The song George Martin said had the “most extraordinary” lyrics
George Martin was always going to be The Beatles’ secret weapon whenever they entered the studio.
Half of the songs that they wrote were pretty simplistic when they first began working with him, but if you go back to their experimental period, Martin was the one helping them grow into far more complex musicians than anyone would have imagined from a couple of kids from Liverpool. But for all of the great extensions that he would make to their records, Martin was still keen to hear what the band was singing about whenever they started venturing outside of their traditional love song method.
Because let’s just say that Martin was less than thrilled with what he was initially offered. The songs that the band were making in the beginning weren’t bad by any stretch, but even if they had found their niche making the best pop songs of the day, a lot of them were focused on the same kind of puppy love lyrics that everyone else was doing. It was still great, but it was by no means complex.
But if Rubber Soul pointed the way forward to more mature tunes, Sgt Peppers was the leap off the diving board. The band had finally grown up as musicians, and while the idea of having a concept album didn’t truly come together like it should have, John Lennon had a good idea of the psychedelic angle that they were going for when he got his son Julian’s drawing entitled ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.
While everyone and their mother were concerned about the title of the song spelling out ‘LSD’, that didn’t seem to matter much to Martin. This was a trip through an Alice in Wonderland-style nonsense story, and despite Lennon being the first one to dismiss most of the songs that he wrote during the Beatles’ time together, Martin said that he was still knocked out by the lyrics when working on the album LOVE after the fact.
The whole appeal of that album was supposed to be about seeing The Beatles’ experiments through a modern lens, and Martin saw ‘Lucy’ as one of the finest examples of Lennon at his best, saying, “This song has the most extraordinary lyrics, with John doing his utmost to build a psychedelic vision rivalling creations by Lewis Carroll and Salvador Dali. Such innocence! The song came together quickly, and the opening bars are simple, but magic.”
Lennon might have been a well-known user of LSD, but even if it’s hard to separate the drug references from the title, it’s not like the song doesn’t work well without the acid-soaked lyrics. The band were still at the top of their game, and even if parents might have had a problem with it, its inclusion in the Yellow Submarine movie almost made too much sense. The whole record was about making something that was more colourful than everyday life, so putting it in the context of a cartoon was a much better way to capture the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
And when you hear it on the LOVE album, that same distorted feeling seems to go up even further. A lot of that is down to how Martin’s son, Giles, helped oversee the mix of the song, but when you have the benefit of modern production, you can hear every single instrument being enhanced in the mix, to the point where those opening piano notes sound like they’re welcoming you into a fantasy world.
But regardless of how many bells and whistles that Martin and co. added to the final version of the song, Lennon’s words were always going to be the standout on the tune. He was looking to create the kind of scene that made you look at their music in a different light, and while ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ had that same kind of energy, this was the true dive down the rabbit hole that the band had promised with their conceptual masterpiece.
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