The Beatles, album "The Beatles 1962-1966 (The Red Album)"
Lyrics of the album -
Listen the albumLP - collections - Studio Parlophone - 1966 mono: 02.04.1973
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JOHN 1963: 'It came to the charts in two days. And everybody thought it was a 'fiddle' because our manager's stores send in these… what is it… record returns. And everybody down south thought, 'Aha! He's just fiddling the charts.' But he wasn't.' JOHN 1972: 'Paul wrote the main structure of this when he was sixteen, or even earlier. I think I had something to do with the middle.' RINGO 1976: 'The first record, 'Love Me Do,' for me that was more important than anything else. That first piece of plastic. You can't believe how great that was. It was so wonderful. We were on a record!' JOHN 1980: ''Love Me Do' is Paul's song. He had the song around in Hamburg even, way, way before we were songwriters.' PAUL 1982: 'In Hamburg we clicked… At the Cavern we clicked… but if you want to know when we 'knew' we'd arrived, it was getting in the charts with 'Love Me Do.' That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go.' PAUL 1984: ''Love Me Do' …the first song we recorded, like, for real. First serious audition. I was very nervous, I remember. John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead at the last minute, because they wanted John to play harmonica. Until then, we hadn't rehearsed with a harmonica; George Martin started arranging it on the spot. It was very nerve-wracking.' PAUL 1988: ''Love Me Do' was us trying to do the blues. It came out whiter because it always does. We're white, and we were just young Liverpool musicians. We didn't have the finesse to be able to actually sound black. But 'Love Me Do' was probably the first bluesy thing we tried to do.' PAUL circa-1994: 'George Martin said, 'Can anyone play a harmonica? It would be rather nice. Couldn't think of some sort of bluesy thing, could you John?' John played a chromatic harmonica… I actually had one too but he'd been clever – he learned to play it. John expected to be in jail one day and he'd be the guy who played the harmonica. The lyric crossed over the harmonica solo, so I suddenly got thrown the big open line, 'Love me do,' where everything stopped. Until that session John had always done it. I didn't even know how to sing it… I can still hear the nervousness in my voice.' -
02:01 Please Please Me (John Lennon – John Lennon and Paul McCartney) - 13.08.1963JOHN 1963: 'Our recording manager (George Martin) thought our arrangement was fussy, so we tried to make it simpler. We were getting tired though, and just couldn't seem to get it right. In the following weeks we went over it again and again. We changed the tempo a little, we altered the words slightly, and we went over the idea of featuring the harmonica just as we'd done on 'Love Me Do.' By the time the session came around we were so happy with the result, we couldn't get it recorded fast enough.' JOHN 1980: ''Please Please Me' is my song completely. It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it? I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie's place. I heard Roy Orbison doing 'Only The Lonely' or something. That's where that came from. And also I was always intrigued by the words of 'Please Lend Your Ears To My Pleas,' a Bing Crosby song. I was always intrigued by the double use of the word 'please.' So it was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison.' PAUL 1988: 'It's very Roy Orbison when you slow it down. George Martin up-tempo'd it. He thought it was too much of a dirge, and probably too like Orbison. So he cleverly speeded us up… and we put in the little scaled riff at the beginning, which was very catchy.' -
PAUL 1964: ''From Me To You.' It could be done as an old Ragtime tune… especially the middle-eight. And so, we're not writing the tunes in any particular idiom. In five years time, we may arrange the tunes differently. (jokingly) But we'll probably write the same old rubbish!!' JOHN 1980: 'We were writing it in a car, I think… and I think the first line was mine. I mean, I know it was mine. (humms melody) And then after that we just took it from there. We were just writing the next single. It was far bluesier than that when we wrote it. The notes, today… you could rearrange it pretty funky.' PAUL circa-1994: 'The thing I liked about 'From Me To You' was it had a very complete middle. It went to a surprising place. The opening chord of the middle section of that song heralded a new batch for me. That was a pivotal song. Our songwriting lifted a little with that song. It was very much co-written.' -
JOHN 1963: 'We wrote that two days before we recorded it, actually.' PAUL 1963: 'John and I wrote it together. We were in a van up in Newcastle somewhere, and we'd just gone over to our hotel. I originally got an idea of doing one of those answering songs, where a couple of us sing about 'she loves you' …and the other one sort of says the 'yes, yes' bit. You know, 'yeah yeah' answering whoever is saying it. But we decided that was a crummy idea anyway. But we had the idea to write a song called 'She Loves You' then. And we just sat up in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it, you know.' JOHN 1963: ''Yeah.' That's sort of the main catch phrase from 'She Loves You.' We'd written the song, and then suddenly realized we needed more… so we added 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and it caught on.' JOHN 1980: 'It was written together (with Paul) and I don't remember how. I remember it was Paul's idea – instead of singing 'I love you' again, we'd have a third party. The 'Woooo' was taken from the Isley Brothers 'Twist And Shout,' which we stuck into everything.' PAUL 1982: 'Occasionally, we'd overrule George Martin, like on 'She Loves You,' we end on a sixth chord, a very jazzy sort of thing. And he said, 'Oh, you can't do that! A sixth chord? It's too jazzy.' We just said, 'No, it's a great hook, we've got to do it.'' PAUL 1988: 'We rehearsed the end bit of 'She Loves You' and took it to George. And he just laughed and said, 'Well, you can't do the end of course… that sixth… it's too like the Andrew Sisters.' We just said, 'Alright, we'll try it without,' and we tried it and it wasn't as good. Then he conceded, 'You're right, I guess.' But we were both very flexible. We would listen to George's ideas too, because he was a producer and a musician, and he obviously knew what he was talking about. There was good to-and-fro. We loved that bit, and we rehearsed it alot. John and I wrote that in a hotel room, on twin beds during an afternoon off – I mean, God bless their little cotton socks, those boys WORKED! Here I am talking about an afternoon off, and we're sitting there writing! We just loved it so much. It wasn't work.' -
PAUL 1964: 'Let's see, we were told we had to get down to it. So we found this house when we were walking along one day. We knew we had to really get this song going, so we got down in the basement of this disused house and there was an old piano. It wasn't really disused, it was rooms to let. We found this old piano and started banging away. There was a little old organ too. So we were having this informal jam and we started banging away. Suddenly a little bit came to us, the catch line. So we started working on it from there. We got our pens and paper out and just wrote down the lyrics. Eventually, we had some sort of a song, so we played it for our recording manager and he seemed to like it. We recorded it the next day.' JOHN 1980: 'We wrote alot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in 'I Want To Hold Your Hand,' I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher's house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, 'Oh you-u-u/ got that something…' And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!' I said, 'Do that again!' In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that – both playing into each other's noses.' PAUL circa-1994: ''Eyeball to eyeball' is a very good description of it. That's exactly how it was. 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' was very co-written.' -
02:09 All My Loving (Paul McCartney – John Lennon and Paul McCartney) - 30.07.1963JOHN 1972: 'This was one of his first biggies.' JOHN 1980: ''All My Loving' is Paul, I regret to say. Because it's a damn fine piece of work. But I play a pretty mean guitar in back.' PAUL 1984: 'Yeah, I wrote that one. It was the first song I ever wrote where I had the words before the music. I wrote the words on a bus on tour, then we got the tune when I arrived there. The first time I've ever worked upside down.' PAUL 1988: 'I think that was the first song where I wrote the words without the tune. I wrote the words on the tour bus during our tour with Roy Orbison. We did alot of writing then.' PAUL circa-1994: 'It was a good show song. It worked well live.' -
JOHN 1972: 'John and Paul, but mainly Paul.' JOHN 1980: 'That's Paul completely. Maybe I had something to do with the chorus, but I don't know. I always considered it his song.' PAUL 1984: 'We recorded it in France, as I recall. Went over to the Odeon in Paris. Recorded it over there. Felt proud because Ella Fitzgerald recorded it, too, though we didn't realize what it meant that she was doing it.' PAUL circa-1994: ''Can't Buy Me Love' is my attempt to write a bluesy mode. The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well but they won't buy me what I really want.' -
RINGO 1964: 'We went to do a job, and we'd worked all day and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said, 'It's been a hard day…' and I looked around and saw it was dark so I said, '…night!' So we came to 'A Hard Day's Night.'' JOHN 1980: 'I was going home in the car and Dick Lester suggested the title, 'Hard Day's Night' from something Ringo had said. I had used it in 'In His Own Write,' but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringo-ism, where he said it not to be funny… just said it. So Dick Lester said, 'We are going to use that title.' And the next morning I brought in the song… 'cuz there was a little competition between Paul and I as to who got the A-side – who got the hits. If you notice, in the early days the majority of singles, in the movies and everything, were mine… in the early period I'm dominating the group. The only reason he sang on 'A Hard Day's Night' was because I couldn't reach the notes. (sings) 'When I'm home/ everything seems to be right/ when I'm home…' – which is what we'd do sometimes. One of us couldn't reach a note but he wanted a different sound, so he'd get the other to do the harmony.' PAUL circa-1994: 'The title was Ringo's. We'd almost finished making the film, and this fun bit arrived that we'd not known about before, which was naming the film. So we were sitting around at Twickenham studios having a little brain-storming session… and we said, 'Well, there was something Ringo said the other day.' Ringo would do these little malapropisms, he would say things slightly wrong, like people do, but his were always wonderful, very lyrical… they were sort of magic even though he was just getting it wrong. And he said after a concert, 'Phew, it's been a hard day's night.'' -
JOHN 1972: 'Both of us wrote it. The first half was Paul's and the middle-eight is mine.' JOHN 1980: ''And I Love Her' is Paul again. I consider it his first 'Yesterday.' You know, the big ballad in 'A Hard Day's Night.' PAUL 1984: 'It's just a love song. It wasn't for anyone. Having the title start in midsentence, I thought that was clever. Well, Perry Como did 'And I Love You So' many years later. Tried to nick the idea. I like that… it was a nice tune, that one. I still like it.' -
JOHN 1972: 'Both of us wrote it. I think we wrote this when we were trying to write the title song for 'Help!' because there was at one time the thought of calling the film, 'Eight Arms To Hold You.'' JOHN 1980: 'Eight Days A Week' was never a good song. We struggled to record it and struggled to make it into a song. It was his (Paul's) initial effort, but I think we both worked on it. I'm not sure. But it was lousy anyway.' PAUL 1984: 'Yeah, he (Ringo) said it as though he were an overworked chauffeur: (in heavy accent) 'Eight days a week.' (Laughter) When we heard it, we said, 'Really? Bing! Got it!'' (Laughs) -
02:20 I Feel Fine (John Lennon – John Lennon and Paul McCartney) - 17.11.1964JOHN 1964: 'George and I play the same bit on the guitar together – that's the bit that'll set your feet a-tapping, as the reviews say. The middle-eight is the most tuneful part, to me, because it's a typical Beatles bit.' JOHN 1972: 'This was the first time feedback was used on a record. It's right at the beginning.' JOHN 1974: 'I wrote this at a recording session. It was tied together around the guitar riff that opens it.' JOHN 1980: 'That's me completely. Including the guitar lick with the first feedback anywhere. I defy anybody to find a record… unless it is some old blues record from 1922… that uses feedback that way. So I claim it for the Beatles. Before Hendrix, before the Who, before anybody. The first feedback on record.' PAUL circa-1994: 'John had a semi-acoustic Gibson guitar. It had a pick-up on it so it could be amplified… We were just about to walk away to listen to a take when John leaned his guitar against the amp. I can still see him doing it… and it went, 'Nnnnnnwahhhhh!' And we went, 'What's that? Voodoo!' 'No, it's feedback.' Wow, it's a great sound!' George Martin was there so we said, 'Can we have that on the record?' 'Well, I suppose we could, we could edit it on the front.' It was a found object – an accident caused by leaning the guitar against the amp. The song itself was more John's than mine. We sat down and co-wrote it with John's original idea. John sang it, I'm on harmonies.' -
GEORGE 1965: 'We are always worried with each record. With 'Ticket To Ride' we were even more worried. There's bound to be a time when we come in at 19 (on the charts). But this 'number one' business doesn't seem to stop – great while it lasts – but now we'll have to start all over again and people will start predicting funny things for the next one.' JOHN 1970: 'It's a heavy record, and the drums are heavy too. That's why I like it.' JOHN 1980: 'That was one of the earliest heavy-metal records made. Paul's contribution was the way Ringo played the drums.' PAUL circa-1994: 'I think the interesting thing is the crazy ending – instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo. We picked up one of the lines, 'My baby don't care,' but completely altered the melody. We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out with this song… It was quite radical at the time.' -
02:05 Yesterday (Paul McCartney – John Lennon and Paul McCartney) - 14.06.1965 -
JOHN 1965: 'We think it's one of the best we've written.' JOHN 1980: 'The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension. When 'Help' came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it's just a fast rock 'n roll song. I didn't realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. So it was my fat Elvis period. You see the movie: He – I – is very fat, very insecure, and he's completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was. Now I may be very positive… yes, yes… but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window, you know. It becomes easier to deal with as I get older; I don't know whether you learn control or, when you grow up, you calm down a little. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.' PAUL 1984: 'John wrote that… well, John and I wrote it at his house in Weybridge for the film. I think the title was out of desperation.' -
JOHN 1965: 'One I do which I like is, 'You've Got To Hide Your Love Away.' But it's not commercial.' JOHN 1971: 'It's one of those that you sort of sing a bit sadly to yourself, 'Here I stand/Head in hand.' I started thinking about my own emotions. I don't know when exactly it started, like 'I'm A Loser' or 'Hide Your Love Away,' or those kind of things. Instead of projecting myself into a situation I would just try to express what I felt about myself which I had done in me books. I think it was Dylan helped me realize that – I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing Pop songs, but to express myself I would write 'Spaniard In The Works' or 'In His Own Write' – the personal stories which were expressive of my personal emotions. I'd have a separate 'songwriting' John Lennon who wrote songs for the sort of meat market, and I didn't consider them, the lyrics or anything, to have any depth at all. Then I started being me about the songs… not writing them objectively, but subjectively.' JOHN 1980: 'That's me in my Dylan period again. I am like a chameleon… influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.' PAUL 1984: 'That was John doing a Dylan… heavily influenced by Bob. If you listen, he's singing it like Bob.' -
JOHN 1980: 'Paul did the first half, I did the middle-eight. But you've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out/ We can work it out' real optimistic, you know. And me, impatient, 'Life is very short and there's no time/ for fussing and fighting, my friend.'' PAUL circa-1994: 'I wrote it as more of an up-tempo thing, country and western. I had the basic idea, the title, had a couple of verses… then I took it to John to finish it off and we wrote the middle together, which is nice – 'Life is very short/ And there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend.' Then it was George Harrison's idea to put the middle into waltz time, like a german waltz… The lyrics might have been personal. It is often a good way to talk to someone or to work your thoughts out. It saves you going to a psychiatrist, you allow yourself to say what you might not say in person.' -
JOHN 1972: 'Me. But I think Paul helped with the verse.' JOHN 1980: 'That's mine. Including the guitar lick, the guitar break, and the whole bit. It's just a rock 'n roll song. Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right? Usually on a ferry boat or somethng. But it was kind of – you know, you're just a weekend hippie. Get it?' PAUL circa-1994: 'Acid was coming on the scene, and we'd often do these songs about 'the girl who thought she was it.' Mainly the impetus for that used to come from John – I think John met quite a few girls who thought they were it… But this was just a tongue-in-cheek song about someone who was a day tripper, a sunday painter, a sunday driver, somebody who was committed only in part to the idea. Where we saw ourselves as full-time trippers, fully committed drivers, she was just a day tripper. That was a co-written effort – we were both making it all up but I would give John the main credit.' -
GEORGE 1977: 'If Paul had written a song, he'd learn all the parts and then come in the studio and say 'Do this.' He'd never give you the opportunity to come out with something. But on 'Drive My Car' I just played the line, which is really like a lick off 'Respect,' you know, the Otis Redding version. And I played the line on the guitar and Paul laid that with me on the bass. We laid that track down like that. We played the lead part later on top of it.' JOHN 1980: 'His (Paul's) song, with contributions from me.' PAUL circa-1994: 'This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session. The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which are always fatal (to songwriting). 'Rings' is fatal anyway, 'rings' always rhymes with things and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, 'These aren't good lyrics but it's a good tune.' Well, we tried, and John couldn't think of anything, and we tried, and eventually it was, 'Oh let's leave it, let's get off this one.' 'No, no. We can do it, we can do it.' So we had a break… then we came back to it, and somehow it became 'drive-my-car' instead of 'gol-den-rings,' and then it was wonderful – because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came.' -
JOHN 1972: 'Me. But Paul helped me on the lyric.' GEORGE 1980: 'I had bought, earlier, a crummy sitar in London… and played the 'Norwegian Wood' bit.' JOHN 1980: ''Norwegian Wood' is my song completely. It was about an affair I was having. I was very careful and paranoid because I didn't want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of the household. I'd always had some kind of affairs going on, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair… but in such a smoke-screen way that you couldn't tell. But I can't remember any specific woman it had to do with.' PAUL 1985: 'It was me who decided in 'Norwegian Wood' that the house should burn down… not that it's any big deal.' -
02:44 Nowhere Man (John Lennon – John Lennon and Paul McCartney) - 22.10.1965JOHN 1980: 'I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music… the whole damn thing, as I lay down. So letting it go is what the whole game is. You put your finger on it, it slips away, right? You know, you turn the lights on and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them.' PAUL 1984: 'That was John after a night out, with dawn coming up. I think at that point in his life, he was a bit wondering where he was going.' PAUL 1988: 'I remember we wanted very treble-y guitars – which they are – they're among the most treble-y guitars I've ever heard on record. The engineer said, 'Alright, I'll put full treble on it,' and we said, 'That's not enough.' He said, 'But that's all I've got.' And we replied, 'Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that. And if that's not enough we'll go through another lot of faders.' They said, 'We don't do that,' and we would say, 'Just try it… if it sounds crappy we'll lose it, but it might just sound good.' You'd then find, 'Oh it worked,' and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of those things.' -
JOHN 1972: 'Both of us. I wrote the middle with him.' PAUL 1977: ''Michelle' was like a joke French tune for when you go to a party or something. That's all it was. And then after a while you say, 'Well, that's quite a good tune. Let's put some real words to it.'' JOHN 1980: 'He and I were staying somewhere and he walked in and hummed the first few bars, with the words, and he says, 'Where do I go from here?' I had been listening to (blues singer) Nina Simone. I think it was 'I Put A Spell On You.' There was a line in it that went, 'I love you, I love you.' That's what made me think of the middle-eight for 'Michelle.' So, my contributions to Paul's songs was always to add a little bluesy edge to them. Otherwise, 'Michelle' is a straight ballad, right? He provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.' PAUL 1988: 'I'll never forget putting the bass line in 'Michelle' because it was a kind of Bizet thing. It really turned the song around. You could do that with bass. It was very exciting.' -
02:27 In My Life (John Lennon – John Lennon and Paul McCartney) - 22.10.1965JOHN 1980: 'It was the first song I wrote that was consciously about my life. (Sings) 'There are places I'll remember/ All my life though some have changed…' Before, we were just writing songs a la Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly – pop songs with no more thought to them than that. The words were almost irrelevant. 'In My Life' started out as a bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember. I wrote it all down and it was ridiculous… it was the most boring sort of 'What I Did On My Holiday's Bus Trip' song and it wasn't working at all. But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember. Paul helped with the middle-eight. It was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then it had all been sort of glib and throw-away. And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric.' PAUL 1984: 'I think I wrote the tune to that; that's the one we slightly dispute. John either forgot or didn't think I wrote the tune. I remember he had the words, like a poem… sort of about faces he remembered. I recall going off for half an hour and sitting with a Mellotron he had, writing the tune… which was Miracles inspired, as I remember. In fact, a lot of stuff was then.' -
JOHN 1980: 'That's me, writing about this dream girl – the one that hadn't come yet. It was Yoko.' PAUL circa-1994: 'It was John's original idea, but it was very much co-written. I remember writing 'the pain and pleasure,' and 'a man must break his back.' …It was amusing to see if we could get a naughty word on the record. The Beach Boys had a song out where they'd done 'la la la la' and we loved the innocence of that and wanted to copy it but not use the same phrase. So we were looking around for another phrase – 'dit dit dit dit,' which we decided to change it in our waggishness to 'tit tit tit tit.' And it gave us a laugh. It was good to get some light relief in the middle of this real big career that we were forging. If we could put in something that was a little bit subversive then we would. George Martin would say, 'Was that dit-dit or tit-tit you were singing?' 'Oh! dit-dit George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn't it?' Then we'd get in the car and break down laughing.' -
JOHN 1972: 'Paul. I think I might have helped with some of the lyrics, Yes, I did. But it was mainly Paul's tune.' JOHN 1980: ''Paperback Writer' is son of 'Day Tripper' …meaning a rock 'n roll song with a guitar lick on a fuzzy loud guitar.' PAUL circa-1994: 'I arrived at Weybridge and told John I had this idea of trying to write off to a publishers to become a paperback writer, and I said, 'I think it should be written like a letter.' I took a bit of paper out and I said it should be something like, 'Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be…' and I proceeded to write it just like a letter in front of him, occasionally rhyming it… And then we went upstairs and put the melody to it. John and I sat down and finished it all up, but it was tilted towards me – the original idea was mine. I had no music, but it's just a little bluesy song, not alot of melody. Then I had the idea to do the harmonies, and we arranged that in the studio.' -
PAUL 1966: 'I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it. The first few bars just came to me, and I got this name in my head… Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church. I don't know why. I couldn't think of much more so I put it away for a day. Then the name Father McCartney came to me, and all the lonely people. But I thought that people would think it was supposed to be about my Dad sitting knitting his socks. Dad's a happy lad. So I went through the telephone book and I got the name McKenzie. I was in Bristol when I decided Daisy Hawkins wasn't a good name. I walked 'round looking at the shops, and I saw the name Rigby. Then I took the song down to John's house in Weybridge. We sat around, laughing, got stoned and finished it off.' JOHN 1980: 'Paul's baby, and I helped with the education of the child… The violin backing was Paul's idea. Jane Asher had turned him on to Vivaldi, and it was very good.' PAUL 1984: 'I got the name Rigby from a shop in Bristol. I was wandering round Bristol one day and saw a shop called Rigby. And I think Eleanor was from Eleanor Bron, the actress we worked with in the film 'Help!' But I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. Eleanor Rigby sounded natural.' -
PAUL 1966: 'It's a happy place, that's all. You know, it was just… We were trying to write a children's song. That was the basic idea. And there's nothing more to be read into it than there is in the lyrics of any children's song.' JOHN 1972: 'Paul wrote the catchy chorus. I helped with the blunderbuss bit.' JOHN 1980: ''Yellow Submarine' is Paul's baby. Donovan helped with the lyrics. I helped with the lyrics too. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio, but based on Paul's inspiration. Paul's idea. Paul's title… written for Ringo.' PAUL 1984: 'I wrote that in bed one night. As a kid's story. And then we thought it would be good for Ringo to do.' PAUL circa-1994: 'I was laying in bed in the Asher's garret, and there's a nice twilight zone just as you're drifting into sleep and as you wake from it – I always find it quite a comfortable zone. I remember thinking that a children's song would be quite a good idea… I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal. I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story – sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he'd lived. It was pretty much my song as I recall… I think John helped out. The lyrics got more and more obscure as it goes on, but the chorus, melody and verses are mine.' GEORGE 1999: 'Paul came up with the concept of 'Yellow Submarine.' All I know is just that every time we'd all get around the piano with guitars and start listening to it and arranging it into a record, we'd all fool about. As I said, John's doing the voice that sounds like someone talking down a tube or ship's funnel as they do in the merchant marine. (laughs) And on the final track there's actually that very small party happening! As I seem to remember, there's a few screams and what sounds like small crowd noises in the background.'
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