How did The Beatles choose the colour of their ‘Yellow Submarine’?
Slap bang in the middle of their first self-serious record, 1966’s Revolver, The Beatles couldn’t help but throw a red herring into the mix. Or rather, a bright yellow underwater boat on which they all professed to live.
Sandwiched in between Paul McCartney’s greatest love song to that point, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, and John Lennon’s ode to a terrifying acid trip with Peter Fonda, ‘She Said She Said’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ epitomises the Fab Four’s sense of irony perhaps better than anything else they released. What had started out in demo form as a mournful meditation on the band’s hometown by Lennon’s inner child became a nursery rhyme about communality thanks to McCartney’s instincts for crowd-pleasing. With future Thomas the Tank Engine narrator Ringo Starr the ideal voice on which to hang the song.
The Beatles got a little help from their friends with recording the track, as Rolling Stone Brian Jones, singer Marianne Faithfull and George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd were among the famous guests on hand to provide backing vocals and sound effects. Meanwhile, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were in their element, shouting captain’s orders, blowing bubbles and making waves to complement Starr’s imitation of a seaman singing a shanty.
Lyrically, the final version ‘Yellow Submarine’ replaces the suggestion in Lennon’s demo that “no one cared” about him in the town where he was born with “a man who sailed to sea”, telling a mythical tale about “the land of submarines”. It’s easy to see what the other half of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership was getting at by framing this children’s story as an old fisherman’s tale. But this framing device still doesn’t explain where he got the idea for a submarine from. Or, more to the point, why he painted it yellow?
Is the “yellow submarine” code for drugs?
According to McCartney, the origin of the song title goes back to his holiday with Starr and their respective girlfriends on the Greek island of Corfu in September 1963. Off the back of Beatlemania exploding in Britain with the release of their biggest single, ‘She Loves You’, the trip was a rare moment of solace for the two Beatles amid the madness of their astronomical rise to superstardom. We didn’t get pestered at all,” McCartney told his friend and biographer Barry Miles in an interview for Miles’ 1997 book Many Years from Now. “But then I remember coming back and hearing, ‘Oh, your record’s big in Greece now,’ and thinking, Well, there goes another little safe haven.”
Two and a half years later, the songwriter was dreaming wistfully of those final days of peace and quiet on his island haven as he drifted off to sleep one night when the words “We all live in a yellow submarine” arrived almost fully formed. The words “yellow submarine” appear to have come from a confection associated with Corfu in his memory. “It’s like a sweet,” he told a journalist in 1967.
The “ypovrichio”, or “submarine”, is a chewy Greek sweet made from the resin of the mastika (or gum) tree and traditionally served on a spoon with a glass of cold water to soften it. It’s popular in local cafes across Greece during summer months and comes in a multitude of flavours, including a vanilla variant – which has a yellowish tinge to its appearance. That flavour was obviously McCartney’s favourite, as it’s the colour of “submarine” he remembered from his holiday.
On the other hand, aficionados of the drug subculture in New York during the summer of 1966 claimed this Greek dessert story was all a ruse designed to keep The Beatles family-friendly. ‘Yellow Submarine’ was, in fact, a metaphor for a new kind of psychoactive barbiturate, which was all the rage in celebrity circles that year, called Nembutal. The drug was consumed in round, oblong yellow capsules, which garnered them the nickname “yellow submarines”.
McCartney has always denied this explanation when it’s been put to him, but it’s hard to deny that the release of a drug and a song with the same highly unusual name within the space of a year is quite the coincidence. However, it’s possible that history’s made a number on the song, which might itself have been the source of Nembutal’s nickname. The drug certainly came first, but the epithet it became known by may only have entered the parlance of its users after ‘Yellow Submarine’ was released as a single.
It certainly presents a rosier picture of the intentions behind the song, which is to imagine that McCartney simply wanted to memorialise the one moment of quiet anonymity he’d experienced in the three years since he became famous. And maybe remedy his best friend’s childhood trauma with a vision of communal confectionery. Now, wouldn’t that be sweet?
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