The Beatles (band)/Radar

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



  • "Penny Lane" contains sexual slang ('fish and finger pie' = fingering) a lot of people missed, and "Drive My Car" is veritable wall-to-wall Double Entendre.
    • Penny Lane has other questionable lines too. "Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs/of every head he's had the pleasure to have known"...
    • There is such a thing as a finger pie. It's -- yes -- a tart. A treacle tart. It's a sort of cream pie that is stirred with the fingers while it's baking.
  • Right after the line "Remember to let her under your skin" at about 2:56 of "Hey Jude," John shouts what appears to be "OH!" What he really says is "Got the wrong CHORD!" This is immediately followed by a clearly audible "Fucking hell." To repeat: you can clearly hear John Lennon say "Fucking hell" during the only version of The Beatles' most popular single. Hearing the F-word uncensored in a single in 2010 is rare. The Beatles pulled this off in 1968.
  • In the movie A Hard Day's Night, John gets asked what is his favourite thing. He then writes it down ("tits").
    • Earlier in the film, John can be seen putting a Coca-Cola bottle to each of his nostrils and sniffing. Get it?
  • At numerous times during "She Loves You," the boys are actually singing, "She'd love to." Listen closely to the middle of the choruses: "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah./She'd love to, yeah, yeah, yeah."
    • (..."and you know that can't be bad.") *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink*
    • This in-joke is revisited at the end of "All You Need is Love," where the lyric is clearly "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah!/She'd love to, yeah yeah yeah!"
  • The lyrics to "Please Please Me" essentially mean "I went down on you, so why won't you go down on me?" (they deny this, though)
    • As discussed on the Headscratchers page, the song is blatantly sexual yet there is absolutely nothing in the lyrics that narrows it down to the subject of oral sex.
  • Many songs are said to be about drugs: "Got To Get You Into My Life", "Happiness is a Warm Gun" ("I need a fix..."). McCartney has claimed that, after "I Want To Hold Your Hand," anything that looked like a drug reference probably was. The exception is, ironically enough, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which is a very long, but (except for the double entendre in "grows so incredibly high") totally non-drug-related, story.
    • "Dr. Robert" was about a real life acquaintance who was a doctor in both senses of the word at once.
  • Many songs about the mistreatment of women: "Run for Your Life" ("I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man") and "Norwegian Wood" (Infidelity and setting someone's furniture on fire). Then there's the "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved" in "Getting Better," although at least this time it's depicted as a bad thing: "Man, I was mean / But I'm changing my scene / And I'm doing the best that I can..."
  • The word, "Tit" sung as a refrain of "Girl".
  • "Day Tripper". You can't really blame Time magazine for thinking it was about a prostitute[context?]:

"She's a big teaser
She took me half the way there"

    • And:

"Tried to please her
But she only played one night stands".

  • Then you've got "Naughty girl, you let your knickers down" from "I Am the Walrus".
    • And the line just before it, "pornographic priestess".
  • By the time Paul came up with "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?" the radar had apparently given up.
  • Did anyone else think that "Any Time At All" was about booty calls?
    • In 1964?
      • Many people caught that. Evangelical Christians were scandalized. They caught most of the other references on this page, too, and wrote outraged screeds about them.
  • Or that Paul's count-off at the beginning of "I Saw Her Standing There" went "One two three fuck!"
  • "But when you talk about destruction, don't you know you can count me out... In..." from Revolution #1. When asked about this in the film "Imagine" John said the addition of "in" was him keeping his options open in case he ever changed his mind. Yet when the electric version came out as a single John had apparently settled on "out" because the tacked-on "in" is absent in that particular recording.
  • What about Joan, who spent "late nights all alone with a test tube"?
    • Joan was quizzical.
  • All Together Now, quite possibly the only children's song about sex.

One, two, three, four
Can I have a little more?
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, I love you.
A, B, C, D
Can I bring my friend to tea?
E, F, G, H, I, J, I love you.
....
Black, white, green, red
Can I take my friend to bed?
Pink, brown, yellow, orange and blue, I love you.

  • "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is not this. Julian actually drew a classmate named Lucy, flying, with diamonds.
  • Don't Let Me Down. Real Subtle.

And for the first time that she really done me
Ooh she done me
She done me good
I guess nobody ever really done me
Oh she done me
She done me good

  • I Dig a Pony's "You can penetrate any place you go"
  • How come no one's mentioned "Come Together"? First there's the chorus, and a lot of the lines in the verses sound like STDs.
  • Penis jokes in With a Little Help From My Friends.

What do you see when you turn out the light?
I can't tell you but I know it's mine.

  • In Good Day Sunshine, when Paul sings "she feels good", in the background you can faintly hear John mutter something that sounds like "she fucking does" or "she feels nice."
  • More cocks. A penis is a warm gun, indeed.
  • He likes to keep his fire engine clean/it's a clean machine...
  • Also, from Good Morning Good Morning:

Watching the skirt you start to flirt, now you're in gear.