“Penny Lane” is a nostalgic look back at the Liverpool “roundabout” or traffic circle where Lennon and Paul McCartney would meet as teens. “A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray”.Lennon changed her name to better segue into “Polythene Pam.” Mustard’s sister Pam (“ She never stops, she’s a go-getter“) was originally named Shirley. No, it had nothing to do with cocaine.”įrom that Lennon wrote, “ Keeps a ten-bob note up his nose / Such a mean old man.” A bob is British slang for a shilling, a small denomination of money no longer in use. Mustard” is not as nasty as his name implies: “Mean” in Britain means “cheap.” John Lennon explained in All We Are Saying that he’d spotted a news story about a man who took extreme measures to avoid spending money: “I’d read somewhere in the newspaper about this mean guy who hid five-pound notes, not up his nose but somewhere else. We grew our hair, dressed in Carnaby Street fashions and overnight, British words like “fab” and “gear” entered our language.īut Beatles lyrics contain many expressions that many American fans still don’t understand, even decades later. The Beatles‘ arrival on our shores changed all that. Until 1964, Americans imagined Brits as businessmen in bowler hats and stuffy butlers who served tea.
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