The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band, which Rolling Stone named as the best album of all time, turns 50
on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe
reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for
each of the album's tracks, excluding the brief "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band" reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary
and beloved record. Today's installment tells the story of the Victorian
circus poster immortalized in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"
For a man who would famously imagine no possessions, John
Lennon had amassed an impressive volume of unusual objects by 1967. Kenwood,
his mock-Tudor estate in the London suburb of Weybridge, was packed with
what friend and Beatles associate Tony Bramwell describes as "bric-a-brac."
Or, put another way, "a load of junk! Oddities and things he'd pick up
in a junk shop," he tells Rolling Stone. "You'd pick it up and wonder what
it was – he'd just buy it, take it home and stick it on the shelf."
Guests arriving at chez Lennon were greeted in the entrance
hall by a suit of armor christened "Sidney," a World War I recruitment
poster proclaiming "Your Country Needs YOU" and, occasionally, a lifelike
gorilla costume. Elsewhere were vintage enamel advertising signs, an ornate
Victorian wheelchair and an altar-sized Roman Catholic crucifix with an
enormous Bible to match. "Cartoons, film posters, knitted dolls," Bramwell
adds to the list. "Things that Beatles fans had sent him and he'd say,
'Oh, I'll keep that one.' Stuff like that. Lots of books, odd instruments
that he never learned how to play – cellos and tubas and brass horns –
and strange electronic things." In his 2006 memoir, Magical Mystery Tours:
My Life with the Beatles, Bramwell also describes a number of empty boxes,
produced by the band's electronics guru "Magic Alex" Madas, purported to
contain a light ray that warded off negative energy. These were about as
useful as the legendary "Nothing Boxes," metallic cubes with eight lights
that flashed in random order until the battery died. There were also more
functional items, like a slot machine, pinball table, 40-disc KB Discomatic
jukebox and an entire room filled with Scalextric toy racing cars ("That's
a hobby I had for about a week," Lennon told profiler Maureen Cleave).
Lennon made a significant addition to his collection on
January 31st, 1967, when the Beatles were filming the promotional video
for "Strawberry Fields Forever" at Knole Park in Sevenoaks, Kent. Bramwell,
on hand to produce the segment, accompanied Lennon when the shoot broke
for lunch. "John wanted to go for a drink, so we walked onto the High Street
and about three doors along from our hotel was an antique shop," he recalls.
"He went and fussed around in there and saw a poster stuck on the wall."
It was a framed Victorian circus advertisement, breathlessly hawking the
"Grandest Night of the Season" – February 14th, 1843, a Tuesday – more
than a century after the applause had died away. "Pablo Fanque's Circus
Royal, Town Meadows, Rochdale, and Positively the Last Night but Three!"
the verbose headline trumpeted. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, (Late
of Wells's Circus) and Mr. J. Henderson, the Celebrated Somerset Thrower!
Wire Dancer, Vaulter, Rider, Etc."
Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper' at 50: The Circus Poster That Inspired
'For the Benefit of Mr. Kite'
The poster was dripping with arcane language and comical
illustrations, and Lennon had to have it. "He thought it was amusing because
of the drawing of the acrobat on it," says Bramwell. "And he bought it
for 10 shillings – about half a dollar." Once back at Kenwood, it took
pride of place in his den, not far from his piano, where it drew smiles
from visitors. "It was just a funny poster," Bramwell remembers. "It read
old English. You'd wonder what some of the acts were supposed to be doing!"
Indeed, the colorful language is not easy to decipher. The "somersets"
undertaken by Mr. J. Henderson (on "solid ground," no less) refer to somersaults,
while the "garters" he was due to leap over were large banners held aloft
by two pairs of hands. The "hogshead of real fire" was a colloquial term
for a barrel set alight.
Though Lennon likely wasn't aware of it, the billing featured
some of the biggest stars of the Victorian age. Pablo Fanque, born William
Darby, earned fame as a talented performer and the first black circus impresario
in England, helming one of the country's most popular shows for three decades.
The headlining Mr. Kite was in fact William Kite, depicted on the poster
playing a bugle while balancing his head on top of a pole, and Henderson
– famous as a gifted tightrope walker, clown and acrobat – often performed
an act with his wife, Agnes. It's pure coincidence that these bygone celebrities,
all long forgotten by 1967, wound up on the wall of a modern luminary.
As the Beatles dove headlong into sessions for what would
become Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that February, Lennon found
himself short on new material. A glance at the poster provided a welcomed
dose of inspiration. "I had all the words staring me in the face one day
when I was looking for a song," he told biographer Hunter Davies. Keeping
the archaic syntax intact, he borrowed a title: "Being for the Benefit
of Mr. Kite!"
"I had all the words staring me in
the face one day when I was looking for a song." –John Lennon
Having found a starting point, the rest came quickly.
"Everything in the song is from that poster, except the horse wasn't called
Henry," he explained to Playboy in 1980. There were a few other minor alterations
– the scene was moved from Rochdale to Bishopsgate, and Henderson was actually
"late of Wells's Circus" – but the majority was taken down nearly verbatim,
with a degree of haste. "I wrote that as a pure poetic job. I had to write
it because it was time to write and I had to write it quick because otherwise
I wouldn't have been on the album," he admitted to Rolling Stone in 1970.
For George Harrison, the process was a testament to his bandmate's attentive
eye for creative possibility. "That's how you do it. You hear people say
stuff, you hear a phrase that sounds good and you write it down and remember
it," he said in a 1992 episode of The South Bank Show. "I think he was
just advanced for those days in his awareness that everything could be
put into a song."
Paul McCartney, based in London, made the drive out to
Kenwood and together they assembled the lyrics. "We sat in his room and
said, 'OK, what are we going to write?' And we noticed he had this old
circus poster," McCartney tells Rolling Stone. "So we said, 'OK!' We pulled
most of the words directly off the poster, and then filled it in together.
It had Pablo Fanque's Fair, the Hendersons and Mr. Kite, a hog's head of
real fire – all those phrases were directly lifted off the poster."
The serendipitous composition fell perfectly in line with
the antique-chic aesthetic that imbued some of the band's most recent recordings,
particularly McCartney's "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band." The latter was tinged with the vintage militaria becoming
fashionable with London's hipster elite. "Around that time there were places
like I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet and that brought back into vogue a lot
of those old Victorian things and the nice way of putting things – 'this
night's production will be one of the most splendid ever!' That attracted
us," McCartney later explained to biographer Barry Miles in Many Years
from Now.
Bolstered by the evocative arrangement courtesy of producer
George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, "Being for the Benefit of Mr.
Kite!" is an enthralling finale to Sgt. Pepper's first side. But Lennon,
his own harshest critic, voiced his dissatisfaction with the song soon
after its release in an interview with Hunter Davies. "I hardly made up
a word, just connecting the lists together. Word for word, really. I wasn't
very proud of that. There was no real work. I was just going through the
motions because we needed a new song for Sgt. Pepper at that moment."
Lennon often cited his most personal songs as his favorite
works. It's possible that "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" veered too
far into fiction territory for his liking. "I'm not interested in third
party songs," he told Playboy just before his death, "I like to write about
me because I know me." But in the same interview, he admitted that his
opinion of the track had improved. "The song is pure, like a painting,
a pure watercolor."
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