ELEANOR RIGBY WAS NEARLY DAISY

IN THE autumn of 1966, I went to interview Paul McCartney at his house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood. He still has it today, being at heart a conservative sort of feller.

There were pieces of modern sculpture around and above the mantelpiece in the main living room I noticed a Magritte — not the sort of painting you would normally associate with a lad from a Liverpool council estate.

The other three Beatles had already moved out into the London suburbs, with lush gardens and rolling lawns, while Paul was in the heart of London in an old period house. When I complimented him on the house, and admired his possessions, he said: ‘People think we are not conceited — but we are’.

I then got him to explain where the words of Eleanor Rigby had come from, which was the point of the interview. The name which first came into his head was a woman called Daisy Hawkins, ‘picking up rice in a church where a wedding had been’. He had no idea where that line had come from. In Bristol, where he had been visiting Jane Asher who was acting there, he was walking round and saw the name Rigby on a shop, and thought that would be a better name.