In the autumn of 1966, John went to Spain after accepting the part of Gripweed in Dick Lester's film of How I Won The War. While relaxing on the beach at Almeria, John started to work on 'Strawberry Field Forever', a song he imagined as a slow-talking blues number. He completed it in a large house he was renting in nearby Santa Isabel.
It started out as a nostalgic view of a Salvation Army Orphanage in Woolton, where he , Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan used to play amongst the trees, and ended up, like so many of John's songs, as a rumination on states of consciousness. Strawberry Field was a large Victorian building with extensive wooded grounds in Beaconfield Road, a five-minutes walk from John's home in Menlove Avenue.
Because of this romantic associations, Strawberry Field became a symbol of his desire to be alone, of his feeling that he was somehow set apart from his contemporaries. If 'Strawberry Field Forever' is a song about John seeing the in a different way to everyone around him, the meaning is clearer in the earliest version of the lyric, where he wrote that no-one is on his wavelength, they're either 'too high or too low.'
It started out as a nostalgic view of a Salvation Army Orphanage in Woolton, where he , Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan used to play amongst the trees, and ended up, like so many of John's songs, as a rumination on states of consciousness. Strawberry Field was a large Victorian building with extensive wooded grounds in Beaconfield Road, a five-minutes walk from John's home in Menlove Avenue.
Because of this romantic associations, Strawberry Field became a symbol of his desire to be alone, of his feeling that he was somehow set apart from his contemporaries. If 'Strawberry Field Forever' is a song about John seeing the in a different way to everyone around him, the meaning is clearer in the earliest version of the lyric, where he wrote that no-one is on his wavelength, they're either 'too high or too low.'