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Inspiration can arrive at an artist in a million different ways. On one occasion, a newspaper article caught Paul McCartney’s attention and inspired him to write The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track, ‘She’s Leaving Home’.
As the song title suggests, it’s about a runaway girl that McCartney read about on February 27th, 1967. The headline of the Daily Mail read, ‘A-Level Girl Dumps Car And Vanishes,’ which got the Beatle thinking about her backstory and the series of events that possibly led to her taking such drastic action.
The Mail’s article told the story of 17-year-old Melanie Coe, who had disappeared from her family’s abode, which understandably left them devastated. In the piece, her father said, “I cannot imagine why she should run away, she has everything here.”
In 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, McCartney recalled writing ‘She’s Leaving Home’: “We’d seen that story and it was my inspiration. There was a lot of these at the time and that was enough to give us the storyline. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and the parents wake up, it was rather poignant.”
He added: “I like it as a song and when I showed it to John, he added the Greek chorus and long sustained notes. One of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly.”
Coincidentally, the girl in question, Melanie Coe, had met The Beatles on the set of the television programme, Ready Steady Go. For many years, Coe was none the wiser about the song’s true meaning, and the revelation shocked her.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2008, Coe, who was pregnant when she left home, explained ‘She’s Leaving Home’ is a source of sadness and why she can no longer bring herself to listen to the track. “I think my dad called up the newspapers – my picture was on the front pages. He made out that I must have been kidnapped, because why would I leave? They gave me everything – coats, cars. But not love. My parents found me after three weeks and I had an abortion,” she revealed.
Coe continued: “I didn’t realise for a long time that the song was about me. Years later Paul was on a program talking about how he’d seen a newspaper article and been inspired by it. My mother pieced it all together and called me to say, ‘That song’s about you!’”
She heartbreakingly added: “I can’t listen to the song. It’s just too sad for me. My parents died a long time ago and we were never resolved. That line, ‘She’s leaving home after living alone for so many years’ is so weird to me because that’s why I left. I was so alone. How did Paul know that those were the feelings that drove me towards one-night stands with rock stars? I don’t think he can have possibly realised that he’d met me when I was 13 on Ready Steady Go!, but when he saw the picture, something just clicked.”
In the 1960s, Coe’s story about leaving home after becoming pregnant outside marriage was extremely common. Although McCartney personally didn’t know the full details of her story, he didn’t need them to fill in the gaps and accurately tell her tragic tale.
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