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In the Autumn of 1966, John went to Spain after accepting the part of Gripweed in Dick Lester's film of How I Won The War. While relaxing on the beach at Almeria, John started work on 'Strawberry Fields Forever', a song he imagined as a slow-talking blues number. He completed it in a large house he was renting in nearby Santa Isabel. It started out as a nostalgic view of a Salvation army orphanage in Woolton, where he, Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan used to play amongst the trees, and ended up, like so many of John's songs, as a rumination on states of consciousness. Strawberry Field (John added the 's') was a large Victorian building with extensive wooded grounds in Beaconsfield Road, a five-minute walk from John's home in Menlove Avenue. Since 1936, it had been a children's home with an annual fete, which aunt Mimi regularly took him to. The gothic grandeur of the building and the mystery of the woods fascinated John. He recognized it as a place where he could be alone and let his imagination run free. He soon discovered that there was a more direct route from his garden into the grounds and it became one of his places of escape. Because of these romantic associations, Strawberry Field became a symbol of his desire to be alone, of his feeling that he was somehow set apart from his contemporaries. If 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is a song about John seeing the world in a different way to everyone around him, the meaning is clearer in the earliest version of the lyric, where he wrote that no-one is on his wavelength, they're either 'too high or too low'. By the time he came to record it, he had deliberately obscured this meaning perhaps for fear of being labelled pretentious - by singing that no-one was in his 'tree', as this was either too high or low. |
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