A song about a place and a feeling
“Strawberry Fields Forever” takes its name from Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children’s home in the Woolton area of Liverpool, close to the house where John Lennon grew up with his aunt Mimi. Lennon remembered playing in the grounds as a child, and the name stayed with him as an image of a private, half-imaginary refuge. The song is not a literal description of the home. It is more a set of impressions about memory, uncertainty and the feeling of seeing the world differently from the people around you.
The lyric is notable for its lack of certainty. “Nothing is real” and the line that follows, about nothing to get hung about, set a mood of detachment, and the phrase “living is easy with eyes closed” is often read as a comment on how people avoid seeing things. Lennon later suggested that the song was an attempt at honest self-description. As with much of his writing, he gave different accounts at different times, so it is wise to treat any single explanation as one view.
Writing and early recording
Lennon began writing the song in Almería, Spain, in autumn 1966, while he was acting in Richard Lester’s anti-war comedy How I Won the War. The first Beatles sessions for it started in late November 1966 at Abbey Road, the group’s first recording work after the break that followed their final tour. The earliest version was gentler and more acoustic.
The band developed it with a Mellotron, a keyboard instrument that plays back tape recordings of real instruments, which supplies the song’s flute-like opening. It was played by Paul McCartney. George Harrison added an Indian instrument called a swarmandal, and the band used reversed cymbals and a drum pattern that Ringo Starr built carefully. This was typical of the time, when psychedelic experimentation in studios was spreading among bands in both London and the United States.
The two versions that became one
The best-known story of the record concerns its editing. Lennon was not satisfied with the first, band-only version and asked for a heavier arrangement with brass and cellos, scored by George Martin. The Beatles then liked parts of both recordings. The two takes were in different keys and tempos. Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick reportedly resolved this by speeding up one and slowing the other until they matched approximately, then joining them with an edit at roughly the one-minute mark. Accounts differ on the details of the speed change, but the joint is audible to careful listeners, and the slightly altered pitch of the voice is part of the song’s dreamy character.
The result was a record unlike the Beatles’ earlier work. It reflects the band’s habit of treating the studio as a place to build music, and it ends with a strange coda in which the recording fades, returns and breaks apart.
The single’s reception
The song was released in February 1967 as a double A-side with “Penny Lane”. In the UK it reached number two, held off the top by Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me”. This was the first time since early in their career that a Beatles single had missed number one in Britain, and it was widely noted in the press, though the single was a very large seller by any normal standard. Over time, many listeners have come to regard it as one of the best records of the decade, and it is commonly mentioned in discussions of the music of 1967.
The promotional film
The film was shot at the end of January 1967, reportedly on 30 and 31 January, in Knole Park near Sevenoaks in Kent, with director Peter Goldmann. The Beatles were not performing live in front of an audience. The film instead matches the strangeness of the music with an irrational series of images.
Those images include a piano set out in the open air and painted with bright colours, and the band members hung with objects or standing in the park, in sequences that were run backwards, speeded up or treated with other effects. Filming in reverse was an economical way to give ordinary movement a dream-like quality, and cutting between different treatments of the same scene mirrored the splice in the recording. In one sequence the group appears to work with paint and a piano, and other sequences show them in the grounds of the park among bare trees. The film also shows how far the band’s appearance had changed: moustaches, longer hair and colourful clothing marked a visual shift that anticipated hippie fashion.
Because the film does not tell a story, it asks for an emotional response. Some viewers found it unsettling, and others thought it pretentious. Its method, which used the clip as an artwork and not as a performance or a plot, has been influential, though it would be a stretch to credit it with inventing the music video.
Afterlife
Strawberry Field closed as a children’s home in later decades, and its gates became a place of pilgrimage for fans. The song has been covered by many artists and remains a touchstone of the Summer of Love era, even though it was recorded in London months before. The London underground scene and the Beatles’ own studio work were running in parallel that winter, and “Strawberry Fields Forever” caught the same mood of doubt and exploration. The film, together with the sister clip for “Penny Lane”, shows the band at a point when they had left the stage and were using the camera and tape machine as their main instruments.