TRIVIA..
The Picture is the Strawberry Fields Orphanage, Beaconsfield Rd in Liverpool, inspiration for the Song.
The Gates were stolen in year 2000 but were recovered a few weeks later.
May 2005 Will See The Orphange Close Down Completely After 69 Years of Child Care.
Wonder What Will Happen To The Gates and Gate Pillar's?

At The Height of Beatles Popularity Signs Such As Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and Abbey Road Were Disappearing As Quick As They Were Being Put Up!

The Single Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields entered the British charts in Feb 1967 at No. 5.
Highest U.K. Position was No. 2. Please Release Me by Engelbert Humperdinck kept The Beatles From No 1 on this occasion, However it was a U.S. No 1 that Year.
To Promote the Song The Group Appeared on a Special Film Clip Aired on BBCs Top of The Pops;
It Was Eventually Shown Worldwide.
Strawberry Fields Can Be Found On The Albums:-
Magical Mystery Tour and The Beatles 1967 to 1970.

The Next Information is From :- A Book Titled SHOUT!

On 17 February, Parlophone released two new Beatles songs: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. The tracks had been recorded late in 1966, for the album that was to surpass Revolver: with a lightweight ditty called When I'm Sixty-Four, they represented the sum of almost three months' work.

Since a single was long overdue, George Martin had no choice but to sacrifice the two three-minute productions that, each in its own way, had involved more time and expense than most entire LPs. The 'double A-side' formula was less a boast than a political necessity, since one side was wholly John's and the other entirely Paul's: the weight of creativity packed into each only emphasised what a gulf lay between them.

Strawberry Fields was the name of an old Salvation Army children's home close to where John grew up in Liverpool. The song was, however, explicit only in its title: a mirror only to its author's almost perpetual LSD trip. Yet his feeling for imagery remained strong enough to shine through the scrawl of the drug across his mind. The words are a perverse riddle from which pictures nonetheless struggle, like lazy ectoplasm, to tell a story.

Penny Lane, by contrast-since Paul had not yet succumbed to LSD-recreated with photographic clarity a part of Liverpool known to all the Beatles, on the way to Woolton and Allerton, near the bus depot where Mimi used to see John off to Dovedale Primary, and 'Barney's', the hall where the Quarry Man played; it mentioned the barber's in the little parade, the roundabout and fire station, the 'four of fish' from chip-shop parlance, the 'finger pie' of adolescent bus-shelter naughtiness: it was surrealism from a rational mind, as recognisable yet mysterious as someone else's snapshot album.

As an arranger, George Martin's only guide was Paul's enthusiasm for the piccolo trumpet passage in Bach's BrandenburgConcerto. David Mason of the London Symphony Orchestra stood by in Studio One with his piccolo trumpet while Paul hummed the notes he wanted and Martin inked them into a score.

Strawberry Fields proved an even greater test of the producer's ingenuity. The song, as John first played it on acoustic guitar, was a simple, reflective melody. With the other Beatles added, it changed to the 'heavy' style they were already absorbing from the San Francisco psychedelic groups. John liked it that way at first but then, a few days later, asked George Martin to produce a softer arrangement with trumpets and cellos. In the end, he could not decide between the two versions. He said he liked the beginning of one but preferred the ending of the other. Martin had to find a way of splicing half the 'heavy metal' version with half the orchestral one. To his lasting credit, no one noticed the join.

Self-surpassing talent, given in double measure, resulted in the first Beatles single since 1962 which did not reach Number One in the Top Twenty. It climbed to second place but could not in the end dislodge a mundane cabaret singer, lately renamed Engelbert Humperdinck, singing an oily ballad entitled Release Me.

The fact was, the Beatles now had an influence no longer measurable by the Top Twenty alone. George Melly, the Jazz singer and critic and a fellow Liverpudlian, reviewed Penny Lane as poetry: it was, he said, a true evocation of Liverpool in the l950s with 'great sandstone churches and the trains rattling past'. The imagery worked with no less power on those who had never seen Liverpool, and barely remembered the Fifties: those for whom Penny Lane's blue suburban skies', like 'Strawberry Fields' acid-swirling bridle-path, became a mirage eclipsing even that of San Francisco. You heard it even better, people said, when you were 'high'.

End of Extract From :- SHOUT! The True Story of The Beatles by Philip Norman 1981.

Extract From BEATLES In Their Own Words Edited by Miles 1982.

Penny Lane. Paul McCartney:
'Penny Lane' is a bus roundabout in Liverpool; and there is a barber's shop showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know - no that's not true, they're just photos of hairstyles, but all the people who come and go/stop and say hullo. There's a bank on the corner so we made up the bit about the banker in his motor car. It's part fact, part nostalgia for a place which is a great place, blue suburban skies as we remember it. and it's still there. And we put in a joke or two: "Four of fish and finger pie." The women would never dare say that, except to themselves. Most people wouldn't hear it, but "finger pie" is just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut.

Strawberry Fields. Paul McCartney:
There's a lot of random in our songs - 'Strawberry Fields' is the name of a Salvation Army School - by the time we've taken it through the writing stage, thinking of it, playing it to the others, writing it, and letting them think of bits, recording it once and deciding it's not quite right and do it again and then find "Oh, that's it, the solo comes here and that goes there", then bang, you have the jigsaw puzzle.
That happens with all our songs, except the ones we want to keep really simple, like 'When I'm 64' and 'Fixing a Hole'. That wasn't "I buried Paul" at all, that was John saying "cranberry sauce". It was the end of 'Strawberry Fields'. That's John's humour. John would say something totally out of synch, like 'cranberry sauce'. If you don't realise that John's apt to say 'cranberry sauce' when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think "Aha!"

Strawberry Fields. Ringo Starr:
Everybody thinks Paul wrote it, but John wrote it for me. He's got a lot of soul has John, you know.

End of Extract From BEATLES In Their Own Words Edited by Miles 1982.

Other Info.

1976 Saw The Release of 20th Century Fox (Russ Regan) Film and Soundtrack of
"All This and World War II". Featuring 30 Beatles Tracks Sung By Various Artists.
Strawberry Fields Forever Was Sung by Peter Gabriel (ex Genesis) with the Film Clip Featuring Britain in 1938 with The White Cliffs of Dover and Neville Chamberlins "Peace in our Time" Piece of Paper.

In 1981, Strawberry Fields Forever : John Lennon Remembered was Publised in The U.S. by Bantam Books as a Tribute To John.

In 1985 Micheal Jackson outbid Paul McCartney for the rights to Lennon & McCartney Songs.
He paid £31.8 million. Then handed "Love Me Do" (first Chart entry) back to Paul as a gift.

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