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2. Strawberry Fields Forever
(Single, 1967)
Regret and drugs warp John's dream of a Liverpool already long gone. Sheer alchemy.
 E (Eels enigma): “I don’t remember when I first heard it, but I remember being four years old and my sister having the 45. I remember dancing around to it in a real crazy, tribal, gorilla-like way. I particularly responded to the weird fade-up at the end. Little kids always respond to the Beatles; it’s some universal thing that I can’t explain.
“I like to think about what it would have been like to have been an adult in 1967, driving down the road one day with the AM radio playing, and hearing that for the first time. It must have been a mindblowing experience. It has this ghostly quality, and the slowed-down Lennon voice, which really dramatised the idea of “maturing”. There’s also a scariness that offsets the nostalgic childhood thing. And I think that’s partly why it stands the test of time. It transcends any Summer of Love bullshit.
“From a musician’s perspective, it’s stunning, a spine-tingler. I really like the other versions of it, too, on bootlegs where Lennon’s voice isn’t slowed down. It really raises the hair on your arms. I love the conversational tone of the lyrics – ‘that is’, ‘I think’, ‘you know’, ‘ah yes’ – that’s unusual for a pop song even now. It’s one of those John Lennon songs that has a preordained quality, as if it just came from the sky. It just sounds perfect.”
 Paul Weller: “I can remember the wonderment it filled me with as a kid and it still does after all these years – the soundscape it creates in my mind which I can never put my finger on and never want to. We've got so much information about The Beatles now, where they wrote this and recorded that and how, but sometimes that takes the magic away. Sometimes you just don't need to know all those things. I remember seeing the two promo films, for this and Penny Lane. I was about nine, watching it on the black and white grainy TV set and I was so knocked out by it, and hearing the song on the radio it was like something coming in from another planet at the time. It's the world's most psychedelic record. No ,I'd never attempt to cover it, wouldn't know where to begin, maybe strip it down, do it on acoustic guitar but that still wouldn't be good enough. You can't touch it.”
 Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips): “Strawberry Fields is a thread that goes through almost everything I’ve tried to do. Me and my older brother Ken would endlessly listen to the end of the song – and I still wish it was John Lennon saying “I buried Paul” instead of “cranberry sauce”. The song is monumentally awesome and strange without that baggage, but it always haunted me – the idea that Paul McCartney is actually dead and here’s John Lennon singing about it. And I can see now this clear thread – that starts with Strawberry Fields – of me being almost mythically obsessed by the idea of a psychedelic death.
“Of course, now I know that was only a stupid story. But there’s more to Strawberry Fields than a story about John Lennon’s childhood. I mean, what the fuck are those lyrics? “No-one I think is in my tree”? Sometimes you sing a line like that and then you pull yourself outside of it and you’re like, what the fuck is that all about? Music’s like that. I always compare it to having really freaky sex. When you’re doing it, it’s like, Wooo, that’s about as good as it gets! And then the minute you pull away from it you’re like, Man that was weird. What are we doing here? But those are the moments that show us there’s a magical invisible area in our lives. And Strawberry Fields does that, for sure.”
 Sufjan Stevens: “Even as a child, I knew this was a song of incarnation. John Lennon’s sobering voice, pitch-shifted down, Ringo’s bombastic beats, George Martin’s gregarious string and horn arrangements, the tape-splicing, the mood swings, that weird nautical alarm clock in the third verse, the jam-out, the fade out, the fantastic coda. It was serious and silly all at once. At the time, I took it literally: Yes, of course, let’s go down and pick strawberries with the Fab Four. Why not? Years later, in college, my friends clued me to the drug references. But now, I’m not so sure. The multiple variations released on the Anthology albums indicate something much deeper. To me, it’s a song about John working it out, shrugging his shoulders, letting it go, returning to an idyllic place from his childhood now lost in memory. In the process he also happened to create one of the most gorgeous psychedelic revelations in pop music.”
Sufjan Stevens photo copyright Denny Bradshaw |
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