Ian MacDonald

I was going back and reading more about The Beatles, 'cause they're in the news so much.

I was reading that book, uh, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, where they go, he goes back through every Beatles song one by one and talks about how it was recorded and the cultural context and stuff.

And it's weird to think about how quickly they recorded those and how they rushed them through it.

And the second they were done with one album, they would have to start on the next one.

But I do think to be fair to Paul, and obviously I don't like to be fair to Paul, I do think his version has the ring of truth.

Well, we could always ask the fun police, Ian MacDonald, who says, you know, he talks about the song's angular verticality, spanning an octave in typically wide and difficult leaps, which certainly shows off McCartney's touch more than Lennon's.

But on the other hand, the chromatic descent via the minor subdominant in the second half of the verse suggests Lennon.

Keep me awake, Stephen.

Unfortunately, the information from Shout got jumbled, and various newspaper articles stated that Tynan was a critic for the Times newspaper of London.

Ian MacDonald repeated this in his 1994 book, Revolution in the Head, writing, "In The Times, Kenneth Tynan called it, Pepper, a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization." And this information is now an established footnote when discussing Sgt.

Pepper.

There are dozens of books, if not hundreds, that repeat the quote.

In Shout, Norman discussed Pepper's impact on Tynan and, amazingly, Mark Lewison as examples at two ends of a spectrum: one an established critic and the other a young fan.

He then quoted a review from The Times without mentioning who the writer is at the start of the next paragraph.

It's possible that one might assume that this quote from the Times is also attributed to Tynan, but it's not true, of course, and should have been an easy piece of information for the likes of Ian MacDonald to verify before he repeated it in Revolution in the Head.

After all, it was one of the first, most glaring incongruities I encountered in my research.

With a little...

I'm not going to bother sorry I won't bother singing it you can hear it imagine it Ian Macdonald in Revolution in the Head said that Paul's melodies scanned whole octaves and things like that you know in other words they ranged over you know a large sort of range of notes in the scale across the scale right could have expressed that better but In other words, he jumped about.

He used big interval jumps and leaps and things like that.

Whereas John Lennon tends to mumble around one note.

That's a funny touch.

You know, doorbell rings, loads of people come round to visit.

My favourites are Uncle Ian and Martin Luther, who presumably has popped in to bang his 95 theses to the front door, which is a hilarious joke.

It's probably one of Paul's Irish Catholic jokes.