‘Imagine all the lonely people’: Belonging and isolation in

the songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney

© James McGrath, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2008

[From the book Displacement and Belonging in the Contemporary World,

ed. Richard Ganis, University of Salford University

Publishing, 2008, pp.113-28].

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‘Imagine all the lonely people’: Belonging and isolation in

the songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney

James McGrath

1. Introduction

“You want to belong but you don’t want to belong because you

cannot belong”: this is how John Lennon summarized his

lifelong perspective in 1980, weeks before his death (Sheff,

1981: 159). In 1967, Paul McCartney sang: “It really doesn’t

matter if I’m wrong I’m right/ Where I belong I’m right/

Where I belong” (‘Fixing A Hole’). These cumbersome quotes

typify the complexity of belonging as a theme in Lennon and

McCartney’s songs, both as leaders of The Beatles (1960-69),

and as solo artists. This paper compares their different

approaches to ideas of belonging in a selection of songs

addressing aspects of home, class, nation and religion.

Equally, it explores ideas of not belonging, through

expressions of isolation. Two ‘modes’ of belonging are

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discussed. Passive belonging signifies compliance (whether

implicit or explicit) with culturally-given ideas of shared

existence. Negative belonging represents resistance to a

cultural idea of belonging, but also, through opposition,

engagement with it. Two interdisciplinary studies are cited,

to consider micro-cultural and macro-cultural ideas of

belonging respectively: Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy:

Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and

Entertainments (1957), and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined

Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).

The Uses of Literacy, based significantly on Hoggart’s

personal experiences of growing up in working-class areas of

Leeds, sympathetically describes Northern English working-

class life, while arguing that working-class attitudes were

being manipulated by “mass art”, including popular music.

Hoggart’s stance is broadly socialist, but his primary

concern is the working-classes’ “cultural subordination”,

ahead of their “economic subordination” (1957: 243-4). He

argues that as the working-classes’ material conditions

improved, their money was being exploited by vacuous

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entertainments. Hoggart warns that, owing to producers’ aims

that its commercial appeal be as wide as possible, mass art

“cannot genuinely explore experience” (1957: 181), and that,

while failing to engage with “the fibre of life” as

experienced by the working-classes (1957: 237), it

discourages them from looking “outwards or upwards” to

engage with contemporary culture (1957: 244).

Hoggart defines “core” working-class attitudes as

prioritizing the “personal and concrete”; that which is

“yours and real”, in the family, home and neighbourhood

(1957: 33). His representation of working-class life

suggests that the majority live in passive belonging under

conditions of cultural isolation, and the “core” focus on the

personal and concrete can be read as a mark of this. The

personal and concrete signify that which belongs to working-

class people within a culture otherwise defined by their

subordination. However, two of Hoggart’s key models

illustrate the grip of working-class

culture as an idea of “belonging” (1957: 19). He discusses

how the working-classes view society as divided between

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“Them”—those in authority or power—and “Us”: the working-

classes as imagined by themselves (1957: 72). This divide

yields Hoggart’s term “uprooting” (1957: Ch. 10). The

uprooted individual is one of working-class origin who,

through achievement, is distanced from this culture, but

rather than ‘becoming’ middle-class, “belongs now to no

class” (1957: 300).

While Hoggart relates “belonging” to the personal and

concrete, Anderson locates “community” in the imagination.

Thus, Anderson, ahead of Hoggart, provides models for

discussing negative belonging, and possibilities of

difference. Anderson’s arguments are cited to discuss what

this paper calls ‘the personal and conceptual’: how macro-

cultural notions of belonging are imagined by individuals.

Anderson defines the nation as an “imagined” community

because the members of even the smallest nation will never

know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear

of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their

communion (Anderson, 1983: 6).

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Anderson’s micro-theoretical terms valuably identify

narrative techniques by which texts—including newspapers,

novels and poems—reinforce ideas of national belonging.

“Simultaneity” refers to apprehensions of shared

“homogenous, empty time”, enabling individuals to imagine

co-existence with unseen others (Anderson, 1983: Ch. 2).

“Sociological landscape” refers to how nations are

represented in texts, and the metonymic significance of the

images therein (ibid).

Anderson historicizes nationalism as, effectively, a

macro-cultural form of negative belonging, arguing that its

origins lie in late eighteenth century Mexican, Venezuelan

and Peruvian national movements, conceived in defiance of

Spanish imperialism (1983: Ch. 4). His key macro-theoretical

concern, however, is that nationalism has subsequently

become a problematic obstacle to the fulfilment of Marxist

theory. Emphasising Marx and Engels’ 1848 declaration that

“The proletariat of each country must … first of all settle

matters with its own bourgeoisie” (in Anderson, 1983: 3-4),

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Anderson confronts contradictions between theory and

history, highlighting the paradox of wars between Vietnam,

Cambodia and China, despite their ostensibly shared

Communist ideologies (1983: 1). Yet, Anderson argues that

nationalism represents not a defeat for Marxist theory, but

an “anomaly”; Imagined Communities thus explores “why, today”,

nations “command such profound emotional legitimacy” (1983:

4).

To argue the historical anomalousness of nationalism,

Anderson compares it with a preceding dominant cultural

system: religion. He consistently writes of nationalism as,

in effect, a transformation of religion; the nation “is

imagined as sovereign” (1983: 7). His model of the nation as

imagined community suggests a sovereign entity co-existing

with each individual, yet never seen in full. The

implication here is that redemption has already occurred;

belonging through, and in, and with the sovereign—national

“community”—has been attained.

Yet, Anderson discusses texts—including nations and

nationalisms, as well as novels and poems—in terms of how

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these have been read by historians and critics, at the

expense of broader representations of the people who are the

substance, and indeed, authors of imagined communities.

Anderson does not significantly confront questions of

whether this “emotional legitimacy”—or passive belonging—is

applicable to all social classes; nor does he consider overt

impulses of negative belonging which may undermine ideas of

national community. For this reason, Lennon and McCartney’s

expressions of personal and cultural isolation—along with

Hoggart’s discussions of cultural divisions, between “Them

and Us”—present instructive, micro-cultural counterparts to

Anderson’s suggestion of an all-pervasive idea of national

“communion”, in “the minds of each”.

2. Two days in the life

To demonstrate similarities and differences in Lennon and

McCartney’s representations of the ‘national’ experience,

the crucial song is ‘A Day In The Life’ (1967). Arguably

their most substantial collaboration, this comprises two

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separately-written narratives, each sung by the author. Its

sociological landscape encompasses the House of Lords, the

English army, ‘Blackburn, Lancashire’ and the Albert Hall.

It suggests, then, a day in ‘the’ English life. What unifies

these metonyms—all occurring in Lennon’s verses—is the

singer’s imagining of England as prompted by a newspaper.

Newspapers, Anderson argues, daily reinforce (passive)

belonging in the idea of national community by juxtaposing

stories of no inherent connection beyond the implication

that they are of ‘national’ interest; “the linkage between

them is imagined”, as, in most instances, is the reader’s

linkage with the events to which they refer (1983: 33). Yet,

Lennon’s response is dissonant with the tone of the reports:

“though the news was rather sad/ Well, I just had to laugh”.

Lennon described writing the song “with The Daily Mail

propped up in front of me” (Davies, 1968: 357), and noticing

two stories, one referring to Tara Browne, “the Guinness

heir who killed himself in a car” and one “about four

thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn” (Sheff, 1981:

183-4). The lyric alludes to these in the lines “he blew his

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mind out in a car” and “four thousand holes in Blackburn,

Lancashire”. The Conservative Mail—then a broadsheet,

bearing the emblem “For Queen and commonwealth”—was, perhaps

surprisingly, one of Lennon’s choice newspapers. The edition

he used was that of Tuesday 17th January 1967.1

‘A Day In The Life’ illustrates how an imagined

community consists not only of people, but furthermore,

places and institutions, which, for most, exist only in the

imagination. However, imagining community is, in effect, an

act of faith; and, suggesting some indifference to the

nation as an idea of belonging, Lennon defamiliarizes iconic

metonyms of England. “Nobody was really sure” if the man in

the car “was from the House of Lords”; the English army “won

the war” not in reality, but in “a film”; and the Albert

Hall, like Blackburn, is full of “holes”. However,

defamiliarization does not merely make the familiar strange:

it exposes its inherent unknowability. This is also

suggested in Lennon’s invocation not of community, but “a

crowd of people”. In the second verse, the singer imagines

1 The articles are ‘Guinness heir babies to stay with grandmother’ (p. 3) and ‘Far and near’ (p. 7).

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himself at the scene of the car accident; here, he implies

his own negative belonging amidst the crowd, who “turned

away”—while “I just had to look”.

Lennon’s view of England encompasses both the

metropolitan and the provincial. However, McCartney’s view,

in the same song, suggesting the same “day”, is restricted

to the immediate. Invoking an individual imagining the

nation, Lennon’s verses pertain to the personal and

conceptual. McCartney’s verse, contrastingly, narrates

activity, in the personal and concrete. In this song,

simultaneity invokes not communion, but division. It is

insightful to consider these differences in terms of

perspectives, and uses of time, that might be characterized

as middle- and working-class. In Lennon’s three verses,

describing reading, the delivery is leisurely and

contemplative. McCartney’s single verse is hurried; the key

phrase is “I noticed I was late”, indicating a passive

belonging: subservience to authority, and the need to

prepare for work. Lennon’s theme of reading (and “having

read the book”) invokes two further, relating themes: free

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time, and an interest in the world beyond the personal and

concrete. The House of Lords and the Albert Hall, metonyms

of politics and culture, signify, again, the conceptual.

However, in McCartney’s verse, the singer’s actions are

physical, not cerebral. He does not have time to imagine the

nation beyond his immediate confines. Falling out of bed,

rushing for a bus, he perceives only the personal and

concrete. These contrasts do not reflect the intellectual

capacities of the personae evoked, but their different

apprehensions of time.

3. “To the insider … small worlds”

Despite the wealth of writings about Lennon and McCartney,

differences in their social backgrounds, and how these may

be reflected in their work, have seldom been considered.

However, for insight into their cultural origins, the most

illuminating texts are not biographies, but their childhood

homes in Liverpool, now restored in period detail by the

National Trust. 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, where the

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McCartneys lived from 1955-63, opened to the public in 1998.

Mendips (251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton), where Lennon lived

from 1946-63, opened in 2003. In the current arrangement,

the houses can only be viewed (by prior arrangement) as a

pair. In addition to illustrating the immediate physical

settings in which the songwriters were raised, these houses—

the first of their type and period to be acquired by the

Trust—suggest various insights into the phenomenology of

social class in post-war England, and how class as a form of

passive belonging may relate to spatial provisions. It is,

thus, revealing to relate Lennon and McCartney’s cultural

views as suggested in ‘A Day In The Life’ to the homes in

which they were raised.

While Lennon’s complicated family background created

ambiguities in his class identity (see below), in terms of

housing, his upbringing was broadly middle-class. Mendips is

a light, spacious, semi-detached house in a tree-lined

suburb. Built in 1933, it was owned by the couple who became

Lennon’s guardians in 1946: his maternal Aunt Mary (‘Mimi’),

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and her husband, George Smith, who worked as a dairyman, but

owned and leased several other (inherited) properties.

McCartney’s social origins, similarly, are not

unambiguous. Deviating from the tendency, outlined by

Hoggart, for fathers to be the sole wage-earners in working-

class households (1957: 42-4), both of McCartney’s parents

were employed. Jim McCartney was a cotton salesman (and

during the war, a volunteer fireman). Mary McCartney was a

midwife and later, health visitor. When Mary died from

cancer in 1956, Jim was earning approximately eight pounds a

week (Flippo, 1988: 17). This placed the McCartneys’ income

below the average of £9-£10 per week at 1954 rates (Hoggart

1957: 20).

In contrast with Mendips, 20 Forthlin Road is a dark,

small, terraced house, on a council estate separated from

Woolton by a golf course. Social differences were keenly

noted by McCartney, who describes his family as “definitely

working-class [but] upper working-class. We were in a posh

area but the council bit of the posh area. John was actually

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in one of the almost posh houses in the posh area” (Miles,

1997: 43-4).

That free time may be experienced differently according

to spatial and economic provisions is indicated by these

songwriters’ homes. At Mendips, assumptions that owners

would have financial resources to heat several rooms, as

well as time and inclinations for individual activities, are

implicit in the design. It has a lounge, a dining room, and

a ‘morning room’. The structure of the McCartneys’ rented

home implies less personal freedom. The main communal room,

smaller than Mendips’s lounge, is the ‘front parlour’. There

is a minuscule dining room, but no third ‘morning room’. As

recreated in consultation with the family, the dining room’s

dominant item is not a reproduction of the original

furniture, but a cabinet housing Beatles memorabilia; the

second living area appears to have seldom been used. This

suggests something of “the ethos of the hearth” (this being

a single source of heat) and how, Hoggart comments,

“everything centres upon the living room” (1957: 294).

Elsewhere, however, McCartney’s focus on the personal,

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concrete and local reveals how (to quote Hoggart), working-

class neighbourhoods are, “to the insider … small worlds”

(1957: 59); and in these neighbourhoods, as also in

‘ordinary’ houses, and in the “mass art” of popular song,

ideas of belonging and isolation carry macro-cultural

significances.

4. From “Us” to “Them”

Unlike Lennon’s semi-hallucinatory invocations of iconic

national images, McCartney’s sociological landscape in

‘Penny Lane’ (1967) evokes, again, a concrete setting. The

landmarks are less national than local: a fire engine,

shelter, and roundabout. Yet despite McCartney’s descriptive

tone, as if describing this (Liverpool) street to an

outsider, these features are conceivably recognisable to any

English listener. However, while Lennon evokes England by

defamiliarizing unique emblems, McCartney celebrates the

familiarity of local features.

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In contrast with the “crowd of people” who “turn away”

in Lennon’s national landscape, “all the people that come

and go” in McCartney’s locally-themed song “stop and say

hello”. Moreover, individuals are identified: a barber,

banker, fireman and nurse. In further contrast with Lennon’s

lyrics—in which, individuals mentioned include Edgar Allen

Poe, Chairman Mao and Sir Walter Raleigh—‘Penny Lane’,

typifying McCartney’s style, is populated not by celebrated

cultural and historical figures, but seemingly ordinary

individuals, each defined by occupation. All of these are

broadly working-class—with the conspicuous exception of the

banker, who, in his every mention, is suggested as, on

Hoggart’s terms, one of ‘Them’. According to Hoggart, ‘They’

include “those in the lower grades of uniformed and

pensioned jobs”, often “mistrusted” by the working-classes,

“even though they may be kindly and well disposed.” (1957:

74). This division is suggested in McCartney’s

representation of the banker, introduced not “in” Penny Lane

but “on the corner”, distinguished as a man “with a motor

car”, but mocked by the children. Moreover, unlike the other

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characters, he is not shown working, but being served,

“sitting waiting for a trim” in the barber’s.

Working-class views are implicit in McCartney’s local

focus, but usually, class is invoked therein as a form of

passive belonging. In Lennon’s lyrics, “class” is made overt

—named as a concept, thus enabling a more critical approach.

In Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ (1970), the ‘Them’ and ‘Us’

divide is explicitly, and bitterly, narrated. Lennon

commented that this song was “for people like me who are

working-class, who are supposed to be processed into the

middle-classes.” (Wenner, 1971: 93). While McCartney’s

lyrics suggest what Hoggart presents as “core” working-class

values, Lennon’s, with similar pertinence, suggest distance

from these. ‘Working Class Hero’ suggests the uprooted

individual, who “belongs now to no class”.

In the conclusion of The Uses of Literacy, some of Hoggart’s

key concerns are the cultural implications of an

implementation of the 1944 Education Act, introduced shortly

before Lennon (born 1940) and McCartney (born 1942) entered

primary school: the eleven-plus examination. Hoggart

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reflects on how grammar-school education, provided for

children who passed, may affect ideas of belonging in

working-class culture, considering personal difficulties

that this may create for individuals who, in their formative

years, find themselves isolated from working-class family

and friends. However, he also considers the further

subordination of the class that they may culturally, if not

emotionally, leave behind, suggesting that the eleven-plus

system may “cause the working-classes now to lose many of

the critical tentacles which they would have retained years

ago” (1957: 337).

Describing the eleven-plus to a New York interviewer,

Lennon commented: “They hang it over you from aged five”

(Elias, 1974). Indeed, the bookshelves that Mimi had built

into the lounge walls at Mendips neatly symbolize the

importance of literacy as a determining factor in class

identity in post-war England. Lennon’s Aunt described how

her nephew, as an infant, was taught by her husband to read

from newspapers, “syllable by syllable” (Coleman, 1984:

113): an experience echoed in Lennon’s childlike intonation

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of the lines “I read the news today, oh boy/ About a lucky

man who made the grade” (‘A Day In The Life’). Lennon and

McCartney both “made the grade” with the eleven-plus, and

were among the first grammar-school educated English popular

musicians to achieve national fame. Furthermore, Lennon (for

two years) attended Art College, while McCartney took three

A-levels (passing one, English). In 1964, Terry Eagleton

made their education the subject of one of the first

academic essays on The Beatles.

Eagleton considers Lennon and McCartney’s grammar-

school backgrounds with reference to the unusualness of

their writing their own songs, enabling them to “express

personal values directly” (1964: 176). Yet, their very

careers in popular music can be read as a rejection of

grammar-school ideals as encapsulated in the Board of

Education’s 1943 report, precipitating the 1944 Act. This

summarizes that grammar-schools, hitherto, had typically

produced individuals who entered “learned professions” or

achieved “higher administrative or business posts” (Board of

Education, 1943: 2). Lennon and McCartney’s chosen

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profession thus represents some defiance of the aspirations

to which their schooling was geared; as Eagleton emphasises,

most English popular musicians were secondary-modern

educated (1964: 176).

McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio (1991)—his first full-scale

classical project, and most substantially autobiographical

work—narrates not only isolation within the grammar-school

experience, but furthermore, an attitude of negative

belonging towards grammar-school ideals. In the ‘School’

movement, as the choirboys sing “This school is good for

us”, the lead tenor, representing McCartney, answers: “This

school is only good for those/ Who want to learn from

books”; the lyric continues: “looking back,/ The most

important thing I found was sagging off”. It was while

“sagging off” (a Liverpoolism for playing truant) that

Lennon and McCartney began writing songs (National Trust,

1998: 3).

Negative belonging is similarly discernible in Lennon’s

‘Working Class Hero’. Though the educational ideals

suggested appear middle-class (“they expect you to pick a

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career”; “there’s room at the top”), the title rejects

these: “A working class hero is something to be”. Playing to

predominantly working-class audiences in Liverpool and,

eventually, being celebrated as figureheads of mass art,

this is what Lennon and McCartney became. Albert Goldman,

Lennon’s controversial biographer, claims that Mimi remarked

of her nephew: “Working-class hero, my eye! He was a middle-

class snob!” (1988: 144). However, there was considerable

substance to Lennon’s “working-class” claims.

Lennon’s ostensibly middle-class upbringing at Mendips

marked an uprooting from a less privileged home-life:

Liverpool Social Services declared the rented one-bedroom

flat where he lived with his mother Julia and her lover to

be inadequate accommodation for a child (Baird, 1988: 10-

11). Further traumas, which suggest pertinent

psychoanalytical explanations for Lennon’s lifelong

uncertainty about belonging, ensued. In 1946, shortly after

moving to Mendips, Lennon was taken on holiday to Blackpool

by his father, Freddie (a merchant seaman). Separated from

Julia, Freddie planned to emigrate with John, but Julia

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traced them. John was asked with whom he wanted to stay; he

first said his father, but as his mother ran away, he

followed her (Pauline Lennon, 1990: 72-4). They returned to

Liverpool, but again, John was entrusted to Mimi. Recalled

in ‘Mother’ (1970), which culminates with Lennon screaming

“Mama don’t go/ Daddy come home”, the 1946 incident in

Blackpool, Lancashire, when “the English army had just won

the war”, may also resonate in ‘A Day In The Life’. The

“rather sad” news that prompted Lennon’s lyric did not, as

has previously been assumed, concern Tara Browne’s fatal car

accident (one month earlier), but the fate of his children

(Daily Mail, 1967: 3). Browne had separated from his wife.

When he died, the children were on holiday with their

paternal grandmother, who fought their mother for custody.

The news that Lennon saw reported that the children would

remain with neither parent, but another matriarch, just as

he had.

Lennon’s most vulnerable statement of isolation,

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (1967), exemplifies the

importance of the conceptual in his work. Strawberry Field

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was a Salvation Army orphanage (a short distance from

Mendips), in the grounds of which, Lennon played as a child,

and attended garden parties (these Salvation Army-led

occasions are suggested in the song’s brass section). While

McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’ remembers a Liverpool childhood by

jubilantly invoking belonging in the local, in Lennon’s

song, the singer is profoundly alone. For the first time on

a Beatles single, Lennon’s vocal was entirely solo, and the

endless landscape of “strawberry fields forever” is entirely

devoid of other people: “No one, I think, is in my tree”.

While McCartney’s lyric suggests his own parents in the

fireman and nurse, Lennon uses an

orphanage to symbolize his childhood. ‘Penny Lane’

celebrates what Hoggart, discussing belonging in the “local

universe” of family, home, and the neighbourhood calls “The

‘real’ world of people” (1957: 102). However, ‘Strawberry

Fields Forever’ proclaims: “Nothing is real”.

In Lennon’s ‘Rain’ (1966), the singer, again, stands in

negative belonging from the crowd (watching as “They run and

hide their heads”), but suggests that, through his detached

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perspective, he can offer enlightenment (“I can show you”).

Similarly, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, beginning “Let me

take you down”, invites the listener to envision a

conceptual space—a horizonless, ostensibly ‘natural’

landscape—in which cultural existence can be unimagined. As

subsequent Lennon lyrics will demonstrate, his style would

progress, using similar expressions of negative belonging to

implore re-imaginings of the modern world.

5. The metaphysics of “the local universe”

The personae evoking daily working-class life in McCartney’s

lyrics frequently suggest Hoggart’s remark that “most

working-people are non-political and non-metaphysical in

their outlook” (1957: 102). Yet, the attention to detail in

McCartney’s writing illustrates an obviousness repeatedly

suggested in Hoggart’s representations of working-class

life, but never overtly stated. McCartney’s lyrics

demonstrate how, in passive belonging under conditions of

economic and cultural isolation, the personal and concrete

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are the political and metaphysical. Political in their

various representations of family, gender, work and money;

metaphysical in what they suggest of how time and space are

experienced under capitalist conditions.2 While Lennon’s

lyrics explicitly foreground the conceptual, McCartney’s

invoke the conceptual within the concrete.

An unfinished McCartney lyric (circa 1968) typifies this.3

Ostensibly conceived as a love song, appealing to “Someone

like you who will love me”, the verses, beginning

“Everything is coming up Tuesday”, include the lines: “The

shoes that went to the cobblers/ Are coming back soled and

heeled”; “The grocer is calling on Thursday”; and “I pay all

my bills on a Friday”. In addition to prioritizing the

concrete, and moreover, the necessary (shoes, groceries),

the fragment typifies further aspects of working-class

values as discussed by Hoggart, in its temporal focus on the

“immediate” (1957: 132). Days of the week—usually the 2 Other ways in which McCartney’s work addresses time as, indeed, a concept, are discussed in an earlier essay (McGrath, 2003).3 This handwritten fragment has yet to ‘belong’ in The Beatles’ mythology; it is unmentioned in studies and commentaries, including internet sources. It is reproduced, without comment, amongst Turner’s illustration plates (1994: n.p.), alongside McCartney’s lyrics for ‘Hey Jude’ (summer 1968), and seems to derive from the same notebook.

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‘working’ week, not the Friday and Saturday nights

traditionally celebrated in popular music—are specified in

numerous McCartney lyrics. Most pertinent here is ‘Lady

Madonna’ (1968). The mark of this song’s engagement with

“the fibre of life”—a quality which, Hoggart had lamented,

was lacking in mass art—is its similarity with his own

commentary on working-class mothers and their centrality

within the home: “Life is very much a week-by-week affair,

with little likelihood of saving a lump sum … Usually the

wife has to operate on her own this narrow system of weekly

finance” (1957:44).

‘Lady Madonna’, which McCartney describes as “a tribute

to the mother figure”, taking “the Madonna image but as

applied to [an] ordinary working-class woman” (Miles, 1997:

449), lists a range of “never-ending” responsibilities,

applauding: “Wonder how you manage to make ends meet”. The

lyric is hymn-like in both imagery and praise. Yet,

McCartney’s song shares with Hoggart’s commentaries on

working-class life an implicit ideology of passive

belonging: the ‘concrete’ of the working-life in both is, as

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the phrase suggests, fixed. Both praise the resilience of

working-class people in post-war life, particularly women—

rather than challenging the cultural system that sustains

their subordination.

Conversely, Lennon’s conceptual engagements with class

assert its malleability, calling for alternatives. By 1971,

Lennon, affiliating himself with Britain’s New Left, was

declaring that “power” could potentially belong “to the

people” (‘Power To The People’). While signifying his

belonging in an imagined community, Lennon’s New Left phase

can be viewed as an expansion of the isolation narrated in

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Asserting his own “working-

class” identity (Wenner, 1971: 93), he proclaimed belonging

in an oppressed, culturally isolated group—and yet, on his

terms, one with revolutionary potential, representing mass

negative belonging. Moreover, ‘Power To The People’, albeit

clumsily, conveys how Lennon’s gender representations grew

more progressive than McCartney’s, accusing the Left itself

of chauvinism:

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comrades and brothers

How do you treat your own woman back home?

She’s got to be herself

So she can free herself

The correlation between the concrete of McCartney’s lyrics

and the conceptual of Lennon’s is thus crucial to the

insights that comparison of their work can offer in cultural

studies. The similarities between Hoggart’s commentaries on,

and McCartney’s evocations of, daily life suggest a

sometimes bleak cultural realism in the passive belonging

implicit in the latter. Yet, McCartney’s realism is

complemented by Lennon’s radicalism. This distinction also

marks their engagements with religion as an idea of

belonging.

6. Where do they all belong?

Lennon’s verses for ‘A Day In The Life’ name a range of

national metonyms, but include no signifiers of organized

29

religion. Similarly, ‘Penny Lane’ omits reference to one of

this street’s most prominent features, St. Barnabas’s

Church, where McCartney was once a choirboy. In another of

McCartney’s invocations of the local, however—‘Eleanor

Rigby’ (1966)—the decline of Christian community is, as

MacDonald notes (1994: 204), an integral theme. This lyric

juxtaposes the lives of two “lonely people”: churchgoing

spinster Eleanor Rigby, and clergyman Father McKenzie. Rigby

represents, in effect, the congregation itself; and at the

song’s end, she dies. Disillusionment within the clergy is

also suggested. Father McKenzie prepares a sermon that “no

one will hear”, but “what does he care?”

Anderson illustrates the metonymic significance of

“plurals” (for example, hospitals, prisons) in the

sociological landscapes of early nationalist Filipino

novels, and how these serve to critique Spanish imperialism

as a dominant cultural system, conjuring “a social space

full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique

importance, but all representative” (1983: 30). However,

McCartney’s focus on the local exemplifies the metonymic

30

potency of the singular within sociological landscapes. The

system most obviously questioned in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is the

Church, whose metonymy as an institution is achieved through

the singularity of a local church within the lyric. With the

chorus, this church assumes a macro-cultural significance,

juxtaposed against “all the lonely people”. ‘Eleanor Rigby’

features no pop instruments, but a string octet. This

formal, traditional arrangement underlines implications of

the Church itself becoming an anachronism. Hoggart’s

observations indicate that McCartney found a suitable figure

to signify the diminishing Christian community, suggesting

spinsters as typical of the few still regularly attending

services, but concluding: “even this limited sense of

belonging is weakening” (1957: 112). However, a second

cultural system is implicitly indicted in ‘Eleanor Rigby’:

the nation itself. While McCartney’s lyric suggests the

decline of religious community, no ‘national’ idea of

community is suggested as succeeding it: “all the lonely

people/ Where do they all belong?”

31

Weeks before The Beatles recorded ‘Eleanor Rigby’,

Lennon commented in an interview for London’s Evening Standard

that Christianity “will vanish and shrink”, adding: “We’re

more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go

first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity” (Cleave, 1966: 160).

When this elicited considerable controversy in America,

Lennon insisted that he had used the Beatles’ popularity to

illustrate the receding cultural presence of Christianity

because this was the first comparison that came to mind: “I

could have said TV, cinema … or anything else that’s

popular” (The Beatles, 1966). These examples imply mass

culture itself as replacing Christianity. While mass culture

is scarcely comparable with religion in terms of addressing

what Anderson calls “the contingency of life … the

overwhelming burden of human suffering” (1983: 10), it

could, and in the Beatles’ work, did, suggest alternative

answers—deriving from other nations.

Underscoring the string octet in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is an

indication of The Beatles’ broadening musical, and with

this, cultural and spiritual outlook. The melody is executed

32

in what McCartney describes as “almost Asian Indian

rhythms”, initially improvised over one piano-chord, E-minor

(Miles, 1997: 281). Discussing The Beatles’ interest in

Eastern religion, McCartney referred to the spiritual

significance of traditional Indian music being based “on one

chord”, summarizing: “one note, one concentrating … one

reaching of a sort of new level … to get you in contact with

a better part of yourself” (Green, 1988: 160).

Along with his prediction that Christianity would

“vanish and shrink”, Lennon precipitated ‘Eleanor Rigby’

with a song reflecting the spread of alternative ideas of

religious belonging into England. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was

a celebration of, and instruction in, attaining “contact

with a better part of yourself”, and like ‘Eleanor Rigby’,

was initially based on one chord, C. Lennon’s song was

inspired by The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book

of the Dead (1964), by three radical American doctors, Timothy

Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. This adapts

extracts from the Tibetan Bardo Thödol to provide instructions

on how to attain “the Void”, or “Clear Light of Reality”, in

33

which, Leary summarizes, there is “no imposition of mental

categories” (Leary, 1964: 36-7). Lennon: “Lay down all

thought, surrender to the Void/ … It is knowing”.

Though the Bardo Thödol teaches how to achieve Void

consciousness through advanced meditation, Leary suggests

that this can be bypassed, and enlightenment be experienced

instantly, via psychedelic drugs. For this reason, ‘Tomorrow

Never Knows’ is generally regarded as (to quote MacDonald’s

innovative, but limited commentary) an “evocation of the LSD

experience” (1994: 191). However, the instrumentation

appears to have been inspired less by this than Leary’s

quotation of Buddhist scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s discussion

of the “Tibetan sacred music” used by lamas while chanting

(in Leary, 1964: 55). Evans-Wentz’s specifications are

realized in the recording: cymbals, timbrels, trumpets and

“big” drums are heard, while clarionets (“sounding like

Highland bagpipes”) are suggested by McCartney’s tape loops

of distorted Mellotron settings, and a “soughing sound, as

of a wind moving through a forest” by a loop of his speeded-

up laughter (Ibid). Throughout this, George Harrison’s

34

sitar, “concentrating” on one chord, supports Lennon’s

repetitious vocal melody, which provides the primary musical

element, chanting. Indicating that he did envisage a

religious dimension to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, Lennon’s

original intention was to feature “thousands of monks

chanting” (Davies, 1968: 361).

Hoggart’s discussion of the “precarious tenancy in

several near-intellectual worlds” held by many uprooted

working-class individuals (1957: 309) has parallels with the

shifting views expressed in Lennon’s lyrics. Harrison, in

whose work, Eastern (particularly Hindu) philosophy

represents a more learned interest, reflected that while

‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was “Basically saying what meditation

is all about”, in retrospect, he was “not too sure if John …

fully understood what he was saying” (The Beatles, 2000:

210). Yet, perhaps more important than what Lennon

“understood” of what he was saying is what he actually said.

7. Song and belonging

35

Lennon’s engagements with the conceptual (Marxism, feminism,

pacifism) could be simplistic, and, in their shifting

affiliations, they may suggest the “mental promiscuity” of

the uprooted, implied by Hoggart as a search for belonging

(1957: 310). However, the “inadequately possessed knowledge”

of the uprooted (Hoggart, 1957: 314) is itself addressed by

Lennon—and he refuses to allow this to prevent his

engagement with alternative ideas of belonging; negative

belonging.

The key song here is ‘Give Peace A Chance’ (1969),

which, as America’s attacks on Vietnam escalated, Lennon

conceived as an anthem that could be sung by protestors.

Challenged by a New York Times journalist about the

effectiveness of the sometimes vague ‘peace’ campaign that

he initiated with his wife Yoko Ono in 1969, Lennon scorned

“middle class gestures for peace” in “intellectual

manifestos”; these, he sneered, were “written by a load of

half-witted intellectuals—and nobody reads them! That’s the

trouble with the peace movement” (Solt, 1988). Lennon’s 1969

song satirizes such “intellectual” ideas of belonging as

36

“this-ism”, “that-ism” and “ism-ism-ism”, before declaring:

“All we are saying/ Is give peace a chance”. The chorus,

featuring around two dozen vocalists, invokes an imagined

community of peaceful protest, self-consciously presenting a

model for imitation. Months later, it was sung by hundreds

of thousands of demonstrators in Washington and New York.

‘Give Peace A Chance’ listed Lennon and McCartney as

co-writers. McCartney was not directly involved with its

composition: his naming was in honour of their longstanding

(but soon to expire) agreement to share credits for any song

written by either. Yet, his credit is appropriate here.

Despite the intimations of personal isolation in McCartney’s

songs, the local sense of belonging is frequently enhanced

by implications of cultural isolation. This occurs lyrically

in ‘Penny Lane’, but also in vocal invocations of community

in McCartney’s ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Hey Jude’, and the

suitably-titled “All Together Now”—all of which can be heard

as precedents to ‘Give Peace A Chance’—and which honour a

working-class song tradition that Hoggart calls the “open”

chorus, in which, the audience participates (1957: 155).

37

While Lennon uses an open chorus to invoke an imagined

community of negative belonging, defined by protest, and

thus, concerning the future, McCartney’s uses of this

tradition occasionally suggest laments for lost belonging. A

rarely-discussed, yet psychoanalytically suggestive instance

of this is a lyric which repeatedly implores an imagined

audience to dance, and sing along, to another song that (to

quote the title) ‘Your Mother Should Know’ (1967). Though

the lyric is upbeat, the mood is undermined harmonically.

The mysterious other song remains elusive: the chorus merely

repeats the title, and there is no middle-eight. McCartney

described improvising ‘Your Mother Should Know’ in “a family

atmosphere”, with older relatives present (Miles, 1997:

355). One inference of the failure to begin the other song,

and of the chorus to fully “open” into participation with

other vocalists, is that “your mother” is absent. After each

chorus, the melody worldlessly bridges back to the verse

refrain across the legato descent and rise of Lennon’s

funereally wistful organ motif, as if searching for this

other song, only to return without it. McCartney’s songs,

38

like Lennon’s, thus suggest certain psychoanalytical

overtones to the persistent, yet usually elusive, notion of

belonging. However, their songs transcend the

autobiographical in addressing key aspects of how belonging

is experienced, or imagined, in the modern world, placing

the individual in relation to wider cultural ideas.

A most resonant instance of how the personal is

foregrounded with the effect of encapsulating broader

cultural themes in McCartney’s work is ‘Let It Be’ (recorded

1969): one of his more Lennonesque lyrics, in that its

expressions of personal isolation were immediately

autobiographical:

John was with Yoko full time, and our relationship was

beginning to crumble … One night during this tense time I

had a dream I saw my mum, who’d been dead ten years or so …

I’m not sure if she used the words “let it be”, but that was

the gist of her advice (Miles, 1997: 538).

39

Unlike in various Lennon lyrics (‘I Call Your Name’; ‘No

Reply’), and in McCartney’s own ‘Eleanor Rigby’, an “answer”

is found in ‘Let It Be’: “Mother Mary comes to me”.

McCartney acknowledges the “quasi-religious” overtones

(ibid), but unlike ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Let It Be’ pertains to

personal spirituality, not organized religion. In both

content and form, the song suggests changing notions of

religious community, further to what Hoggart discusses as

“primary religion” (1957: 112-9), in which, core beliefs in

an after-life persist, and prayer is occasionally practiced,

but within the personal and concrete of the home: a setting

implicit in the “night” imagery of ‘Let It Be’. Moreover,

this hymn-like lyric was recorded as a song which could be

consumed within the home. Yet, more culturally-resonant

changes in “primary” religion in post-war England are

apparent here. The lyric chorus invokes Christian and

Buddhist perspectives in precise simultaneity: “There will

be an answer, let it be”. This refrain is prayer-like in its

plea, yet the “answer” is self-evident, here and now. In

their sentiment and repetition, the “words of wisdom”, let it

40

be, resound as a mantra, as used in meditation (“Lay down

all thought”, Lennon sang). A purpose of meditation is to

surrender attachment. Buddhist teacher Achaan Chah

instructs: “Give up clinging to love and hate, just rest

with things as they are … When you sit, let it be. When you

walk, let it be” (Kornfield and Breiter, 1985: 5).

Lennon and McCartney’s songs suggest that in a secular

age, religious sensibilities persist. Acknowledging that

“With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which

belief in part composed did not disappear,” Anderson

discusses the “modern darkness” of post-Enlightenment

rationalist secularism, asserting that as religion declined

as the dominant cultural system, “a secular transformation

of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” was

required, and that “few things were (are) better suited to

this than an idea of nation” (1983: 11). Yet, as ‘A Day In

The Life’ illustrates, an idea of nation does not always

provide a sense of belonging or “meaning” for the

individual. Nor does it necessarily transform fatality into

continuity. Eleanor Rigby was “buried along with her name”.

41

National identity is a culturally-imposed idea of

selfhood. In this, it is comparable with notions of ego-

loss, integral to numerous religions, including Christianity

and Buddhism. However, these command the ego’s conscious

surrender, rather than its unconscious cultural absorption.

In a secular narrative, the nation continues without the

individual after fatality. In the Christian narrative, the

individual enters another realm. However, in the Buddhist

narrative, as Leary summarizes, the Void is reached through

“death and rebirth of the ego”, not the body (1964: 12).

Similarly, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ suggested that rebirth

could be experienced before death: “surrender to the Void”;

“play the game existence to the end/ Of the beginning”. The

acknowledgements of Eastern religion in Lennon and

McCartney’s work, importantly, indicate choices of macro-

cultural ideas of belonging, and imaginings of community

which transcend ‘national’ borders.

Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (1971) revisits principles of the

comparably instructive ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, imploring:

“Imagine all the people/ Living for today”. The 1971 song,

42

moreover—stemming, again, from Lennon’s Marxist phase—

directly engages with macro-cultural ideas of belonging.

“Imagine no possessions”, Lennon sings. Elvis Costello’s

‘The Other Side Of Summer’ (1991) highlights a

conspicuousness of this, asking “Was it a millionaire/ Who

said ‘imagine no possessions’?”. Yet, the possessions that

Lennon asks the listener to un-imagine are not concrete

belongings, but—distantly echoing his uses of

defamiliarization in ‘A Day In The Life’—conceptual, and

indeed, cultural attachments, including “heaven”, “hell”,

and “religion” itself. When Lennon sings “Imagine no

countries”, he points to the cultural attachment that

Anderson views as the historical anomaly preventing (to

quote the song) “all the people/ Sharing all the world”: the

idea of nation. Lennon suggests that without this, there

would be “nothing to kill or die for”; Anderson, comparably,

asserts that the idea of nation, as an imagined, sovereign

community, “makes it possible … for so many millions of

people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such

limited imaginings” (1983: 7). Yet what Lennon suggests, in

43

songs as diverse as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Strawberry

Fields Forever’, ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and ‘Imagine’, are

unlimited imaginings.

Lennon points to the concrete of the conceptual:

imagination as something that is—to return to Hoggart’s

definition of the personal and concrete—“yours and real”;

something that belongs to people. Conversely, McCartney’s

lyrics illuminate the conceptual of the concrete. The only

major songwriter of his generation to emerge from a working-

class Northern background and suffuse his work with

representations of its daily life, McCartney’s attention to

detail represents merely the opening point to a lyrical

depth which has seldom been recognised. The differences in

McCartney and Lennon’s views are mutually flattering, and

can offer, as this paper has sought to demonstrate, numerous

cultural historical insights, through their realism and

radicalism respectively. McCartney: “look at all the lonely

people”. Lennon: “Imagine all the people”.

44

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to my PhD supervisors, Peter Mills and Mary

Eagleton; to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK

for funding my doctoral research; and to Paul Wheeler for

his encouragement.

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