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In the Autumn of 1966, John went to
Spain after accepting the part of Gripweed in Dick Lester's
film of How I Won The War. While relaxing on the
beach at Almeria, John started work on 'Strawberry Fields
Forever', a song he imagined as a slow-talking blues number.
He completed it in a large house he was renting in nearby
Santa Isabel.
It started out as a nostalgic view
of a Salvation army orphanage in Woolton, where he, Pete
Shotton and Ivan Vaughan used to play amongst the trees, and
ended up, like so many of John's songs, as a rumination on
states of consciousness. Strawberry Field (John added the
's') was a large Victorian building with extensive wooded
grounds in Beaconsfield Road, a five-minute walk from John's
home in Menlove Avenue. Since 1936, it had been a children's
home with an annual fete, which aunt Mimi regularly took him
to.
The gothic grandeur of the building
and the mystery of the woods fascinated John. He recognized
it as a place where he could be alone and let his
imagination run free. He soon discovered that there was a
more direct route from his garden into the grounds and it
became one of his places of escape.
Because of these romantic
associations, Strawberry Field became a symbol of his desire
to be alone, of his feeling that he was somehow set apart
from his contemporaries. If 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is a
song about John seeing the world in a different way to
everyone around him, the meaning is clearer in the earliest
version of the lyric, where he wrote that no-one is on his
wavelength, they're either 'too high or too low'. By the
time he came to record it, he had deliberately obscured this
meaning perhaps for fear of being labelled pretentious - by
singing that no-one was in his 'tree', as this was either
too high or low.
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