I know that a lot of you have already offered me your answers to this quiz and I have checked them and told you your scores. Anyway, for the benefit of Mr Kite and anybody else who doesn’t yet know whether their answers were right or wrong, here are the answers to my second even more difficult Beatles quiz. Hopefully, you didn’t do the quiz by writing “Dunno” ten times. Or:
“Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”,
“Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”, “Dunno”.
As in the first quiz, all of the questions and answers involved Sergeant Pepper and the other LPs after this.
1 Who had a silver hammer?
One of the comparatively few Beatles songs about a serial killer:
“….Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine
Calls her on the phone
Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?
But as she’s getting ready to go
A knock comes on the doorBang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
Came down upon her head
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
Made sure that she was dead.”
Your clue was about coffee. What brand of coffee is it in the picture ?
Maxwell House, of course. No marks for anybody who thought it was either “Nescafé’s Silver Hammer” or “House’s Silver Hammer”.
2 Who always arrived late for tea?
This is a humdinger of a question, though I say so myself. In the song “Cry baby, cry” on the White Album, the song suddenly includes various verses from the Beatles version of “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, which is one of the many traditional English nursery rhymes:
“Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She’s old enough to know better
So cry baby cryThe Duchess of Kirkcaldy always smiling
And arriving late for tea
The Duke was having problems
With a message at the local bird and bee”.
The photograph provides an easy answer. Look at the name of the pub:
3 Which fairground attraction gives its name to a Beatles song?
Well, as everybody knows except Charles Manson, it’s a helter skelter, as we English call it:
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again
Charles Manson didn’t know what a “helter skelter” was, and interpreted it differently. Paul McCartney explained:
“Charles Manson interpreted that ‘Helter Skelter’ was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse….. It’s from the Bible, Revelation . Manson interpreted the whole thing – that the Beatles were the four horsemen, ‘Helter Skelter’ was the song – and he arrived at having to go out and kill everyone.”
4 What was the name of the lovely meter maid?
In the song her name is Rita:
“Took her out and tried to win her
Had a laugh and over dinner
Told her I would really like to see her again
Got the bill and Rita paid it
Took her home I nearly made it
Sitting on the sofa with a sister or two
Oh, lovely Rita meter maid
Where would I be without you?
Give us a wink and make me think of you
Lovely Rita meter maid, Rita meter maid“
5 What was anybody doing in “Penny Lane?
There are so many that you could make it up and probably get it right! Here’s a list:
“a barber showing photographs all the people stop and say hello
(a banker with a motorcar) the little children laugh at him behind his back
I sit a fireman with an hourglass he likes to keep his fire engine clean
the pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray she feels as if she’s in a play
the barber shaves another customer we see the banker sitting waiting for a trim the fireman rushes in”
6 She was a working girl, north of England way. But what happened to her?
Well, success on a fabulous scale:
“She was a working girlNorth of England wayNow she’s hit the big timeIn the U.S.A.“
She had been so bad, in actual fact, that the song was banned immediately from the BBC.
“Yellow matter custard
Dripping from a dead dog’s eye
Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess
Boy you been a naughty girl
You let your knickers down I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g’ joob”And here again are the said knickers:
Apparently the BBC did not allow any reference on air to sex, body parts south of the navel, underwear in the same location and so on. For the BBC censor, the mere use of the word “knickers” was enough to condemn the song into the fires of hell. Implied drug use saw off a further two Beatles songs, another was banned for mentioning suicide, and the final one was banned twenty years after it was released for political reasons.
8 Who has a barrow in the market place and what did Molly do?
Well, in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” :
“Desmond has a barrow in the market place”
and Molly gets up to quite a lot. Any one of :
“Molly is the singer in a band Molly says “I like your face” as she takes him by the hand
she begins to sing Molly stays at home and does her pretty face
in the evening she still sings with the band
happy ever after in the market place Molly lets the children lend a hand*
The picture, by the way, refers to the fact that a group, called “Marmalade”, released this song as their own single.
9 Which two other colours are mentioned in “Yellow Submarine” as well as yellow?
Take your pick:
White, red, brown, blue and possibly purple. That’s about it for me.
And the origin of the song? Well, Paul explained:
“in that moment before you’re falling asleep – that little twilight moment when a silly idea comes into your head – and thinking of ‘Yellow Submarine’. ‘We all live in a yellow submarine…”
10 “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly.” Who is it?”
Well the song begins with the answer:
“Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes”
“It’s the image of this female who would come and save me – this secret love that was going to come one day. So it turned out to be Yoko, though, and I hadn’t met Yoko then. But she was my imaginary girl that we all have.” (John Lennon)
Supposedly, we even know the identity of “Lucy”.
“She was Lucy O’Donnell, and she was a fellow pupil at Heath House, a nursery school, with Julian Lennon. She only found out she was in a Beatles song when she was 13, in 1976.”
John Knifton 