‘Penny Lane’: Paul McCartney’s answer to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
While The Beatles dreamt up weird and woozy worlds in their music, the band’s work always belonged to Liverpool. It was grounded in the North West city that made them and raised them as time and time again, their lyrics, vocal performances and musical styles took them back home. In 1967, that was clearer than ever when they released a two sided single. On side B, John Lennon contemplated childhood on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and on side A, Paul McCartney took listeners on a walking tour as George Martin deemed ‘Penny Lane’ to be, literally and spiritually, another side to the same song.
When talking about ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, John Lennon once referred to the track as “psychoanalysis set to music.” Following a difficult childhood tainted by his father leaving the family, being sent away to live with his aunt and then the traumatic death of his mother, this track felt like Lennon’s first attempt at grappling with his family past on a track. He’d later go deeper on the topic, calling out directly to his mother by name on ‘Julia’ or laying himself bare on the devastating solo song, ‘Mother’. But ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was a first step, shrouded in a protective, psychedelic veil that seemed to keep the tender heart of the track safe as Lennon revisited his childhood park in the song.
While Lennon saw it as therapy, the rest of the band and their producer saw the track as a beautiful piece, celebrating where he’d come from and how far he’d grown from a difficult youth. “I’ve seen Strawberry Field described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place,” Paul McCartney said. It became a tender song to all of them, but especially to George Martin who put so much care into getting it right, knowing how important it was to Lennon.
“He listened carefully, head down deeply in concentration,” engineer Geoff Emerick recalled from inside the studio. Then, once the track was finished and ready, he remembered Martin, “lifted his head, and a grin spread across his face. He had loved what we had done with it.”
But while Martin treated ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ with clear tenderness, he gave the same to ‘Penny Lane’, the track he saw as Paul McCartney’s counterpart to Lennon’s track. Both were released together as part of a double-sided single, which, although it proved to be a terrible idea commercially speaking, made perfect sense spiritually as Martin saw the two songs as part of the same conversation between the band and their home.
He called ‘Penny Lane “Paul’s answer to ‘Strawberry Fields’”, adding, “They’re both evocative of their youth.” While Lennon’s track is more introspective and hazy, McCartney’s is more outright. He takes listeners on a tour of a street, calling in at the various shops and introducing the cast of characters he recalled from his childhood. It was a place the band knew well, acting as a centre point for their lives in a lot of ways. As McCartney explained, “A lot of our formative years were spent walking around those places. Penny Lane was the depot I had to change buses at to get from my house to John’s and to a lot of my friends. It was a big bus terminal which we all knew very well. I sang in the choir at St Barnabas Church opposite.” So, really, just as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was a point of the mental map for Lennon, ‘Penny Lane’ is the same for McCartney.
McCartney’s track also fostered the same wholesome, tender craft from the team just when Lennon and McCartney’s personal relationship was beginning to be strained as the band entered their later years; the making of ‘Penny Lane’ stuck out as a good memory, bonding them together again as they wrote it. “We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on,” McCartney remembered fondly.
When released together, they flopped. “Brian came to me, really concerned, and said, ‘I’ve got to have a really strong single’”, Martin recalled. He trusted and loved these tracks deeply, so he offered them up, stating, “I couldn’t give you anything stronger than these two songs; ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’”. The issue was that as both songs were so strong, releasing them together meant that their charting power was cut in half, so neither could perform to their full ability. But beyond the metrics, the decision to put both tracks on one disc feels right and feels special, keeping the two bandmates’ odes to home together as one remembrance from two life long friends.
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