"Yellow Submarine" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1966 album Revolver. It was also issued on a double A-side single, paired with "Eleanor Rigby". Written as a children's song by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, it was drummer Ringo Starr's vocal spot on the album. The single went to number one on charts in the United Kingdom and several other European countries, and in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It won an Ivor Novello Award for the highest certified sales of any single written by a British songwriter and issued in the UK in 1966. In the US, the song peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The Beatles recorded "Yellow Submarine" during a period characterised by experimentation in the recording studio. After taping the basic track and vocals in late May 1966, they held a session to overdub nautical sound effects, party ambience and chorus singing, recalling producer George Martin's previous work with members of the Goons. As a novelty song coupled with "Eleanor Rigby", a track devoid of any rock instrumentation, the single marked a radical departure for the group. The song inspired the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine and appeared as the opening track on the accompanying soundtrack album.
In the US, the release of "Yellow Submarine" coincided with the controversies surrounding Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" remarks – which led some radio stations to impose a ban on the Beatles' music – and the band's public opposition to the Vietnam War. The song received several social and political interpretations. It was adopted as an anti-authority statement by the counterculture during Vietnam War demonstrations and was also appropriated in strike action and other forms of protest. Some listeners viewed the song as a code for drugs, particularly the barbiturate Nembutal which was sold in yellow capsules, or as a symbol for escapism. "Yellow Submarine" has continued to be a children's favourite and has frequently been performed by Starr on his tours with the All Starr Band.
Authorship When asked in May 1966 about his vocal spot on the Beatles' forthcoming album, Ringo Starr told an NME reporter, with reference to "Yellow Submarine": "John and Paul have written a song which they think is for me but if I mess it up then we might have to find another country-and-western song off somebody else's LP." In a joint interview taped for use at the Ivor Novello Awards night in March 1967, McCartney and Lennon said that the song's melody was created by combining two different songs they had been working on separately. Lennon recalled that McCartney brought in the chorus ("the submarine... the chorus bit"), which Lennon suggested combining with a melody for the verses that he had already written.
McCartney commented in 1966: "It's a happy place, that's all ... We were trying to write a children's song. That was the basic idea." Their working manuscript for the lyrics shows a verse crossed out and an accompanying note from Lennon reading: "Disgusting!! See me." Scottish singer Donovan contributed the line "Sky of blue and sea of green".
In 1972, Lennon made the following statement about the song's authorship: "Both of us. Paul wrote the catchy chorus. I helped with the blunderbuss bit."
In 1980, Lennon talked further about the song: Yellow Submarine' is Paul's baby. Donovan helped with the lyrics. I helped with the lyrics too. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio, but based on Paul's inspiration. Paul's idea. Paul's title ... written for Ringo." In his 1997 authorised biography, Many Years from Now, McCartney recalled coming up with the initial idea while lying in bed, adding that "It was pretty much my song as I recall ... I think John helped out... but the chorus, melody and verses are mine."
Previewing the 2022 release of the Beatles' Revolver: Special Edition, however, Rob Sheffield says of the song, "But John's home demo shows how it began as a melancholy acoustic ballad, evoking Plastic Ono Band". He says this solo recording debunks the widely accepted view that "Yellow Submarine" was merely a McCartney children's song dashed out for Starr, and that it conveys a deeper emotional resonance than was previously apparent.
Concept and composition Author Steve Turner writes that in its focus on childhood themes, "Yellow Submarine" fitted with the contemporaneous psychedelic aesthetic, and that this outlook was reflected in George Harrison's comments to Maureen Cleave in his "How a Beatle Lives" interview, when he spoke of an individual's purity at birth and gradual corruption by society. Cleave likened his perspective to a contention put forward in William Wordsworth's poetry. In Many Years from Now, McCartney says he "started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he'd lived" and that the story line became gradually more obscure.
According to McCartney, the idea of a coloured submarine originated from his 1963 holiday in Greece, where he had enjoyed an iced spoon sweet that was yellow or red, depending on the flavour, and known locally as a submarine. Lennon had also thought of an underwater craft when he and Harrison and their wives first took the hallucinogenic drug LSD in early 1965. After the disorienting experience of visiting a London nightclub, they returned to Harrison's Surrey home, Kinfauns, where Lennon perceived the bungalow design as a submarine with him as the captain. Musicologists Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc comment that the band's adoption of a coloured submarine as their vessel chimed with Cary Grant captaining a pink one in the 1959 comedy film Operation Petticoat, made during the height of his psychoanalytical experimentation with LSD.
The Beatles' and psychedelia's adoption of childhood themes was also evident in the band's May 1966 single "Paperback Writer", as the falsetto backing vocals chant the title of the French nursery rhyme "Frère Jacques". Starr later said he found "Yellow Submarine" a "really interesting" choice for his vocal spot, since his own songwriting at that point amounted to "rewriting Jerry Lee Lewis's songs". In author Jonathan Gould's opinion, Starr's "guileless" persona ensured the song was presented with the same "deadpan quality" that he gave to the Beatles' feature films. As a result, Gould continues, the eponymous submarine "became a satirically updated version of the improbable craft in which Edward Lear put his characters to sea – the Owl and the Pussycat's pea-green boat, the Jumblies' unsinkable sieve".
The song begins with the first verse, opening with the line "In the town where I was born". The structure comprises two verses and a chorus; a third verse, followed by a chorus; two further verses, the first of which is an instrumental passage; and repeated choruses. In musicologist Alan Pollack's description, the melody is "painfully simple, though in a subtle way, bears the John Lennon stamp of pentatonicism". The composition uses just five chords; in Roman numeral analysis, these are I, ii, IV, V and vi.
The lyrics offer an anti-materialist message typical of the Beatles' songs on Revolver and of psychedelic culture. Reising and LeBlanc view the song's lyrics as a celebration of "the simple pleasures of brotherhood, exotic adventure, and an appreciation of nature". They also see "Yellow Submarine" as the band introducing travel-related imagery to align with a psychedelic journey conveyed in an LSD trip, a theme used more introspectively in "Tomorrow Never Knows", where Lennon exhorts the listener to "float downstream". Musicologist William Echard recognises the psychedelic traits of oceanic imagery, childhood and nostalgia as especially prominent in the song, thereby making "Yellow Submarine" one of the most obvious examples of UK psychedelia's preoccupation with a return to childhood.
Recording Main session The Beatles began recording "Yellow Submarine" during the eighth week of the sessions for Revolver. The project was characterised by the group's increased experimentation in the studio, reflecting the division between their recording output and the music they made as live performers. The first session for the song took place at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) on 26 May 1966, but without producer George Martin, who was unwell. Author Ian MacDonald views Bob Dylan's contemporaneous hit single, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", as a possible inspiration on the Beatles. The two songs share a similar marching rhythm and a festive singalong quality.
The band spent much of the afternoon and evening rehearsing the song. They recorded four takes of the rhythm track, with Starr playing drums, Lennon on acoustic guitar, McCartney on bass, and Harrison on tambourine. The performance was taped at a faster tempo than appears on the completed track, which is in the key of G major.
Following a reduction mix of take 4, Starr recorded his lead vocal and he, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sang vocals over the choruses. The vocal parts were again treated with varispeed; in this instance, they were recorded a semitone lower. Harrison's contribution is especially prominent, departing from his bandmates to sing an f1 note on the word "submarine". The recording was given another reduction mix, reducing the four tracks to two, to allow for the inclusion of nautical and party-like sound effects.
Sound effects overdubs The Beatles dedicated their 1 June session to adding the song's sound effects. For this, Martin drew on his experience as a producer of comedy records for Beyond the Fringe and members of the Goons. The band invited guests to participate, including Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd, Marianne Faithfull, Beatles road managers Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, and Alf Bicknell, the band's driver. The studio store cupboard was sourced for items such as chains, bells, whistles, hooters, a tin bath and a cash till.
Although effects were added throughout the track, they were heavily edited for the released recording. The sound of ocean waves enters at the start of the second verse and continues through the first chorus. Harrison created this effect by swirling water around a bathtub. On the third verse, a party atmosphere was evoked through a combination of Jones clinking glasses together and blowing an ocarina, snatches of excited chatter, Boyd's high-pitched shrieks, Bicknell rattling chains, and tumbling coins. To fill the two-bar gap following the line "And the band begins to play", Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick used a recording of a brass band from EMI's tape library. They disguised the piece by splicing up the taped copy and rearranging the melody.