Post-Beatles life would hardly be perfect for Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
The pair traded blows with one another in the press and studio, with bickering over worldviews, musical taste, and even the meaning behind some of their work. The Beatles‘ Abbey Road proved to be a point of contention for both men, with McCartney once ridiculing Lennon in an interview where he broke down a theory the Imagine songwriter held about the album. Lennon’s theory relates to She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, which according to Music Express puts Linda McCartney in place as the titular woman. McCartney would squash this rumour in an interview with the outlet, saying that it wasn’t to do with anyone in particular.
He said: “No she wasn’t. Well, John– what does he know? (laughs) This is the joke. He doesn’t know any more than I do or anyone else does. He’s gold, John. He was great, a fabulous guy and a beautiful person but he didn’t have a monopoly on sense. He was as daft as the next man. He could make his mistakes too. I don’t know. She may have been.
“I wrote it round about that time, but I didn’t consciously think, ‘She came in through the bathroom window.’ Alot of the time when I do songs like that, it’s just because the words sound good. You can get stuff which makes great sense but which is not good to sing. It doesn’t flow well. The words aren’t right.”
McCartney would often rely on the way words sounded, rather than what they mean, in his more surrealist writings. It showed often on Ram, his second solo album, with the song Monkberry Moon Delight. McCartney once confirmed that the song had no real meaning behind it, just a surrealist piece of writing that had more to do with milk than anything more revealing.
He said: “I’d always liked writing love songs, ballads, and rock ‘n’ roll songs, but then one of my other little side interests was to invent surrealist stuff. Admiral Halsey was someone I’d read about – he’s a character from American history – and I just liked the name.
“I was very into surrealism at that particular time, so I wrote songs like Monkberry Moon Delight which is again totally surreal. The word ‘monkberry’ actually came from our kids! That was how they said milk when they were little – ‘can I have some monk?’ – you know, in the way that kids get funny names for things. So, Monkberry Moon Delight to me was like a milkshake!”
McCartney would also single out the “butter pie” lyric of Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey as an example of writing with surrealism in mind. He said: “No, there’s no meaning behind it. Because I like surrealist art, I also like surrealist words.
“A great example of this is Lewis Carroll writing Alice in Wonderland – it’s a crazy thing, you’ve got a cat sitting in a tree that grins and talks, and you’ve got Alice falling down a hole and meeting the red queen, and so on. That whole tradition was something that I loved, and when I met John I learned that he loved it to. So, it was something that became a bond between us.”
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