I’m sure I’ve told this anecdote before, but it was seeing the videos for ‘Penny Lane’ along a few Beatle promos (‘Hey Bulldog’, ‘The Night Before’) that fully changed my mind about seeing what all this hype about the Beatles was. In fact, I am certain I have, because I dedicated a whole post to it in about 2014. To summarise that post, I wasn’t really sure about the Beatles before 2009, but then the Rock Band game came out alongside the remasters. VH1 had a timeslot dedicated to Beatles videos. ‘Penny Lane’ was one of them, and upon hearing the music and seeing the jovial chemistry between these four people on-screen – plus, the supposed agreement that this was the best band of all time – I sent myself into the void and ended up researching everything there was to know about the group.

‘Penny Lane’ is one of my favourite Beatles songs. Years after humming the track to myself on the way to school when I was 14, it still brings a happy feeling when those ringing bass notes mark the sudden introduction. But it’s not just for nostalgia’s sake that I appear to be clinging onto this one for some sort of support. Just in general, the track is executed to perfection. Paul McCartney wrote a song about a street in Liverpool he would frequently pass through as a kid, mirroring the same approach John Lennon took on for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. While that track became the experimental psychedelic exhibition, ‘Penny Lane’ was much straighter in approach whilst still maintaining a regal air about it with all the woodwinds and trumpets and other instrumentation that were more typical of an orchestra than a rock band.

As I said earlier, the music video played a big part in me wanting to find out more Beatles stuff. In the context of their careers, it was made at the point where the Beatles made it clear they weren’t going on tour anymore. The videos for ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were also revealed after an extended break, in which people were wondering if the Beatles bubble had burst and they were heading for a split. They came back with moustaches and promo videos where they weren’t lipsyncing to the words or ‘playing’ their instruments. They make it most clear in this one in a very obvious manner. They ride past their instruments on their horses as if they are above them, to say ‘we’re not doing that stuff anymore’. When John Lennon starts saying “In Penny Lane” at 1:46, the camera switches to another scene as if to say ‘Nope. We don’t do that here.’ And when they are actually handed their instruments at the end, they pretend they have no idea what they are and start fiddling about with them, while Lennon flips a table over because he didn’t get his guitar. It’s a funny, little anti-music video, signifying that these boys were now men. Men with funny looking moustaches.