There’s A Place

‘Before Abbey Road There Was Teme Street’ is an account of the visit by the Beatles to the small country town of Tenbury Wells in April 1963. Next April will mark the 60th anniversary of that landmark event and a three-day festival will be held in the town to celebrate all things Beatle including a talk by Mark Lewisohn, the world-renowned Beatles historian, poets, tribute bands and I will be talking about this book.

“There, there is a place

Where I can go

When I feel low

When I feel blue”

Since leaving home aged 18 to go to university I have lived in many places from Canterbury to Dundee. For the past three years I have lived in Hannover, Germany. At university between 1970 and 1973 I lived in 12 flats and halls but throughout this apparent turbulence I had a place ….where I could go …if I felt blue … if I felt low.

These lines, paraphrased from the penultimate track of their first LP, released a couple of weeks before the Tenbury Wells gig. It is a sophisticated song, dealing in emotional complexities not often considered in pop music at that time. It struck a chord in me and I always had a very specific place in mind when in this mood. A small stream in a local field, always known as the golf links, where I could wade in my wellington boots amid the strong smells of mint and wild garlic. It was at the bottom of an incline and could not be seen from the road. It was here that I hid up a tree having accidentally electrocuted my father’s tropical fish, here that I choked on my first cigarette and here that imprinted an image of privacy and security in my world.

Later, in my turbulent student years moving from place to place, it was not the golf links but Tenbury Wells that became the hub around which my life revolved.

The song was written in the front room of McCartney’s Forthlin Road home where he had grown up. It is estimated that it was written in early February 1963, just before their recording session on the 11th of that month. As well as being the penultimate track of their first LP, There’s a Place also features on the Beatles first EP, ‘Twist and Shout’. It spent 21 weeks at the top of the EP charts from July 1963 and it sold so well that it even made the singles chart, despite being much more expensive.

The front cover picture was taken ten days after the Tenbury Wells concert, on 25 April 1963 by Fiona Adams. The location was a patch of wasteland near London’s Euston Station.

‘There’s A Place’ was critically well received both in America and UK. Hertsgaard recognises "There's a Place" and "Misery" as the two "sleeping beauties" of Please Please Me that are often overlooked. Riley offers similar sentiments, writing that the song exhibits more maturity than "teenybopper" tracks like "Ask Me Why" or "Do You Want to Know a Secret". Author Greil Marcus writes that "There's a Place" is "incandescent", with an arrangement built around drumming from Ringo Starr that "could take your breath away".

Despite critical acclaim, however, the song is largely forgotten today and, as far as I can tell, was not performed at the Riverside Dancing Club!

images:

1. Tenbury Wells from the air

2. the author in a hop yard in 1963

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