The Beatles Read Online Free

first springlike morning we’d had that year. Thinking about the weather Paul said, ‘It’s getting better’. He was meaning that spring was here but he started laughing and, when I asked him why, he told me that it reminded him of something.”
    The phrase took Paul’s mind back to drummer Jimmy Nicol, who briefly became a Beatle in June 1964, substituting on tour for a sick Ringo. Nicol was an experienced musician who had worked with the Spotnicks and Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, but he had to learn to be a Beatle overnight. Called in by George Martin on June 3, he met John, Paul and George that afternoon and was on stage with them in Copenhagen the following night. A week later in Adelaide, after playing just five dates, Nicol was given his fee, together with a jokey ‘retirement present’, a gold watch. “After every concert, John and Paul would go up to Jimmy Nicol and ask him how he was getting on,” says Hunter Davies. “All that Jimmy would ever say was, ‘It’s getting better’. That was the only comment they could get out of him. It ended up becoming a joke phrase and whenever the boys thought of Jimmy they’d think of ‘it’s getting better’.”
    After the walk on Primrose Hill, Paul drove back to his home in St John’s Wood and sang the phrase over and over, while picking out a tune on his guitar. Then he worked it out on the piano in his musicroom which had a strange tone that sounded almost out of tune. “That evening John came round,” remembers Davies. “Paul suggested writing a song called ‘It’s Getting Better’. Now and again, they’d write whole songs individually, but mostly one of them had half a song and the other one would finish it off. That’s how it was with this one. Paul played what he’d come up with to John and together they finished it.”
    ‘Getting Better’ proved an interesting example of how they curbed each other’s excesses when they worked together. The optimism of Paul’s chorus, where everything is improving because of love, is counterbalanced by John’s confession that he was once a schoolboy rebel, an angry young man and a wife beater. When Paul sings that things are getting better all the time, John chimes in with ‘it couldn’t get much worse’.
    Asked about the song years later, John admitted it referred to his aggressive tendencies, “I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.”

FIXING A HOLE
    ‘Fixing A Hole’ was another Sgt Pepper song assumed to refer to drugs. People assumed that Paul was talking about ‘fixing’ with heroin. But the song really was about renovating his life, allowing himself the freedom to close up the cracks and holes that allowed the enemies of his imagination to leak in. “It’s the hole in your make up which lets the rain in and stops your mind from going where it will,” as he put it.
    Although it wasn’t about DIY, Paul may have drawn the images from his Scottish hideaway, High Park, that he had bought in June 1966 on the advice of his accountants. The house, which had 400 acres of grazing land, hadn’t been lived in for five years and was in poor condition from the regular battering of rain and sea winds. The brown walls were dark with damp, the only furniture consisted of potato boxes and there was no bath.
    Paul decorated this property ‘in a colourful way’ as remembered by Alistair Taylor, Brian Epstein’s assistant who accompanied Paul and Jane on their first visit to High Park. “The brown paint made the farmhouse look like the inside of an Aero bar,” he wrote in his book Yesterday: My Life With The Beatles. “Paul decided he’d had enough of it so he went into Campbeltown and bought lots of packets of coloured pens. The three of us spent the next few hours just doodling in all these colours, spreading them all over the wall and trying to relieve the gloom.”
    In 1967, in an interview with artist Alan Aldridge,