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be myself and to have a good time. Dancing was my passion. I was crazy for the music of the time and couldn’t wait until the next single came out. When the song says ‘Something was denied’, that something was me. I wasn’t allowed to be me. I was looking for excitement and affection. My mother wasn’t affectionate at all. She never kissed me.”
    On Friday October 4, 1963, Melanie won a Ready Steady Go! mime competition. By coincidence, it happened to be the first time the Beatles were on the show and she was presented with her award by Paul McCartney. Each of the Beatles then gave her a signed message. “I spent that day in the studios going through rehearsals,” she says, “so I was around the Beatles most of that time. Paul wasn’t particularly chatty and John seemed distant but I did spend time talking to George and Ringo.”
    Melanie’s flight from home took her into the arms of David, a croupier she had met in a club. They rented a flat in Sussex Gardens near Paddington Station and, while out walking one afternoon, they saw her photo on the front page of an evening newspaper. “I immediately went back to the flat and put on dark glasses and a hat,” she said. “From then on, I lived in terror that they’d find me. They did discover me after about ten days, because I think I’d let it slip where my boyfriend worked. They talked to his boss who persuaded me to call them up. When they eventually called to see me, they bundled me into the back of their car and drove me home.”
    To escape from her parents, Melanie married at 18. The marriage didn’t last much more than a year and by the age of 21 she had moved to America to live in an ashram and tried to make it as an actress. Melanie now lives in Spain with two children and a partner, buying and selling Fifties Hollywood jewellery. “If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t choose to do it the same way,” Melanie remarks. “What I did was very dangerous but I was lucky. I suppose it is nice to be immortalised in a song but it would have been nicer if it had been for doing something other than running away from home.”

BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR KITE!
    In January 1967, the Beatles went to Knole Park near Sevenoaks in Kent to make a promotional film for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. “There was an antiques shop close to the hotel we were using,” says former Apple employee Tony Bramwell. “John and I wandered in and John spotted this framed Victorian circus poster and bought it.”
    Printed in 1843, the poster proudly announced that Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal would be presenting the ‘ grandest night of the season’ at Town Meadows, Rochdale, Lancashire. The production was to be ‘for the benefit of Mr Kite’ and would feature ‘Mr J. Henderson the celebrated somerset (sic) thrower’ who would ‘introduce his extraordinary trampoline leaps and somersets over men and horses, through hoops, over garters and lastly through a hogshead of real fire. In this branch of the profession Mr H challenges the world’. Messrs Kite and Henderson were said to assure the public that ‘this night’s production will be one of the most splendid ever produced in this town, having been some days in preparation’.
    John began to write a song using the poster’s words. It now hung in his music room and Pete Shotton saw him squinting at the words while he picked out a tune on his piano. John changed a few facts to fit the song. On the poster, Mr Henderson offered to challenge the world, not Mr Kite: the Hendersons weren’t ‘late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair’, Kite was ‘late of Wells’s Circus’. In order to rhyme with ‘ don’t be late’, John moved events from Rochdale to Bishopsgate and to rhyme with ‘will all be there’ he changed the circus to a fair. The original horse was named Zanthus rather than Henry.
    Pablo Fanque, Mr Kite and the Hendersons were never more than colourful names to John but records show that, 150 years