Derek Taylor continues:
Next morning, another lovely day. I felt very nice and clean around the brain, always have a lovely morning after acid. A few months earlier Paul and I had gone shopping for suits; he had told me navy blue pinstripe was already on the way back (meaning that he wore it) and I fell for it – and ordered one.
I had taken it down with me to Bradford; just right for Bradford I said. I wore it down to breakfast and then we went off to the Victoria Hall where the Black Dyke Mills Band were waiting on hard wooden chairs, looking bloody marvellous and real and solid and honourable and stocky and lots of other words like that.
If yon Wikipedia is to be believed, the history of the Black Dyke Mills Band (and yes, that name is funny, get over it) stretches all the way back to 1816, when a businessman and French horn player named John Foster stared “a small brass and reed band” in Queensbury, West Yorkshire, England. It was actually the third iteration of this band, starting in 1855, that adopted the name of the company Foster owned, the Black Dyke Mills. The band continues to this day, having won numerous prizes in brass band competitions and made over 350 recordings — but only one of them was produced by Paul McCartney and released on Apple Records. Actually two: the A-side was a number Paul threw together called “Thingumybob,” which also served as the theme song of the Yorkshire Television comedy of the same name.
For the B-side they recorded a version of “Yellow Submarine”:
A good time was had by all. D. Taylor again:
It was a good morning for everyone because the portable recording unit worked, the band and McCartney worked, and the press worked out beautifully – I saw dozens of old friends and we had a few pints and then lunch.
At around three o’clock, as we filmed the last TV interview (“How do you like Bradford?” “It’s great…”; fast-moving stuff like that) I decided to off the suit and black shoes, put on a pair of red corduroys and a white Mexican cotton shirt from Olivera Street, Los Angeles, a couple of beads, an Indian scarf and down my throat went another 250 milligrams of the dreaded heaven-and-hell drug. What a day for a daydream.
Afterward McCartney, Taylor, and party climbed into a limousine and headed back toward London. But they got sidetracked along the way.
As we rolled away from the South Midlands and approached the Northern Home Counties the acid really started to bounce. It was late afternoon and if there was a heaven to be found on this soil, then I reckoned it would be found this evening, in the green and gold of this divine countryside.
“Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar?” “Yes,” said Peter Asher. “Where would you like to go?” I asked. “AA Book,” said Paul. “Pick the most beautiful name in Bedfordshire,” I said, “that’s where we should go.”
Peter looked at the map for what seemed like two hours or more.
“Harrold,” he said.
And so the limo changed course and headed for the village of Harrold. There they hit the pubs and were welcomed warmly by the townspeople. Many tales are told of that night, both in The Beatles Bible and in Taylor’s book, but as we’re already running a bit long here, I’ll let you go with one last passage from As Time Goes By:
“Welcome to Harrold, Paul,” said the sandy man, the local dentist, downing the rich gold beer he had earned with his shears. “I can hardly believe it, in fact I think I’m dreaming.”
We next found ourselves in his house, below dipping oak beams, a banquet provided for us, hams and pies and multi-jewelled salads, new bread and cakes, chicken and fruit and wine; and the dentist’s wife, a jolly lady, still young beyond her maddest fantasies, bringing out her finest fare. Paul McCartney was at her table in the village of Harrold.
Hiding at a turn on the crooked staircase stood a little girl, shy and disbelieving. But she had brought a right-handed guitar and landed it in Paul’s (left-handed) hands but the wizards were producing this play by now and floating with the splendour of this, the strangest Happening since Harrold was born, the dentist and his wife, and the neighbours as they crowded the windows and the parlour, and the children, all caught their breath as Paul McCartney began to play the song he had written that week: “Hey Jude,” it began.
I sat peacefully, full of the goodness you can find within yourself when goodness is all around and the dentist’s wife picked up on it and asked why life couldn’t always be like this and I told her there was nothing to fear, nothing at all and the dentist brought out the wine he had been saving for the raffle at the fete next Saturday and we drank that to celebrate the death of fear and the coming of music to Harrold.
[…] to be that it was a variation on “Thingumybob,” the tune he had written and produced for the Black Dyke Mills Band. The other, and this is surprising to me, was “Wild Honey […]