'Beautiful' Beatles song made Paul McCartney a 'serious writer' but John Lennon said it was his work
Liverpool catapulted The Beatles to stardom and the band made overt references to the city of their birth in a handful of their songs. Our city shaped Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, making them the witty and charming young stars that the world fell in love with - and they reflected on that in a number of tracks.
John's original lyrics to the 1965 track 'In My Life' followed the bus route he took as a child, mentioning Penny Lane and Strawberry Field. However, he scrapped this idea to make the song a more general meditation on reminiscence and the past.
The band returned to the idea of songs about childhood memories and those specific places with the 1967 double A-side single 'Penny Lane' / 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Those songs saw Paul and John write about their respective memories of their South Liverpool childhoods.
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Their 'Scouseness' was on show again a couple of years later, when The Beatles recorded 'Polythene Pam' and sang with heightened Scouse accents on the 'Abbey Road' track. But one of their most famous songs with links to Liverpool has disputed origins.
Paul and John both lay claim to being the primary author of the 1966 song 'Eleanor Rigby'. Paul said he came up with the song's melody as he sat at his piano and the character in it was originally called Daisy Hawkins.
About that, he told the Sunday Times in 1966: "The first few bars just came to me. And I got this name in my head – 'Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.' I don't know why ... I couldn't think of much more so I put it away for a day.
"Then the name 'Father McCartney' came to me – and 'all the lonely people'. But I thought people would think it was supposed to be my dad, sitting knitting his socks. Dad's a happy lad. So I went through the telephone book and I got the name McKenzie."
He then changed the idea, saying that the 'Help!' actress Eleanor Bron's name may have inspired him. Rigby came from a shop in Bristol, which Paul spotted when watching then-girlfriend Jane Asher act at Bristol's Old Vic.
Looking back at that in 1984, Paul said: "I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. 'Eleanor Rigby' sounded natural."
The content of the song - the life of a lonely woman - was inspired by an elderly woman Paul knew when he was younger - he would do her shopping and sit with her at home. He explained: "Growing up I knew a lot of old ladies – partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling.
"You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well.
"I don’t even know how I first met 'Eleanor Rigby', but I would go around to her house, and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy.
"Later, I would offer to go and get her shopping. She’d give me a list and I’d bring the stuff back, and we’d sit in her kitchen. I still vividly remember the kitchen because she had a little crystal radio set.
"That’s not a brand name; it actually had a crystal inside it. Crystal radios were quite popular in the 1920 and 30s. So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write."
The song's origins were called into question in the 1980s when a gravestone including the name Eleanor Rigby was found at St Peter's Church in Woolton - the church where Paul and John first met in 1957. Paul maintains Eleanor Rigby was a character he made up but said the coincidence with the name may have a subconscious thing.
The origins of the name of the song's character is not the only disputed aspect of the song. Though it is widely accepted that Paul was the primary writer of 'Eleanor Rigby', John claimed he wrote most of it.
John told journalist Alan Smith in the 1970s that he wrote around 70% of the lyrics and in 1980 he said he wrote all of the song - other than its first verse. John's friend Pete Shotton did not agree, saying he had contributed "virtually nil" to the song's composition, whereas Paul was more generous, saying: "John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80–20 to me, something like that."
'Eleanor Rigby' featured on the album 'Revolver' and was part of a double A-side single with 'Yellow Submarine'. Critics were very fond of it and it was named the NME's single of the year for 1966.
In the New York Times, critic Dan Sullivan wrote: "(In 'Eleanor Rigby', The Beatles are) asking where all the lonely people come from and where they all belong as if they really want to know. Their capacity for fun has been evident since the beginning; their capacity for pity is something new and is a major reason for calling them artists."
The song had a wide-ranging impact. It was praised for capturing the difficulties of life in post-war Britain. The Guardian's John Harris said it: "perfectly evokes an England of bomb sites and spinsters, where in the darkest moments it does indeed seem that 'no one was saved'."
Songwriter Jerry Leiber said: "I don't think there's ever been a better song written". In its review rock magazine KRLA Beat said: "the haunting melody is one of the most beautiful to be found in our current pop music."
Paul believed the writing of the song represented a step forward in the quality of his work. He later reflected: "I remember thinking to myself, What am I going to do when I’m thirty?
"Thirty was the big age. Will I still be in a group? I remember being round at John Dunbar’s (artist) house, having a very clear vision of myself in a herringbone jacket with leather elbow patches and a pipe, thinking ‘Eleanor Rigby’, this could be a way I could go, I could become a more serious writer, not so much a pop writer."
A statue of 'Eleanor Rigby' by artist Tommy Steele was unveiled on Stanley Street in Liverpool city centre in 1982. The woman has her handbag on her lap, with a shopping bag and a copy of the ECHO either side of her. It is dedicated to 'all the lonely people'.