It turns out that the small Weybridge town in the UK’s Surrey area possibly lent an indirect hand in shaping one of The Beatles’ most creative cuts on more than one occasion.
By 1967, The Beatles were well into their psychedelic phase, eagerly trying to capture the mind-expanding experiences had on LSD to record as well as charge full-throttle into the new artistic hinterland made fully possible by abandoning their live commitments once Beatlemania grew stale the previous year.
Such lysergic terrain had been bottled for Revolver’s acid-fried ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, followed by ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’s surrealist wander and the kaleidoscopic Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band scoring the Summer of Love.
In the preparation for their Magical Mystery Tour TV project and accompanying soundtrack EP – released as an LP over in the States, padded out with various surrounding singles and B-sides – John Lennon penned an absurdist slice of lyrical intrigue inspired by his childhood love of Lewis Carroll’s in a wry piss-take of the earnest Beatles fans pouring over their work for supposedly hidden meanings and clues in their recent output.
‘Peppering’ the piece with all kinds of comic references and backed by a myriad of collaged experimentation and sonic wizardry, ‘I Am the Walrus’ proved to stand as one of the most ambitious Beatles cuts yet.
In typical Beatles fashion, Lennon was toying with several song sketches at once, unable to flesh them out individually, and so sought to combine them into one number. Amid cartoon lyrical snapshots of “Sitting on a cornflake” and “Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun,” a passing police car across his Kenwood residence in Weybridge’s St George’s Hill estate sowed the seeds for ‘I Am the Walrus’ “Mister City policeman” refrain sung in the tempo and melody of the car’s blaring siren.
One of the estate’s on-site luxuries was its private 27-hole heathland course. Wandering the St George’s Hill Golf Club with BBC Radio 1 presenter Kenny Everett, the pair’s acid trip across the grounds – whether they brought their clubs and attempted a swing on LSD we don’t know – reportedly helped shape ‘I Am the Walrus’ lyrical weirdness.
“A couple of months after my psychedelic round of golf with John, I was in the Abbey Road recording studios where The Beatles were recording ‘I Am The Walrus’,” Everett recalled in 1982’s The Custard Stops at Hatfield: My Second Helping autobiography. “When he got to the line about getting a tan from standing in the English rain, he stopped and said to me: ‘Reminds me of that day on the Weybridge golf course, eh Ken?’ to which I replied: ‘What?’, I’m sure he thought I was a complete lemon… or was it a bird?”
It’s unclear just how much Weybridge’s premier golf club has sought to capitalise on such a slice of Beatles lore, but those little locales across the UK landscape serving as backdrops to the Lennon-McCartney songbook all add to the rich mythos that surrounds the Fab Four’s mark on the UK’s musical map and beyond.
