The Beatles song ‘Penny Lane’ is chock-full of nostalgic tit-bits from the band’s youth in Liverpool. Paul McCartney wrote the song in response to John Lennon’s similarly evocative composition ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, drawing on the draft lyrics Lennon had shown him for earlier track ‘In My Life’ the year before.
Both Lennon and McCartney’s odes to their childhood were likely inspired by Bob Dylan, too. As McCartney attests, he had one of Dylan’s earliest albums on repeat at home in his early twenties. This album was probably The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which includes Dylan’s oneiric recollection of childhood ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’.
Among the characters, places and pastimes we encounter in ‘Penny Lane’, there’s the bus shelter in the middle of the roundabout where The Beatles would buy “a four of fish” and chips and partake in giving “finger pies” to girls their age. There’s also a banker who never wears a coat even when it rains, a fireman with an hourglass, and a nurse selling flowers.
But the most famous reference of all is the one that begins the song, and appears again in its final verse. The barber on Penny Lane, with the wall of his shop “showing photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure to have known”. McCartney confirmed that this lyric was based on a real barbershop, where the barber “had these pictures that all the barbers have, of the haircut you can have if you ask,”
So who was the barber?
The real barbershop that McCartney was referring to is technically just past the end of Penny Lane, about 50 metres past the roundabout with its bus shelter, on Smithdown Place in Wavertree district of Liverpool. In the 1980s, the song’s composer gave an interview in which he namechecked the place. “There was a barber called Bioletti, a little barber. I think he’s still there, actually.”
At the time, Italian barber Bioletti was still running his little shop at the end of the famous Liverpool lane, but he’s since sold the business on. When current owner Tony Slavin took over, he renamed it Penny Lane Barber Shop. Now some of the photographs adorning the shop’s wall include one of Paul McCartney himself, sat in one of its chairs having his hair styled by John Lennon in the early 1960s.
Tony Slavin’s barbershop is still running and generally open for business, aside from a temporary closure for refurbishment at the present time. It received a visit from the man who made it famous six years ago, during his appearance on The Late Late Show’s Carpool Karaoke. Apparently he didn’t have time for a trim, though, as he came of of the shop sporting the same customary mullet he went in with
