Interview for London Life • Saturday, December 4, 1965

Interview

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The fertility of Paul’s mind at the time was well captured in a remarkable interview he had given in November to the British writer and literary critic Francis Wyndham for a short-lived upmarket weekly magazine called London Life. Wyndham was by then forty-one, compared to Paul’s twenty-three, and had only a glancing interest in rock and pop. […]

Wyndham had first met with both John and Paul but described the meeting by saying, “They gave an impenetrable performance—a double act with John facetiously punning on clichés and Paul obligingly feeding him. The jokes were good but no better than Beatle jokes on the cinema or television screens.” The resulting quotes were unusable, so he rebooked Paul on his own, and they spoke for two hours at Brian Epstein’s office in London’s West End. “He was ready to talk about his music,” Wyndham wrote, “and did so with the minimum of suspicion or self-consciousness.” The result was an almost four-thousand-word open quote that stands as a unique record of Paul’s intellectual and artistic aspirations at this crucial juncture in the history of the Beatles.

From “Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year” by Steve Turner

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Everything we’ve done we get sick of. We’ve got some comedy songs on our new LP. There’s one called ‘Norwegian Wood.’… It’s something new for us. It’s just that we’re a bit sick so we thought we’d write something funny. You can’t be singing 15-year-old songs at 20 because you don’t think 15-year-old thoughts at 20 — a fact that escapes some people.

The Word

This could be a Salvation Army Song. The word is love, but it could be Jesus (it isn’t mind you, but it could be). ‘It’s so fine, it’s sunshine, it’s the word’. It’s about nothing, really, but it’s about love. It’s so much more original than our old stuff, less obvious. ‘Give the word a chance to say/ That the word is just the way’ – then the organ comes in, just like the Sally Army.

We Can Work It Out

The middle eight is the best – it changes the beat to a waltz in the middle. The original arrangement was terrible, very skiffley. Then at the session George Martin had the idea of splitting the beat completely. The words go on at a double speed against the slow waltz music.

Girl

John’s been reading a book about pain and pleasure, about the idea behind Christianity – that to have pleasure you have to have pain. The book says that’s all rubbish; it often happens that pain leads to pleasure, but you don’t have to have it, that’s all a drag. So we’ve written a song about it. ‘Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure/ Did she understand it when they said, that a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure/ will she still believe it when he’s dead?’ Listen to John’s breath on the word ‘girl’: we asked the engineer to put it on treble, so you get this huge intake of breath and it sounds just like a percussion instrument.

It’s an interesting time just now because something’s got to happen. There’s got to be some kind of change. It probably won’t be drastic but I think the good thing about us is that we keep contradicting ourselves. I saw someone on TV asked what he wanted out of life and he said ‘a cozy rut.’ To be in a cozy rut is about the sickest thing ever, I think. You can enjoy it, but what’s the point of living in a cozy rut? We could stay in one now forever, repeating our early hits, and if we did come up with something exciting we’d have to scrap it.

…

They are the two great influences on 1965. They definitely started us thinking again—Dylan about lyrics, and The Who about backings, bigger feedback, that sort of thing. We had that feedback idea in ‘I Feel Fine’ but The Who went further and made all kinds of weird new sounds.

We want to do what we would have liked when we were record buyers ourselves. A 14-track LP and a separate single is unheard of in the States. There you’d have just 12 tracks, and the single would just be two numbers from the LP.

Writing songs and performing are equally rewarding—that is, when it goes well. But the songwriting thing looks like being the only thing you could do at 60. I wouldn’t mind being a white-haired old man writing songs, but I’d hate to be a white-haired old Beatle at the Empress [sic] Stadium playing for people.

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From London Life, 1965-1966 | British Online Archives (microform.digital):

Launched in 1965, London Life was one of several titles owned by The Illustrated London News (ILN). A reincarnation of The Tatler (1901-1965) – which, from its inception, had catered primarily to a wealthy and conservative readership – London Life represented a radical departure from its predecessor. This new magazine endeavored to “reflect all aspects of the life of London“ and, throughout its brief existence, it successfully conveyed the spirit of the “Swinging Sixties” in the world’s “capital of cool”. Encompassing nearly 5,000 images, this collection contains all 63 issues of London Life, published between October 1965 and December of the following year. 

London Life covers a wide range of topics, from music and film to sexuality and the thriving nightlife of London’s West End. At the same time, it captures the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of British society, documenting the emergence of a more diverse media landscape and audience. Featuring interviews with cultural icons such as Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, as well as contributions from rising stars such as supermodel Jean Shrimpton and entertainer Anita Harris, London Life remains emblematic of 1960s counterculture. Accordingly, this collection contains essential material for researchers and students of cultural history and, specifically, of Britain’s cultural revolution.