WE ALL LIVE IN A ROTTING WHALE, A ROTTING STINKING WHALE, A ROTTING STINKING WHALE

After years of putting up with claims and counter claims for what the inspiration was for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (was a girl in Julian Lennon's class, or was his dad just ripped to the tits on LSD?) we can now start to ponder what, exactly, was the thinking behind We All Live In A Yellow Submarine.

Boyhood friend of Lennon, David Ashton, reckons it was a picture of a beached whale he and John drew in the 1960s. The poor mammal had wound up down near Hale Lighthouse (a lovely place to visit, by the way) and wasn't in a good way:

"I was always aware there was some connection between the whale and Yellow Submarine but when I found the picture it really confirmed it. You only have to look at it to see.

"John and I used to go to Hale Lighthouse and when the whale was stranded we went down to see it.

"It was going rotten and was yellow. There were crows and seagulls eating it.

There are quite a few other Lennon songs that we would suggest could also have been inspired by a mouldering, stinking pile of blubber, now we come to think of it.