Eleanor Rigby (BDJ Remix)

In the summer of 1966, the Beatles scored a No 1 with a double A-side single. On one side was "Yellow Submarine", and on the other there was "Eleanor Rigby", a sombre song with string backing about lonely people. It featured Eleanor Rigby, who sat by the window, and Father McKenzie, who may or may not have been the priest who officiated at her funeral, to which nobody came.

Paul claimed that he had originally considered calling her Daisy Hawkins, although it is difficult to see how "Daisy" could have been made to fit the song's meticulous scansion, in which two unstressed syllables follow each stressed syllable, except at the end of a line.

He then syas that hetook the name "Eleanor" from Eleanor Bron, who starred with the Beatles in the film Help!, and "Rigby" from the Bristol wine merchants, Rigby & Evens. But in the 1980s, a grave was discovered in St Peter's Church, Woolton, Liverpool, where McCartney and Lennon went sunbathing as teenagers, bearing the name Eleanor Rigby. nother gravestone had the word "McKenzie" sprawled on it.

But who was the lonely person who picked up the rice in a church where a wedding had been really ?

Paul stated on various occasions that the original lyrics featured a 'father McCartney'; he changed these to 'father McKenzie' since he did not want people to think it was about his father. But was it ?

If the orginal lyrics were indeed about his father (McCartney), then whom would 'Eleanor Rigby' have referred to in the very first conception of the lyrics ? Could this have been 'mother McCartney', or - more likely - Mary McCartney (Paul's mother's name) ? Both fit the the rythm of the song much better than 'Daisy Hawkins' !

The lyrics were put together among The Beatles and friends (Pete Shotton), so we shouldn't expect to extract too much relevance concerning Paul in them. In later years, Lennon claimed that he suggested most of the words, but this appears unlikely, apart from the chorus.

McCartney used a string octet of studio musicians, composed of four violins, two cellos, and two violas, all performing a score composed by George Martin.The octet was recorded on 28 April 1966, in Studio 2 at Abbey Road Studios and completed in Studio 3 on 29 April and on 6 June. Tantalisingly, the string quartet was recoreded (close - miked) on all four tracks of the EMI machine. Imagine if we had those ttracks to mix with !

The original stereo mix has Paul's voice only in the right channel during the verses, with the string octet mixed to one channel, while the mono single and mono LP featured a more balanced mix. In my ears, the stereo mix from June '66 was bungled: the stereo string quartet is further bounced into a mono track (in the middle of the stereo field), and lead vocals are on the extreme right, but sometimes seem to wander. The chorus features true stereo vocals on 2 occasions, but a 'fake' sounding stero in another case.

Perhaps even George Martin was unhappy with the stereo version, when stereo became the norm instead of the mono versions. A complete remix was done for the Love release, boasting a stereo string quartet and centred vocals; unfortunately, the song fades in and out of other tracks in Love.

Another remix ws made for the 1999 re-release of the Yellow Submarine movie. Again a decent stereo landscape, but here the vocals sound slightly out of sync....

So, there appears to be room for a definitive remix of Eleanor Rigby: fixing the stereo image, including a/o a stereo string quartet & true stereo vocals in the chorus throughout.

George Martin, in his autobiography All You Need Is Ears, takes credit for combining two of the vocal parts, having noticed that they would work together contrapuntally. I didn't like it, so created a more suitable ending. Re-did the intro as well, while I was on it.......