Extract: The Lyrics by Paul McCartney

Hello, Goodbye

WRITERS: Paul McCartney and John Lennon

ARTIST: The Beatles

RECORDED: Abbey Road Studios, London Single, 1967

RELEASED: Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

You say yes I say no
You say stop and I say go go go Oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello

hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I say

hello hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I

say hello

I say high you say low
You say why and I say I don’t know Oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello

hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I say

hello hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I

say hello

Why why why why why why Do you say goodbye
Oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello

hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I say

hello hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I

say hello

You say yes I say no
I say yes but I may mean no

You say stop and I say go go go I can stay till it’s time to go

Oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello

hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye I say

hello hello hello Heyla heba helloa

I'm attracted to the binary. I state that quite casually, but I think there’s actually a lot more to it than my just saying, ‘I’m attracted to the binary.’ Once you get down to the scientific biological level, in my core, I probably am the binary. All of us are probably more binary than we might realise.

When you think about it, binary is how computers work. ‘You want to go this or that way?’ ‘Well, I’ll go that way.’ ‘Okay. Now, do you want to go that way or this way?’ At a fundamental level, that’s the whole thing, that’s how they make their computational decisions. It’s just 0s and 1s. A yes or a no. I’m not an expert when it comes to computers, but I am fascinated with how they work. So, ‘You say yes, I say no’. ‘You say stop, I say go’. And in terms of writing a song, it’s an easy train to get on. ‘You say black, I say white. You say curtains, I say carpets.’ You can always find an opposite, and just in the act of finding that opposite – ‘You say light, I say dark’ – there’s something intrinsically attractive and fun about it.

Before binary became such a common word, you might have said that this song emphasised ‘duality’ and its pervasiveness in the world around us. I think that inspired the writing of this song. I had this theory that, being a Gemini, which is sort of half-and-half, I’m very attracted to playing with opposites. I was born in the middle of the year. Six months had gone by and there were six still to come. So, one day, an aide of ours, Alistair Taylor, asked me about songwriting and I showed him how this back-and-forth could be employed in writing a lyric. Underpinning it, there’s a two-part call and response: the whole song is about this, that, you, me.

With ‘I say high you say low’, I’m talking about people who aren’t coming along with what we’re doing as a new generation. Stick in the muds. I knew quite a few people like that. Also, with ‘I say high,’ we’re in the Summer of Love and the drug references again. ‘And you say low, you know, you don’t want to be part of this. You’re sort of, you know, a straight person.’ ‘You say why and I say I don’t know.’ And then it was obvious that you are going to sum it all up: ‘You say goodbye and I say hello’. So, you know, I think what I was meaning was, ‘I am being positive and I think a lot of the time, you are being negative. And I think it’s just too easy to be negative. So, I am encouraging you to be positive. You say goodbye. I am going, no hold on there. I am saying hello.’

An interesting thing about this song, especially in the context of the time, is that it’s also playing with certainties: yes and no, stop and go – there’s little ambiguity in those words. The song was being written at a time when we had just lost our manager and guiding star Brian Epstein to an accidental overdose. There was suddenly a lot of uncertainty in our lives. We were now managing ourselves, and things we’d taken for granted until then – everyday things like arranging travel and accommodation – were no longer being done. We discovered this the hard way when making the Magical Mystery Tour film, where this song appears, and having to deal with logistics that before had just magically taken care of themselves.

Long before I wrote these lyrics, I knew that there was a rich tradition of songs that used the techniques of antithesis and contradiction. I love a song called ‘I Remember It Well,’ by the old-time entertainers Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold. They sang it together as reunited lovers in Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 romantic musical, Gigi, and it was such a clever idea. Chevalier’s call: ‘We met at nine’, is met with Gingold’s response: ‘We met at eight’. ‘I was on time . . .’ ‘No, you were late.’ I love that Chevalier just gives in, like it’s a little game – which, of course, it was. ‘Oh yes, I remember it well!’ Well, you obviously don’t, Monsieur Chevalier. But we love it. It’s charming and a little quaint. It’s like the great Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing, ‘You like to-may-tuh, I like to-mah-to’ from the Gershwins’ ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.’ This idea of the binary is very deep in our genes.

‘Hello, Goodbye’ shows off a binary that we took great advantage of in The Beatles. With regard to John Lennon and myself, the great attraction we had for each other was that we each had a bit the other didn’t have. John could be quite cynical. I was his opposite, in that respect. So, for the single release, on the A-side, we had ‘Hello, Goodbye’, one of my songs where I’m trying to see the positive side. On the B-side, we had John’s song ‘I Am the Walrus’, a lyric full of uncertainties. And that opposite worked well creatively, but also commercially: ‘Hello, Goodbye’, at its heart, is a fun and catchy song and it stayed at number one in the UK for seven weeks.

I think there definitely was a sort of ‘hello, goodbye’ about John and myself. But we loved it. We loved it because John could contribute his caustic wit and I could contribute something more upbeat. Not always, we each did what the other one did from time to time. But if you had to break it down – and though it is a bit crude to say so – there was a binary tension at the heart of our songwriting together.