The Beatles - two opposite things at the same time as they contrasted the mundane and the surreal in a number of their songs.

Eleanor Rigby. (Excerpt from the book The Beatles and their Journey into Beatledom).

On the day the sainted John met arch cherub Paul, all augured well for their joint venture to conquer the lust laden beats of the new rock ‘n’ roll era. The heat was high, the light airy, the beat mesmeric and the wide summer sky arced over the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete of June 1957 amid a rich panoply of parading figures, as nubile, rose bedecked beauty queens and their retinue, the oomphing brass band of the Cheshire Military Yeomanry, processional figures in fancy dress and the crowds in shirt sleeves and summer dresses trying their luck on the coconut shies and tombola sideshows, the magnificent dray pulling shire horses, the whistles and shouts of the Liverpool Police Dog Display Team, the multi-coloured bunting and the flags unfurled and finally, the rocking Quarrymen, provided a feast for the eyes and ears. All cucumber sandwiches, cakes, lemonade and salt, vinegar, fish and chips, a typical British summer scene with the merest hint of Pepper.
The buzzing, chattering, cordial crowds, enjoying their afternoon teas and beer tents, soon turned their attention to the evening’s festivities, as the cool, collected head Quarryman Lennon, likewise turned to look upon the resourceful, talented young onlooker McCartney, whom he would soon enlist in their holy war against all that was staid, stuffy, sexless and ultimately, soulless.
Theirs then was essentially a spiritual journey. And in the corner by the adjacent church hall, scene of the evening’s musical entertainment, in the forgotten shadows and eternal somnolence, the graveyard headstones quietly baked in the searing, early summer heat.
One in particular stood unnoticed then, but was surely a monolith sign of things to come; hidden in plain sight and just giving the merest, unspoken, gentle hint that the soon to be emerging flourish of songs, tunes and plangent chords of mind blowing fervour from the ethereal void of Beatledom, would wash over a world that was to become unrecognisable, as the psychic dam of sexual repression and frustration burst asunder.
In the solitude and the shade, the gravestone of one Eleanor Rigby, lonely figure of broken promises, dreams unfulfilled, lost faith, companionless death and faceless anomie, stood as a warning, a foreboding, that in change, wanted or unwanted, the currents and streams of history, whilst initially travelling underground, would eventually surface, sweeping away the past as if it were all just some long forgotten dream.
On that day, history was indeed made and the Labskaus, the dream-world of The Beatles, sons of Liverpool, was born amongst this warm, convivial, Liverpudlian crowd, as a splendid time was indeed, guaranteed for everybody concerned, a congregation of local souls who had yet to be converted. But all that could still wait awhile as the natural pace of an as yet unspoken history, gradually gathered momentum.
And in the dreamy locality of their South Liverpool childhoods, in the land of stone and rock, they dreamed their proto-surrealist dreams, amid the mundane chatter of suburban families, close knit, though in no way, well heeled.
When John Lennon said in 1966 that The Beatles were more ‘popular than Jesus’, this was very probably an accurate description of the failure of many Christian churches and clerics in the UK to minister to the real needs, views, values and beliefs of their dwindling congregations as well as the general British public. By then of course, The Beatles had become a global monster and the four most famous people in the world. So Lennon was right. Paul McCartney too, with his astonishing narrative song Eleanor Rigby (1966), was portraying similar themes.
When Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher appeared at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre in the mid 60’s - Paul went to see her. He noticed Rigby’s wine office opposite the theatre in Bristol but already knew that there was a Rigby’s Pub in Liverpool not too far from the Cavern. However subliminally this happened, eventually he arrived at the name Rigby for the eponymous heroine of this song. Then there’s also the Eleanor Rigby grave in St Peter’s Church in Woolton Village when John and Paul first met which may well have been another subliminal influence on McCartney.
Paul later described these coincidences as ‘magic’. True or not (and I have no reason to believe they are not), these synchronistic coincidences have all fed into the mania and the songs and vice-versa and this process of synchronicity (in terms of the mania at least) , continues to this day. Indeed, the songs Eleanor Rigby and Penny Lane are just two of numerous examples of the strange weirdness of the McCartneyesque.
In Eleanor Rigby Paul McCartney begins a new literary journey in which both he and Lennon combine old fashioned English artifice with new age, transatlantic cool, matching Lennon’s arduous quest for the touchstone of both truth and beauty.
And whilst the search for truth may sometimes mean describing mundane, everyday reality, the search for beauty is definitely a transcendent and therefore (at times) surreal journey. Here, it is also Macca’s penchant for a great storyline from which he could tease out the eternal strangeness of otherwise everyday occurrences, which is skilfully observed and fulfilled, lyric wise.
The aged spinster, (whose enigmatic and elegant name Eleanor was probably matched by her former nubile beauty), in living a life of broken promises and dreams, is not only typical of those living a lonely existence, but existential in the sense that whilst her duties as a Church Warden portray her as a person of faith, this is a sham.
It is so precisely because the face she shows to the outside world, is put away and kept in a jar by the very door she both enters into and leaves from that very same world. Living in the existential moment, her life is a series of daily episodes, artificial on the outside world, and despairing and moribund on the inside, her faith gone, she is already dead.
Furthermore, her loss of faith is now reflected in the larger society in which she still nominally associates, and since Father Mackenzie, the pastor of her own parish church has not only a dwindling, ageing congregation, but a dwindling faith himself, he too has ceased to care.
Since she has already died on the inside, her physical death is met with indifference by the wider world, and seeing as no-one came to her funeral to hear the eulogy cum sermon her pastor had written in honour of her passing, her loneliness in life, is reflected even in her demise.
Ultimately, it is her loss of faith which ends in her unsaved soul passing over into the dark void of nothingness, negating her very life force. It is in a sense, as if she had never lived. This ia a story song about faceless ego-death and the loneliness which has transpired for its main protagonist without any drug induced soul searching.
When multiple coincidences collide, the effect can be stunning and in this case these are spookily and evocatively poignant. And when the origins of the names of the song’s two main character (Rigby and Mackenzie) are delved into, one can see why. Whilst the lyrics themselves tell the sad tale of the archetypal, broken hearted, jilted spinster, the back story to the song is just as interesting.
For a song where the narrative is obviously key, McCartney nevertheless was again inspired to compose melody and initial first line, before borrowing and adapting ideas and words from various sources including Starr and Donovan and the theatrical composer Lionel Bart, - like the musical jackdaws both he and Lennon sometimes impersonated.
As supposedly mundane at first glance as these sources seem, their subterranean roots percolated upwards and once more enveloped the song in a perniciously eerie and almost grotesque fabulosity. A fabulosity whose minimalist, musicological features once again intruded on the more obvious conclusions that can be drawn, subtly borrowing from the something from nothing tradition, which was already so well established in the city of their birth.
This was Macca’s own version of the Void and inimitable in the sense that it was a brooding mood of absence on which the mundanely sad, indeed fairly ubiquitous events ultimately turned. With the ancient Druidic burial site of the Calder-Stones close at hand and bang centre in the middle of Liverpool’s very own stone quarrying arena, the gravestone of one Eleanor Rigby had stood, quietly withstanding the years of weather worn neglect, another engraved with the name Mackenzie nearby.
Beginning a new literary journey in which both he and Lennon would successfully combine old fashioned English artifice with new age, transatlantic cool, (and matching Lennon’s arduous quest for the touchstone of both truth and beauty), Macca’s penchant for a great storyline from which he could tease out the eternal strangeness of otherwise everyday occurrences, was skilfully observed and fulfilled, lyric wise.
The Beatles, pop stars, icons, leaders of a generation, not only wanted to search for their own spiritual salvation, but were willing to go out on a limb to inform their fans that whilst living for the moment was all very well and good, - to do so at the expense of and because of a loss of faith (religious or otherwise), was an exercise in decadent vapidity, with spiritual resources easily spent but not so easily recouped.