The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever

Two recordings joined in the middle, about a Liverpool garden

In the autumn of 1966 John Lennon was in Almería, in southern Spain, acting in Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War. Between scenes he wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever” on a guitar. The title was a place, not a dream he had invented for the studio. Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army children’s home in Woolton, Liverpool, a short walk from Aunt Mimi’s house on Menlove Avenue, where he had grown up. As a boy he climbed the wall and played in the grounds with Ivan Vaughan and his other friends.

The Beatles recorded the song at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, between 24 November and 22 December 1966. George Martin produced and Geoff Emerick engineered. The first arrangement was slower. Paul McCartney played the Mellotron flute phrase that opens the record. Lennon then asked for a heavier version, with cellos and trumpets written by Martin. They ended with two finished recordings, in different keys and at different speeds.

Lennon liked the beginning of one and the rest of the other, and he asked Martin to join them. Emerick sped one tape up and slowed the other until the pitch matched, then joined the two together at about the one-minute mark. The join is still there if you listen for the drums: the sound of the kit changes under the vocal. Martin said afterwards that the speeds met more cleanly than he had expected.

The lyric stays inside that uncertainty. Lennon sings that living is easy with eyes closed, then that it is getting hard to be someone. He was not describing a drug manual. He was describing the gap between the boy in the Woolton garden and the man who had just stopped touring.