Beatles – Penny Lane

I love the visuals in this song. I’ve never had the pleasure of being there but it feels like I’m standing in the middle of Penny Lane in 1967.

This song was part of what I think was the best single ever released. Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields. Both of the songs are connected with Liverpool. Both John and Paul wrote about places where they grew up.  Paul explained that Penny Lane was a suburban district where, until age four, he lived with his mother and father.

The Beatles did not include these two songs on Sgt Pepper. They recorded singles and albums separately for the most part. They ended up on the Magical Mystery Tour album in America.

Lennon and McCartney were competitive and for the most part it was a good competitiveness that resulted in timeless songs that will be still remembered 100 years from now.

They made promotional films for both songs. This must have been a shock to some people. They had not seen the Beatles since the year before…they had ditched the mop tops and gone weird…that must have been in some people’s minds. The music had a sophistication that earlier songs didn’t have.

The single only made #2 in the UK…it was locked out of the #1 position by no other than Elbert Humperdinck with Release Me. It did peak at #1 in the Billboard 100, #1 in Canada, and #1 in New Zealand in 1967.

In 1967, Capitol released Beatles music on a new but short-lived format called “Playtapes.” These tape cartridges did not have the capabilities to include entire albums, so a truncated four-song version of “Magical Mytery Tour” was released in early 1968 in this portable format, some rare copies having a picture from the “Help!” soundtrack album on the front of the tape. “Penny Lane” was one of the four songs on this release. These Playtapes are highly collectable today.

Paul McCartney: “When I came to write it, John came over and helped me with the third verse, as often was the case. 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. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on.” John himself relates: “We really got into the groove of imagining Penny Lane, you know – the bank was there, and that was where the tram sheds were and people waiting and the inspector stood there, the fire engines were down there. It was just reliving childhood.” In John’s Playboy interview of 1980, he concurs about his input in writing the song: “I wrote some of the lyrics. I can’t remember which. It was all Paul’s melody.”

“There was a barber shop called Bioletti’s with head shots of the haircuts you can have in the window and I just took it all and arted it up a little bit to make it sound like he was having a picture exhibition in his window. It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I imagined the banker, it was not a real person, and his slightly dubious habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain. The fire station was a bit of poetic license; there’s a fire station about half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a third verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line ‘It’s a clean machine.’ I still like that as a phrase, you occasionally hit a lucky little phrase and it becomes more than a phrase. So the banker and the barber shop and the fire station were all real locations.”

Here are the two videos…Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane… See those glasses that John Lennon slips on in the Penny Lane Video? The square ones…I have some identical from that time period…they are really cool.

Penny Lane

In Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say, “Hello”

On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
And little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a mac
In the pouring rain, very strange

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back
In Penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass
And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen
He likes to keep his fire engine clean
It’s a clean machine

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
A four of fish and finger pies
In summer, meanwhile back
Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout
The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
And though she feels as if she’s in a play
She is anyway

In Penny Lane, the barber shaves another customer
We see the banker sitting waiting for a trim
And then the fireman rushes in
From the pouring rain, very strange

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back
Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
Penny Lane!

Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

36 thoughts on “Beatles – Penny Lane”

      1. Yeah, I don’t know either but you should look it up. I have a slight memory of something regarding that, I believe but I don’t remember what. You can link it though, it usually work better that way

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      4. Oh I did for the people who couldn’t see it after you said something. It’s odd…some did see them. Now Penny Lane is linked at the bottom

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  2. We started watching “Get Back” on Disney. It is quite a time capsule and watching the interaction between each of them is interesting. Loved the videos (and the glasses). All such a walk down memory lane.

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    1. I’m such a Beatle nerd I’ve went through it twice. You are right…the interaction is really interesting. They were much more like brothers than partners in business. That is one of the reasons they didn’t last longer but made them great.

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  5. A great song… I’ve listened to it a few times in the past two months or so & really reminded myself how good it is in every way. And with ‘Strawberry Fields’ on the other side (won’t call either one a ‘b-side’) it is a contender for greatest rock single.
    Playtapes sound interesting, but I wasn’t clear on what were they… like an early video cassette with video and audio?

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    1. Thanks man! Yea I would love to find one. I do buy the occasional laserdisc just for the sake of it….if it has a cool cover.

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  8. Figures John wrote some of the third verse “it’s a clean machine” was supposed to have had sexual overtones, as did the “fish and finger pies.”

    George Martin talked about this song and how Paul wanted to get a piccolo trumpet into the piece, and Martin went ahead and found someone who could play it in the middle. I guess Paul didn’t know what it was called, but he swanted it…

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  10. Nice. Yeah, I got to stroll down Penny Lane once, which was very cool. It was closed off to traffic then, so only pedestrians. Not sure if it is still like that. It was many years ago.

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      2. I was going to say…he might have liked that and picked it on purpose also…and just took it later…or yea…he could have gotten it from there.

        That book is good so far about George and Eric. So far it’s a quick history on their respective music history..The triangle hasn’t started yet. .I’ll review it when finished.

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  13. Loved and still love penny lane. We moved out of Liverpool around the time it came out, to move to The Isle of Anglesey in Wales, but the evocative imagery was relevant to my life in 1966 – we lived in Kirkdale/ anfield near the football ground, with cobblestone Victorian streets, at my grandmas house. Outside toilet, no hot water, coal fire. Then in more suburban waterloo, in a flat in a big house shared toilet and bathroom with 3 other flats. And the mice and fleas. We didnt do the Penny Lane area sadly and I still havent been there. But The Beatles were still huge in Scouse pop culture, and life in general. Still have my Beatles chewing gum cards….:)

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    1. I have read where Liverpool was/is a tough city. They don’t suffer fools very much…but they do have a lof of good hard working people.
      I would love to visit there one day…it’s a goal of mine.

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      1. Hope you get to go! Id say the number one characteristic of liverpudlians is the sense of humour. Everyone makes the same sort of cracks thst john paul george and ringo did in their heyday. And i love witty banter!

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      2. Yes I do also! My 21 year old son just came back from Germany visiting his girlfriend. He wants me to go abroad now. I told him we will.

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