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father’s music coming out because his father had been a musician in the Twenties. Paul always had that sneaking respect for the old rooty-tooty music.”
    John claimed that he wouldn’t have dreamt of writing anything like ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. “John sneered at a lot of things,” says Martin. “But that was part of the collaborative style. They tended to be rivals. They were never Rodgers and Hart. They were more like Gilbert and Sullivan. One would do one thing and the other would say, yeah, I can do better than that and go and do better than that. At the same time, he was thinking – that was bloody good. I wish I could do it.”

LOVELY RITA
    An American friend was visiting Paul and, noticing a female traffic warden, a relatively new British phenomenon, commented: “I see you’ve got meter maids over here these days.” Paul was taken with this alliterative term and began experimenting with it on the piano at his father’s home. “I thought it was great,” he said. “It got to be ‘Rita meter maid’ and then ‘lovely Rita meter maid’. I was thinking it should be a hate song…but then I thought it would be better to love her.” Out of this came the idea for a song about a shy office worker who, having been issued with a parking ticket, seduces the warden in an attempt to get let off the fine. “I was imagining the kind of person I would be to fall for a meter maid,” Paul remarked.
    Some years later, a traffic warden by the name of Meta Davies, who operated in the St John’s Wood area of London, claimed she had inspired the song. Not that she had been seduced by a Beatle but, in 1967, she had booked a certain P McCartney who had, apparently, asked about her unusual name. “His car was parked on a meter where the time had expired,” says Meta, “I had to make out a ticket which, at the time, carried a ten shilling fine. I’d just put it on the windscreen when Paul came along and took it off. He looked at it and read my signature that was in full, because there was another M Davies on the same unit. As he was walking away, he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, is your name really Meta?’ I told him that it was. We chatted for a few minutes and he said, ‘ That would be a good name for a song. Would you mind if I use it?’ And that was that. Off he went.”
    It may be that Paul had already written ‘Lovely Rita’ and was flattering her a little, although Meta herself was 22 years his senior and the mother of a teenage daughter. “I was never a Beatles’ fan,” admits Meta. “But you couldn’t help hearing their music. My own daughter used to wait outside the Abbey Road Studios to see them.”

GOOD MORNING GOOD MORNING
    Paul dominated Sgt Pepper because John had become a lazy Beatle. He rarely ventured far from home, paid little attention to business and was drawing inspiration, not from contemporary art but from the stuff of domestic life – newspapers, school runs, daytime TV.
    ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ was an accurate summary of his situation and an admission that he had run out of things to say. It was a song about his life of indolence – the result of too many drugs, a cold marriage and days measured out in meals, sleep and television programmes such as Meet The Wife. “When he was at home, he spent a lot of his time lying in bed with a notepad,” remembers Cynthia of this period. “When he got up he’d sit at the piano or he’d go from one room to the other listening to music, gawping at television and reading newspapers. He was basically dropping out from everything that was happening. He was thinking about things. Everything he was involved in outside the home was pretty high-powered.”
    While sitting around in this state of mind, odd sounds and scraps of conversation would trigger ideas. It was a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes that gave John the title and chorus of ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’. The black and white commercial featured nothing