So I had to get some cod lines to take the sting out of it, and put the tongue very firmly in cheek. 'Will you still need me?' is still a love song. 'Will you still look after me?', okay, but 'Will you still feed me?' goes into Goon Show humour. I mean, imagine having three kids called Vera, Chuck and Dave! It was very tongue in cheek and that to me is the attraction of it. I liked 'indicate precisely what ...' I like words that are exact, that you might find on a form. It's a nice phrase, it scans.
It's pretty much my song. I did it in rooty-tooty variety style. George Martin in his book says that I had it speeded up because I wanted to appear younger but I think that was just to make it more rooty-tooty; just lift the key because it was starting to sound a little turgid. George helped me on a clarinet arrangement. I would specify the sound and I love clarinets so 'Could we have a clarinet quartet?' 'Absolutely.' I'd give him a fairly good idea of what I wanted and George would score it because I couldn't do that. He was very helpful to us. Of course, when George Martin was sixty-four I had to send him a bottle of wine.
Next up was 'Lovely Rita', 
PAUL: 'Lovely Rita' was occasioned by me reading that in America they call traffic wardens 'meter maids', and I thought, God, that's 'so American! Also to me 'maid' had sexual connotations, like a French maid or a milkmaid, there's something good about 'maid', and 'meter' made it a bit more official, like the meter in a cab; the meter is running, meter maid. Hearing that amused me. In England you hear those American phrases and they enter our vocabulary. We let them in because we're amused, it's not because we love them or want to use them, it's just because it's funny. 'Rita' was the only name I could think of that would rhyme with it so I started on that, Rita, meter maid, lovely Rita. And I just fantasised on the idea.
I remember one night just going for a walk and working on the words as I walked. This was about the time that parking meters were coming in; before that we'd been able to park freely, so people had quite an antagonistic feeling towards these people. I'd been nicked a lot for parking so the fun was to imagine one of them was a bit of a easy lay, 'Come back to my place, darlin'.' It somehow made them a figure of fun instead of a figure of terror and it was a way of getting me own back.
It wasn't based on a real person but, as often happened, it was claimed by a girl called Rita who was a traffic warden who apparently did give me a ticket, so that made the newspapers. I think it was more a question of coincidence: anyone called Rita who gave me a ticket would naturally think, 'It's me!' I didn't think, Wow, that woman gave me a ticket, I'll write a song about her -- never happened like that.
They began work on John's 'Good Morning' on 8 February, but continued to fiddle with it until the very last. The animal effects were not added until 28 March and the final mixing did not take place until mid-April. It is a song about suburban torpor.
PAUL: This is largely John's song. John was feeling trapped in suburbia and was going through some problems with Cynthia. It was about his boring life at the time, there's a reference in the lyrics to 'nothing to do' and 'meet the wife'; there was an afternoon TV soap called Meet the Wife that John watched, he was that bored, but I think he was also starting to get alarm bells and so 'Good morning, good morning'.
When we came to record it we used Sounds Incorporated to do a big sax thing; they were friends of ours who had been on tour with us. But we still felt it needed something more manic so we decided to use a lot of sound effects on the fade.
The great thing about working at EMI Abbey Road was that anything you needed was within reasonably easy reach. EMI was so multidimensional they had everything covered and we took advantage of all this. We used Daniel Barenboim's piano that he'd just recorded on; they would sometimes lock it but we would just ask, 'Can you unlock it?' and they'd say, 'Sure.' That was used on the big chord at the end of 'A Day in the Life'. There were so many grand pianos laying around, there were Hammond organs, there were harmoniums, there were celestes, and there was a sound-effects cupboard which they used for doing plays and spoken-word albums. George Martin said, 'There is a library, what do you want?' and we said, 'What have you got?' so we got the catalogue. 'Right, elephants, cock-crowing, the hunt going tally-ho, we'll have that ...'
PAUL: We had an audience laughing on the front of 'Sgt. Pepper'. It had always been one of my favourite moments; I'd listened to radio a lot as a kid, and there had always been a moment in a radio show, say with somebody like Tommy Cooper, where he would walk on stage and he'd say hello, and they'd laugh, and he'd tell a joke, and they'd laugh, and there would always be a moment in these things, because it was live radio, where he wouldn't say anything, and the audience would laugh. And my imagination went wild whenever that happened. I thought, What is it? Has he dropped his trousers? Did he do a funny look? I had to know what had made 'em laugh. It fascinated me so much, and I'd always remembered that, so when we did 'Pepper' there's one of those laughs for nothing in there, just where Billy Shears is being introduced they all just laugh., and you don't know what the audience has laughed at.
