Paul McCartney unwittingly met the girl who'd later inspire the Beatles' She's Leaving Home
She's Leaving Home was one of the most spellbinding moments on the Beatles’ 1967 magnum opus Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. A heartstring-tugging document of coming of age angst, its sweeping orchestral arrangement supported a lyric that was inspired by a very real story.
The Paul McCartney-penned narrative gently expanded on a young girl’s decision to leave her stuffy, conservative parents’ home and - at Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock (as the day begins) - sneaks out to join the man (from the motor trade) that she was going to start her new life with.
Marrying sentiment with rebellion, She's Leaving Home balances a sympathetic, and nostalgic, longing for the past with the increasing rejection of conservatism then rife within 1960s youth culture.
This was characterised by its parent-perspective chorus lyric - sung in typically spine-tingling fashion by John Lennon.
We're not the first to say it, and we won't be the last, but it's wonderful stuff all round. But the unlikely, fateful layers behind its origin deepen its magic…
Firstly, there's that newspaper story that McCartney based his lyric on. Within the February 27th 1967 edition of the Daily Mail, a story that ran with the headline 'A-level girl dumps car and vanishes', detailed how a young schoolgirl - Melanie Coe - had disappeared from her family home in London’s Stamford Hill. Not even taking her car (an Austin 1100) or any of her wardrobe full of clothes - only the clothes she was wearing that day.
This had lead her extremely worried parents to contact the national press, with her father telling the paper that, “I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here… even her fur coat.”
Melanie, whose hasty exit was spurred by finding out that she was pregnant, would later turn up safe and sound. She wasn't aware that the newspaper story had inspired She's Leaving Home until many years later.
In later life, she explained to the press that while her parents did in fact provide her with all the material possessions she could ever need, what she wanted most of all was some kind of emotional closeness. "As a 17-year-old I had everything money could buy - diamonds, furs, a car - but my father and mother never once told me they loved me,” Coe told the Daily Mail in 2007, echoing the dynamic presented in McCartney's lyric.
Source: musicradar.com/Andy Price
