Пенни Лейн: История песни The Beatles

1967 single by the Beatles
the song

"Penny Lane" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a double A side single with "Strawberry Fields Forever" in February 1967. It was written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. The lyrics refer to Penny Lane, a street in Liverpool, and make mention of the sights and characters that McCartney recalled from his upbringing in the city. The Beatles began recording "Penny Lane" in December 1966, intending it as a song for their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Instead, after it was issued as a single to satisfy record company demand for a new release, the band adhered to their policy of omitting previously released singles from their albums. The song features numerous modulations that occur mid verse and between its choruses. Session musician David Mason played a piccolo trumpet solo for its bridge section. "Penny Lane" was a top five hit across Europe and topped the US Billboard Hot 100. In Britain, it was the first Beatles single since "Please Please Me" in 1963 to fail to reach number 1 on the Record Retailer chart. In November 1967, "Penny Lane" was included on the US Magical Mystery Tour album. In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked the track at number 280 on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". In 2006, Mojo ranked the song at number 9 of "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs". In 2011, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Penny Lane is a road in the south Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill. The name also applies to the area surrounding its junction with Smithdown Road and Allerton Road, and to the roundabout at Smithdown Place that was the location for a major bus terminus, originally an important tram junction of Liverpool Corporation Tramways. The roundabout was a frequent stopping place for John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison during their years as schoolchildren and students. Bus journeys via Penny Lane and the area itself subsequently became familiar elements in the early years of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership. In 2009, McCartney reflected:
"Penny Lane" was kind of nostalgic, but it was really [about] a place that John and I knew 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. Lennon's original lyrics for "In My Life" had included a reference to Penny Lane. Soon after the Beatles recorded "In My Life" in October 1965, McCartney mentioned to an interviewer that he wanted to write a song about Penny Lane. A year later, he was spurred to write the song once presented with Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever". McCartney also cited Dylan Thomas's nostalgic poem "Fern Hill" as an inspiration for "Penny Lane". Lennon co wrote the lyrics with McCartney. He recalled in a 1970 interview: "The bank was there, and that was where the tram sheds were and people waiting and the inspector stood there, the fire engines were down there. It was reliving childhood." Writing for the song took place early in the sessions for what became the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which commenced following a three month period when the Beatles had pursued individual interests. Beatles biographer Ian MacDonald suggested an LSD influence, saying that the lyrical imagery points to McCartney first taking LSD in late 1966. MacDonald concluded that the lyric "And though she feels as if she's in a play / She is anyway" was one of the more "LSD redolent phrases" in the Beatles' catalogue. Music critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler similarly described the subject matter as "essentially 'Liverpool on a sunny hallucinogenic afternoon'".

"Penny Lane" begins in the key of B major and is in common time throughout. The song comprises three rounds of two verses and a chorus, with the chorus repeated during the final round. According to music critic and musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, writing in his 1973 book Twilight of the Gods: "For both musical and verbal reasons, the song comes out as childishly merry yet dreamily wild at the same time. The hallucinatory feeling concerns problems of identity rather than drugs specifically, asking what, among our childhood memories, is reality and what is illusion."

Production began in Studio 2 at EMI Studios on 29 December 1966 with piano as the main instrument. McCartney intended the song to have a "clean" sound akin to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album. Engineer Geoff Emerick recalled McCartney playing Pet Sounds repeatedly during recording session breaks, adding that "it wasn't altogether unsurprising [when] he wanted 'a really clean American sound'" for "Penny Lane". Initially, McCartney recorded keyboard parts onto the individual tracks of the four track tape: a basic piano rhythm on track one; a second piano, recorded through a Vox guitar amplifier with added reverb, on track two; a prepared piano producing a "honky tonk" sound on track three; and percussion effects and a harmonium playing high notes fed through the guitar amplifier on track four. On 30 December, the four tracks were mixed together to form the first track of a new tape. In author Mark Hertsgaard's description, the trumpet solo is the recording's "pièce de résistance" and evokes a "sense of freedom, energy, and sheer happiness". Author Jonathan Gould describes the sound as "impossibly high and bright", and says that the solo represents a "neo Baroque pastiche of every fanfare ever blown" and casts a magical spell that allows the Beatles to insert the risqué "Four of fish and finger pies" line into the chorus that follows. Classical music scholar Barry Millington described Mason's contribution as "surreal, unearthly a fusion of classical and rock" and commented that "so high does the part go", it was mistakenly assumed to have been sped up after recording. The two and six disc anniversary editions also featured a new remix of "Penny Lane" prepared by Giles Martin, designed to allow the keyboard parts to be heard distinctly. – such as the number 46 bus to Penny Lane, the shelter on the roundabout, and a fireman riding a white horse – but street scenes featuring the Beatles were instead filmed in and around Angel Lane in Stratford, in the east of London. This filming includes the band members riding horses and took place on 5 February. Another street scene features only Lennon, walking along King's Road, Chelsea among a crowd in a manner that author Robert Rodriguez terms "as if in a nostalgic reverie". More filming was done in Knole Park in Sevenoaks, where the clip for "Strawberry Fields Forever" had been filmed the week before. Shot on 7 February, this footage includes further horse riding scenes, with the band members dressed in matching red tunics, and the closing scene, when they arrive at a table set up in the park, bearing a large candelabra. During the horse ride, they pass by a stage filled with their guitars and drum kit, the latter bearing the familiar Beatles logo. The musicians sit at the table, where they are waited on by two attendants (played by Bramwell and Mal Evans) dressed in Renaissance era costumes and wigs, and presented with their musical instruments. According to music critic Chris Ingham, the film appears to be "little more than an extra curricular afterthought" relative to the surreal and experimental "Strawberry Fields Forever" clip. He adds that it nevertheless closes with "another iconoclastic gesture" as Lennon overturns the table and scatters its contents. In their avoidance of any performance related content, the clips developed the promotional medium the Beatles had introduced in 1966 with their clips for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain". Martin came to regret the decision to omit the two songs, describing it as "the biggest mistake of my professional life". Against the Beatles' wishes, "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" were included on the US Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967. In 2017, both songs were included on the two disc and six disc 50th anniversary editions of Sgt. Pepper.

In Britain, most reviewers were initially confused by the single and predicted that the Beatles' creative advances might not be rewarded in record sales. The commercial qualities of "Penny Lane" ensured that it was the more favourably received of the two songs. Melody Maker said the brass parts were "beautifully arranged" and concluded: "Tinged with sentimentality, the number slowly builds into an urgent, colourful and vivid recollection of the Liverpool street that the Beatles remember so clearly." An editorial in The Times said: "'Penny Lane' looks back to the days when parochialism was not an attitude to be derided. While it may seem that the commonplace suburb is a pleasanter source of inspiration than a psychedelic ecstasy, it may also be that the song is instinctively satisfying a youthful appetite for simplicity " This was due to chart protocol whereby only the sales of the better selling side of a double A side were eligible, and the record's overall sales were effectively halved. On the national chart compiled by Melody Maker, the combination was number 1 for three weeks. Its failure to top the Record Retailer chart provoked comments in the UK press that the Beatles' position of eminence was at an end, with headlines such as "Has the Bubble Burst?" The band were unperturbed by the result. In Starr's recollection, it was a "relief" and "took the pressure off" the group, while Lennon said in a late 1966 interview: "We sort of half hope for the downfall. A nice downfall. Then we would just be a pleasant old memory." In the United States, the song became the band's 13th single to reach number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, doing so for a week before being knocked off by the Turtles' "Happy Together". With "Penny Lane" as the favoured side, the single was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America on 20 March 1967. There, the single initiated an upsurge in the ongoing critical discourse on the aesthetics and artistry of pop music, as, centring on the Beatles' work, writers sought to elevate pop in the cultural landscape for the first time. One of these laudatory appraisals came from Time magazine, whose writers said that the Beatles had "bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music". In his television show Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein highlighted the trumpet solo on "Penny Lane" among examples of the genre's eclectic qualities that made contemporary pop music worthy of recognition as art. The single was also number 1 in Australia (for five weeks), West Germany (four weeks), the Netherlands and New Zealand (each for three weeks), Canada, Denmark and Malaysia. In France, it peaked at number 4.

According to historian David Simonelli, further to "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1966, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" "establish[ed] the Beatles as the most avant garde [pop] composers of the postwar era". He also says:
With this double sided single, the Beatles planted the flag of Romanticism squarely at the center of psychedelic rock. They emphasized innocence, childhood as purity, improvisation, and the spirits of individuality and community united as one. For the next three to five years, these ideals would dominate rock music on both sides of the Atlantic. The Beatles' vision dominated the entire rock music world. Ian MacDonald comments on "Penny Lane"'s place in an era of high optimism in Britain marked by a vibrant arts scene, England's victory in the 1966 World Cup, and the Beatles' standing as "arbiters of a positive new age" in which outdated social mores would be superseded by a young, classless worldview. He writes: "With its vision of 'blue suburban skies' and boundlessly confident vigour, 'Penny Lane' distills the spirit of that time more perfectly than any other creative product of the mid Sixties. Couched in the primary colours of a picture book, yet observed with the slyness of a gang of kids straggling home from school, 'Penny Lane' is both naive and knowing – but above all thrilled to be alive." MacDonald adds that although the song "fathered a rather smug English pop vogue for brass bands and gruff Northern imagery", its sequence in the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine demonstrated it to be "as subversively hallucinatory as 'Strawberry Fields'". Music critic Tim Riley praised the musical arrangement and said the song was "as perfect as pop gets". He also wrote: "'Penny Lane' survives as a classic because its surface charm masks its structural intelligence – the appeal is as simple and sweet as the youthful glow it recaptures." Some commentators have described the pairing as pop music's best double A side. On the magazine's 2021 revised list, the song appears at number 280. In Mojos list of "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs", published in 2006, the song appeared at number 9. In his commentary on the track, Neil Innes admired McCartney's melodic gifts and the key changes, and he described the song as "mould breaking" with lyrics that "ran like a movie". Sociologist Andy Bennett views the characters in the lyrics as representing a "story book version of British suburban life", an approach that he says anticipated television soap operas such as Brookside and EastEnders. Bennett writes that a similar notion of "Britishness" informed music videos by Britpop acts in the 1990s, particularly Blur's "Parklife", which brought to life some of the lyrical imagery of Lennon–McCartney songs and the "utopian reminiscing" evident in "Penny Lane". The promotional clips for "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" are recognised as pioneering works in the medium of music video. In 1985, they were the oldest selections included in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'s exhibition of the most influential music videos. The two films occupied a similar place in MoMA's 2003 "Golden Oldies of Music Video" exhibition, where they were presented by avant garde artist Laurie Anderson. Liverpool poet Roger McGough credited "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" as the first examples of British streets and locations being celebrated in pop music and of the Beatles creating a "mythology" for Liverpool. The song's popularity led to the regular theft of Penny Lane street signs and the area becoming one of the city's major tourist attractions. As of 2014, the roundabout was home to the Sgt. Pepper Bistro & Bus Shelter, although the business had long ceased operating. The feature films Wonderwall (for which Harrison supplied the instrumental musical score in 1968) and Almost Famous include characters named after the song. Former adult film star Jennifer Ketcham said she chose her pseudonym Penny Flame to reflect her fondness of the Beatles song and marijuana.

In 1969, the Beatles' publishing company Northern Songs was acquired by ATV, a media company owned by Lew Grade. By 1985, ATV was being run by Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes à Court, who decided to sell the catalogue to Michael Jackson. As of 2009, Catherine Holmes à Court Mather was still the copyright owner of "Penny Lane", which is one of the few Lennon–McCartney songs not owned by Sony Music Publishing. "Penny Lane" was instantly popular with both contemporary pop artists and supper club entertainers. According to author Alan Clayson, it was one of several McCartney compositions that "walked a safe and accessible line" and allowed easy interpretation during a period when "schmaltz was represented in the charts as much as psychedelia". Artists who have covered the song include Amen Corner, Judy Collins, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, Engelbert Humperdinck, James Last, Enoch Light, Kenny Rankin, John Valby, Newton Wayland and Kai Winding. McCartney has regularly included the song in his tour set lists. He first performed it on his New World Tour in 1993. Elvis Costello performed "Penny Lane" during a concert at the White House in June 2010 when McCartney received the Gershwin Prize from President Barack Obama. In his introduction to the song, Costello said that his mother had grown up less than a mile from Penny Lane, and so hearing the Beatles single had been a powerful moment for him and his family.