Penny Lane by The Beatles

Every New Zealand #1 single…

The Beatles enjoyed 14 #1 singles in New Zealand between 1963 and 1970 – it almost certainly would have been more if someone had maintained the charts during 1965. ‘Eight Days A Week’, ‘Help!’, ‘Ticket To Ride’, ‘Yesterday’, and ‘We Can Work It Out’ were all worldwide hits that could have feasibly topped the chart.

Despite 1965’s absence, The Beatles have topped New Zealand’s singles charts more than any other artist. Katy Perry (WTF…) and Justin Bieber are their closest competition.

The Beatles

The Beatles were a global phenomenon in the 1960s, keeping pace with popular music’s rapid development in the 1960s. You probably know about them already….

Penny Lane

The Beatles recorded ‘Penny Lane’ over the winter of 1966–67. It’s a nostalgic recollection of Paul McCartney’s adolescence – he later explained to Clash Music, “I’d get a bus to his house and I’d have to change at Penny Lane, or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story.”

We put in a joke or two. ‘Four of fish and finger pie.’ The women would never dare say that, except to themselves. Most people wouldn’t hear it, but ‘finger pie’ is just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut.

Paul McCartney, Anthology liner notes, 1997

McCartney was attempting to emulate the clean, orchestral textures of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The track’s built around McCartney’s piano. He invited David Mason to contribute a piccolo trumpet solo after seeing him play the instrument on a BBC television broadcast of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto.

‘Penny Lane’ was among the first songs to be accompanied by a music video:

‘Penny Lane’ was one of the earliest songs recorded in the Sgt. Pepper sessions, but was released as a standalone single with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. George Martin explains:

The only reason that ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ didn’t go onto the new album was a feeling that if we issued a single, it shouldn’t go onto an album. That was a crazy idea, and I’m afraid I was partly responsible. It’s nonsense these days, but in those days it was an aspect that we’d try to give the public value for money.

The idea of a double A side came from me and Brian, really. Brian was desperate to recover popularity, and so we wanted to make sure that we had a marvellous seller. He came to me and said, ‘I must have a really great single. What have you got?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got three tracks – and two of them are the best tracks they’ve ever made. We could put the two together and make a smashing single.’ We did, and it was a smashing single – but it was also a dreadful mistake. We would have sold far more and got higher up in the charts if we had issued one of those with, say,’When I’m Sixty-Four’ on the back.

George Martin, Beatles Anthology

‘Penny Lane’/’Strawberry Fields Forever’ was famously blocked from topping the charts in the UK by Engelbert Humperdinck’s middle-of-the-road crooner ‘Please Release Me’. But ‘Penny Lane’ made it to the top of the charts in New Zealand.

My verdict

As Martin says above, ‘Penny Lane’ is one of the Beatles’ very best songs. It has a lot to offer – sophistication without sacrificing verve and energy, snide humour balancing sweetness and nostalgia. ‘Penny Lane’ also forms a terrific yin-yang with the trippy, boundary-pushing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.

The Aftermath

The Beatles continued to rule the pop world through most of the 1960s, although perhaps the ‘Penny Lane’/’Strawberry Fields’ double a-side was their absolute peak. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival challenged their reign over rock and pop.

• 1970s album reviews
• NZ #1 hits