The Beatles were part of a cultural revolution in the 1960s. The group’s contribution cannot be understated. Their own popularity spread throughout the U.K. and then the world, with U.S. domination undeniably sealing their status as the most important and influential band in the history of recorded sound. Many recall their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February 1964 in the U.S. or on 4 November the previous year at the Royal Variety Performance in the U.K. as the pivotal moments when the 1960s seemed to burst into colour. The extent to which the band were spearheading this popular explosion or were in a sense being carried by it, in the early days at least, is a topic for endless subjective debate. There is an argument that says society was moving towards what became described as ‘permissive’ (in the first instance in a kind of pejorative way, then latterly, as attitudes shifted, the term has been adopted with more positive connotations) before the Beatles became famous. The Contraception Pill Act of 1961 was a step in that direction and popular music, believe it or not, did exist before the Fab Four. The fact remains that the changes were happening and the Beatles were front and centre.
George Harrison’s observation while being interviewed for The Beatles Anthology (1995) that the group were scapegoats for global ‘madness’ is an acutely perceptive one. What started out as a rock’n’roll band ended up becoming a monster which was way beyond their control. World-wide pent-up post-war frustration needed an outlet and Elvis Presley and co had already set the ball rolling. In the same documentary, Ringo Starr says he felt the group were not being appreciated for their music in a live context, because by the time the Beatles were filling stadiums in the U.S., the ‘madness’, as Harrison refers to it, was at such a level that the music couldn’t be heard and their show had become secondary to the gross spectacle of the roadshow. Prisoners of their own success and fame, everywhere they went the band attracted attention from the media, governments and fringe organisations – often with malevolent intentions, looking for an excuse to cause trouble. Their influence on the younger generation was clearly regarded as a threat by some in society, aggravated by John Lennon’s remarks about the Beatles being ‘bigger than Jesus’ in March 1966, the backlash from which caused outcry in parts of the U.S. and contributed to the band’s ultimate decision to stop touring.
Revelations about drug-use as the decade drew on, whether it be the suggestion that they smoked pot at Buckingham Palace while receiving their MBEs (later denied by Harrison) or Paul McCartney admitting to a news crew that he’d taken LSD, or George and John being busted by the police, merely served to strengthen the argument for those wishing to cite the Beatles as a malign influence on youth, the architects of a breakdown in society. In their wake we had seen the Rolling Stones and other groups, their antics capturing headlines and supposedly furthering the decline in moral standards which came hand-in-hand with sexual liberation for both women and men, culminating in the mass gatherings of youth which characterised the end of the decade. In the meantime, further relaxation of laws applying to homosexuality, censorship, abortion and divorce had all come about during the decade, undoubtedly nudged along the way by the sense of liberation provided, in part, by the kinds of sounds, images, literature and fashion being produced by and promoted in, popular culture. By 1969 the influence of the Beatles and their peers had gone far beyond music and art. It was now part of the world’s consciousness.
Once again, the extent to which the Beatles were an influence for the good or bad beyond music remains debatable depending on your political and sociological view of history. However, despite the detractors and those who would accuse them of somehow bringing about an unravelling of social standards in the 1960s, there is actually a strong sense to the contrary running through their work, sometimes openly, sometimes as a subtext. Their predilection for writing about ‘love’, firstly as a synonym for romantic relationships and later as a metaphor for spiritual awakening and by extension ‘peace’, is well-covered ground. One can go through the songs and pick out any number of examples. If you’re looking for signs of the Beatles endorsing ‘permissiveness’, I suppose you could hold up ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ or ‘Ticket to Ride’ as casual examples. However, I’m interested in a subject which is far less immediately obvious in their writing, but which, on closer inspection, is a recurrent theme, maybe even obsession, running through not only their output while the group existed, but also into the solo years and that is the use of the word ‘home’ and its implied associations.
What does the word ‘home’ mean exactly? Somewhere to live, perhaps, in the loosest sense? Beyond that I suppose it means different things to all of us. For some, maybe it means domestic bliss, to others the opposite. It can have good or bad associations. To the Beatles at least, I would argue, based on their lyrical output from the 1960s, it is more of a concept, an idyll or escape, a subject for yearning nostalgia, possibly for a situation that either never existed or maybe did, but in an imperfect or incomplete way. It certainly matters to the Beatles and would appear to have almost mythological comfort status for them. On a basic level, it’s easy to perhaps see why – after all, as I said, this is a group which carried ‘madness’ everywhere it went and spent years on the move and living in hotels while touring. But there is much more to it than that. In the songs credited to Lennon – McCartney and George Harrison from 1962 to 1970 and released during that time period under the name the Beatles, I count 74 direct uses of the word ‘home’ in their song lyrics, not including the word ‘homeward’ or other allusions to being at home or in home towns. It also appears twice in the title of a song, one primarily by Lennon, the other by McCartney.
It gets more interesting when you look at where these references are and which Beatle makes them. Of the 12 UK LP releases from 1963 to 1970, 1965’s Help! is the only one to feature a complete set of songs which do not have the word ‘home’ in any of the lyrics. Why? We’ll get to my theory about that in due course. Also, the general trend (and this really is fascinating) seems to be John Lennon writing the word ‘home’ more in songs from the early period of the Beatles’ fame and then Paul McCartney doing so in the later years, with Lennon backing away from the direct reference. Harrison uses the word once, but let’s not forget he didn’t get as many songs published as the other two and Starr doesn’t use it at all in his two sets of lyrics BUT, it could be argued, both songs allude to the concept of ‘home’ or at least a refuge of some kind. More on that later. At this point, before we get into specific examples, it is useful to consider what ‘home’ meant for Lennon, McCartney and Harrison in particular.
By the time the Beatles officially split in 1970, John Lennon had lived in at least eight permanent addresses, seven of them while in the band. These were: 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree, Liverpool until July 1946, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, Liverpool until 1963, briefly at the President Hotel in Bloomsbury, London in 1963, 57 Green Street, Mayfair, London in 1963, 13 Emperor’s Gate, Kensington, London until July 1964, Kenwood, St George’s Hill, Surrey until 1968. 34 Montagu Square, London until 1969 and Tittenhurst Park, Ascot, Berskshire until 1971, which he eventually sold to Ringo. He then moved to the U.S., living mainly in Bank Street, New York from 1971 to 1973 and then the Dakota Building, from 1973 until his death in 1980.
Paul McCartney, like Lennon, also moved about quite a bit. His family moved into a flat in Knowsley, Liverpool in 1944, then a council house in Speke, Liverpool in 1946, then to 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, Liverpool, in 1955. He also had the same brief stay at the President Hotel in Bloomsbury in 1963, followed by the move to 57 Green Street with the rest of the band in 1963, before moving into 57 Wimpole Street, Marylebone, London, the same year as a permanent house-guest of the Ashers, before he moved into his own property at 7 Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, London from 1966 onwards (a house he still owns to this day), while also buying High Park Farm in Campbeltown, Scotland at about the same time. He has, of course, purchased numerous properties around the world since then.
George Harrison lived at 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree, Liverpool, until 1950, then 25 Upton Green, Speke, Liverpool until 1962, stayed briefly with the others in London at the President Hotel, Bloomsbury in 1963 before they all moved to 57 Green Street, Mayfair in 1963, then he lived at Whaddon House, Knightsbridge until 1964 when he purchased Kinfauns in Esher, Surrey, living there until 1970, whereupon he moved into Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames, where he lived until his death in 2001, but also by that point had properties elsewhere, most notably perhaps, in Hawaii.
Add to these lists the seemingly never-ending string of hotels and houses these men stayed in throughout the 1960s and you start to get a picture of a very restless, rootless bunch of people, especially during the Beatles years and that is before we take into account each one’s personal circumstances, beyond where they lived. Paul McCartney lost his mother in October 1956 and John Lennon lost his in July 1958. Paul was 14 and John was 17 when these life-changing tragedies struck. It obviously affected both men enormously (or boys, as they were) and is a subject which would recur throughout their careers as defining moments in their lives. Lennon, in particular, references his mother in numerous songs, notably ‘Julia’ (from The Beatles, 1968), ‘Mother’ and ‘My Mummy’s Dead’, both on his 1970 LP John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. On this same album, jam-packed with personal references, he also sings about the requirement for us all to experience a ‘home’ in the song ‘Isolation’, which in itself speaks volumes, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Between the years 1963 to 1965 and the LPs Please Please Me and Rubber Soul, Lennon uses the word ‘home’ twenty-two times in songs, including in one title, ‘When I Get Home’, from A Hard Day’s Night. Then from 1965 onwards, it is McCartney who picks up the baton, using it forty-two times until 1970, not including the word ‘homeward’. He also writes a song with ‘home’ in the title, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. There’s a kind of symmetry to this (albeit biased towards McCartney in the end), as indeed there are with many aspects of their song-writing. The complete usage of the word on U.K. albums is as follows: Please Please Me (1963) – two times (McCartney), With the Beatles (1963) eleven times (eight to Lennon, three to McCartney), A Hard Day’s Night (1964) thirteen times (Lennon, including one song title), Beatles for Sale (1964) twice (Lennon), Help! (1965) no use of the word at all, Rubber Soul (1965) three times (McCartney), Revolver (1966) once (McCartney), Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) ten times (nine to McCartney, including a song with it in the title and one to Lennon), The Beatles (White Album, 1968) seven (McCartney), Yellow Submarine (1969) once (Harrison), Abbey Road (1969) three times (McCartney, not including two uses of the word ‘homeward’) and Let It Be (1970) seventeen (fifteen to McCartney and two to Lennon). This all refers to lyrics written by members of the Beatles and does not include instances of the word which may occur in cover versions they either recorded for release or performed. There are four more uses of the word in the song ‘Get Back’, which was issued as a single as well as on the Let It Be album, although the album version only contains three.
Overall, we find forty-seven (forty-nine if you include ‘homeward’) by McCartney, twenty-six by Lennon and one by Harrison. So, let’s look at the uses in more detail. First up, in the McCartney-penned tune ‘P.S. I Love You’, which appears on the Please Please Me LP (1963) and was also the B-side to ‘Love Me Do’, from the previous year, uses the word in a line promising to return, written as if in correspondence with a significant other and has been interpreted by some to have been inspired by the fact that he was away with the band in Hamburg at the time of writing, though I consider it to be far more general than that. I suspect it to be an early McCartney ‘pastiche’ song, with little actually related to his personal situation. The tune itself is superior to its A-side in my opinion, if a little less commercial. It has an almost Caribbean feel to it. However, it is the first time we hear any of the Beatles mention ‘home’ and is therefore significant in that sense. Home was, or had been up to this point, Liverpool, with intermittent trips away, most recently to Germany. Also of note is the fact that John and Paul would write songs at home, whether that be Forthlin Road or Menlove Avenue, where Lennon lived with his aunt. Interestingly, going back even further to the track ‘You’ll Be Mine’, an early number from 1960, when they were the Quarrymen, the absurd dialogue spoken by Lennon about being brought burnt toast implies some kind of domestic set-up, in a surrealistic way. At any rate, McCartney gets first official credit in the Beatles for mentioning ‘home’ in a song.
With the Beatles is the album where it kicks in for Lennon with ‘home’ references. In the LP’s opening number, ‘It Won’t Be Long’, he sings the word six times, bemoaning his loneliness and looking forward to his romantic partner’s return. On the face it, pretty straightforward, but fast-forward seven years to his screaming for his absent parents in ‘Mother’ and we start to see something a bit deeper going on in John’s head. The same can be said of ‘All I’ve Got to Do, also from With the Beatles, where he is convinced that all it takes is a phone call to bring the missing person back. This takes us a step further into John’s subconscious as we’re arguably into unresolved grief/post-traumatic fantasy or self-protection territory. The other song on the album that mentions home is ‘All My Loving’, from Paul, singing about written correspondence again. This time the song’s author is on record as saying he wrote the words before the tune while away from home, so it clearly is something which was on his mind, albeit briefly because, from this point on, he doesn’t return to the theme until Rubber Soul, two years later. John however is on a roll and as the Beatles rocket to fame, he takes the concept of home and runs with it.
At this point it’s worth mentioning that the young John’s home life had been fairly unconventional as he was raised by his aunt, not his mother and his father was absent. With this in mind, it is interesting that, as the band became more and more popular and Lennon himself was swept away by the ‘madness’, during which he described his condition with typical self-deprecation and zero political correctness, likening it unfavourably with Elvis Presley’s poor physical health towards the end of his life, he is the writer talking about home in his songs. On stage at Shea stadium we can see the exasperated Lennon playing electric piano with his elbows and talking utter nonsense to the crowd because he knew they couldn’t hear him over the screaming anyway. So, home, the idyll, the escape, the comfort blanket if you like, is referenced during a period of Lennon’s writing for the Beatles which, it could be argued, was something akin to a mental breakdown of sorts, a depression. I would argue that the use of the word home in Lennon’s early songs is a symptom of his fragile mental state during the ever increasing pressure of Beatlemania, which was about to get even heavier.
In ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, Lennon writes about the joy of returning home and how it makes him feel. Are these yet more yearning references to his missing parents? Also, on the album we have John’s ‘When I Get Home’, the first of two Beatles songs with ‘home’ in the title. Here, he has emotional and relationship issues to sort out, but he needs to be home first. Or indeed, he needs to obtain a home, because, perhaps he’s never had the one he wants. Taken in the context of the fact that this song was recorded a month before Lennon did actually, finally, get a home of his own in Surrey, for his wife and son as well, this song seems to have even more direct meaning. It’s a curious coincidence maybe that John’s mother Julia was killed in July 1958 and here he was, moving house – a known stress – in July 1964, six years after the trauma of losing her (he had also moved out of Newcastle Road in July 1946). No surprise perhaps that, at this particular time, a confused and possibly fragile songwriter just happens to put thirteen references to ‘home’ in his work.
On the next album, sometimes considered to be markedly more introspective, Beatles for Sale, we have Lennon singing about home again, right from the off. In ‘No Reply’ we have a direct contrast to ‘All I’ve Got To Do’, because now he’s saying his efforts to communicate by phone are being ignored, possibly deliberately. Has he woken up from the delusion or is it, in fact, deepening? There’s now some paranoia creeping in. Compare McCartney’s output from this period, which features no use of the word ‘home’ at all. It has long been contended that of the three songwriters, Paul was the one least negatively affected by the touring and the impact of Beatlemania; that he somehow was able to absorb much of the craziness and maybe even was able to thrive off it.
By the time we get to Help! (1965), two major things are going on in Lennon’s world specifically. He (like the others) is smoking marijuana. He’s also stopped subconsciously calling for help in his work by talking about home and instead opted for a full-on confession, in a song, that he’s struggling. The lyrics of ‘Help!’ are possibly the first example of Lennon writing a song that cannot be interpreted as being primarily about romance. This is about his mental state. He uses the word ‘insecure’. The upbeat arrangement disguises the fact that the man is suffering and the record-buying public are all walking around singing about his pain. His growth as a songwriter coupled with the influence of marijuana (the two are linked) has, in a sense, redirected his mind sufficiently to start exploring his problems in his work, even if, as they would all discover, no drug can ever really mask the issues or make them go away. This is another theme he would later return to in 1970, on the track ‘I Found Out’. On Help! all the writers are feeling vulnerable to a degree, Harrison singing about loneliness on the track ‘I Need You’ and McCartney penning ‘Wait’ (containing the word ‘home’, but not used until the next album) and ‘Yesterday’. Ironically, the world can’t get enough of the Beatles, even if they are blatantly telling us that things are difficult. They are halfway through the 1960s and about as far away from home as they will ever be. The pressures of touring continue and so, the next LP, Rubber Soul (1965), features the many complex aspects of Lennon’s personality filtered through a marijuana haze, to produce some of his greatest work to date, along with one example of his worst.
On ‘In My Life’, a much more calm, almost serene, Lennon takes us on a nostalgic journey and although he doesn’t mention ‘home’ specifically, the entire song is a vibrant metaphor for his inner peace, presumably attained with the aid of weed, formerly expressed through his repeated desire to find that home which has eluded him. In the lyrics of ‘Nowhere Man’ we see Lennon talking about himself again and the empty environment referred to is actually his house out in Surrey. There were times when Lennon probably felt a little ‘out of it’ (incredible really, given the influence the Beatles now wielded) because he wasn’t living up in town like McCartney. On ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ we get the dark suggestion that he might have actually burned down someone’s room (home), if you interpret it that way and on ‘Run for Your Life’, one of his most immature and offensive sets of lyrics, he seems to be suggesting he’d kill his partner in a jealous rage. Although the opening lines are lifted from another song – ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ (house = home, you see the connection) recorded by Elvis, that is no excuse and it’s an area that rock’n’roll has strayed into numerous times over the years, much to its shame. This particular song is a blight on Rubber Soul and probably their worst ever. Quite the opposite of ‘In My Life’, even if it shares the word ‘life’ in its title. This song is problematic as is this aspect of his personality – pent up rage, for being abandoned, twice, may explain, but does not justify it. To Lennon’s credit, he is on record as disliking the song himself. At any rate, that is it, now, for ‘home’ references from Lennon apart from one on ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and a couple of times on ‘The One After 909’ from Let It Be (1970), but this track was actually written some time between 1957 and 1960. The reference on the Sgt Pepper track is actually quite instructive as it has the protagonist initially going home, but is then distracted by a slew of other activities, much in the same way as the song’s author.
So, what is fascinating is that just as acid takes hold of Lennon and Harrison and the touring stops, so too do John’s explicit references to ‘home’, but guess what, this is where McCartney’s begin in earnest. On Revolver, John is now singing about LSD and its effects, pretty much abandoning romance as a theme and writing about whatever happens to him, be it mundane or part of an acid-awakening. His overall talent as a songwriter wins through though, meaning that the quality of the songs never suffers, in fact, he manages to push pop music forward more than ever, by using the studio to reproduce the sounds he hears in his head. Paul mentions ‘home’ on ‘For No One’, putting one protagonist indoors and the other outside, possibly an oblique reference to his reticence to embrace acid like Lennon – he has even said more than once since that he felt that taking LSD would result in not being able to ever return home, in a figurative sense! Well, fancy that. Also interesting is Paul’s famous recollection of the Beatles boarding a British Airways flight out of the Philippines, after causing uproar by supposedly ‘snubbing’ the first family, having been aggressively manhandled at the airport and then kissing the seats on the plane because it was from home. Home, that focal point of obsession for both Lennon and McCartney, the intensity of which swings on a fulcrum as dynamics within the band change.
Before work begins on the Sgt Pepper album, both Lennon and McCartney hark back to their childhoods by writing two songs about Liverpool – home in other words, as a way of finding some common frame of reference and a theme to move forward with. On ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ then, home is a combination of reality and the surreal for Lennon, both lyrically and sonically, while ‘Penny Lane’ is memory lane for McCartney and indeed all of them. Acid and the lack of touring pressure, for Lennon, seems to have freed him temporarily from his personal crises and enabled him to almost rebuild his identity, seemingly split into pieces on Rubber Soul. Is this him talking to Paul or himself? No wonder they started sending messages to each other in songs after the band split up. For Paul, now a studio musician and under considerable pressure to try acid, he begins overtly yearning for home in his lyrics. It is clearly a symptom of anxiety for both men, which comes and goes depending on how comfortable they are with a situation. So, on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, McCartney is directly mentioning home nine times, as well as singing about Liverpool-based experiences on ‘A Day in the Life’. On the title track he sings to the listener, inverting the situation, as if suggesting ‘you won’t see me (pun intended) on a stage, so you’ll have to buy this album. From now on, we live in YOUR home’.
Now we get ‘She’s Leaving Home’ from Paul, which on one level is a song which is about exactly what it says in the title. Subconsciously though, is this McCartney singing about himself again, through a story smokescreen and announcing to everyone that he too has finally taken the LSD route? The protagonist has taken the plunge and done it. Food for thought. Just for good measure, Paul throws in another ‘home’ reference on ‘Lovely Rita’, just the one though, which fits with the surreal narrative in the song. Next up, we get the one and only reference to ‘home’ from George in a song, while in the Beatles. ‘It’s All Too Much’ does not see the light of day until the Yellow Submarine album of 1969 (‘Yellow Submarine’, incidentally, another example of Paul singing about a place to live, without directly mentioning ‘home’) but when it does, it reveals another subconscious anxiety about the use of acid, but in a more glib, ‘British’ way, implying the whole experience needs to be completed by teatime. This line rather neatly sums up three of the group’s underlying obsessions of the era – acid, home and tea. ‘Love’, their other preoccupation, also features elsewhere in the lyrics. Quite appropriate for a track often cited by critics as a slice of homespun psychedelia and a far cry from the darker sounds emerging from other bands, particularly in America, who were also using the drug. The Beatles launching themselves into transcendental meditation under the guidance of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh after the death of Brian Epstein does unlock the door to a swathe of creativity within the group, with all of them presenting new material for demos, for the first time ever. However, it seems to have done little to reduce tension within the band, who find they have to contend with all kinds of business nonsense when they return to the U.K. Although Paul does adopt meditation as part of his regular mindfulness routine, it doesn’t seem to have prevented the word ‘home’ from popping up in his lyrics on his new songs, while John, on the other hand, is looking in an entirely new direction.
On The Beatles (1968) otherwise known as The White Album, all ‘home’ references come from Paul again, perhaps thinly disguising the fact that he is now the songwriter of the two beginning to feel the pressure of holding the group together, as John discovers Yoko Ono and heroin. ‘Back in the USSR’ may be a pastiche but the line about being home screams out at me every time. On ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, the characters achieve domestic bliss and on ‘Honey Pie’, the singer (Paul) implores his absent love (or possibly mother) to return. Ringo gets in on the ‘home’ act too, sort of, in ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, his first set of lyrics for the band, referring to physical parts of his house, featuring in his song asking not to be overlooked.
Following the incredible tension and fragmentation of the White Album sessions, Paul’s grand plan is now to get back to what the group used to be before the Beatlemania and the drugs and the business problems laid at their feet after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967. The singer of ‘Get Back’ telling one of the song’s invented characters to follow the advice of its title, feels like it could either be Paul calling out to John or to himself, desperate to hold on to the Beatles while interest is eroding from both John and George. Lennon is keen to explore artistic avenues with Yoko and George is bringing material to the sessions which is frankly as good as, if not better than theirs. The song ‘Two of Us’, sees Paul incorporate the word ‘home’ into his lyrics no less than twelve times, while ‘The Long and Winding Road’ refers to a thoroughfare in Scotland which takes one to Paul’s farm, a location he would retreat to later in the year as the group disintegrated. On ‘Let It Be’, he finally gives up any attempt to disguise the fact that he’s singing about his mother by referencing her directly. Plans to perform their newly written material in some exotic location soon ebb away when it becomes obvious nobody can be bothered and there’s no time anyway, so they decide to appear live on the roof of the Apple Offices building in Savile Row and after that, all go home afterwards.
But it doesn’t end here. There’s still Abbey Road (1969) to consider. The Beatles’ actual chronological swansong is an epic work, my personal favourite LP of theirs and contains another three open references to ‘home’, five if you include the word ‘homeward’. It’s also called Abbey Road because that is where the group recorded the bulk of their material throughout the 1960s, so in that sense can be viewed as their musical ‘home’. The opening line of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, which has one of the song’s characters poring over scientific equipment at home could well be Paul talking about himself and his upcoming solo album, recorded almost entirely at his home in St John’s Wood, rather than at Abbey Road Studios, also in St John’s Wood. I doubt it though as he had this song during the Get Back sessions, but with Paul, you never know. Ringo Starr surprises once again with his tune ‘Octopus’s Garden’, which is basically him saying ‘I wish I was hidden away in a bolthole somewhere and not dealing with your bull****’. The real tear-jerker for fans comes in ‘Golden Slumbers’ with Paul singing to an imaginary companion, possibly a baby, that there is no way back. That’s it. They (the Beatles) are not going home again, ever. It’s over. There’s also the added irony that Paul probably wrote the tune for this at his father’s home in Liverpool, after seeing the words to the poem ‘Cradle Song’ on some sheet music which had been left on the piano.
John now decides to go cold turkey with the drugs and document it in a song and along with Yoko, confronts many of his demons head-on, including having a home and the death of his mother as well as freeing himself from drugs and the Beatles. Eventually the lure of the United States takes the Lennons overseas permanently, but John’s quest for that ideal home still isn’t over. He sells his Tittenhurst Park estate to Ringo, who lives there (and elsewhere) for many years before selling it on. Ringo’s first solo album, Sentimental Journey (1970), features a photograph of the Empress pub in Liverpool, near to his childhood home, on the front cover. Nostalgia for Liverpool clearly remains in Ringo’s head as he goes on to reference it numerous times throughout his solo career. Through the 1970s Lennon has to battle both with himself AND the U.S. government, who want him to leave. He spends time apart from Yoko, reliving his youth before the Beatles and eventually they move back in together in New York and he is allowed to remain on U.S. soil. In a tragically cruel twist of events he is later shot dead outside his home by a deranged man obsessed with fame.
George Harrison, having purchased Friar Park and moved in in 1970, sets about making his new home totally central to his life. The artwork for his solo album All Things Must Pass (1970), including the famous cover, is shot in the house and grounds. The song ‘Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)’, from that LP is about the original owner of Friar Park. Much of George’s subsequent solo work is recorded in studios he has installed there and the location is also used for music video shoots. The house and the garden occupy much of George’s time as he comes to terms with the legacy of the Beatles. The garden, in particular, is a sanctuary for George and he is on record as saying he felt great relief whenever he came home to the grounds. Another deranged man attacks George at this property shortly before the guitarist’s death in 2001. Fortunately, George and his wife Olivia manage to subdue the attacker. Harrison also enjoyed time away from the U.K., especially in Hawaii, which was an inspiration for some of his greatest later solo work. For Paul McCartney, home continues to be a central theme to his life and career. After his initial solo LP McCartney is recorded at home, he then goes on to work on the album Ram, with his wife Linda, featuring the song ‘Eat at Home’, plus other references to his bucolic life and artwork shot at the farm in Scotland. His biggest solo hit (as Wings) is ‘Mull of Kintyre’, about an area near his home in Scotland, a monster-selling single in 1977/78. He goes on to record more albums at home over the next few decades.
In conclusion then, it is evident that the Beatles, the group who contributed so much to the changes which occurred in the 1960s, were actually just a band of talented musicians looking for a place in the world, which decided to elevate them onto a pedestal. The greatest and most dangerous ‘hysteria’ was not from the fans, but from those failing parts of the Establishment which felt that they could not accept the changing times which the Beatles seemed to typify. The initial effects of this seem to have made one of their songwriters reach out for ‘home’ or a sense of belonging, while the later pressures away from the gruelling touring schedule appear to have transferred the anxiety across to the other. John and Paul were clearly very different personalities, brought together by their love of and talent for music. Far from being the architects of the fall of Western civilisation, I contend that really all each of them was searching for was a life filled with real love, which they believed they could find at home – in the end. There is nothing destructive or malicious about that ambition. All of the Beatles found their physical homes eventually, but their spiritual and eternal homes must surely be in the hearts and minds of all of us who cherish the music, which will never die. Nor will the willingness to be creative and challenge accepted norms, surely the basis of all art?
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