The Beatles – Paperback Writer

A letter to a publisher, and a bass louder than EMI allowed

On 13 April 1966 The Beatles booked EMI Studio Three at Abbey Road for a song Paul McCartney had brought in that week. He had driven to John Lennon’s house at Kenwood, in Weybridge, because he wanted to write something that was not another love song. The idea was a letter. A writer begs a publisher to read his novel, and the first line is the greeting: “Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?” They finished the words in the music room that afternoon. Lennon helped with the lines. Under the chorus, the backing voices sing the old French round “Frère Jacques”, almost as a joke.

The session ran into 14 April, and moved between Studio Three and Studio Two. George Martin produced. Geoff Emerick, the engineer, wanted McCartney’s bass louder than EMI’s house rules usually allowed. He put a loudspeaker in front of the bass cabinet and used that speaker as a microphone, so the low notes sat further forward. The guitar figure is bright and quick. The bass is the part that hits first.

Ken Townsend, a technical engineer at Abbey Road, had just built a machine that copies a vocal and lays the copy a fraction of a second later. Lennon hated singing the same line twice to thicken it. The machine did the second pass for him. “Paperback Writer” uses that copy on the lead vocal. You hear one voice, slightly widened, not two separate performances stacked by hand.

The story in the lyric is small and specific. The writer claims his book is a novel of a dirty man whose son is working for the Daily Mail, and he offers a sonnet if the publisher wants one. McCartney was not describing his own career. He was tired of another song about holding hands.