The 1965 song Paul McCartney said ‘Eleanor Rigby’ wouldn’t exist without
In 1957, John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time at St Peter’s Church Hall fete in Woolton, Liverpool on a sunny afternoon when skiffle was in the air.
Somewhere among the ancient headstones in the churchyard lay the engraving “Eleanor Rigby”, a name these two budding musicians would make world-famous nine years later with the arrival of The Beatles masterpiece album, Revolver. It’s a quirk of fate that will continue to boggle minds for millennia.
Although McCartney would love to claim that ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was dreamt up on the very day he met Lennon, this wasn’t the truth, unfortunately. Indeed, McCartney may have stored the name in his subconscious, but the name Eleanor was particularly popular in the 20th century, and Rigby is certainly not scarce among British surnames. As it transpires, McCartney’s Eleanor Rigby was very much alive when he met her.
During his teen years, McCartney made an early start on his people-pleasing ways by offering to help an elderly neighbour with menial chores. As you might have guessed, this local sweetheart went by the name Eleanor Rigby. “I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat,” McCartney once recalled, “which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy.”
Besides Rigby’s loneliness, McCartney took creative license, conjuring up the twisted tale of Father McKenzie, who wipes “dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave”. With such a line, one can understand the rumours related to St Peter’s Church, but we’ll take McCartney’s word for it.
‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a prominent milestone in McCartney’s development as a songwriter. During The Beatles’ early rise to fame, Lennon and McCartney focused on upbeat rhythm and blues hits, often about love or lack thereof. In contrast, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a moving orchestral number that built upon the success of ‘Yesterday’, McCartney’s subdued contribution to Help!
Principally, McCartney wanted to frame ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with orchestral strings to evoke the same degree of emotion. “George Martin had introduced me to the string quartet idea through ‘Yesterday’,” the songwriter remembered in The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present. “I’d resisted the idea at first, but when it worked, I fell in love with it. So I ended up writing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with a string component in mind.”
In contrast with the smooth, mournful strings heard in ‘Yesterday’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was more uptempo and intense. Much of this intensity was achieved by the sharp string work, inspired by Bernard Hermann’s famous stabbing sounds created for the murder scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. “In George’s [Martin] version of things, he conflates my idea of the stabs and his own inspiration by Bernard Hermann, who had written the music for the movie Psycho,” McCartney added.
He continued, “George wanted to bring some of that drama into the arrangement.” So, he turned to the master of drama in the era and quite literally brought a touch of ‘cinema’ to the song.
Martin’s string arrangements undoubtedly added a thrilling edge to the story of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. The Hermann-inspired stabs highlight parallels between Norman Bates’ taxidermied mother and the lonely world of Rigby, who wears “the face that she keeps in a jar by the door”.
Beyond the classical flourishes in the instrumentation, both pieces are astounding and timeless, and their quirky kinship also reveals the open way that McCartney writes. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the secret to successful songwriting is the ability to paint a picture,” he says.
“It’s sheer observation, like painting en plein air,” he concludes – en plein air being the practice of setting up an easel outdoors and painting the scene beyond it. McCartney and The Beatles were masters at this, and then they dressed up their observations with anything they could that matched, for ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ it was a degree of dramatic grandeur that coloured the everyday with a shimmer of mysterious glitter.
