You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away is a track from the Help! Album written by John Lennon. It is a close as Lennon ever came to directly imitating another artist (Bob Dylan), and he describes this song, like I’m A Loser before it, as belonging to his Dylan period. In the long term, the main effect of Dylan’s inspiration was to open Lennon up to more introspective and personal lyrics. This reflective approach to lyrics was to become his lifelong practice. But the initially – and most clearly in this track – Lennon experimented with Dylan’s overall sound including his distinctive vocal phrasing and folk arrangement, so much so that the song comes across as a homage.
That’s me in my Dylan period again. I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.
Even when the Beatles are consciously mimicking or imitating other artists, they normally bring in sufficient originality that the result adds something to its inspiration. That’s the case again here, I think.
Although Lennon mimics Dylan’s phrasing and vocal style, his own voice is rather different and has an authentic melancholy of its own. The lyrics are less complex than many Dylan songs, but are perhaps more accessible and universal. The production and arrangement are very tasteful with the sound of 12-string guitar doubling the melody in places, and a lovely flute solo (with duetting overdubbed alto and tenor flutes) restricted to the outro.
The Beatles BibleOne of the highlights of The Beatles’ Help! album, ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ was also the first of their songs since 1962 to feature a session musician.
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WikipediaThere has been some speculation about the meaning of the lyrics over the years, with three options put forward:
- Lennon had to hide his marriage (in the early days of the Beatles they tried to keep it secret)
- It relates to an affair Lennon was having at the time
- It relates to Brian Epstein (who was gay, which was illegal in Britain at the time)
It’s just my opinion, but I think the first of these is unlikely as the secret of the Lennons marriage was well and truly out in the open by the time the song was written. The second one is quite plausible as Lennon was rumoured to or suspected be having affairs (one with Alma Cogan, and possibly another referred to obliquely in Norwegian Wood).
The third possibility is intriguing as it is quite a sympathetic message, which may relate to Lennon’s own complex attitude to homosexuality. In 1963 he had taken a holiday with Epstein.
I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the rumours went around that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship…
We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I’d say, ‘Do you like that one, do you like this one?’ I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this, you know.
When they returned, Lennon – drunk at Paul McCartney’s 21st birthday – seriously beat up the Beatles friend and Cavern compere, DJ Bob Wooler (who was also gay) after he asked Lennon about the trip:
He’d insinuated that me and Brian had had an affair in Spain. I was out of me mind with drink. You know, when you get down to the point where you want to drink out of all the empty glasses, that drunk. And he was saying, ‘Come on, John, tell me’ – something like that – ‘Tell me about you and Brian, we all know.’ And obviously I must have been frightened of the f*g in me to get so angry. You know, when you’re twenty-one, you want to be a man, and all that. If somebody said it now, I wouldn’t give a s**t. So I was beating the s**t out of him, and hitting him with a big stick, too, and it was the first time I thought, ‘I can kill this guy.’ I just saw it, like on a screen – that if I hit him once more, that was going to be it.
It was a very literally a homophobic attack, but the phobia – by Lennon’s own account – related to his own sexuality.
In later life, Lennon reportedly told his second wife Yoko Ono that he had been open to the idea of sex with men, but had never met anyone sufficiently attractive:
John and I had a big talk about it, saying, basically, all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not [bisexual] because of society. So we are hiding the other side of ourselves, which is less acceptable.
Lennon never directly addressed the underlying meaning of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, but has said that it relates to his own emotions:
It’s one of those that you sing a bit sadly to yourself, ‘Here I stand, head in hand…’ I’d started thinking about my own emotions. I don’t know when exactly it started, like ‘I’m A Loser’ or ‘Hide Your Love Away’, those kind of things. Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself, which I’d done in my books.
Although the lyrics refer to “she” in several places they can as easily be interpreted in terms of shame (perhaps relating to internalized homophobia) as to a clandestine heterosexual affair:
Everywhere people stare
Each and every day
I can see them laugh at me
Whatever Lennon meant by it, the song provided some solace for at least one teenager, Tom Robinson, who grew up to be a gay rights campaigner and rock star.
My generation had grown up as teenagers in the 60s with pop music as a defining characteristic of who we were. Yet for those of us who’d grown up attracted to the same sex, the lyrics always described someone else’s situation, never our own. It was boy meets girl, every bloody time, even the great lesbian icon Dusty Springfield was singing about ‘him’ in the lyric. The nearest thing I heard to the way I was feeling was John Lennon’s lyric to You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away – which can only have been about Brian Epstein.
It’s only subsequently we’ve found out about the holiday that John Lennon took with Brian Epstein in Spain. According to the rumour mill John later reported he’d gone to bed twice with Brian, the first time to see if he liked it and the second time to confirm that he didn’t. Immediately after that holiday the Beatles recorded the Help album, which included that song.
While not knowing this at the time, I was hopelessly in love with another boy at school spending my every waking hour thinking about it, and having to hide my love away was the big all-pervading secret that dominated my life. The song was just so true to my life, except for one crucial detail. The lyric went ‘if SHE’S gone, I can’t go on’ and suddenly the lyric wasn’t about me after all.
Fun fact: I went to the same school!
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