"The greatest pop record ever made. A record that never dates, because it lives outside time”: How The Beatles created Strawberry Fields Forever - the experimental masterpiece that John Lennon regarded as the best song he ever wrote for the band

It is regarded by many as the best song that John Lennon ever wrote for The Beatles - and that was a view held by Lennon himself.

Lennon once described Strawberry Fields Forever as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote”, adding that, along with Help!, “they were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it”.

Strawberry Fields Forever is quite simply a masterpiece, a poignant, heartfelt song that bridges the innocence of Lennon’s post-War childhood with the kaleidoscopic, heady sensation of ’60s psychedelia.

It is also a landmark moment in the rich back catalogue of The Beatles.

Like everything within the exhaustively chronicled career of The Beatles, there's no shortage of opinions on when exactly John Lennon first came up with the germ of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Forums were abuzz in late 2024, when a clip in the Beatles ’64 documentary showed Lennon in a New York hotel room at the height of Beatlemania playing what certainly sounds like the opening, descending melody of Strawberry Fields Forever - on a Melodica. Some observers were not convinced.

What is fairly certain is that Lennon wrote the whole song between 26 September and 6 November 1966 in Spain, during filming for the Richard Lester-directed film How I Won The War, a black comedy in which Lennon plays hapless Private Gripweed.

In David Sheff’s 1980 book, The Last Major Interview With John Lennon And Yoko Ono, Lennon recalled the writing of Strawberry Fields Forever: “We were in Almeria,” he said, “and it took me six weeks to write the song.

“I was writing it all the time I was making the film. And as anybody knows about film work, there’s a lot of hanging around.

“I have an original tape of it somewhere, of how it sounded before it became the psychedelic sounding song it became on record.”

Like the Paul McCartney-penned Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever was Lennon’s nostalgia-fuelled look back to his childhood years in Liverpool.

Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army children’s home in the leafy Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon had lived since the age of five with his Aunt Mimi at ‘Mendips’, 251 Menlove Avenue.

One of Lennon's childhood treats was the garden party held each summer, near the home, where a Salvation Army brass band played.

"There was something about the place that always fascinated John,” said Mimi in Hunter Davies’ book, The Beatles. “He could see it from his window. As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late.’”

When Lennon wrote the song, it was also informed by his experiences with LSD.

In the The Beatles Anthology, Lennon described the song as “psychoanalysis set to music”.

“The second line goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree’,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “Well, what I was trying to say in that line is, ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius’… What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is, ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.’”

Lennon continued to work on the song at his house Kenwood, in Weybridge, Surrey, recording demos when he returned from filming in Spain. He also included parts played on a mellotron, an instrument he bought in August 1965.

On 24 November 1966, all four Beatles arrived at Studio 2 of EMI Recording Studios [now called Abbey Road Studios] to begin work on the song. This was the first activity by the band since they completed their final tour of the US on 29 August 1966.

For Lennon, who had felt vulnerable and unable to connect with any of the cast during the filming of How I Won The War, reuniting with the band was a revelation.

"I was never so glad to see the others,” he was quoted as saying in Jonathan Gould’s 2007 book, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America. “Seeing them made me feel normal again."

Strawberry Fields Forever would become one of the most technically complex recordings The Beatles ever attempted.

The song was recorded over eight dates in the final weeks of 1966: 24, 28 and 19 November and 8, 9, 15, 21 and 22 December.

The band, producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick would spend an unprecedented 55 hours of studio time completing the song.

Take One on 24 November began with Lennon playing the band the song on his acoustic before he changed to his Epiphone Casino for the recording.

McCartney played the mellotron and wrote the melody for that instrument on the introduction.

This take opened with a verse instead of the chorus, beginning with the line, “Living is easy with eyes closed”.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to this version, with George Harrison’s overdubbed slide guitar on the choruses really elevating Lennon’s vocal.

On 28 November, the band reconvened to try a different arrangement, featuring McCartney’s mellotron intro followed by the chorus.

The band re-recorded the song again on 29 November, using the same arrangement. Harrison added arpeggio chord patterns and Lennon’s vocal was recorded with the tape running fast so when it played back at the normal speed his voice was lower, with a slurred effect.

As ever, McCartney delivers an impeccably judged bass line beneath the crystalline jangle of the guitars.

George Harrison’s cascading swarmandal [Indian harp], which intros the second and third verses, injects an Eastern flavour to the sound.

As with Dylan, Lennon’s lyrics spill effortlessly over stanzas, the lyrics seemingly driving the form and direction of the song’s structure.

Lennon added a second vocal over the chorus, and final overdubs included piano and additional bass.

The subsequent mixdown became Track 7 - and the first minute of this version would be used for the final released version of the song.

At this point, Lennon wanted to try something different with the song and turned to George Martin for help.

In Joseph Brennan’s 1996 book, Strawberry Fields Forever: Putting Together The Pieces, Martin said of Lennon: "He'd wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous. He asked me if I could write him a new line-up with the strings. So I wrote a new score.”

This new score utilised four trumpets and three cellos.

The sessions for Martin’s brass and cello arrangement took place on 15 December.

The musicians included cellist Joy Hall, the first woman to appear on a Beatles song.

Martin’s string and brass parts enhanced the Indian flavour of the song.

As Ian McDonald noted in his 1994 book, Revolution In The Head, Martin’s scoring of the cellos would "[weave] exotically" around McCartney's "sitar-like" guitar figures before the coda.

As the sessions rolled on, overdubbing and editing continued at a pace.

At the end of December 1966 Lennon reviewed acetates of the previous version, Take 7, and the new remake, Take 26.

According to Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recordings Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962-1970, Lennon told Martin that he liked both the “original, lighter” take 7 and “the intense, scored version” of take 26.

Then, in a decision that only someone with boundless creative vision yet no engineering knowledge would make, Lennon asked Martin to simply stick the two versions together.

“There are two things against it,” Martin replied, as reported in Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “They are in different keys and different tempos. Apart from that, fine.”

“Well,” Lennon reportedly said, “You can fix it.”

And so it was that on 22 December, 1966, George Martin and Geoff Emerick sat in the control room of Studio 2 at EMI Abbey Road Studios and pondered how to splice the two versions together.

Armed with only a pair of editing scissors, a couple of tape machines and a varispeed control, Emerick and Martin embarked on some trial-and-error experimentation.

By speeding up the playback of the first takes and slowing down the playback of the second, Emerick eventually managed to get them to match in both pitch and tempo.

Take 7, which opened the song, was left in its original key of B flat major, while Take 26, recorded in C major and at a faster tempo, was slowed by 11.5 per cent, which brought the tempos and keys of both versions into line.

They had fulfilled Lennon’s seemingly impossible request, “with the grace of God, and a bit of luck,” said Martin.

The edit can be heard on the finished, released version at precisely 60 seconds in, immediately prior to the words “going to” in the second chorus.

The joining of the two versions marked the completion of Strawberry Fields Forever, nearly a month after recording began.

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On 13 February 1967, Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A-side with Penny Lane.

In line with the band’s usual practice of not including tracks released as singles on albums, Strawberry Fields Forever was omitted from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a decision which George Martin later acknowledged was a “dreadful mistake”.

Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was the first Beatles single since Please Please Me in 1963 not to reach No. 1.

The song reached No. 2 in the UK, kept from the top slot by Englebert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me.

Music writer Peter Doggett noted that the failure of Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane to reach the top slot was “arguably the most disgraceful statistic in chart history”.

Doggett described Strawberry Fields Forever as "the greatest pop record ever made" adding that it is “a record that never dates, because it lives outside time”.

The stunning inventiveness of Strawberry Fields Forever left both fans and critics bewildered and breathless.

It was the sound of The Beatles taking a huge creative stride forward.

In the States, the song marked the point at which writers sought for the first time to elevate pop to a higher cultural plain. A 1967 feature in Time magazine led the way:

“[The] Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of.

“They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music.”