The Hidden Meanings In Penny Lane

You’ll never be able to hear Penny Lane in the same way again once you know what Paul McCartney was really singing about in this song.

I imagine the Beatles were highly amused when the UK’s staid middle-class institutions, such as the BBC, and US radio stations innocently played Penny Lane without realising the song contained several sexual innuendoes and a drug reference.

English working-class sexual expressions and culture

The English working classes use many seemingly innocent expressions to describe sex; a bit of how’s your father means to have sex, meat and two veg. is used to describe male genitalia and garden gate means fellatio.

McCartney plays with some of these expressions throughout the song in much the same way as earlier generations of English musicians and comedians had done. McCartney was following his cultural and musical roots.

The hidden sexual meanings in verse 2

“On the corner is a banker with a motorcar,

The little children laugh at him behind his back.”

A wealthy banker (he has a motorcar, not common in ’50s Britain) has several illegitimate children who make fun of him when he’s not around. How do we know this? By the next line.

“And the banker never wears a Mac

In the pouring rain — very strange.”

Mac is short for Mackintosh, which is what we call a raincoat in the UK. A Mac is made of rubberised fabric to make it waterproof. You can see where this is going; Mac is slang for condom.

Now we can see that the wealthy banker never wears a condom when he’s with his mistress, in the pouring rain, (when ejaculating). This is very strange as he already has a number of illegitimate kids who laugh at him.

You’d think he’d have learned.

The hidden sexual meanings in verse 3

“In Penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass

And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen

He likes to keep his fire engine clean

It’s a clean machine”

The fireman fantasises about the Queen and masturbates (he likes to keep his fire engine clean) thinking of her. He does it a lot — it’s a clean machine.

The hidden meanings in the 2nd chorus

The 2nd line of the chorus lyrics change for the second rendition.

“A four of fish and finger pies in summer”

A four of fish is innocent enough, it means fourpence worth of fish and chips. But this only serves to lead us into the second part of the line, finger pies. A finger pie is English working-class slang for a man inserting his finger into a certain part of a woman’s anatomy.

Paul McCartney. The cute Beatle?

The hidden drug reference in verse 3

“Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout

The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray”

In the UK, people sell artificial poppies from a tray in November to commemorate Remembrance Day; the proceeds provide financial assistance for veterans and their families. It’s a scene you see on every British High Street throughout the land.

Except, there is something wrong with the image McCartney portrays; poppies are usually sold by former and serving members of the armed forces, not nurses. The lyrics use the nurse to symbolise someone selling narcotics stolen from a local hospital. Poppies reference opium, morphine, and heroin of course.

Penny Lane is not that idyllic place in the summer sun but a more gritty working-class area of ‘50s Liverpool.

The concluding hidden sexual meaning

“In Penny Lane, the barber shaves another customer,

We see the banker sitting waiting for a trim”

A final double meaning that echoes the sexual innuendoes of British Music Hall singer comedians from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s that McCartney was very familiar with.

The banker is waiting for his mistress for a trim — to have sex.

Penny Lane will never be the same again

Penny Lane is an incredibly deceptive song. What appears to be a lightweight pop song with happy-clappy lyrics about childhood memories, is in fact a darker recollection of working-class life in Liverpool in the ’50s.

It’s not just the lyrics that are deceptive. The music is far more sophisticated than you might think from a casual listen.

The song starts in a standard pop structure (B major — I, VI, II, V for those interested). It uses unexpected 7th and sus chords which begin to hint at the true musical complexity of Penny Lane.

Halfway through the 2nd cycle of the verse, the song surprisingly changes to a different key (the parallel minor for those still with me). This is accompanied by a change of harmonic rhythm.

McCartney added a foreshadowing chord in this 2nd cycle that points to yet another key change for the chorus, a G#m7b5 — good grief, that’s hardly simple. The chorus key change is down to A, rather than up as in most other pop songs.

There is more, but my head is spinning writing this theory stuff. Instead, take a listen to Penny Lane from an entirely new perspective.

This article first appeared at medium.com.