On 27 February 1967, the Daily Mail newspaper ran a story headlined 'A-Level Girl Dumps Car and Vanishes'. Seventeen-yearold Melanie Coe, studying for her A-level examinations at Skinner's Grammar School in Stamford Hill, London, ran away from home leaving behind a mink coat, diamond rings and her own car. 'I cannot imagine why she should run away, she has everything here,' her father was quoted as saying.
PAUL: John and I wrote 'She's Leaving Home' together. It was my inspiration. We'd seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who'd left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line.
So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up and then ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the Greek chorus, long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly.
Before that period in our songwriting we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It's a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well.
While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents' view: 'We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy.' I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents.
Then there's the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in 'Yellow Submarine', they weren't real people.
George Harrison said once he could only write songs from his personal experience, but they don't have to exist for me.
The feeling of them is enough. The man from the motor trade was just a typical sleazy character, the kind of guy that could pull a young bird by saying, 'Would you like a ride in my car, darlin'?' Nice plush interior, that's how you pulled birds. So it was just a little bit of sleaze. It was largely mine, with help from John.
This was the first Beatles track arranged by someone other than George Martin. Paul was getting very keen on the possibilities of orchestral settings and felt that 'She's Leaving Home' would be best suited by this type of arrangement.
PAUL: I rang George Martin and said, 'I'm really on to this song, George. I want to record it next week.' I'm really hot to record it, I've got one of those 'I've got to go, I've got to go!' feelings and when you get them, you don't want anything to stop you, you feel like if you lose this impetus, you'll lose something valuable.
So I rang him and I said, 'I need you to arrange it.' He said, 'I'm sorry, Paul, I've got a Cilla session.' And I thought, f------ hell! After all this time working together, he ought to put himself out. It was probably unreasonable to expect him to. Anyway, I said, 'Well, fine, thanks George,' but I was so hot to trot that I called Mike Leander, another arranger.
I got him to come over to Cavendish Avenue and I showed him what I wanted, strings, and he said, 'Leave it with me.' It is one of the first times I actually let anyone arrange something and then reviewed it later, which I don't like as a practice. It's much easier if I just stay with them. Anyway he took it away, did it, and George Martin was very hurt, apparently. Extremely hurt, but of course I was hurt that he didn't have time for me but he had time for Cilla.
In his book George Martin wrote, 'I couldn't understand why he was so impatient all of a sudden. It obviously hadn't occurred to him that I would be upset.'
Paul: 'It didn't work out badly. I don't like the echo on the harp, but that must be George rather than Mike Leander, or, to give him his due, it might have been one of us saying, "Stick some echo on that harp." You just can't tell.'
