The Edinburgh street that shaped The Beatles’ most forward-thinking song, ‘Rain’
At least in the early days, you would think The Beatles would have been most inspired by their native Liverpool surroundings. A street in Murrayfield, Edinburgh, doesn’t ring that many bells.
However unsuspecting it was, this was the place where John Lennon spent some of his happiest memories in childhood, gallivanting north of the border every summer to spend time with his Aunt Mater, Uncle Bert, and cousin Stan. It was a tradition he upheld until the age of 17, when he was already treading musical boards with The Quarrymen, but the height of The Beatles was still a few years out of reach.
Naturally, these long summers in Edinburgh left a lot of time for thinking for a formative Lennon, who viewed his time there as so pivotal that he later wanted to buy the home on Ormidale Terrace where his family lived. To look from the outside, it doesn’t seem like much: old brick housing, bay windows, a royal blue front door. Yet it was inside where the real history lay.
The story goes that Lennon wrote one of his future band’s most forward-thinking tunes in the house, simply in the cupboard under the stairs beside the telephone. It would go on to be the B-side for the iconic ‘Paperback Writer’ in 1966, but ‘Rain’ signified far more than just an unfortunate turn of the elements.
Of course, it should have been pretty obvious that Edinburgh was the muse for a song like ‘Rain’, given Scotland’s environmental penchant for the wet and wild weather. That idea could have easily been picked up in any possible conversation, especially as Lennon later commented that the song addressed “People moaning because… they don’t like the weather.”
While Lennon may have been voicing his disapproval for what is roundly considered a national pastime in Scotland, its effect generally became more psychedelic as time wore on and The Beatles ventured further into that swirling world. Whether the meteorological references alluded to stages of a drug-induced trip was entering into a separate mind-bending pool of thought entirely.
It was much in the nature of The Fabs that they never directly expressed how this unavoidable aspect of 1960s culture truly influenced them. Paul McCartney tried to get away with the ruse, “Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing, and what we got onto was that it’s no bad thing. There’s no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back,” so take from that what you will.
But even still, it was hardly surprising that Lennon’s storied connections to Scotland were a heavy influence on him, no matter how these may have morphed and altered down the line. From Murrayfield to the masses, many things changed over the course of his life – but the one thing that stayed was the rain.
As such, while it is obviously correct to see The Beatles as an inherently Liverpudlian band, it would be remiss to ignore their links to other parts of the world and how these shaped who they became. For Lennon, it was Edinburgh, his home from home and the place where the wet weather never stopped storming down.
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