Nothing is real

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ double A-side single, “Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever”. Oddly enough, after the Beatles had started their run of No. 1 hits in 1963 with the “Please Please Me” single, this - arguably their best - was the first of their singles not to top the charts, reaching only second place. 

John Lennon reckoned that “Strawberry Fields” was possibly his greatest achievement, and I agree, although there are plenty of others that come close. It’s magnificent, hauntingly strange, out there on its own. Lennon at his most fundamental, aided by the recording magic of George Martin at Abbey Road studios, where famously two seemingly incompatible versions of the song were spliced together. “Strawberry Fields”, backed (or fronted, according to one’s taste) by McCartney’s “Penny Lane”, constituted a pair of startlingly new songs at the time, songs of a type we had never heard before. Two very different yet complementary evocations of a world now scarcely recognisable, a world that, for their composers, wasn’t the trippy late 1960s but the late Forties going on into the early Fifties. Autobiographical songs. Childhood in the Liverpool suburbs.

A child’s world, where the most ordinary things were extraordinary, puzzling, magical. The mysteries of adult society, the very sense of being alive, wonder.  Banalities, commonplaces, treasures. A pretty nurse selling poppies, a banker waiting to have his hair trimmed, a fireman rushing in, the overgrown garden of a former Salvation Army home, blue suburban skies. Both of those songs speak to me of a kind of silence that characterised those times, the silence of cold, bright, breath-visible early mornings, when life and all its possibilities stretched ahead. A future that everyone assumed would just go on getting better and better, as would the music. Peace and love, man. A cliché that’s easy to poke fun at. What happened?

Part of what happened was what the world woke up to on the morning of 9th December 1980. Wicked and senseless beyond belief. And today? Fracture, hatred, alienation, craziness, mediocrity. Liverpool has changed too. The city eventually got round to celebrating its musical heroes, marketing them, exploiting their legend. But go to those song locations now – along Smithdown Road and Beaconsfield Road - and there’s not much left, a few graffiti, a space where a road sign has been nicked, a laconically named café, a coachload of Magical Mystery Tourists. 

So long ago; was it just a dream? What have we lost? What have we gone and done?

Take a listen, and marvel. Strawberry Fields forever.