On the national chart compiled by Melody Maker, the single reached number 1 for three weeks.

  The failure to top the Record Retailer chart prompted British press headlines including "Has the Bubble Burst?" It was the first time a Beatles single had missed number 1 since "Please Please Me" in 1963. The band were unmoved. Ringo Starr called it a "relief" that "took the pressure off", and Lennon said in a late 1966 interview: "We sort of half hope for the downfall. A nice downfall. Then we would just be a pleasant old memory." American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, on his television show Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, singled out the trumpet solo on "Penny Lane" as an example of what made contemporary pop worthy of recognition as art.

• 6. The First Music Videos

  ›

  Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, had grown anxious about the band's low public profile since their final US tour ended in August 1966. Worried also about competition from the Monkees, an American television and recording act formed in the Beatles' image, Epstein conceded to pressure from EMI and asked Martin for a new single in January 1967. Martin told him about "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", describing them as the best songs the group had recorded to that point.

  The promotional films for both songs were directed by Peter Goldmann, a Swedish television director, and produced by Tony Bramwell for Epstein's company Subafilms. The clip for "Penny Lane" includes footage of Liverpool, showing the number 46 bus to Penny Lane, the shelter on the roundabout, and a fireman on a white horse. Street scenes featuring the Beatles were filmed not in Liverpool but in and around Angel Lane in Stratford, east London, on the 5th of February. One scene shows only Lennon walking along King's Road in Chelsea, which author Robert Rodriguez describes as "as if in a nostalgic reverie".

  More filming took place on the 7th of February at Knole Park in Sevenoaks, where the "Strawberry Fields Forever" clip had been shot the week before. That footage included horse-riding scenes with the band in matching red tunics, and the final scene at a table bearing a large candelabra, waited on by attendants in Renaissance-era costumes and wigs played by Bramwell and Mal Evans. Journalist Joe Cushley described the film as "Lewis-Carroll-goes-to-Liverpool". McCartney predicted at the time: "In the future all records will have vision as well as sound. In twenty years' time, people will be amazed to think we just listened to records."

  The clips were first broadcast in America on The Ed Sullivan Show and in Britain on Top of the Pops, each one day before the single's release in those countries. On the 11th of March, both films aired on American Bandstand, where host Dick Clark introduced the "Penny Lane" clip with a warning that it showed a "very interesting and different looking Beatles". By 1985, the two films were old enough to be among the oldest selections in MoMA's exhibition of the most influential music videos.

• 7. Ownership, Legacy, and the Street Itself

  ›

  In 1969, the Beatles' publishing company Northern Songs was acquired by ATV, a media company owned by Lew Grade. By 1985, ATV was being run by Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes a Court, who decided to sell the catalogue to Michael Jackson. Before the sale, Jackson allowed the rights to "Penny Lane" to be excluded from the deal. As of 2009, Catherine Holmes a Court-Mather, Holmes a Court's teenage daughter at the time of the sale, remained the copyright owner, making "Penny Lane" one of the few Lennon-McCartney songs not owned by Sony Music Publishing.

  On Rolling Stone's 2021 revised list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time", the song appears at number 280. In Mojo's 2006 list of "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs", it ranked at number 9. The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011. Music critic Tim Riley wrote that it "survives as a classic because its surface charm masks its structural intelligence". Sociologist Andy Bennett argued that the characters in the lyrics anticipated British television soap operas such as Brookside and EastEnders, and that a similar sense of Britishness informed Britpop music videos in the 1990s, particularly Blur's "Parklife".

  The song's popularity turned the real Penny Lane into a tourist destination and made its street signs a regular target for theft. Liverpool poet Roger McGough credited it and "Strawberry Fields Forever" as the first examples of British streets being celebrated in pop music and the Beatles creating a "mythology" for the city. George Martin came to describe the decision to leave the song off Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as "the biggest mistake of my professional life". Elvis Costello performed "Penny Lane" at the White House in June 2010 when McCartney received the Gershwin Prize from President Barack Obama; Costello noted that his mother had grown up less than a mile from the actual road.