Paul McCartney reveals picture that inspired his song Lady Madonna, the very intriguing true-life stories behind other Beatles hits

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Now we CAN work it out! Macca reveals picture that inspired his song Lady Madonna, the very intriguing true-life stories behind other Beatles hits
° Vietnamese mum breastfeeding a child behind iconic 1968 Lady Madonna song 
° The photo’s caption also gave him his title and opening line for the hit song
° It read ‘Mountain Madonna, with one child at her breast...’ 
° Sir Paul McCartney had never mentioned the connection before in conversation
By Steve Turner For Daily Mail
PUBLISHED:  6 November 2017

Paul McCartney has confessed to National Geographic magazine that his iconic 1968 song Lady Madonna was inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese mother breastfeeding a child, which the magazine had published in 1965.
What he didn’t mention was that the photo’s caption also gave him his title and opening line. It read ‘Mountain Madonna, with one child at her breast . . .’ In frequent discussions over the years about the song he had never mentioned this connection before.
Now, this fascinating story will join the mythology that surrounds all The Beatles songs and how they came about.
Some stories are well known, such as how Penny Lane was an area of Liverpool, and that Strawberry Field (no ‘s’) was a children’s home in whose landscaped grounds John Lennon used to play.
It was also well known that McCartney woke up with the tune for Yesterday already complete in his mind.
I began seriously researching the songs in the Nineties, uncovering new stories and getting more details about the ones already known.
Here is a selection of the most intriguing.

I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU
(Rubber Soul, 1965)
McCartney’s relationship with girlfriend Jane Asher inspired some of his most tender love songs (And I Love Her, Things We Said Today, Here There And Everywhere) as well as some of his bitterest rebukes.
When she made it clear that she would not be abandoning her acting career to spend more time with him, he was upset.
‘I knew I was selfish,’ he later admitted. ‘It caused a few rows. Jane went off and I said: “OK then. Leave. I’ll find someone else.” It was shattering to be without her. That was when I wrote I’m Looking Through You.’


Paul McCartney has confessed to National Geographic magazine that his iconic 1968 song Lady Madonna was inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese mother breastfeeding a child, which the magazine had published in 1965

SHE SAID SHE SAID
(Revolver, 1966)
In August 1965, The Beatles threw a party at their rented home in Benedict Canyon, LA, for a few friends, including actor Peter Fonda. During the evening Lennon and George Harrison took LSD, and George began to feel as if he was dying.
Fonda, more experienced in drug taking, took it upon himself to be a guide.
‘I told him there was nothing to be afraid of,’ Fonda explained to me. ‘I said I knew what it was like to be dead because as a child I’d accidentally shot myself in the stomach and my heart stopped three times while I was on the operating table.
‘John was passing by and heard me saying: “I know what it’s like to be dead.” He looked at me and said: “You’re making me feel I’ve never been born. Who put all that s**t in your head?” ’ The exchange gave John the starting point for this song written during the sessions for Revolver in 1966.
The first verse goes: ‘She said: “I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad,” And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.’
‘When I heard the album for the first time,’ said Fonda, ‘I knew exactly where the song had come from, although John never acknowledged it to me and I never mentioned it to anyone.’

PAPERBACK WRITER
(45rpm single, 1966)
Up to 1966, most Beatles songs had been about boy-girl romance. McCartney’s aunt challenged him to broaden his subject matter.
‘My Aunt Mill said: “Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?” ’ said Paul. ‘So I thought: “All right Aunt Mill. I’ll show you . . .” ’
The result was a convoluted story of a wannabe novelist who promises to do anything he can to get a bestseller, which includes the line: ‘His son is working for the Daily Mail, It’s a steady job, but he wants to be a paperback writer.’

SHE’S LEAVING HOME
(Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967)
Newspapers — and the Mail in particular — were an important source of inspiration in 1967.
A story published on February 27 about an A-level student who ‘dumps car and vanishes’ told how Melanie Coe, 17, had left home without explanation. Her father was quoted as saying: ‘I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here.’
Knowing only these bare details, McCartney wrote She’s Leaving Home. ‘The amazing thing was how much it got right about my life,’ Melanie told me years later.
‘The song quoted the parents as saying, “We gave her everything money could buy,” which was true in my case. I had two diamond rings, a mink coat, hand-made clothes in silk and cashmere and even my own car.
‘Then there was the line “after living alone for so many years”, which really struck home to me because I was an only child and I always felt alone.’

HELLO, GOODBYE
(45rpm single, 1967)
Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s assistant Alistair Taylor asked McCartney for a songwriting demonstration. Paul sat at his harmonium and asked Taylor to call out the opposite of every word he sang. For ‘yes’ Taylor would shout ‘no’, for ‘stop’ he would shout ‘go’.
‘I’ve no memory of the tune,’ Taylor later said. ‘I wonder whether Paul really made up the song as we went along or whether it was running through his head already. Anyway, shortly afterwards, he arrived at the office with a demo tape of the latest single — Hello, Goodbye.’

WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?
(The White Album, 1968)
Langur monkeys are everywhere in Rishikesh, India, where The Beatles went to learn Transcendental Meditation in 1968. When McCartney came across a couple copulating on a dirt track he mused on why it was that monkeys weren’t as inhibited by modesty as we are.

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN
(The White Album, 1968)
Lennon said the title came from a gun magazine. Sometimes he said it was a cover headline, and at other times an advert inside: ‘I thought — what a fantastic thing to say. A warm gun means that you’ve just shot something.’
After years of searching, I discovered the headline was in The American Rifleman, above a full-page story by Warren W. Herlihy, who wrote about introducing his young son to the joys of shooting.
The magazine headline was a play on Happiness Is A Warm Puppy, a 1962 book by Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz.

OB-LA-DI OB-LA-DA
(The White Album, 1968)
Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott — a member of Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames — coined the phrase on which the song was built. It had a special meaning in his tribal language that he never shared with anyone.
Onstage he would yell ‘Ob-la-di’ to the audience. They would shout back ‘Ob-la-da’ and he would say ‘Life goes on’. In 1984, McCartney said: ‘[Jimmy] got annoyed when I did a song of it because he wanted a cut. I said: “Come on, Jimmy. It’s just an expression. If you’d written the song, you could have had the cut.” ’


Paul McCartney and girlfriend Jane Asher arrive at the London premiere of Clive Donner's comedy Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush at the London Pavilion 1968

DEAR PRUDENCE
(The White Album, 1968)
Written by Lennon for actress Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence while in Rishikesh. She spent so much of her spare time meditating that John wrongly assumed she was having a breakdown.
‘John, George and Paul would all want to sit around jamming and having a good time, and I’d be flying into my room [to meditate],’ she told me. ‘They were all serious about what they were doing, but just not as fanatical as me.
‘The song that John wrote was just saying: “Come out and play with us. Come out and have some fun.”’

SEXY SADIE
(The White Album, 1968)
Originally titled Maharishi, this was a vicious attack on the guru they’d followed to India. Lennon in particular had become disillusioned by him, fuelled by unsubstantiated rumours of Maharishi’s avarice. John knew the song could be libellous if he used real names, so he retitled it Sexy Sadie, who in the lyrics ‘made a fool of everyone’.


Newspapers — and the Mail in particular — were an important source of inspiration in 1967. A story published on February 27 about an A-level student who ‘dumps car and vanishes’ told how Melanie Coe, 17, had left home without explanation

POLYTHENE PAM
(Abbey Road, 1969)
Lennon once said Polythene Pam was about: ‘A little event with a woman in Jersey, and a man who was England’s answer to [U.S. poet] Allen Ginsberg.’
The English Ginsberg was Royston Ellis. The woman was his then girlfriend, Stephanie.
Apparently, the three wrapped themselves in polythene and spent the night in the same bed.
‘We’d read these things about leather,’ Ellis said. ‘We didn’t have leather, but we had polythene bags. I don’t think anything very exciting happened and we wondered what the fun was in being “kinky”.’ There was also a Liverpool fan called Pat Hodgetts who had a habit of chewing polythene. The Beatles called her Polythene Pat.

SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW
(Abbey Road, 1969)
Beatles fans known as ‘Apple Scruffs’ — after the band’s label — would congregate outside McCartney’s house in St John’s Wood, London. One day, some decided to investigate more closely. ‘We found a ladder and stuck it up at the bathroom window,’ former Scruff Diane Ashley told me. ‘He’d left it slightly open. I was the one who climbed up and got in.’
She let others in through the front door and, as a result, some of Paul’s property went missing. Diane was surprised when she heard the song: ‘I didn’t believe it at first because he’d hated it so much when we broke in. But then I suppose anything can inspire a song, can’t it?’

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD
(Let It Be, 1970)
Linda McCartney told me the title and some of the imagery of wild and wet weather were suggested to Paul by their remote Scottish farm near Campbeltown. Whichever direction you drive down the peninsula of Kintyre, the road is both long and winding.
‘It’s all about the unattainable, the door you never quite reach,’ Paul once said. ‘This is the road you never quite get to the end of.’

LET IT BE
(45rpm, 1970)
Because McCartney was christened a Roman Catholic it’s often assumed this song with its gospel chords and references to wisdom, darkness, mother Mary and a light that shines, is a modern hymn. Even Paul has admitted that it sounds ‘quasi-religious’.
However, it originated during the time The Beatles were falling apart, and Paul had a dream during which he heard his mother (whose name was Mary) offer him consoling words.
‘She died when I was 14, so I hadn’t heard from her in a while and it was very good,’ Paul said. ‘It gave me some strength. In my darkest hour, mother Mary had come to me.’

Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year by Steve Turner (Ecco, £9.99) is out in paperback on November 30.