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ago,they were stars in the circus world. Mr Kite was William Kite, son of a circus proprietor, James Kite, and an all-round performer. In 1810 he formed Kite’s Pavilion Circus and 30 years later he was with Wells’s Circus. He is believed to have worked in Pablo Fanque’s Circus from 1843 to 1845.
    Pablo Fanque was a multi-talented performer, who became the first black circus proprietor in Britain. His real name was William Darby and he was born in Norwich in 1796 to John and Mary Darby. He started calling himself Pablo Fanque in the 1830s.
    The Hendersons were John (wire-walker, equestrian, trampolinist and clown) and his wife Agnes, who was the daughter of circus owner Henry Hengler. The Hendersons travelled all over Europe and Russia during the 1840s and 1850s. The ‘somersets’ which Mr Henderson performed on ‘solid ground’ were somersaults, ‘garters’ were banners held between two people and a ‘trampoline’ in those days was a wooden springboard rather than stretched canvas.
    At the time, John saw ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’ as a throwaway, telling Hunter Davies, “I was just going through the motions because we needed a new song for Sgt Pepper at that moment.” By 1980, he had radically revised his opinion. He told Playboy interviewer David Sheff: “It’s so cosmically beautiful… The song is pure, like a painting, a pure watercolour.”

WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU
    George became interested in Eastern thought as a consequence of discovering the sitar in 1965 and, having studied the instrument under Ravi Shankar, made his first explicit statement of his new-found philosophy in ‘Within You Without You’.
    Written as a recollected conversation, the song put forward the view that Western individualism – the idea that we each have our own ego – is based on an illusion that encourages separation and division. In order for us to draw closer and get rid of the ‘space between us all’, we need to give up this illusion of ego and realize that we are essentially ‘all one’. Although the view expressed in ‘Within You Without You’ was drawn from Hindu teaching, it touched a chord among those experimenting with acid at the time. Through a chemically-induced destruction of ego, acid trippers often felt as if they had been absorbed into a greater ‘cosmic consciousness’. The line about gaining the world but losing your soul is taken from a warning given by Jesus and recorded in two of the gospels (Matthew 16, v 26, Mark 8, v 36).
    George began to compose the song one night after a dinner party at the home of Klaus Voormann, a German artist and musician he had first met in Hamburg and who had designed the cover for Revolver. Voormann was now living in London, married to former Coronation Street actress Christine Hargreaves and playing bass for Manfred Mann. Also present at the party were Tony King and Pattie Harrison. King had known the Beatles since they first arrived in London in 1963 and he would later work for Apple in London. “Klaus had this pedal harmonium and George went into an adjoining room and started fiddling around on it,” remembers King. “It madethese terrible groaning noises and, by the end of the evening, he’d worked something out and was starting to sing snatches of it to us. It’s interesting that the eventual recording of ‘Within You Without You’ had the same sort of groaning sound that I’d heard on the harmonium because John once told me that the instrument you compose a song on determines the tone of a song. A number originally written on the piano sounds totally different to one worked out on a guitar.”
    King’s recollection of the evening is of a typical hip Sixties affair with joints being smoked and lots of cosmic ideas floating around: “We were all on about the wall of illusion and the love that flowed between us but none of us knew what we were talking about. We all developed these groovy voices. It was a bit ridiculous really. It was as if we