She's Leaving Home Print

This could be the strangest coincidence in the history of pop music. Paul McCartney was inspired to write the verses of “She’s Leaving Home” after reading an article in the British tabloid Daily Mirror about Melanie Coe, a teenage runaway. But bizarrely enough, Paul had actually met Melanie four years earlier. In 1963, The Beatles appeared on the pop music show Ready Steady Go!, and Paul judged a song miming competition in which Melanie took part. Four girls danced and lip-synced to Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”, and Paul chose Melanie as the winner (Excerpts from the programme are pictured in the upper left corner). In the following years, Melanie frequented London clubs and would rub shoulders with acts like The Beatles (again), The Rolling Stones, and The Hollies. She became a fashionable London socialite who would often dance the night away and go home with strange men, much to the chagrin of her parents. One day her mother decided that she had had enough and ripped some of Melanie’s provocative clothes to shreds. In Melanie’s own words: “She wanted me to look like Princess Anne, not my idol, Marianne Faithfull.” And things got worse from there. When Melanie’s parents found her birth control pills, they were outraged, and they made her flush the pills down the toilet. So what does all this have to do with the song? Well, Melanie ran away from home after the pills incident, and then the Daily Mirror published an article about her dated February 27th, 1967, the very article that inspired Paul to write “She’s Leaving Home” for The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The article revealed how her parents had given Melanie everything that she could have ever wanted, including a car. But she left it all behind with only a note. Melanie would later describe how her parents went out for an afternoon, so she seized the opportunity and left. The story continues from there, according to an interview with Melanie conducted years later: “I was 17 by then and ran away leaving a note, just like in the song. I went to a doctor and he said I was pregnant, but I didn’t know that before I left home. My best friend at the time was married to Ritchie Blackmore, so she hid me at their house in Holloway Road. It was the first place my parents came to look, so I ran off with my boyfriend, who was a croupier, although he had been ‘in the motor trade’ like it says in the song. I think my dad called up the newspapers – my picture was on the front pages. He made out that I must have been kidnapped, because why would I leave? They gave me everything – coats, cars. But not love. My parents found me after three weeks and I had an abortion.” Boy Wonder: Burt Ward, who played Robin in the Sixties TV series Batman, dated Melanie in 1969. I added John Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce and George Harrison's Mini-Cooper, both purchased in 1967, to the collage mix, representing the "motor trade".

Print:Giclee on Canvas

Size:16 W x 20 H x 1.25 D in

Size with Frame:17.75 W x 21.75 H x 1.25 D in

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