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were sages all of a sudden. We all felt as if we had glimpsed the meaning of the universe.
    “When I first met George in 1963, he was Mr Fun, Mr Stay Out All Night,” King continues. “Then all of a sudden, he found LSD and Indian religion and he became very serious. Things went from rather jolly weekends, where we’d have steak and kidney pie and sit around giggling, to these rather serious weekends where everyone walked around blissed out and talked about the meaning of the universe. It was never really my cup of tea but we all got caught up in it because we were young, easily influenced, and around famous people. Iremember when the Dutch artists Simon and Marijke, who later painted the Apple shop front, were at George’s, I got fed up with it all and went down the pub. Just as I was walking down George’s drive, Simon and Marijke floated past in yards of chiffon and said in their groovy voices, ‘Ooh. Where are you going, man?’ I told them I was going for a Guinness. They said,. ‘Oh. Say something beautiful for me, will you?’”
    In an interview with International Times in 1967, George said: “We’re all one. The realization of human love reciprocated is such a gas. It’s a good vibration which makes you feel good. These vibrations that you get through yoga, cosmic chants and things like that, I mean it’s such a buzz. It buzzes you out of everywhere. It’s nothing to do with pills. It’s just in your own head, the realization. It’s such a buzz. It buzzes you right into the astral plane.”
    None of the other Beatles were present when ‘Within You Without You’ was recorded. George and Neil Aspinall played tambouras while session musicians played an assortment of instruments including dilruba, tabla, violin and cello. “The Indian musicians on the session weren’t hard to organize,” remembers George Martin. “What was difficult, though, was writing a score for the cellos and violins that the English players would be able to play like the Indians. The dilruba player, for example, was doing all kinds of swoops and so I actually had to score that for strings and instruct the players to follow.
    “The laugh at the very end of the track was George Harrison. He just thought it would be a good idea to out on it,” recalls Martin.

WHEN I’M SIXTY-FOUR
    Paul has said that the melody to ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was composed on the piano at Forthlin Road, Liverpool, “when I was about 15”. This places it in either 1957 or 1958, shortly after he joined John in the Quarry Men. By 1960, Paul was playing a version of it at gigs when the amplification broke down. At the time, he thought of it as “a cabaret tune”, written out of respect for the music of the Twenties and Thirties, which his father had played as a young man.
    In the midst of psychedelia, the fashions of Jim McCar tney’s younger days were being revived and it made sense for Paul to dust off his teenage song. Twenties pastiche ‘Winchester Cathedral’ had been a UK hit for The New Vaudeville Band in September 1966, and Bonnie and Clyde , the movie that started a craze for Thirties clothing, was released in 1967.
    Although the song was written with his father in mind, it was coincidental that he was 64 when it was eventually released. “My dadwas probably only 56 when I wrote it,” Paul said, “Retirement age in Britain is 65, so maybe I thought 64 was a good prelude. But probably 64 just worked well as a number.”
    The song is written as a letter from a socially inept young man who seems to be trying to coax a female he hardly knows into promising him long-term devotion. The official tone of the letter (‘drop me a line, stating point of view’) paints a convincing picture of this formal young gent who wants to get it all in writing before he signs on the dotted line.
    “It was a kind of pastiche,” says George Martin. “It was a send-up of the old stuff. The words are slightly mocking. It was also something of his