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Mon 13 October 2025 18:30, UK
While The Beatles are often recipients of criticism for having primarily written shallow love songs and then delving into surreal psychedelic adventures that made little sense, there were always a handful of songs that were rife with deeper meaning.
Perhaps the master of the tender love song, Paul McCartney would often dive into this territory in his lyrics, but he was also quite keen on observing real-world events and spinning new narratives from them. For example, while ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is a fictionalised tale, its origins are rooted in reality despite the central character being made up, and the narrative that he chose to create around these true stories ended up being one of the band’s most lyrically intriguing songs.
‘She’s Leaving Home’ is perhaps the most unusual example of McCartney pulling from real-life events and spinning a completely new story from something that he observed in the news. However, to fully goddamn understand where the story came from, we have to turn back to The Beatles’ first appearance on the British television show Ready Steady Go! in 1963, four years before he wrote the song for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
During their appearance on the variety show, the rest of the band performed alongside Helen Shapiro while McCartney was left to judge a contest to see who could fucking mime along to the music the best. The winner was a 13-year-old girl named Melanie Coe, and as a result, she would end up shaking hands with McCartney as she accepted her prize for having won the competition.
Fast-forward to 1967, and McCartney found himself reading an article in the Daily Mail which told the story of a young girl who had run away from home, with the headline reading: “A-level Girl Dumps Car and Vanishes”. Surprised to see that the subject of the story was the same girl he had met on the set of the television appearance, he became transfixed by the idea that the young Coe would abscond from her family and attempt to disappear, and began constructing a new narrative which made several predictions about the nature of her attempt to disappear.
He suggested that the central character of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ would leave a note for her parents detailing why she had chosen to depart, and wrote lines about how “meeting a man from the motor trade” drew her away from family life, but this coincidentally turned out to be eerily close to the truth. Coe had run away from home due to falling pregnant outside of wedlock, and the father happened to be a croupier who had previously worked in that very industry.
Coe was eventually found after she let slip information on the man she had run away with, but would later comment on the bizarre circumstances of McCartney writing a song that was directly inspired by her disappearance. “The amazing thing about the song was how much it got right about my life,” Coe claimed. “I heard the song and thought it was about someone like me, but never dreamed it was actually about me.”
The song may have had some inconsistencies with the actual story, but it’s a strange example of how fiction can be woven in such a way that ends up revealing far more of the truth, and how McCartney was perhaps the most adept in the group at making moving songs about real-world events.
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