‘Ubu Cocu’: the unusual play that found its way into Paul McCartney’s lyrics
There were plenty of inspirations floating around The Beatles while they were writing songs. Given how frequently they were required to put out material, it’s no surprise that the band members had to keep their eyes and ears open to whatever might kickstart the songwriting process. Sometimes it was books, sometimes it was speeches, and sometimes it was television that helped make songs happen.
Like any good Britons, The Beatles were frequent watchers of the BBC. George Harrison kept the tele on one night in January of 1969 and stumbled upon a programme about the German waltz. That’s how he became inspired to write the 3/4 shuffle of ‘I Me Mine’. Paul McCartney was also a frequent viewer and listener of the Beeb, and while making it up to Liverpool from London in the late 1960s, McCartney stumbled upon a play by French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry being broadcast over the radio.
“When I was driving up to Liverpool from London, I heard Ubu Cocu, which is Alfred Jarry,” McCartney explained on the BBC radio programme This Cultured Life. “This is lesser known – he’s known for Ubu Roi – but Ubu Cocu was great, and it was a great BBC production on the radio, and I listened to it all the way up.”
Jarry’s recurring themes and plot points would eventually become directly involved in McCartney’s lyrics. “Really got well into that, and the whole thing about Jarry and pataphysics, which is a non-science that he invented. So it ended up in the lyrics for one of my songs.” That would be ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, where the central character’s first victim, Joan, is studying “pataphysical science” before meeting her grisly end.
“‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life,” McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me, it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don’t know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell’s hammer.”
Evidently, McCartney wasn’t the only student of pataphysics in music. British progressive rockers the Soft Machine included two different versions of a ‘Pataphysical Introduction’ on the 17-minute ‘Rivmic Melodies’ that takes up the entirety of side one on their sophomore album, Volume Two. But pop audiences at large didn’t end up associating pataphysics with Soft Machine or even the man who invented the term: McCartney took ownership of the fake science once ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was released in 1969.
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