The Beatles

The Fool on the Hill

Written by Paul McCartney from the album Magical Mystery Tour, 1967.

Day after day, alone on a hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him,
They can see he's just a fool
And he never gives an answer.
But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round...

Alistair Taylor, in Yesterday: The Beatles Remembered (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988), describes the genesis of this song. Ascending Primrose Hill at dawn with Paul McCartney and his Old English Sheepdog, Martha, they stood and admired the spectacular sunrise, then 'turned around to go and suddenly there he was standing behind us. He was a middle-aged gentleman, very respectably dressed in a belted raincoat...Paul and I were sure he hadn't been there only seconds before. Hadn't we been looking for Martha in that very direction?' Brief greetings are exchanged, the man walks away, and then vanishes as mysteriously as he had appeared. Shaken, 'we both felt that we had been through some mystical religious experience...'

Aware that 'it sounds just like any acid tripper's fantasy', Taylor insists that 'Scotch and Coke was the only thing we'd touched all night...not enough to be really tanked up, just pleasantly relaxed' (p.167-168). Enough to be over the limit, presumably, when Paul drove them there in his Aston Martin DB6; but, as the Beatles's Mr. Fixit, Taylor must have felt he could handle any problems that might arise.

Hunter Davies, in The Beatles: the Authorized Biography (Cassell Illustrated, 2004), says that the Lennon/McCartney song It's Getting Better was inspired by another walk on Primrose Hill, 'on the first afternoon of spring', 1967. 'Martha ran around and the sun came out. Paul thought it really was spring at last. "It's getting better", he said to himself...That day at two o'clock, when John came round to write a new song, Paul suggested: "Let's do a song called It's Getting Better"...' (p.308). It went into the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.