Interview for Disc And Music Echo • Saturday, December 16, 1967

Interview

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“If there is any message at all in “Hello, Goodbye,” it is that the answer to everything is simple. It’s a song about everything – and nothing. “Stop – go.” “Yes – no.” If you have black, you also have white. That’s the amazing thing about life, all the time. Realisation and awareness of all views, different things…”

The words are Paul McCartney’s. For more than five years, Beatles students have been busy dissecting their songs, finding hidden meanings and interpreting the words with weighty prose.

John and Paul are inclined to shrug off all the attempts to dig deep behind their poetic words.

“Our songs,” said McCartney, “are about people and things, love playing a big role, if you like, because it’s a nice subject – and anyway, it’s always been sort of traditional to have love as a theme for songs. But with ‘Hello, Goodbye’, the song’s about blacks and whites in the world… something like the Bee Gees thing: ‘Today I found that the world is round. and it doesn’t rain every day.'”

But Lennon and McCartney do not think their trend to “realism” in songs – which has also been identified with others, including Kink Ray Davies – is particularly significant.

“It will be back round to love songs very soon,” said John. “We haven’t stopped writing love songs – ‘Lucy In The Sky’ was a love song.