PENNY LANE 1967

One lovely feature of the new book is the glimpse it provides of Paul’s handwritten drafts for lyrics. Barely a word is crossed out in his vignette of Liverpool life, Penny Lane. It’s as if the lines were dictated.

Only one change stands out, in the first verse about the ‘barber showing photographs / of every head he’s had the pleasure to know’. It seems the next line was originally to be ‘It was easy not to go — he was very slow’. That changed to ‘All the people that come and go, stop and say hello’.

As McCartney recalls, Bioletti’s Barbers on Penny Lane really did exist, and all four Beatles used to drop in there. ‘You’d look at the photos in the window and then go in and say: “I’ll have a Tony Curtis,” or “I’ll have a crew cut.” ’

Paul is still proud of the opening line, about ‘every head’. It’s a technique he calls ‘free indirect speech’, echoing something a barber might say and giving it a new twist of meaning — a trick he credits to his english teacher, Alan Durband, at Liverpool Institute high School for Boys.

Those lessons must have stuck, because he suspects there is an echo of hamlet in Let It Be: ‘O, I could tell you — but let it be. horatio, I am dead.’

he explains: ‘In those days, you had to learn speeches by heart because you had to be able to carry them into the exam and quote them.’

Slivers of Shakespeare are mixed up with boyhood memories, like the ‘pretty nurse’ he saw as he waited for a bus at the Penny Lane shelter. She was ‘selling poppies from a tray’, as the song goes.

‘That pretty nurse,’ he says now. remember her vividly.’

Like fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, all those memories tumble over each other and form the pattern of a song. It’s a breathtaking insight into the mind of a genius.