Who was The Beatles song ‘Fool On The Hill’ written about?
By the time they reached the wider US audience with their famous 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles were established as a global phenomenon. Even at this juncture, one could tell they weren’t your average rhythm and blues group; these four cheeky chaps from Liverpool had something unique that would ultimately change the world.
With hordes of screaming women in tow, The Beatles began to divert their lyrical whim from simple love songs in 1965. The year saw the arrival of dark, edgy songs like ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)‘ and ‘Girl’. This was just the beginning of a dramatic transformation that would see the Beatles eventually dressed like the cast of Scooby-Doo, inspired by Beat literature, psychedelic drugs and Eastern culture.
The psychedelic chapter clicked into fourth gear with the release of Revolver in 1966. Tracks like ‘Love You To’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ whetted the appetite before the colourful onslaught of 1967, the year of gear five: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band and the Magical Mystery Tour EP.
These two seminal releases marked the pinnacle of The Beatles’ oblique material, with apparent references to drug use – ‘Lucy in the Sky’ jumps to mind – and George Harrison’s continued use of the sitar. Of course, not every track was littered with innuendo and experimental instrumentation: ‘Penny Lane’ is a relatively transparent and sentimental trip down memory lane, and ‘All You Need is Love’ is another straightforward message.
What about that strange, eerie Magical Mystery Tour cut, ‘The Fool on the Hill’? I hear you ask. In the naivety of youth, I envisaged this “fool” as a strange, suited Englishman, banished from society and sitting wearily on a hill watching inevitable storm clouds rolling in from the horizon.
Perhaps it was the lines, “nobody wants to know him” and “nobody seems to like him”, or the minor key piano progression, but something totally barred any conception that the song might be set in India. Alas, McCartney once suggested that the “fool” in the song was a dreamlike projection of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Beatles’ meditation teacher.
“‘Fool on the Hill’ was mine, and I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi,” McCartney recalled in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. “His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle, he wasn’t taken too seriously. It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to … I was sitting at the piano at my father’s house in Liverpool, hitting a D 6th chord, and I made up ‘Fool on the Hill’.”
So, the “fool” curiously smiling on the hill is a happy, peaceful and wise man after all. Contrary to my early interpretation, it is more likely that the suited Englishmen rushing around in urban regions are the ones wearily dodging clouds and perhaps even inciting a giggle from the fool on the hill.
Offering some redemptive credence to my theory, however, is the fact that McCartney’s early conception was inspired by a man who inexplicably appeared nearby while he was taking a stroll up Primrose Hill in the mid-1960s. Mysteriously, the man disappeared from sight.
Soon after, McCartney recounted the odd occurrence to Brian Epstein’s assistant, Alistair Taylor, and they began to discuss the idea of an omnipresent God. Taylor later documented this account of the song’s inception in his book, Yesterday.
So, it would appear that our “fool on the hill” is a spiritual amalgamation of God, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the strange disappearing man on Primrose Hill and quite possibly McCartney himself.
Watch Paul McCartney portray the ‘Fool on the Hill’ near Nice, France, for the Magical Mystery Tour film below.
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