"Polythene Pam" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road, the fourth piece in the album's climactic medley. It is a brief, brisk character sketch of a woman from the North who, dressed in a bag made of polythene, roams the streets at night and earns coverage in the tabloid paper News of the World. John Lennon wrote it during the group's 1968 sojourn in India. While a third source has been proposed, Lennon moulded the character of Polythene Pam from two women he knew personally. The first is "Polythene" Pat Dawson, an early Beatles fan so named for her appetite for the plastic; the second is Royston Ellis' girlfriend Stephanie, who spent a night in bed with Ellis and Lennon clad in a polythene bag.
The song was to be recorded for the Beatles' 1968 White Album but instead made Abbey Road, a contribution of Lennon's to the medley (also dubbed the Long One) that he viewed with frigidness. In fact, he later called the song, along with another of his medley pieces, "bits of crap I wrote in India". The band recorded "Pam" on three separate days in July 1969 as a continuous piece with "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window", which comes after in the Long One.
Generally described as a rock and roll song, critics have spotlighted "Pam"'s driving rhythm and Lennon's singing in an aggressive Scouse accent. It is one of the Long One's several character sketches and builds narrative unity by linking to the previous track "Mean Mr. Mustard", a portrait of an old miser whose sister is Polythene Pam. As for its musical role in the medley, "Pam" intactly leads to the resolution back to A major in the beginning of "Bathroom Window", returning to the key in which the medley's first piece is written. Most critics reviewing Abbey Road or the Beatles catalogue have said little about the song.
However, "Pam" hardly concerned the Beatles' time in India. It in fact draws from two or three women in Lennon's life, two of whom are far more often discussed across scholarly books and biographies. The first is "Polythene" Pat Dawson (born Hodgett); as a fourteen-year-old girl from Liverpool, she was a Beatles fan and frequently attended their shows at the local Cavern Club. She would eat polythene—in her recollection, by winding it into in knots, sometimes after burning it and letting it cool. Her friend worked at a polythene factory and ensured her a steady supply of the plastic. She once related: "... I got quite friendly with [the Beatles]. If they were playing out of town they'd give me a lift back home in their van. It was about the same time that I started getting called Polythene Pat." In his John Lennon Encyclopedia, the journalist Bill Harry introduces Dawson as a "Liverpool barmaid who had a brief flirtation with John".
The second source is Royston Ellis' girlfriend Stephanie. Ellis was an English Beat poet who would tour the country to read his verse alongside a jazz and pop or rock and roll performance. Having been invited to the University of Liverpool in 1960, he met and befriended the Beatles and even accompanied them during one of their gigs that year. Three years later, he chanced to meet them again. Ellis had since quit the Beat culture and found work as a ferry engineer in Guernsey. It is there that the Beatles performed on 8 August, at Candie Gardens, after which Ellis encountered Lennon and invited him to pass the night at his and Stephanie's flat. According to the Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack, Ellis had rented a garret especially for the event. Then, with Stephanie wearing a polythene bag, the three stayed the night together in bed. Their memories drift apart as to what exactly happened.
Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about.
—Lennon in a 1980 interview
Lennon told David Sheff in their 1980 interview: "That was me, remembering a little event with a woman in Jersey [sic], and a man who was England's answer to Allen Ginsberg ... I met him when we were on tour and he took me back to his apartment and I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. ... Perverted sex in a polythene bag." About the character of Polythene Pam's wearing jackboots and kilts, he added: "She didn't wear jack boots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated." Lennon did not imply that Stephanie was the woman dressed in polythene, and neither does Bill Harry. From his end, Ellis did not remember any "perverted sex" but faintly remembered Stephanie; he recalled his own picture in 1994:
We'd read all these things about leather and we didn't have any leather, but I had my oilskins and we had some polythene bags from somewhere. We all dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the night with us in the same bed. I don’t think anything very exciting happened and we all wondered what the fun was in being 'kinky.'
The Beatles performed at Candie Gardens, Guernsey, on 8 August 1963. Lennon's chance encounter after the concert would stoke in him a muse for the character of Polythene Pam.
He suggests that the night's events stemmed from a verse in his poetry booklet: "I long to have sex between black leather sheets, and ride shivering motorcycles between your thighs." Paul McCartney presented his account of the night's events as Lennon had relayed them: "John, being Royston's friend, went out to dinner with him and got pissed and stuff and they ended up back at his apartment with a girl who dressed herself in polythene for John's amusement, so it was a little kinky scene." Moreover, he said that Ellis had encountered Lennon in the first place by attending their gig, although he said they met "down South ... somewhere like Shrewsbury", and that the pair subsequently had dinner together before retreating to Ellis' flat. His biographer Barry Miles indicates that McCartney too had met Ellis in Guernsey. Since "Pam", for the most part, sketches a character's being dressed in polythene, Lennon's night with Stephanie and Ellis is the main source for the song.
The third source, confidently named by the Beatles associate Tony Bramwell but left out of many Beatles texts and biographies, was "an old 'bag lady' who used to hang around the Knightsbridge end of Hyde Park, close to the army barracks". As he explained, she would sleep in the park and keep her belongings in plastic bags, and Lennon was struck by her. In addition, the musicologist Walter Everett suggests that Pam's polythene bag dress refers to Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bag Productions company; Lennon explicitly mentions it in "Come Together". The music author Kevin Courrier likewise sees a hint of their performance art bagism, but only in Stephanie's act of being in bed while inside a polythene bag.
The Abbey Road medley
I think Paul has conceptions of albums, or attempts it, like he conceived the medley thing. I'm not interested in conceptions of albums. All I'm interested in is the sound. I like it to be whatever happens. I’m not interested in making the album into a show. For me, I'd just put 14 rock songs on.
—Lennon
When working on Abbey Road, the Beatles did not know that their time as a band was fast moving towards divorce. Lennon originally wanted a rock and roll album, and McCartney, a pop symphony/opera, so the album was split two ways: the first side contained individual songs, and most of the second was a sixteen-minute medley. The idea for the medley was McCartney's, and the group's producer George Martin claimed his share of credit in its creation in wanting "to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music". He had long been advising the group to "think symphonically", to use motifs and complex structures and forms. Thus, the medley's songs, short "half" songs, are connected in some way by thematic or tonal coherence and link together through segues and fades.
The Beatles biographer Hunter Davies coldly describes the medley as a long string of "short pieces that ... were unfinished, hardly worked on, half realised scraps that got melded together, running into each other, with the odd reprise, to fill up the end of the album", although he follows the narrative that the Beatles knew Abbey Road would be their last album. Lennon was less eager about the Long One, both because it was McCartney's idea and because he preferred unvarnished rock and roll free from intricate album structures and other grand touches. Such was his preference that when Neil Aspinall suggested Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band include a reprise of the title song, Lennon told him: "No one likes a smart-arse, Neil." He said that his three contributions to the medley, "Sun King", "Mean Mr. Mustard", and "Pam", were "juggled ... about until it made vague sense"; and according to the author Chris Ingham, he would have considered them "garbage". Some critics hold that the three Lennon numbers are the medley's weakest patch. In spite of this, Ingham, one of these critics, thinks they are "hugely entertaining musically" with their peculiar characters, and Mark Hertsgaard, another, praises "Pam"'s "wicked humor". Rolling Stone agrees: "He contributed some of its most eccentric parts, like the sneering 'Mean Mr. Mustard' and the quick, funky put-down 'Polythene Pam.'"
The author Nicholas Schaffner writes: "Like all their best albums, Abbey Road is inhabited by a large cast of whimsical characters—such as Maxwell, who cheerfully bumps off all and sundry with a magic hammer; Mean Mr. Mustard with the 10-shilling note up his nose, who gets his kicks out of screaming obscenities at Her Majesty; and his transvestite sister Pam, resplendent in a polythene bag." In "Mean Mr. Mustard", another medley number, the title character has a sister Pam. Her name, going as far back as the song's demo in 1968, was originally Shirley, but Lennon changed it to Pam "to make it sound like it had something to do with it" and hence make the medley sound continuous. Lennon wanted to record his medley songs at one go, without interruption; as Womack writes, "In so doing, they would not only serve the purposes of the musical suite but also share in the unfolding character studies that the medley was beginning to accrue."
"Pam" was first intended to be recorded for the White Album. Lennon performed a demo at George Harrison's Kinfauns home in May 1968 much resembling its finished released state, save for the name change from Shirley to Pam and an altered verse: instead of "She's the kind of a girl that makes the News of the World", he sings "It's a little absurd but she's a nice class of bird". The demo is also somewhat longer but, Rolling Stone's Jordan Runtagh argues, still too meagre to become a song in its own right as Lennon utters the two verses over and over; towards the demo's end, he says "It's too long, that!". Lennon recorded another at his Kenwood estate. On 24 January 1969, he played "Pam" during the Get Back sessions for the only time. The musicologist Alan W. Pollack hesitates to call this performance of the song a performance and, rather, prefers sketch: "John and Paul in particular seem to be having a dickens of a time keeping their signals straight with respect to either words or chord changes."
Lennon sang an off-mike guide vocal on "Pam", while McCartney did the same on "Bathroom Window". Harrison played a guitar solo, during which Lennon shouts words of encouragement ("Fab! That's great! Real good, that. Real good ..."), some of which appear on the finished recording. At the very beginning of "Bathroom Window", in anticipation of the change of tempo, Lennon gives out a laugh and then shouts "Oh, look out!". Lennon thought that Starr could not find an adequate drum part for the recording; the sound engineerGeoff Emerick writes about a sour comment Lennon made comparing Starr's drumming to Dave Clark's. Pestered, he eventually said: "Sod it, let's just put one down anyway", and even after Starr earnestly devised a new part with McCartney and prepared to play it on a new backing track, Lennon told him: "I'm not playing this bloody song again, Ring. If you want to redo the drums, go ahead and overdub them." And Starr did overdub them with Emerick's help.
The band carried out overdubs on the track on 28 July, although, according to the Beatles historian John C. Winn, many of these contributions, such as piano and electric piano, were subsequently cut. Recording was completed on 30 July, when the final vocal, guitar, and percussion overdubs were taped. These included a second lead guitar part by Harrison, playing the descending notes into the start of "Bathroom Window". After listening to the recordings to check for the transitions between the medley pieces, the group accepted that of "Pam"/"Bathroom Window". On August 14, stereo mixing was finished, and "Pam" and "Bathroom Window" were fused into the medley "without the slightest hint of a pause between the [former and 'Mean Mr. Mustard', the song preceding it in the medley]", as Womack notes. George Martin produced "Pam", and Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald, along with John Kurlander and Alan Parsons, engineered it.
For a time, the medley was intended to run with "Her Majesty" flanked by "Mustard" and "Pam". However, while the Abbey Road tracks were being remixed, on 30 July, McCartney deemed "Her Majesty" unfit for the Long One and told the sound engineer John Kurlander to scrap it. Since Kurlander was under orders not to throw out any Beatles recording, he inserted it at the end of Abbey Road after "The End". His edit was only rough. Due to this change in sequencing, "Pam" opens with "Her Majesty"'s final chord, and the end of "Mustard" is covered by the opening chords of "Pam", though the transition between them remains rather plane since "Pam" opens with a D major chord common to "Mustard". These errors were never fixed; when Kurlander tried doing so on 30 July, McCartney told him: "Never mind, it's only a rough mix, it doesn't matter."
Composition
Style and music
Lennon's guitar strumming in the song has been likened to Pete Townshend's (pictured here in 1972) in "Pinball Wizard".
The musicologist Tim Riley and Kevin Courrier both label "Pam" a "punchy" rock and roll track. Lennon sings in an exceptionally coarse Scouse accent to evoke Polythene Pam's roots from the North and her crude demeanour. Ian MacDonald writes that the accent "harks back to the band's dirty days in Merseysidedivebars"; he adds that "heavy pseudo-samba percussion" drives the song along. Lennon's voice is accompanied by scat backing vocals featuring from the third bar of a verse till its end. Several critics liken Lennon's grand, aggressive guitar strumming throughout the song to the Who's "Pinball Wizard", which was a hit at the time. In fact, during a studio take of "Pam", Lennon is heard cracking a joke about the album to which "Pinball Wizard" belongs, Tommy.
In another comment on the song's rough sound and rhythm, the scholar Steve Hamelman writes that the song "pulses madly, as if the mere memory of this 'attractively built' girl could make male hormones rage".
"Pam" is written in common time in the key of E major. The riff and stanzas use the double plagal cadence (♭VII–IV–I) common in rock music; it and variations of it (such as I–♭VII–IV) appear repeatedly in the Beatles catalogue, such as in "The Night Before", "Here Comes the Sun", the chorus of "Dig a Pony", and coda of "Hey Jude". In terms of structure, "Pam" alternates between a brief introduction and a verse twice, before returning to the introduction and moving to an outro segueing into the song. The verse is ten bars long; it can be interpreted as an AABA quatrain tied with a spacer phrase. After a repeated instance of the double plagal cadence, the melody transitions to a flat third chord (G major, but heard as a fifth of flat sixth) and then to the dominant (B major), and then leads to a phrase of ♭VI–♭VII–I that runs twice. Rhythmically, a motif stressing the last three eighth notes in the first half of a measure occurs throughout, the only time such a motif appears on a completed Beatles song. Pollack writes that "Pam"'s melody is "pattering", as in "Mustard": "Like the latter, this one provides melodic contour, such as it minimally exists, by transposing its simple downward motifs up or down the scale. In particular note the chromatic upward crawl in the 3rd phrase."
"Pam" is harmonically similar to "Mustard", written in the same key and using the same chords, barring G major. However, the progressions differ. In "Mustard", the melody starts with the tonic and leads to the subdominant before returning to the tonic, while in "Pam", the melody lines culminate in the tonic. Furthermore, the dominant's role in "Mustard" is its usual one, to form a complete cadence, but "Pam" relies on a flat seventh chord to form a cadence, as the dominant serves only a supporting role in the melody. "Pam" closes with a guitar outro lasting 22 bars, making up around forty percent of the song. In its final moments the guitars' bassline walks down the E major scale in steps and half steps (E/D/C#/B). Then, they arrive at A major, the home key of the following song, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" as well as the key of the medley's first piece, "You Never Give Me Your Money" (along with A minor). Since "Money", the medley had followed E major, and so the return to A major marks a resolution, hence "one of the medley's most exciting moments", as Womack sees it. Owing to its abridged structure, Pollack writes that "Pam" and its likewise short companion "Mustard" "combine to create a single, unbroken and quite powerful one-two wind up punch of a lead into ['Bathroom Window']".
Lyrics
Lennon leads the charge with slashing chords from his 12-string acoustic guitar. McCartney helps pump up the quick tempo with a stabbing, round-note bass line, with Ringo Starr contributing a kind of polyrhythmic, tom-heavy beat against a lush backing vocal holding steady 'ah ah ah's. Lennon gives the track a regional flair, singing in a clipped Northern accent ... He also employs a kind of local rhyming slang with exaggerated, hard-syllable sounds ... Following a brief, echo-effected guitar solo, the arrangement transitions into a descending progression, blending seamlessly into the next track without any tape edit, continuing the 'medley.'
Lennon said that Polythene Pam is a "mythical Liverpool scrubber dressed in her jackboots and kilt". Nicholas Schaffner writes that the characters of Pam and her brother Mr. Mustard may as well belong in Lennon's nonsense novel A Spaniard in the Works. In the music journalist Jim Beviglia's view, few details about Pam's character are divulged, and those that are all concern her appearance. Pam is androgynous—"so good looking but she looks like a man". She is Mean Mr. Mustard's sister, but beyond their kinship, their personalities are wholly dissimilar.
Some critics note that Lennon's cries of yeah, yeah, yeah closing each verse are a deliberate reference to the band's 1963 song "She Loves You"; the group had referenced "She Loves You" once before, in the coda of 1967's "All You Need Is Love". Pollack chews on this observation but also considers whether the yeah, yeah, yeah refrain was "by this point in time just a lazy habit".
Lennon himself dismissed the song, along with "Mean Mr. Mustard", as "only finished bits of crap I wrote in India". Most critics assessing the Beatles catalogue or Abbey Road as a whole have dedicated one sentence to "Pam", or otherwise have named it in passing or not at all. Billboard's Joe Lynch simply describes it as "another minute-long rocker" following "Mustard". In a contemporary review of the album, Alan Smith deems it a fast "rocker" and says that its guitar breaks called to mind "Summertime Blues". William Mann, another contemporary reviewer, noted the songs lying between "Sun King" and "Golden Slumbers" in the Long One as "rock-'n'-roll songs that seem to find their tunes in developments of the same initial mood and musical invention", and yet another, John Mendelsohn, writes for Rolling Stone that "Pam" and "Mustard" transfer the listener to "John Lennon's England meeting these two human oddities". In general rankings of Beatles songs, some music writers such as Bill Wyman lump "Pam" with the rest of the medley and grade them collectively. In their 2023 rankings, the music journalist Michael Gallucci lists it at number 168 out of 229, and fellow journalist Mark Beaumont places it in the bottom quartile, commenting: "'Pinball Wizard' power chords, nifty solo, broad Scouse accent, low-rent S&M; there was so much going on in John's throwaway 70-second rocker about a bizarre sexual encounter in Jersey in 1960 [sic] ... that you wish he'd written a chorus for it."
Covers
The American jazz and R&B band Booker T. & the M.G.'s(pictured in 1967) covered "Polythene Pam" the year after its release.
Booker T. & the M.G.'s covered "Pam", as well as many other Abbey Road tracks, on their 1970 album McLemore Avenue. Their album was a mostly instrumental reinvention of the Beatles' work, thought up by Booker T. Jones after hearing it for the first time: "... I thought it was incredibly courageous of The Beatles to drop their format and move out musically like they did. To push the limit like that and reinvent themselves when they had no need to do that. ... The music was just incredible so I felt I needed to pay tribute to it." Roy Wood of Electric Light Orchestra recorded the song for the 1976 musical documentary All This and World War II, and Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees did so for the 1978 Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band film soundtrack. When Mojo magazine released an album of Abbey Road covers, Abbey Road Now!, to commemorate the album's fortieth anniversary, "Pam" featured in a medley with "Mean Mr. Mustard" by the indie rock band Cornershop. The music journalist Paul McGuinness chose this recording as the best cover of both "Mustard" and "Pam".
The music video for the Beatles' 1995 single "Free as a Bird", directed by Joe Pytka, contains nearly a hundred allusions to the Beatles' life and work, among them a girl donning a plastic mac. According to Bill Harry, she is meant to represent Polythene Pam.
Personnel
Writers and scholars disagree somewhat on the instruments composing "Pam" and who played them. And despite the recording takes of "Pam" and "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" being one and the same, the two tracks have different personnel listings but nevertheless very similar instrumentation. The basic list, agreed upon by Hunter Davies, Walter Everett, Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin, Ian MacDonald, John C. Winn, and Kenneth Womack, is this:
Winn notes the use of "whipcrack" percussion but does not credit it to anyone. MacDonald writes that McCartney played electric piano. Guesdon and Margotin tentatively indicate a piano part fronted by Lennon and credit another guitar part to McCartney.
↑Barry Miles, in his diary on the Beatles, records Lennon and Ellis' encounter under 6 August 1963, two days before the group's show at Candie Gardens. However, his biography of Paul McCartney, consistently with other sources, does mark 8 August as the date of their meeting. Yet, it says that the group performed at the Guernsey Auditorium, not at Candie Gardens.
↑He also conjures up the Beatles' reaction to Lennon's retelling the events of that night: "He came back with all these tales about a girl who dressed in polythene: 'Shit! There was this chick and it was great...' and we thought, 'Oh, wow!'"
↑Traditional works of Beatles scholarship state otherwise, but their account has since fallen out of favour. For example, Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution in the Head (2005) that the group, conscious of their fate, gave their assent for the medley mostly to close their career together with a majestic ending, a celebration.
↑Still, some people close to the Beatles had their suspicions. The sound engineeer Alan Parsons, who worked on Abbey Road, wrote in the foreword to Solid State (2019): "I also knew that, realistically speaking, Abbey Road would be the last time the Beatles would be the Beatles." George Martin too sensed an unmistakable end to their partnership, and Ethan Russell gathered from the photoshoots for the album cover that "they were not a happy group". While he did not know for sure, George Harrison said that "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line".
↑According to Kenneth Womack, the "acoustic simplicity" of "Her Majesty" did not suit the medley's vigour, especially when placed amid "Mustard" and "Pam".
↑All three use different criteria to decide what qualifies as a Beatles song.
↑Winn, Womack, and Guesdon and Margotin do not outright distinguish between a lead guitar and a rhythm guitar, but the distinction is implied. Further, some authors such as Davies indicate "vocals" and "backing vocals", so it is understood that the first of these means "lead vocals".
↑This list only mentions parts indicated by more than one author; others are mentioned afterwards.
↑The attribution of these percussion parts to Starr is tenuous, since some writers do not credit them to him and others suggest that his bandmates played them. Bill Harry, for instance, writes that Lennon was on maracas, McCartney on cowbells, and Harrison on tambourine, and Womack notes in his biography of Abbey Road: "The overdubs were rife with additional percussion too, with everyone chipping in with a range of instruments, including maracas, tambourine, and cowbell." (emphasis added)
↑"The Night Before", "Here Comes the Sun", & common in rock music: Everett 1999, pp.312–313; "Dig a Pony", "Hey Jude", variations, & appear repeatedly: Martinelli & Bucciarelli 2023, p.69
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