Why the Beatles made films
By early 1967 the Beatles had stopped touring, and promoting a record in person was no longer an option. Appearing on television shows in several countries was also tiring and repetitive. A short film that could be sent out to broadcasters offered a way around both problems. It is also worth noting that such films were not entirely new for the group. In 1966 they had made clips for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain”, and the idea that a performance on film could substitute for an appearance had been tested by then.
The “Penny Lane” film was made to accompany the double single released in February 1967, which paired the song with “Strawberry Fields Forever”. The two films were made at about the same time, with the same director, and the stylistic differences between them are interesting. This article concentrates on “Penny Lane”.
The song and its Liverpool references
Paul McCartney wrote the song about a real place, a street and bus terminus in Liverpool that he knew from his youth. The lyric lists a barber, a banker, a fireman and a nurse, and mentions a roundabout in the street, the shelter on it, and a fire station. Much of this is observed detail, shaded with the slightly surreal tone of someone remembering a place. The song was written partly in response to Lennon’s memory song, which was a way of looking back at their shared hometown.
The record’s sound is bright and clear. It uses a piccolo trumpet, played by the session musician David Mason, which McCartney is said to have been inspired to add after hearing a similar sound in a Bach concerto on television. The arrangement and the visual idea are quite different from the heavy, dream-like “Strawberry Fields”.
How it was shot
The film was directed by Peter Goldmann, a Swedish director who also worked on the companion clip. It was shot in early February 1967, reportedly on 5 February, using locations in and around London and in Kent, notably the park near Sevenoaks. Despite the song’s subject, the group did not shoot in Liverpool for this clip. Some Liverpool street footage has been described in accounts, but it is best to treat the exact sources of the images cautiously.
The film mixes scenes of the four walking and riding in a park, a dinner scene in formal dress, and shots in which the band appears with real everyday objects and street settings. Horses feature in several sequences. Different accounts describe the costumes and settings in different ways, and it is easy to overstate certain details, so the best summary is that the clip combines a fantasy of period costume with the plain street imagery of the lyric.
The camera work and editing are quite sophisticated for the time. The film uses slow motion, quick cuts and layered shots, and the images are cut in time with the music in the manner of the later music video. Because they were not performing live, the Beatles did not need to mime a full performance, and the film could be built from separate pieces, including images that echo individual lines. The editing was reportedly handled by the Beatles’ team in a short space of time.
Its place among early music videos
It would be wrong to call “Penny Lane” the first music video. Short filmed performances had existed for decades, including the Scopitone jukebox films of the early 1960s and the film clips shown on television. The Beatles’ own A Hard Day’s Night in 1964 had presented songs as visual sequences, Bob Dylan’s clip for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” appeared in 1965, and the Monkees television band had made a series built partly around song sequences in 1966. The Beatles’ contribution is better described as adding a creative and widely seen example at a time when the form was still undefined.
What distinguishes the Penny Lane film is that the visuals are neither a record of a concert nor a story, but a mood. Later generations of music-video makers worked in the same way. It is also an early sign of how recordings in the late 1960s were designed to be seen as well as heard, though the form only became central to the music business in the following decades, with the rise of dedicated music television in the 1980s.
Style and fashion
The group appear with moustaches and longer hair than in their earlier clips, and their clothes mix military-style jackets with other period pieces, a look that fed into the dandyish mod fashion that became popular in London that year. The shift in image was noticeable to contemporaries and matched the shift in the music, from the clean-cut early 1960s toward a more flamboyant look. Whether the film was intended as a statement is unclear; it may simply reflect the interests of the four at the time.
Reception and legacy
“Penny Lane” reached number one in the United States in March 1967, while in the UK the double single stalled at number two behind Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me”, which was a surprise. Television stations used the clip, the record was heavily played on pirate radio and the BBC, and in later decades it has been regularly reproduced in documentaries and collections. The street itself became a pilgrimage site in Liverpool, and the street signs have been taken by fans so often that the city has reportedly painted the names on walls instead.
The film should be seen as a modest, inventive piece of promotion and not as a revolution. Its significance lies in the confidence with which the group treated the format as another place to experiment, at the same time as they were doing so in the recording studio.