Vaughan Willmore tells of how the most celebrated pop song of the 20th century was written in the back of a taxi on the way to the Algarve.
It was May 1965 and the height of Beatlemania when Paul McCartney landed at Lisbon airport ahead of a then arduous five-hour journey to the sunnier climes of the Algarve. It was a holiday he’d been looking forward to for weeks: a chance to escape the pressure of filming The Beatles second film, Help, and to spend time with his long-standing girlfriend, Jane Asher. As it transpired, McCartney’s journey to the Algarve would also be an opportunity to compose the lyrics to one of the most popular songs ever written.
In his new book, The Lyrics:1956 to the Present, Paul McCartney tells of how he’d awoken one morning with a melody in his head. It was a tune so fully formed he was convinced it was an old standard from his youth. The very next day he played it to his friend and songwriting partner John Lennon, who had no recollection of hearing it before. After speaking with other friends, McCartney realised the melody didn’t exist anywhere except in his head. He describes in the book how having a melody appear like that was so unusual it felt akin to ‘finding a £10 note in the street’. To help him remember it, he added ‘dummy’ lyrics, along the lines of ‘scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs’.
The Lyrics:1956 to the Present, published November 2021 by Penguin
The melody remained, without words, until he arrived in Portugal. As he explains in the book, “We were heading down to Albufeira and I was in the back of the car. It was very hot and very dusty and I was sort of half asleep. One of the things I like to do when I’m like that is try to think. I started to think through other options to fit the melody and the syllables of ‘scram-bled-eggs’. You have possibilities like yes-ter-day and sud-den-ly. I also remember thinking: people like sad songs. I like sad songs. By the time I got to Albufeira, I’d completed the lyrics.”
On reaching Albufeira, a then quieter but burgeoning resort popular with celebrities of the day, McCartney met up with his friend, the Shadows guitarist Bruce Welch, to whom he played the melody, resplendent with its new lyrics. In the coming days, McCartney would refine the lyrics. He stayed in Portugal for the best part of two weeks before leaving a day earlier than planned as Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, wanted the Fab Four together in London, ready for the breaking news they were to receive MBEs from the Queen.
‘Yesterday’ was voted the best song of the 20th century in a BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and the Number 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine. It’s one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music, with over 2,000 recorded versions, including ones by Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye.
Nearly 60 years after it was written, the song’s lyrics of lost love and better days passed continue to resonate, which is pretty impressive given that the lyrics were scribbled on an envelope in the back of a taxi. And even more remarkable when considering that Paul McCartney wrote those lyrics when he was just 22 years old.
