Will the Real Penny Lane Please Stand Up?

I have been reading and interesting Beatles website: http://beatlesite.blogspot.com

When I got to the review of Paul’s Penny Lane the reviewer comments that he finds it too sweet. He goes on to say that if Paul had written in a little darkness it might have thrown all the sunlight into sharp relief and given the song a little more punch.  May I remind him and you that Paul has mentioned that the song is surreal.  One of the main keys to understanding surrealism is to remember that what you see (or to hear) is not all that is there. A trout can look like a monk and an apple becomes part of a simple gambling game.

We must assume that Penny Lane contains more than a charming suburban street. While John’s lyrics can containe implied meanings and portamento words requiring you to think through what he is saying, many of Paul’s best lyrics are very dense.  We can see Eleanor Rigby and Father McKensey; we know what they look like and how they live.  In Penny Lane the pictures are even clearer.  In fact that clarity I suspect is what makes it difficult to penetrate the shiny surface and see Paul’s surrealistic picture beneath it.

That first character introduced is the banker who refuses to wear a raincoat thus causing children to laugh at him.  I’m not sure what is so funny about not wearing a raincoat but in the late ’60s raincoats became associated with a passtime known as “Streaking”.  In other words our dignified banker discards his raincoat and goes flying down Penny Lane stark naked–surely enough to make the children laugh particularly as we suspect .. well nevermind.

The barber is quite easy.  One sees him as slightly camp and gesturing with his shiny steel scissors while in the window one see heads without bodies–severed and impaled.

The chorus of course is lovely but when pray tell me did Liverpool present present its citizens with blue skies?

It’s easy to see that the firemen is just a trifle strange with his picture of the Queen and obsession with “A clean machine. ” The nurse for me as rather Delta Dawn figure dressed perhaps in a World War one uniform humming to herself waiting for her young man with a mustache to return.

Not quite thin blue suburban sky anymore because just as in real life beneath the sunny surface lie human beings in all their strange variety.