The most experimental album The Beatles had made to that point contains a nursery rhyme about living in a submarine, sung by the drummer. It went to number one, and half the world spent the next sixty years insisting it was about something else.
Here is who wrote it and why, what happened in the studio, and what to make of the drug theory.
The Short Answer
It is a children’s song. Paul McCartney wrote it in bed as a story for kids, deliberately using short words so they could sing along, and designed it for Ringo Starr’s voice. The submarine is a place where all your friends live together, and that is the entire content.
The Story Behind the Song
McCartney has described the writing several times and the accounts agree. He was lying in the garret of the Asher family home on Wimpole Street in London, where he was living with his girlfriend Jane Asher’s family, in the moments before sleep.
He was thinking about a song for Ringo, so he kept the melody within a narrow range. Then he started building a story, an old sailor telling children about the places he had lived, one of which had a yellow submarine.
He has said the chorus, melody and verses are his and that Lennon helped, and that the lyrics get more obscure as the song goes on. Lennon’s home demo shows it beginning as something slower and more melancholy before McCartney’s instincts turned it into a singalong.
Why did Ringo sing it?
Because every Beatles album gave him a lead vocal, and by 1966 the band had stopped recording cover versions, so his spot had to be written for him. McCartney has said he thought Ringo was good with children, a knockabout uncle type, and that a children’s song suited him.
Starr was characteristically modest about it, telling an NME reporter in May 1966 that Lennon and McCartney had written a song they thought was for him, and adding a caveat about whether he would manage it.
He also improved it. A line should have been about everyone having all he needs, and Ringo sang it as all we need. That version stayed.
What happened in the recording?
A party. The basic track was cut on 26 May 1966 at EMI in London with George Martin producing and Geoff Emerick engineering, and the sound effects were added on 1 June.
The room that night included Mal Evans on bass drum, Neil Aspinall, Martin and Emerick on backing vocals, Pattie Boyd, and Brian Jones and Marianne Faithfull, who happened to be around. They ran chains in tubs of water, blew bubbles, shouted nautical commands and generally made noise into microphones.
The result is the most crowded recording on Revolver, on an album otherwise defined by tape loops, backwards guitars and studio isolation.
Is it about drugs?
The band said no, repeatedly and from the beginning, and McCartney’s account has never changed in sixty years.
The theory usually points at yellow capsules of a barbiturate that circulated in the mid-sixties and were nicknamed accordingly. There is no evidence connecting the song to it, and the timeline of the writing does not support it. The song sits on an album that contains a genuine drug song, “She Said She Said,” which sounds nothing like this.
The interesting thing is not whether the theory is true. It is that by 1966 the audience had decided every Beatles lyric contained a code, and applied that assumption to a song written to help children sleep.
Did people read politics into it?
Yes, and that was more common at the time than the drug reading. The song was picked up as a commune anthem, as a statement about people living together outside society, and later as a protest chant in various countries with the words changed.
None of that was intended and all of it works, because a song about a group of friends living happily in their own sealed world will attach itself to whatever group is singing it.
How successful was it?
It was released on 5 August 1966 as a double A-side with “Eleanor Rigby,” which is one of the strangest pairings the band ever issued. It went to number one on every major British chart, held it for four weeks and charted for thirteen, and topped the charts in several European countries, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In the United States it reached number two on the Hot 100.
It won an Ivor Novello Award for the highest certified sales of any single by a British songwriter issued in the UK that year. In 1968 it became the title song of an animated United Artists film and the soundtrack album that followed.
Why is it divisive?
Because of where it sits. Beatles fans who consider Revolver a flawless record tend to treat this as the one lapse, an unnecessary piece of whimsy between “Here, There and Everywhere” and “She Said She Said.”
The counter-argument is that a band capable of only one mode is a smaller band. Revolver is the album where they proved they could do anything, and one of the things they could do was write a perfect song for a five-year-old.
Why it lasted
Because it does the job it was built for. McCartney chose short words on purpose, and generations of children have learned it before they could read, which is a harder piece of craft than it sounds.
Songs learned in childhood are the ones people know completely and can never place, because nobody ever told them the title; when that happens, our song lyrics search sorts it out.