The Beatles Lyric That Was Literally “Posterized”

Sometimes songwriters must work tirelessly to wrangle a song into shape, changing words and melodies nonstop until everything fits just right. And other times, songs can just present themselves, almost heaven-sent, in a tidy package.

It was clearly the latter for The Beatles in the case of the song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” which appears on their magnificent Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album from 1967. And it was all thanks to John Lennon’s chance run-in with an antiquated circus poster.

“Benefit” Performance

In early 1967, John Lennon found and purchased from an antique shop a poster advertising a 19th-century British circus. That was essentially the basis for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Lennon didn’t have to do a lot of imagining, as he explained in an interview with author David Sheff:

“The whole song is from a Victorian poster, which I bought in a junk shop. It is so cosmically beautiful. It’s a poster for a fair that must have happened in the 1800s. Everything in the song is from that poster, except the horse wasn’t called Henry. Now, there were all kinds of stories about Henry the Horse being heroin. I had never seen heroin in that period. No, it’s all just from that poster. The song is pure, like a painting, a pure watercolour.”

Much credit deserves to go to George Martin for the realization of the song in the studio. Lennon wanted a circus atmosphere and left it to Martin to create that. The producer did so by finding studio tapes of calliopes, chopping them up, and then reassembling them at random. That effect takes an antiquated circus and sends it hurtling into the psychedelic era.

One other note on the writing of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”: It was long thought to be a solo John Lennon composition, even though, like so many Beatles songs, it was automatically credited to Lennon/McCartney. But in 2013, Paul McCartney started playing the song in his live shows, and explained in interviews he helped Lennon take the poster’s text and assemble it into the song’s lyrics.

Examining the Lyrics of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

A viewing of the poster Lennon bought finds that many of the phrases in the song’s lyrics are taken directly from the text. That includes some wildly fabulous stretches of words like, Over men and horses, hoops and garters / Lastly through a hogshead of real fire.

But when you read that poster, there’s nothing in there that jumps out that tells you it could be a pop song. Lennon deserves credit for realizing there was something in those outsized descriptions that could seem subversive when presented to the modern audience of the time.

Beyond that, the ability of Lennon and McCartney to add some structure to the hype of the poster can’t be understated. They changed some of the names of the people and places a bit to make them flow a tad better, and they added punchy phrases here and there to get some rhymes in the verses. (For example, what a scene at the end of the first verse.)

One bit of whimsy they added was the kicker to the second verse: And, of course, Henry the Horse dances the waltz. In the poster, the horse’s name was Zanthus, and he wasn’t doing any dancing. Lennon and McCartney also did some editing, finding the bits and pieces of the song that were most fantastical to capture the imagination of listeners.

In the context of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” fits the theme of somewhat routine experiences being elevated by the musical backdrop. Thanks to the Fab Four, this old-fashioned circus becomes nothing less than the epicenter for all that is mystical and magical.

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Photo by John Pratt/Keystone/Getty Images