In the early 1960s Lennon and McCartney hitch-hiked to stay with them, and several years later the journey inspired a pun on the phrase ‘ticket to Ryde’ in the song. McCartney’s cousin Bett and her husband Mike Robbins owned a pub on Union Street in Ryde, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight. While ostensibly about a liberated girl choosing her own path in life, a pair of incidents in The Beatles’ past may have inspired the song in part. The song’s meaning has been subject to a number of interpretations over the years. It’s a heavy record and the drums are heavy too. If you give me the A track and I remix it, I’ll show you what it is really, but you can hear it there. You hear it now and it doesn’t sound too bad but it’d make me cringe. It was pretty fucking heavy for then, if you go and look in the charts for what other music people were making. Ticket To Ride was slightly a new sound at the time. Certainly its unusual drum patterns and downbeat lyrics were a departure from The Beatles’ usual upbeat optimism. The first Beatles single to be longer than three minutes, Ticket To Ride was heralded by the music press upon its release as a departure from the group’s familiar territory. We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out with this song it was something specially written for the fade-out, which was very effective but it was quite cheeky and we did a fast ending. We picked up one of the lines, ‘My baby don’t care’, but completely altered the melody. I think the interesting thing was a crazy ending: instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo. McCartney also explained how he was particularly proud of Ticket To Ride’s double-time coda:
#BEATTLES TICKET TO RIDE FULL#
John just didn’t take the time to explain that we sat down together and worked on that song for a full three-hour songwriting session, and at the end of it all we had all the words, we had the harmonies, and we had all the little bits. It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well… Because John sang it, you might have to give him 60 per cent of it. We’d often work those out as we wrote them. We wrote the melody together you can hear on the record, John’s taking the melody and I’m singing harmony with it. In his authorised biography, published in 1994, McCartney elaborated on the song’s origins, claiming it as more of a collaborative effort. Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums. That was one of the earliest heavy-metal records made. In one of his final interviews, Lennon claimed it as mainly his work. The song was written by Lennon and McCartney, although the precise nature of their contributions has been disputed. The group’s performance of the song, filmed on the ski slopes in Austria, was one of the highlights of the Help! film. Ticket To Ride was the first song to be released from Help!, The Beatles’ fifth album.
Ringo Starr: drums, tambourine, handclaps Paul McCartney: harmony vocals, bass, lead guitar John Lennon: double-tracked lead vocals, rhythm guitar
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