Incidentally, the barber’s shop was called Bioletti’s. In his biography, ‘Many Years From Now,’ Paul recalled, “It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I imagined the banker, it was not a real person, and his slightly dubious habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain. The fire station was a bit of poetic licence; there’s a fire station about half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a third verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line ‘It’s a clean machine.’” The track was recorded in January 1967 and among the musicians who were to perform on overdubs were flautists Ray Swinfield, P.Goody, Manny Winters and Dennis Walton; trumpeters Leon Calvert, Freddy Clayton, Bert Courtley and Duncan Campbell; oboists Dick Morgan and Mike Winfield – and bassist Frank Clarke. Clarke was later to say, “I’ve spent a lifetime playing with top orchestras, yet I’m most famous for playing on 'Penny Lane'.”

Paul was still not satisfied with the track and he was sitting at home watching the BBC2 TV show ‘Masterworks’ with David Mason performing Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto No.2 in F Major. He arranged for Mason to be hired to play trumpet on the ‘Penny Lane’ track and was satisfied with the finished result. Recording manager George Martin commented, “We had no music prepared. We just knew that we wanted little piping interjections. As we came to each little section where we wanted the sound, Paul would think up the notes he wanted and I would write them down for David. The result was unique, something that had never been done in rock music before, and it gave ‘Penny Lane’ a very distinct character.”

The number is one of the most uplifting and cheery of the Beatles' songs and caused problems in Liverpool with fans stealing the actual Penny Lane street signs. It was an act later to be repeated at Abbey Road and resulted in Liverpool Corporation ceasing to make street signs for Penny Lane, settling for painting the street name on buildings instead. It was suggested that Paul might have been inspired by Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Fern Hill’, a nostalgic look at childhood, which Paul had been reading at the time. He composed the number on his piano at his Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood house.

The piano had a psychedelic rainbow painted on it by David Vaughan.
John Lennon helped him on the third verse. ‘Penny Lane’ was issued as a double ‘A’ side with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on Parlophone R5570 on Friday 17th February 1967 when it became the first Beatles single since ‘Love Me Do’ not to hit the No.1 spot, being held at No.2 by the Engelbert Humperdinck hit ‘Release Me’. The British release received its world premier broadcast via the pirate radio station Radio London and Parlophone issued the first 250,000 in special bags with a full colour sleeve. It was released in America on Capitol 5810 on Monday 13th February 1967 with advance orders of over a million copies. This was a record in itself for Capitol, with the highest quantity of a single ever pressed and shipped out in a three-day period. The number topped the charts in the U.S. A different version of the number was included on the ‘Anthology 2’ CD.



Sixties City note:
Stan Williams, a former schoolfriend of John Lennon, identifies the nurse as Beth Davidson in a book about growing up in Liverpool. Williams said Lennon would have known Davidson from his childhood. The lyrics to the song are: "Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout, the pretty nurse is selling poppies from the tray, and though she feels she's in a play, she is anyway."
According to Williams, a group of boys, including Lennon, saw Davidson selling poppies on the street dressed in a cadet nurse's uniform. "In my mind's eye, I still like to visit that special October day in 1954 when Beth had her image trapped within the lens of Lennon's creative imagination," Williams told the Daily Telegraph. Davidson died of cancer in the 1970s.