She's Leaving Home

Our cover of the song in which the She of She Loves You grows up and Leaves Home, the ultimate generation gap song by the band whose music defined that time. For a band that with their upbeat update of fifties rock n roll ("roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news") basically composed the soundtrack of the generation gap ("anything that you want... we can do" "there's a place where I can go...and it's my mind" "money can't buy me love" "it's getting better all the time" and see track 1) they could also be surprisingly un-partisan and generous about it. Compare this song with the Who's proto-punk "My Generation" for instance. I would contend, however, that their very ability to transcend the conflict and empathise achingly with both sides in songs like this was why they largely won the argument for their own side. (Cat Stevens' "Father and Son" follows this lead in this a few years later.) It would have been a cheap trick to sing a hippy credo like "Love is the one thing that money can't buy"( A band that embraced Lennon's brilliant angry young man cover of "Money" and McCartney's manna-querying "Did you think that money was heaven sent?" weren't going to fall or expect us to for that. It's not that the mortified parents in this song don't love their daughter (or more accurately the 'baby' they remember. They just don't know who she is. We precede the song with an extract from my (work in progress) Beatles novel "All About The Girl": June 18, 1967. Absent Father’s Day: because real men didn’t have their own day then. President Johnson may have proclaimed a Day honouring fathers in America that President Nixon would make law and a permanent national holiday in 1972 but in Swinging London the Pepper-hot BBC Beatles, currently rehearsing All You Need Is Love for the world’s first live satellite broadcast, were voicing the daughters and sons beyond their command. She’s Leaving Home and, essentially, I’m Leaving with her. She sheds our Parents a musical Note about living alone for so many years which leaves Wicked Stepmother Mary nose-cold and dry-eyed on the top of the world and Absent Dad, when he finally gets home, feeling even more sorry for himself than usual. In a minimalist, open-heart grief-lyric (taut heart-strings tuned on those understated short stories Paperback Writer and Eleanor Rigby) Mother Mary picks up the letter that’s lying there; is standing alone at the top of the stair, before she, and the held musical Note, and the audience hanging on it, break... down… and cry to her husband, 'DADDY, OUR BABY'S GONE!'

E Bm F#m C#m F#7
Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins 
F#m7/B B9
Silently closing her bedroom door
F#m7/B B9
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more

E Bm F#m C#m F#7
She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching a handkerchief
F#m7/B B9
Quietly turning the backdoor key
F#m7/B B9
Stepping outside she is free


[Chorus]
E
She (We gave her most of our lives.)
E
Is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives.)
E Bm6
Home (We gave her everything money could ^ ^ ^ 
C#m F#7 C#m F#7
She's leaving home after living alone for so many years
buy

[Verse]
E Bm F#m C#m F#7
Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown,
F#m7/B B9
Picks up the letter that's lying there.
F#m7/B B9
Standing alone at the top of the stairs,

E Bm F#m C#m F#7
She breaks down and cries to her husband "Daddy our baby's gone!"
F#m7/B B9
Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly?
F#m7/B B9
How could she do this to me?


[Chorus]
E
She (We never thought of ourselves.)
E
Is leaving (Never a thought for ourselves.)
E Bm6
Home (We struggled hard all our lives to get ^ ^ ^ 
C#m F#7 C#m F#7
She's leaving home after living alone for so many years
by

[Verse]
E Bm F#m C#m F#7
Friday morning at nine o'clock she is far away
F#m7/B B9
Waiting to keep the appointment she made
F#m7/B B9
Meeting a man from the motor trade


[Chorus]
E
She (What did we do that was wrong?)
E
Is having (We didn't know it was wrong.)
E Bm6
Fun (Fun is the one thing that money can't 
C#m F#7 C#m F#7
Something inside that was always denied for so many years
buy

CODA
C#m7 F# A E
She's leaving home (bye bye)

credits

from It Was 60 Years Ago Today (LP), released February 4, 2023

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All You Need Is The Pancakes You Make A Shrove Tuesday Special from Mag...

Tony Book 1934-2025, King of Frome and Europe

In 1956, a 22-year-old Tony Book was playing at the top of my road for Frome Town in the old Western League. I never got to see him play in that unforgettably Somerset-muddied red and white kit because he moved up that year to the dizzy heights of his home town club Bath City. He was still at Bath in 1964 (aged 30!) by the time I was old enough to join The Badger’s Hill crowd. The crowd remembered him though. Then, as if by magic, in 1968 – one of so many other real-life British rags-to-riches fairy stories from those years - he was a star in the pages of my football annual as captain of a Manchester City team that had won the English football league and qualified for the European Cup. What’s more, his younger brother Kim had also risen significantly from Frome Town to be a football league goalkeeper at Bournemouth and Northampton. 

This was an age of miracles – free school milk, full student grants, no tuition fees, workers’ rights; a functioning national health service, public ownership of major industries; full public transport; Richard Burton, the son of a miner and a barmaid, playing Hamlet at the RSC; Glenda Jackson, the Birkenhead daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner, getting to RADA and the RSC. Not to mention John, Paul, George, Ringo, (Harry, Harold, Alfie, Vic, Joe, Frank, Billy, Glenda, Mary Q, Cilla, Lulu, Sandy, Twiggy…) When you get all that in your first twenty years, along with a World Cup and George Best, it’s a hard act to follow. 

Woke King Arthur

The title track from our forthcoming Arthur project "Wake King Arthur" and one that contrives to wake him up from his long sleep and come and save us from the appalling mess we are in at the moment. When a British government proudly adopts a motto like "Stop The Boats" as its shining motto and ideal you know we have fallen a long way from the Lost Land of chivalry and mercy, of might defending justice, which thrilled and inspired me as a boy. Wake me, wake me He come out on top, he beat Hordes of heathen, he pluck Swords of lightning from the BC AD 6 and 6/9teenth Century Justice might and mercy king of all chivalry. Wake me, wake me He Arth and Ursus, he yoke Rome and Logres, he ride Wings and horses, he steal Grails from Annwn as a Norman knight a bird of prey an earthed angel tree, Celtic god a Dark Age white horse galloping free. Woke King Arthur In the 20th Century. Wake me, wake me He ever present, he a Church-hilled dragon, he the King of Europe, never Heard of England, he a Druid henge a hollow hill a forest a sea British May King ever changing eternity. Woke King Arthur In the 20th Century. (spoken) You who think you defend This lost land of Logres From drowning migrants For your offshore profits You're not Arthur's Britons Follow your money GO! He fights invaders who claim Lost Land acres from the Drowning migrants, for their Offshore profits, he’s the Lose yourself to save yourself they don’t want to see Release the Pax Britannia brand of Arthur-ity. Woke King Arthur In the Twenty first Century.

Come Together

One of countless 'underground' Beatles tracks (typically on the B side of the agile or the final track of the side of the albums) that too-cool-for-school listeners don't seem to have heard when they dismiss the Beatles as 'merely' a very good pop band. Did the genuinely and studiedly cool and groundbreaking (and at times quite poppy albeit with an edge one a Pale Blue Eyes=Dear Prudence sort of way) Velvet Underground make anything even in 1967 that was more 'underground' than 'Walrus' and 'Strawberry Fields' in that iconoclastic year or 'Rain' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows' the year before or even 'Ticket To Ride' (which was an 'A' side number one single AS WELL) the year before that? And I'm not even going to mention 'Revolution 9' (or 'The Inner Light') in '1968. Just because 'Come Together' is lifted into rock heaven by McCartney's stunning and intricate bass part doesn't make it any 'underground' 'progressive' or 'experimental.' It (and all these others mentioned) just rocks its way into the ear of everyman and woman as well as the dilettantes.
Lyrically, 'Come Together' is daringly new - and I would even use the F word (feminism) in the traditionally macho sex-objectifying world ofrocknroll.

On the subject of which, Lennon's lifelong weakness for naughty boy sexual innuendo in his lyrics - from 'Please Please Me' through 'I'll Get You ( In The End)' and 'A Hard Day's Night' to 'Come Together' (where it, is it were, grows up and comes out with it) was possibly at work in the original title of the track that dominated Side 2 of 'Abbey Road' which was originally known as 'The Big One'. Rather beautifully, these innuendos are never single entendres as they tend to be with Stones lyrics but contribute an earthing giggle out of the side of a heavenly kiss in the total effect of a Beatles record. It would be perverse and reductive to insist on them but it is funny in a boyish sort of way, part of their subversiveness and refusal quite to be squeaky clean National Treasures. (like getting stoned in the Buckingham Palace toilets before receiving their MBSEs).

Here all that grows up into a very Sixties celebration of a consummation in which the love object is no longer separate and 'other' as in a conventional pop song but merges with the love subject in a revolutionary union. Our take was never likely to challenge the glorious perfection of the original but its author would hopefully approve this male/ female fusion/ revolutionary love anthem, sung, played and recorded after co-cooking/imbibing our Covid Christmas dinner, on 25 Dec 2020.
On the subject of which, Lennon's lifelong weakness for naughty boy sexual innuendo in his lyrics - from 'Please Please Me' through 'I'll Get You ( In The End)' and 'A Hard Day's Night' to 'Come Together' (where it, is it were, grows up and comes out with it) was possibly at work in the original title of the track that dominated Side 2 of 'Abbey Road' which was originally known as 'The Big One'. Rather beautifully, these innuendos are never single entendres as they tend to be with Stones lyrics but contribute an earthing giggle out of the side of a heavenly kiss in the total effect of a Beatles record. It would be perverse and reductive to insist on them but it is funny in a boyish sort of way, part of their subversiveness and refusal quite to be squeaky clean National Treasures. (like getting stoned in the Buckingham Palace toilets before receiving their MBSEs).
Here all that grows up into a very Sixties celebration of a consummation in which the love object is no longer separate and 'other' as in a conventional pop song but merges with the love subject in a revolutionary union. Our take was never likely to challenge the glorious perfection of the original but its author would hopefully approve this male/ female fusion/ revolutionary love anthem, sung, played and recorded after co-cooking/imbibing our Covid Christmas dinner, on 25 Dec 2020.  
lyrics
Here come old flat top
He come grooving up slowly
He got joo joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please
He wear no shoe shine
He got toe jam football
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca-Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together, right now, over me
He bag production
He got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard
He one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together, right now, over me
He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one mojo filter
He say, "one and one and one is three"
Got to be good looking 'cause he's so hard to see
Come together, right now, over me
Oh
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Oh
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
credits
from It Was 60 Years Ago Today, track released January 1, 2021 

Lennon/McCartney

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I Want To Hold Your Hand To The End Of Abbey Road by Peacock's Tale folk indie duo

Ticket To Ride

I Am The Walrus

All You Need Is Love

It Was 60 Years Ago Today ( Beatles celebration)

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Fabs making their landmark debut LP in 24 hours (Feb 11 1963) Peacock’s Tale old married woke folk indie duo have made a 14 track EP of Beatles stories, covers and pastiches charting that real life rags to riches fairy story 1960-1970 and its impact on Factory girl Cindy. “It Was 60 Years Ago Today.” https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-60-years-ago-today-ep 

Essentially it's a 60s kitchen sink magical-realist rags to riches real life fairytale in which Factory Girl (expelled from Grammar School at 14) Cindy gets to the Beatle Ball (a ticket to ride, leaving home, getting the word Love, going to India etc). 

 The gay colours; the sumptuous costumes; the irreverent majesty. The moment Cinders got to the ball and became Lucy. In the Sky. With Diamonds. The moment khaki became satin; Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali; Van became the Man; frogs became princes; pumpkins turned to bubble cars; guitars became wands; school became art school; Satan became Santa; guns became flowers; the artisan became the artist; George Eastham became George Best; the Black GI wielding his Master’s axe became Jimi Hendrix; the Stone Age came in colours; Brian Epstein came as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; the Hollies became King Midas (on their way to becoming Crosby, Stills, Nash and Jung); the Wurzels became Jeff Beck; the council estate got through the generation gap in the barbed wire and up up and into the Milky Way, heading like that “they think it’s all over, it is now” Geoff Hurst counter-attack over the Gates and into Heeeeeevennnnn!. 

 ...until the 60s midnight knell tolls (At the end of Abbey Road was a crossroads. John turned left; Paul turned right; Ringo turned back and George...kept going.) A bucket of cold water over her Sixties bed. Paul’s lyrics stop meaning anything. John cuts off a decade of Beatle growth, gets a short, back and B sides, and stops being funny. England lose the World Cup. Wales never have it. Pan’s People become Legs and Co. The Stones emigrate. Legs disappear. The Mersey Sound and the Internationale become Standard English and National Service. Jesus Christ Superstar becomes Andrew Lloyd Weber. 

Johnny went West. And Cindy went East. And maybe she is still there. Will her baby brother James, armed with her old copy of 'Pepper' clutched like a Cinderella slipper, be able to find her again?

 This YouTube of one of the tracks (She’s Leaving Home) is proving popular. https://youtu.be/Z9p9tpucPnc

News story https://townandaround.net/previous-issue/February-2023/mobile/index.html  (page 10)

It Was 50 Years Ago Today - Dec 12 1965

With a little help from my friends Waterline (above) I've put together a commemoration narrative of that moment 50 years ago today when the act you've known for all these years - the ultimate fusion of art and popular culture - played a live concert tour date in Britain for the last time.

Here it is in apple-bite size chunks.

Introduction  (and a happy 100th birthday to Frank Sinatra)

Norwegian Would - But Did She?

Live at The Capitol Cinema, Cardiff, Sunday December 12 1965

We Can Work It Out - Can't We?

A Loaded Warm Revolver 

In December 1965, the Beatles were so loaded with hits, they not only put out a Christmas No 1 single with two A sides, they also put out a Christmas No 1 album of 14 more songs without needing to include either. In that spirit, here's a Christmas bonus for you from Warwick and me from 'Doin different - new ballads from the East of England' (spot the Beatle influence!)

The Ballad of Wells Next the Sea

Finally, for a performance the other Christmas A side (Day Tripper) and the complete fairy story of that Capitol Cinema concert in Cardiff,  here's the second half of 

'Beat Music: It Was 50 Years Ago' 

as broadcast live on Folkspot (now West Norfolk) Radio by guitarist John William and I in 2013 (poster at top of page).

Lynn Festival shows, Hendrix, Beatles and a book at Christmas - my BBC radio interview on Sue Marchant's Big Night In

Hold you hard! 75 minutes into the programme, Sue Marchant interviews me about my crazy 4 shows in July and the Doin' Different ballad book on her Big Night In show (BBC Eastern Counties radio) here

 

Above , modelling the Hendrix show fifth heaven pilgrim - external eyes half open, internal eye beginning to see All - after my interview with the wonderful Sue Marchant.

Below, No More Mr Nice Guy, modelling my martyrdom as William Sawtrey. Method, darling.

 

 

 

Watch a trailer of the EWife of Lynn's Tale here

 

 

And an earlier interview with Breckland radio at the Folk in a Field festival here

 

I Feel Fine

Yes, I still do. 50 years ago today (on Thursday 10 Dec) 'I Feel Fine' replaced the Stones' one-week number one 'Little Red Rooster' at the top of the Christmas charts and stayed there for five weeks. It was like the party would never stop.

Another significant date is December 12 1965, the night the Beatles played their last ever live concert gig in mainland Britain- at the Capital Cinema Cardiff.

Hear Brian Matthews of Radio 2's Sounds of the Sixties trail the celebration show created by guitarist John William and I , 'It Was 50 Years Ago Today':

https://soundcloud.com/gaz29-1/brian-matthews-trails-it-was-50-years-ago-today-on-r2

And if that whets your appetite, hear John and I performing the whole show live and on air at http://www.folkspot.co.uk/, -  here


The show and the novel imagines Factory Girl Cindy meeting her Beatle Prince backstage at this final concert, escaping a blind alley with her real-life boyfriend. It's magical mystery realism.

Here's the Christmas 1964 section of Beat music, the novel, narrated by Cindy's little brother James Spectre:

"Dad is home. A Labour Party report on a proposed Open University of the Air, designed to extend Higher Education to lower income groups, a three pipe problem solved in full by Harold Wilson on the back of some election posters between church and lunch on Easter Sunday 1963, and done up in crimson ribbon, is trailing in the silver jet-stream behind Santa’s sleigh. Stepmother magicks back into Mother Mary and brings all her gift-wrapped summer of loving down from the always winter loft. Both parents are as wide-eyed and excited as their children, and everything is lying before us like an unopened gift. And, away from ‘Wanger’ Wheeler’s football field, where I’m always at the back, in goal, I’m John at Christmas Number 1, miming electric razor feedback on Pop of the Tops, airing George n John lead guitar on Fairy godmother Mary’s laundry-slat wand and being Ringo. I FEEL FINE."

a prayer for john lennon (d. dec 8 1980)

https://bardonthewire.bandcamp.com/track/a-prayer-for-john-lennon-d-dec-8-1980

i am not

sure that god

speaks

more in the silence

or the age's

talentless violence

but in earshot

of atlantic fury

you fell

silent,

new york exploding

unholy smoke

in your heart

and for a bad moment

dear john

i am lost again.

dec 8 1980

Review - McCartney by Peter Ames Carlin

I thought this was a much better Beatles book than most - and I've read a few. The most interesting point to me is the identification of McCartney as the heart and the riddle of the Beatles. The author traces this to McCartney's actual childhood - a warm working class family home blighted by the death of his mother Mary from cancer - and then through all the other deaths and black hole griefs that Macca has brave-faced down with no other faith than music. As the film 'Nowhere Boy' sympathetically shows, this loss of a mother and his refuge in rock n roll is what linked him in that mirror opposite relationship to Lennon. It proposes McCartney as the tormented and difficult genius, rather than as the usual straight man to Lennon's romantic agony. The book is generous to George except in terms of coverage (very Beatle that) and more or less ignores Ringo (the usual mistake) but it is very interesting about the problematic nature of Paul's joyous (apparent) simplicity and gets to the arrogant Paul revealed in those Beatles songs where he insists on seeing it his way (We Can Work It Out, I'm Looking Through You). The book may not be correct in seeing Paul rather than George as the real dark horse - but it does not commit the cardinal sin of biting the Beatle hand that feeds it, or of making you feel and think less of its subject. It takes a clear-eyed look at the darkness that McCartney lit up and gives him due credit for facing it down and if it finally can't tell you why McCartney is a mystery in a way that's the point.

Forty Years Ago Today

Forty Years Ago TodayThe Beatles' Pepper-hot summer of love soundtrack album came out on June 1 1967. As a tribute to a band who curiously write so often for 'all the lonely people' (why did loneliness preoccupy such in-crowd guys?) , here's an excerpt from my Beatle novel/play/poem/whatever...

How did you do what you did to my rebel big sister in the summer of love? If I knew how you did it to her-

- If you can remember it, man, you weren’t there.

Tch. I wasn’t. I was eleven. I “had to go to bed early”. It would take me until 1973 to grow a moustache. The only acid I experimented with was in chemistry practicals. And my only bad trips were the bus rides to Grammar School. I wanted to go all the way down to Strawberry Fields instead - and then all the way up Penny Lane. As always with the Fabs, you got a lot more for your pocket money. I had to rely on the radio of course, not having the largesse of my podgy friend Timothy, but by time you got there, a haunting elegy is making you as happy as a fool on a hill. And then you turn around at Penny Lane for a big yellow iced lolly of joy. And all the better for that hint of acid in every lick!

Meanwhile, in the grown up world, The Times is calling Sergeant Pepper “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation.” The BBC is banning it. Tim Uptheroad’s Dad is saying the Beatles are young boys with more money than sense and that they dress like women. My big sister says his Dad’s idea of a man is a killer in khaki and that she prefers the peace uniforms the Beatles are wearing against Nam on ‘Pepper’. Mam snaps back that the summer of love is a fancy phrase for living in sin and that my sister has let her knickers down, whatever that means .

- Follow that, Mick.

Well, the Stones usually do. Which isn’t a put down - originality isn’t everything. Stones’ records seldom start less than brilliantly. They really kick. And then they get stuck in a groove. But the Beatles were never predictable like that. And in 1967, having rewritten the groove in 1963, they rewrote the groove again so completely that for once the Stones – with the possible exception of Brian Jones - couldn’t find it. Meanwhile, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band led a whole generation up a completely different garden path. Past tangerine trees and flowers that grew incredibly high. Follow that, Mick

- Come on, Mick!

Nobody could though. Not even the Beach Boys whose mind-bending harmonies helped to inspire the change. And certainly not the arse-wriggling Stones. The Stones weren’t going to start evolving now. They had peacock-and fannied into the aristocracy of the English class system in their Beatle haircuts sooner than you could say St John’s Wood while Our John was still agonising about childminders. They’d followed the Fabs to the top of the English-free zone that used to be the US charts and we called it the British Invasion. But before I Want To Hold Your Hand any British Invasion was about as likely as the “Coronation Street” theme panning over Manhattan skyline. And the un-cute, unoriginal – though undoubtedly rocking – 1960s Stones never got invited up to Buckingham Palace either where naturally our Mopheads of the British Empire shared a pre-MBE joint in the naughty boys’ room. And when some debutante asked John if he was “the funny one” he said, “No, I’m the one with the big dick.” “The Beatles want to hold your hand but the Stones want to burn down your town,” wrote Tom Woolf. But it was the Beatles who burned it down.

I read a PG Wodehouse public school novel recently where all the angst is solved in the last chapter. The chaps who doubted the chap who couldn’t rat on a chap (even though that chap, rather than he, was a bounder). But in the last chapter it all comes out and the chaps organise it so the hero gets to score the winning try as the house team he’d been sacked in disgrace from wins the Cup. And as I put the book down, I suddenly found myself saying aloud about my life and career, “It hasn’t been like that- it’s all gone wrong for me.” And I cried like a child for what I’ve never had. And it’s that feeling – that glimpse of Eden from outside – that the Beatles music always captures for me.

George, what’s the most important thing in life?

- Love.