Stephen King’s favourite song by The Beatles: “It has only one thing to say”
There are few writers more prolific and potent than Stephen King. The undoubted king of horror fiction, the writing royalty has made a sumptuous career of creating stories that have not only captured the cultural society they were born in but formed those that followed. In many ways, King has mirrored another cultural behemoth, The Beatles.
The four lads from Liverpool spent their earlier years in perhaps the most prolific period in pop history. Only in the spotlight of public attention as a complete band for just seven years, they created a library of work that has defined culture ever since. While King has had a far longer time in the limelight, he can also be regarded as one of the most prolific writers of all time.
Across an impressive career, he has delivered a whole range of novels, though two things seem to connect. Almost every one of his books contains some kind of spooky element and a nod to pop music. A child of the 1960s, it’s no surprise that music features heavily in his life.
Thankfully, we were able to listen to some of King’s musical inspirations when he spoke to the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs about the eight songs he would take with him to an inescapable desert island. Speaking with Kirsty Young in 2006, King picked out the work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as particular favourites.
King is a huge fan of the band and has referenced them an inordinate amount of times in his books. A child of the time, it seems only fitting that King should make heavy reference to the band throughout his time behind the typewriter, through a myriad of titles, including Deadzone, Christine, Doctor Sleep, and perhaps most famously in The Shining.
In fact, the story goes that Lennon ended up inspiring one of King’s greatest titles, The Shining. The lyrics “we all shine on” from Lennon’s ‘Instant Karma’ were said to have stopped King in his track when searching for the perfect title for his hotel horror.
But which would be his ultimate track from the Fab Four? Judging by his answer to the titular question in the show, it would be a classic from their early pop pomp. ‘She Loves You’ from The Beatles has always been a top track from the band, and it struck a chord with a young King: “Of all The Beatles songs, it seems to me that it’s travelled the best over the years to my ear. It still sounds totally fresh when I hear it today, as it did when I first heard it, when I was probably at 16 years old. It just gets in, it has only one thing to say, and it says it.”
While it may deem another classic pop song from the band, ‘She Loves You’ is actually a move away from the music of the time and positioned the group as early innovators in pop. As McCartney recalled in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now: “It was again a she, you, me, I, personal preposition song. I suppose the most interesting thing about it was that it was a message song, it was someone bringing a message. It wasn’t us any more, it was moving off the ‘I love you, girl’ or ‘Love me do’, it was a third person, which was a shift away. ‘I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you, so there’s a little distance we managed to put in it, which was quite interesting.”
While it was unlikely that the phrasing drew a young Stephen King to the song, The Beatles’ development into the thinking man’s pop group would have undoubtedly rendered King’s modern view of the group. It was in songs like ‘She Loves You’ that The Beatles really showed their mettle.
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