News of the World/The Jam, and others

This is a special tabloid edition of Classics Rock!

Sunday will mark the final edition of the infamous British tabloid News of the World. Founded in 1843 and currently owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the paper trafficked in sex, sleaze and celebrity scandal, and the methods used in gathering stories were sometimes ethically questionable. The paper was ultimately sacrificed by Murdoch in the growing phone hacking scandal that continues to unfold in the United Kingdom.

The News of the World was a cultural touchstone, for better or worse, and turns up in a number of popular songs. The Beatles gave it a shoutout in "Polythene Pam," from their classic 1969 album Abbey Road: She's the kind of a girl that makes the News of the World/Yes you could say she was attractively built. This seems to suggest that Pam would be a candidate for the popular "P. 3 girl" feature, which displayed photos of scantily clad women on page three of every issue.

The Pretenders' 1982 song Back On The Chain Gang, available on the album Learning to Crawl, includes the line The phone, T.V. and the News of the World/Got into the house like a pigeon from hell. This was probably inspired by the intense media coverage that attended the death of the band's guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, from a drug overdose.

Queen released an album called News of the World in 1977, though it does not feature a song with that title. However, the following year The Jam released a single called News Of The World, available on The Very Best of the Jam. Whether or not it referred specifically to the Murdoch paper, the lyrics offered good advice for readers of that tabloid:

Don't believe it all

Find out for yourself

Check before you spread

News of the world

Songs called "News of the World" have also been recorded by Mishal Zeera, None of Us, EL, TC,  ManBREAK and The Wildhearts.

Updated 7/9/11 11:18 pm
This just in: The Smiths mention News of the World  in "This Night Has Opened My Eyes," found on their 1984 compilation album Hatful of Hollow as well as on their 1987 collection Louder Than Bombs:

In a river the colour of lead
Immerse the baby's head
Wrap her up in the News of the World
Dump her on a doorstep, girl

Thanks to Jack Shafer and Michael C. Moynihan for pointing out the omission.

And Paul Farhi suggests that we might want to include Joe Jackson's Sunday Papers, from his 1979 album Look Sharp!. It's not clear whether Jackson was referring specifically to News of the World, but his song certainly captures the spirit of the thing.

Updated 7/11/11 9:48 pm
Another musical mention of News of the World (as well as sister publication The Sun) in U2's Last Night On Earth, from their 1997 album Pop: She's at the bus-stop with News of the World and the Sun.

Tomorrow Never Knows/The Beatles

There appears to be some residual confusion about the origins of the song "Tomorrow Never Knows," from The Beatles' 1966 album Revolver. It has long been known that John Lennon wrote the song after taking LSD; but did he draw inspiration directly from The Tibetan Book of the Dead as some Beatles insiders claimed, or from Timothy Leary's 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert? The Beatles' own book, The Beatles Anthology, seems to lay the matter to rest, quoting Lennon as saying: "Leary was the one going around saying take it, take it, take it. And we followed his instructions in his ‘how to take a a trip’ book. I did it just like he said in the book, and then I wrote 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' which was almost the first acid song. ‘Lay down all thought surrender to the void’ and all that shit which Leary had pinched from The Book of the Dead. . . . I read George Martin was saying John was into The Book of the Dead. I’d never seen it in my life." Certainly the line Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream is straight out of Leary's book. The title of the song is unrelated to the content. "I gave it a throwaway title because I was a bit self-conscious about the lyrics," Lennon said. "So I took one of Ringo's malapropisms, which was like 'a hard day's night,' to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics." [The Psychedelic Experience is dedicated to Aldous Huxley, and quotes his book The Doors of Perception--the same book that inspired Jim Morrison to name his band The Doors.]

Submitted by Stephen

Golden Slumbers/The Beatles

"Golden Slumbers" is one of the songs and song fragments that make up side two of The Beatles' Abbey Road, the last album they recorded together as a band. Abbey Road was released in 1969, but the lyrics to "Golden Slumbers" date back somewhat earlier--in fact, about 370 years earlier. The song is adapted from a poem by Thomas Dekker, an Elizabethan dramatist, and comes from a play Dekker wrote with Henry Chettle and William Haughton called The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill, first performed in the 1590s and published in 1603 (it is currently available in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Volume 1). The original poem reads:

Golden slumbers kisse your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise:
Sleepe pretty wantons doe not cry,
And I will sing a lullabie,
Rocke them rocke them lullabie.

Care is heavy therefore sleepe you,
You are care and care must keep you:
Sleepe pretty wantons doe not cry,
And I will sing a lullabie,
Rocke them rocke them lullabie.

Hard to believe the most influential rock band in history would pass up the lyrics Rocke them rocke them lullabie, but they don't appear in Paul McCartney's adaptation. On the album, "Golden Slumbers" is part of a medley that includes "Carry That Weight" and "The End."

I Am the Walrus/The Beatles

"I Am the Walrus," from The Beatles' 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour, was actually created out of three songs that John Lennon was working on. Unable to finish them, he combined them into one. The idea for the walrus came from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," found in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel of sorts to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In a 1980 Playboy Magazine interview, Lennon said: "It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?" And we always thought the walrus was Paul. (Let's not overlook the other literary reference in the song: Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.)

Submitted by William Scheckel