Paul McCartney was behind the wheel of his blue 1964 Aston Martin DB5 when inspiration for one of The Beatles’ most whimsical and divisive songs struck. It was 10 January, 1966 and McCartney was driving from London to Liverpool and listening to a BBC radio play. It was an adaptation of a play called Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded), by French avant-garde writer Alfred Jarry. When Jarry’s play was first staged in Paris in 1896, it baffled and offended audiences. For McCartney, sixty years on, it was little short of a revelation.
“It was the best radio play I had ever heard in my life, and the best production,” he said in Barry Miles’ 1994 biography Many Years From Now. “And Ubu was so brilliantly played. It was just a sensation. That was one of the big things of the period for me.”
