Paul McCartney Says the Concept of The Beatles’ ‘Fixing a Hole’ Is Both Metaphysical and Physical

Paul McCartney says the concept of The Beatles‘ “Fixing a Hole” is both metaphysical and physical. Everything changed once he took LSD for the first time.

Paul McCartney based The Beatles’ ‘Fixing a Hole’ on something that happens in the songwriting process

In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that before he writes a song, there’s a black hole. Then he gets his guitar or piano out and fills it with a song. So, that’s what Paul is talking about in The Beatles’ “Fixing a Hole.“

“The notion that there is a gap to fill is no less honourable a basis for an inspiration than a bolt of lightning coming down out of the sky,” Paul wrote. “One way or another, it’s a miracle. I sit down and there’s a blackness. There’s nothing in this hole. Maybe I start conjuring and at the end of three hours I have a rabbit to pull out of what had looked like a hole but was actually a top hat. Or, at the end of the session there’s not a black hole anymore but a coloured landscape.”

Paul’s views of songwriting are poetic, but something else also inspired his Sgt. Pepper track.

There’s something metaphysical that inspired Paul on ‘Fixing a Hole’

Paul was the last Beatle to take LSD. He feared it’d change him, and he wasn’t wrong.

Paul wrote, “I was very reluctant because l’m actually quite straitlaced, and I’d heard that if you took LSD vou would never be the same again. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I wasn’t sure that was such a terrific idea. So I was very resistant.”

Eventually, Paul took LSD, and when he did, it changed him. However, not in the way he thought. “I was pretty lucky on the LSD front, in that it didn’t screw things up too badly. There was a scary element to it, of course. The really scary element was that when you wanted it to stop, it wouldn’t. You’d say, ‘Okay, that’s enough, party’s over,’ and it would say, ‘No it isn’t.’ So you would have to go to bed seeing things.”

However, a small blue dot started appearing whenever Paul closed his eyes. “It was as if something needed patching,” he explained. “I always had the feeling that if I could go up to it and look through, there would be an answer…”

Paul realized that there was a metaphysical idea of a hole, the one he plugs whenever he writes a song, and a physical one that appeared whenever he closed his eyes. Both inspired Paul on “Fixing a Hole.”

“The fact is that the most important influence here was not even the metaphysical idea of a hole, which I mentioned earlier, but this absolutely physical phenomenon – something that first appeared after I took acid. I still see it occasionally, and I know exactly what it is. I know exactly what size it is,” Paul wrote.

The singer-songwriter says his song isn’t about heroin

In The Lyrics, Paul also mentioned that some people take “Fixing a Hole” to be about heroin.

He wrote, “That’s most likely because they’re visualising needle holes. At the point the song was written, the drug was more likely than not to be marijuana.”

“Fixing a Hole” was also inspired by literal fixings of holes. Paul explained, “As it happens, I was living pretty much on my own in London and enjoying my new house. So the whole world of home improvements was beginning to impinge on me in a quite literal way.”

So there were many literally holes that Paul was plugging and some he was imagining while writing “Fixing a Hole.” However, the most important thing was that Paul filled his imaginary hole when he wrote the Sgt. Pepper track.

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