The poster, advertising a performance by Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal to be held at the Town Meadows, Rochdale, on 14 February 1843, was bought by John from an antique shop in Sevenoaks, Kent, when the Beatles were filming a promotional clip for 'Strawberry Fields Forever' on 31 January 1967. All the main characters of the song feature on the poster: for example, Mr Henderson, who announced his intention to leap 'through a hogshead of real fire ... Mr H. challenges the World!' The evening was advertised as 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite'.
PAUL: 'Mr Kite' was a poster that John had in his house in Weybridge. I arrived there for a session one day and he had it up on the wall in his living room. It was all there, the trampoline, the somersets, the hoops, the garters, the horse. It was Pablo Fanque's fair, and it said 'being for the benefit of Mr Kite'; almost the whole song was written right off this poster. We just sat down and wrote it.
We pretty much took it down word for word and then just made up some little bits and pieces to glue it together. It was more John's because it was his poster so he ended up singing it, but it was quite a co-written song. We were both sitting there to write it at his house, just looking at it on the wall in the living room. But that was nice, it wrote itself very easily. Later George Martin put a fairground sound on it.
The fairground sound, suggested by John, was a brilliant piece of production work on George Martin's part. George had an enormous amount of experience using sound effects, most of it predating the Beatles, but in this instance he took a leaf out of their book. Using the same random principles that Paul had used in selecting the loop tapes for 'Tomorrow Never Knows', he made a tape up in the William Burroughs-Brion Gysin tradition. He described the event in Summer of Love, his account of the making of Sgt. Pepper. Taking a collection of steam organ recordings, he instructed the tape operator Geoff Emerick to transfer them all on to one tape:
'Geoff,' I said, 'we're going to try something here; I want you to cut that tape there up into sections that are roughly fifteen inches long.' Geoff reached for the scissors and began snipping.
In no time at all we had a small pyramid of worm-like tape fragments piled up on the floor at our feet. 'Now,' I said, 'pick them all up and fling them into the air!' He looked at me. Naturally, he thought I'd gone mad ...
'Now, pick 'em up and put them together again, and don't look at what you're doing,' I told Geoff ... When I listened to them, they formed a chaotic mass of sound ... it was unmistakably a steam organ. Perfect! There was the fairground atmosphere we had been looking for. John was thrilled to bits
