The Beatles and The Women They Wrote

By Eleanor Grant

In Paul McCartney’s newly released autobiography ‘The Lyrics’, he muses on the lines that make up some of the most well-known and covered songs in The Beatles’ catalogue. ‘I’d like to think’ he writes, ‘that I’ve always been very empathetic towards women, but the point was brought home to me one day when a girl stopped me and asked “Have you ever realised how many of your songs are about women?” I hadn’t ever really thought about it.’ It’s an astute observation. The Beatles have written 18 songs with women’s names in the title, and more if you include names mentioned in their lyrics. The women Paul, John, Ringo, and George write about are plentiful – mothers, lovers, girlfriends, and wives – real and imaginary, who are given rich inner lives and colourful characters. With ‘love’ coming up time and time again as the most frequently used word in their discography, there is no question as to whether the women the group wrote about were adored, whether fictional and fantastical or actual and living, as they continue to be by listeners now as they were then.  

Written by Lennon, ‘Girl’ from 1965’s Rubber Soul is a self-aware, melancholic take on romance and the femme fatale, directly opposed to McCartney’s ‘Michelle’, a twee love song reminiscent of their very early musical career spent busking and singing in French to try and impress women. It is about an imaginary woman who, for Lennon, turned out to be not so imaginary. He later remarked, ‘Girl’ is real. There’s no such thing as the girl; she was a dream, you know, but the words are all right, you know […] It wasn’t just a song, and it was about, you know, that girl — which happened to turn out to be Yoko in the end, but the one that a lot of us were looking for.’ The girl in question is ‘cool’, puts Lennon down, and makes him feel ‘a fool’ in front of his friends but still, he cannot bring himself to leave her, symptoms typical of the femme fatale and the man bewitched by her. The lyrics contain some of Lennon’s most scorching criticism of the sexual repression and guilt encouraged by the Catholic Church, which he despised – ‘Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?’ – making ‘Girl’ one of the band’s earliest ventures into revolutionary thinking.

One of the group’s most unsettling tracks, in a departure from the simpler love songs of their earlier anthology, McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ on Revolver took the group in the direction of baroque pop, with this being the first song where no member plays instrumental. It imagines the life of a lonely woman called Eleanor, who works in a church and dreams of marriage, but the closest she comes is cleaning up the rice thrown over happy newlyweds. She waits by the window, ‘wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door’, but as McCartney sings, no one knows who the smile she wears is for if anyone. Her isolation is paralleled by Father McKenzie’s, who writes sermons that ‘no one will hear’ and darns his own socks, though as McCartney asks if there is no one there to see them, ‘what does he care?’. It speaks to the declining church attendance in the 1960s, as well as the general disparity that people find in their lives when they are absent of companionship. It suggests that loneliness demands escape and forces these characters to live within ‘a dream’. It is a testament to McCartney’s fascination with experiences that are not his own, as opposed to Lennon who ‘wasn’t interested’ in writing about ‘people like that’. As he later remarked, ‘I like to write about me, because I know me’. Eleanor Rigby, who dies alone ‘buried along with her name’ at a funeral where ‘nobody came’, could not have been further from that. Remarkably, though McCartney chose the title for the song at random, he later discovered a woman named exactly that in the graveyard in St. Peter’s Parish Church where he and John Lennon met. Buried a few graves over from her was a man called McKenzie.

In what has become a staple of psychedelic rock, and rumoured to allude to the band’s use of LSD during the production of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was inspired by John’s son Julian. According to Lennon, ‘This is the truth: my son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, “What is it?” and he said, “It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” and I thought, “That’s beautiful.” I immediately wrote a song about it.’ Lennon was heavily influenced by the works of Lewis Carroll, and his Alice in Wonderland-inspired vision invited the listener to picture themselves in a surreal world occupied by a ‘girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who leads them through ‘cellophane flowers of yellow and green’ and into ‘newspaper taxis’ and trains with ‘plasticine porters with looking glass ties’. The dreamy, drug-induced haze the song encompasses makes Lucy closer to a symbol than the schoolgirl she was inspired by. The imagery of the girl in the boat who leads Lennon to a better, more enlightened, place (the girl  ‘who would come and save me – this secret love that was going to come one day’ as Lennon later remarked) turned out to be Yoko.

A McCartney original, ‘Lady Madonna’ was penned after he saw a picture of a Malayo-Polynesian woman breastfeeding her child in National Geographic. Its bluesy style and the bass line with arpeggios running up and down capture the never-ending list of tasks for the working-class mother in the 1960s. ‘The original concept was the Virgin Mary’ McCartney said later, ‘but it quickly became symbolic of every woman, the Madonna image but as applied to the ordinary working-class woman. It’s really a tribute to the mother figure, it’s a tribute to women’. It loosely follows the scheme of the ‘Monday’s Child’ nursery rhyme – ‘Tuesday afternoon is never ending, Wednesday morning papers didn’t come, Thursday night your stockings needed mending’ – closing with ‘see how they run’, a double entendre which could apply to the children playing at Lady Madonna’s feet or the stockings which need darning. The ‘see how they run’ in ‘Lady Madonna’ is contrasted with the same line in Lennon’s psychedelic ‘I Am The Walrus’ where it describes pigs running from a gun in an LSD-induced hallucination. In ‘Lady Madonna’, however, it is grounded in realism, reminding the listener of Lady Madonna’s endless responsibilities which she seems to carry out all on her own.

The only Lennon solo recording in The Beatles' discography, ‘Julia’ from The Beatles is Lennon’s ode to his mother, who died in a car accident when he was 18. It is minimalist and stripped back with plenty of finger picking, characteristic of the band’s time spent in India and Yoko Ono’s influence on Lennon. He later said of the song, ‘Julia was my mother. But it was sort of a combination of Yoko and my mother blended into one’. After years spent alluding to mothers and lovers in his contributions to the band’s earlier works, ‘Julia’ seemed to mark a turning point in Lennon’s attitude towards love. ‘Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia’ he sings, speaking of the impossibility of ever speaking to his mother again. At the end of the same verse, he admits that ‘Ocean child calls me’, with Yoko Ono’s name translated as ‘ocean child’ in Japanese. Rather than shying away from naming the thing he had most been searching for, Lennon attempts to make peace with his mother’s death and speaks of the person he has found to love just as much as he did her.

Harrison’s widely covered, deeply romantic contribution to Abbey Road, ‘Something’ was widely attributed to his wife Pattie Boyd at the time of release, though he later downplayed this. Regarded by Lennon and McCartney as one of Harrison’s best songs, and perhaps one of the best moments on Abbey Road, ‘Something’ was remarkably sentimental and straightforward in a period where The Beatles were writing cryptically and ambiguously about love. It can be read in different ways: ‘You're asking me will my love grow? I don't know, I don't know’ could imply that Harrison is uncertain whether this relationship with this woman will develop into something long-term and meaningful. On the other hand, it could suggest that he cannot love her any more than he already does – his love is so encompassing that it has reached its capacity. Like their earlier efforts, ‘Something’ embodies the idea that this woman is somehow different and has made an impact on Harrison – ‘Something in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover’ – so much so that he cannot leave her, even if he wished it. Unlike Lennon’s ‘Girl’, Harrison’s muse is not a femme fatale, nor is she an Eleanor Rigby.  Her anonymity and lack of identity make her, in some ways, the most accessible of The Beatles’ women, because she could be anybody. Frank Sinatra famously called it ‘the greatest love song ever written’, and many would be inclined to agree.

These are only a handful of the women The Beatles wrote about and were inspired by over the span of seven years and twelve studio albums. There are countless more, with individual songs or mentions in passing. Each of them would go on to write about the women they loved – their own creations and their individual wives and partners – in their solo endeavours, but these songs remain acclaimed and loved by listeners today.