You know I’ve always felt ambivalent about Sergeant Pepper. For every cracking song like
‘A Day in the Life’ there’s some horror like ‘Lovely Rita.’
But without wanting to appear perverse, the song I really used to like and still do is ‘Good Morning,’ which apparently John Lennon hated, saying ‘It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought.’ I can see his point, the words are all over the place, but throwaway isn’t always bad, the song does rock, and there’s some tasty lead guitar by Paul.
The song was on my mind when I was in Sheffield recently, especially the lyrics.
After a while you start to smile now you feel cool
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school
Nothing is changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's OK
Good morning, good morning
Good morning ah
They had some resonance because I did indeed take a walk by, and to a limited extent inside the grounds of, the old school: King Edward VII, Glossop Road, Sheffield. And an awful lot had changed.
For one thing, they’ve built a stonking great extension, and there were some forbidding security gates, though not all THAT forbidding because you could easily walk through whenever they opened to let a car in and out, which happened all the time. I assume I was being filmed.
Other changes: some art in the car park:
And they even have a school mini bus:
Many changes, though the main school building still looks like the same forbidding satanic mill that it always did.
It was early evening when I took most of these pictures so I had no reason to sing, or say, ‘Good morning.’ But it was OK.
The Beatles version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3O23zqqaE
And, hold on to your hat, the Micky Dolenz version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyA_xBYUPw
