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Paul was probed on the drug associations: “If you’re a junky sitting in a room and fixing a hole then that’s what it will mean to you, but when I wrote it I meant if there’s a crack, or the room is uncolourful, then I’ll paint it.”

SHE’S LEAVING HOME
    In February 1967, Paul came across a newspaper article about a 17-year-old London schoolgirl studying for her A GCE level exams who’d been missing from home for over a week. Her distressed father was quoted as saying, “I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here.”
    The subject of teenage runaways was topical in 1967. As part of the creation of an alternative society, counter-culture guru Timothy Leary had urged his followers to ‘drop out’, to abandon education and ‘straight’ employment. As a result, streams of young people headed for San Francisco, centre of Flower Power. The FBI announced 90,000 runaways that year – a record.
    With only the newspaper story to go on, Paul created a moving song about a young girl sneaking away from her claustrophobically respectable home in search of fun and romance in the swinging Sixties. What he didn’t know at the time was how accurate his speculation was. He also had no idea that he had met the girl in question just three years before.
    The runaway in the story was Melanie Coe, the daughter of John and Elsie Coe, who lived in Stamford Hill, north London. The only differences between her story and the story told in the song are that she met a man from a gambling casino rather than from ‘the motor trade’ , and that she walked out in the afternoon while her parents were at work, rather than in the morning while they were asleep. “The amazing thing about the song was how much it got right about my life,” says Melanie. “It 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,” Melanie continues. “I never communicated with either of my parents. It was a constant battle. I left because I couldn’t face them any longer. I heard the song when it came out and thought it was about someone like me but never dreamed it was actually about me. I can remember thinking that I didn’t run off with a man from the motor trade, so it couldn’t have been me! I must have been in my twenties when my mother said she’d seen Paul on television and he’d said that the song was based on a story in a newspaper. That’s when I started telling my friends it was about me.”
    Melanie’s case was a textbook example of the generational friction of the late sixties. Melanie wanted a freedom she’d heard about but could not find at home. Her father was a successful executive and her mother a hairdresser, but their marriage was dry and brittle. They had no religion: to them the most important things in life were respectability, cleanliness and money. “My mother didn’t like any of my friends,” says Melanie. “I wasn’t allowed to bring anyone home. She didn’t like me going out. I wanted to act but she wouldn’t let me go to drama school. She wanted me to become a dentist. She didn’t like the way I dressed. She didn’t want me to do anything that I wanted to do. My father was weak. He just went along with whatever my mother said, even when he disagreed with her.”
    It was through music that Melanie found consolation. At the age of 13, she began clubbing in the West End of London and, when the legendary live television show Ready Steady Go! started in late 1963, she became a regular dancer on the show. Her parents would often scour the clubs and drag her back home. If she came back late, she would be hit. “When I went out, I could be me,” she said. “In fact, in the clubs I was encouraged to