John Lennon Instagram – ELEANOR RIGBY. 🔴 Both of us. I wrote a good lot of the lyrics, about 70 per cent. The first verse was his and the rest are basically mine. But the way he did it… Well, he knew he had a song. But by that time he didn’t want to ask for my help, and we were sitting around with Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, so he said to us, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics.’ He had the first lines about ‘Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church when there is nobody there.’ And we worked in a room together on it somewhere to finish off a verse and a bit, and then the rest of it was finished off in the studio. We had Father McCartney for a bit, but he said his dad would be upset ‘cause it sounded better than McKenzie, but we made it into McKenzie, but from then on it was new characters. He didn’t have the middle eight, ‘Ah, look at all the lonely people’ – he and George Harrison were settling on that as I left the room to go to the toilet, at the studio, and I turned around and said, ‘That’s it!’ I just dig the strings on Eleanor Rigby, it’s sort of like ‘30’s strings. Jane Asher turned him on to Vivaldi and he made that backing and it was very good. Ray Charles did a great version of this.