R&b
When The Beatles started out they were famously recast by manager Brian Epstein as four boys next door, their suits and mop top haircuts quickly varnishing over their raw rock ‘n’ roll roots. As time moved on, however, those roots showed through – sometimes in unexpected ways.
Take ‘Sun King’. A classic moment from the band’s final album ‘Abbey Road’, it was initially called ‘Here Comes The Sun King’ – before having its title shortened, to avoid confusion with George Harrison’s classic ‘Here Comes The Sun’.
Very much a group effort, the root for ‘Sun King’ owes a debt to Fleetwood Mac, then in their blues rock phase. Perhaps the biggest band in the country at the time, The Beatles lifted aspects of the guitar sound on No. 1 single ‘Albatross’ and turned it into their own.
George Harrison commented in 1987: “At the time, ‘Albatross’ (by Fleetwood Mac) was out, with all the reverb on guitar. So we said, ‘Let’s be Fleetwood Mac doing ‘Albatross’, just to get going.’ It never really sounded like Fleetwood Mac… but that was the point of origin.”
The final vocal part borrows from a plethora of Romance languages, spoof words pilfered from Spanish, Portuguese, and beyond. Essentially meaningless, it goes:
“Quando para mucho mi amore de felice corazón Mundo paparazzi mi amore chicka ferdy parasol. Cuesto obrigado tanta mucho que canite carousel“
The phrase ‘chicka ferdy’ was a nod to their rebellious days as rock ‘n’ roll teens in Liverpool, and it carries a hidden meaning. John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1969: “We just started joking, you know, singing ‘cuando para mucho.’ So we just made up… Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, you know. So we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something.”
It took over 40 years for the true meaning of ‘chicka ferdy’ to emerge, though. Paul McCartney revealed the truth in a 2020 radio interview. “There was a thing in Liverpool that us kids used to do, which was instead of saying ‘fuck off’, we would say ‘chicka ferdy’, he explained. “We were thinking that nobody would know what it meant, and most people would think, ‘Oh it must be Spanish’, or something. But we got a little seditious word in there!”
He added: “We had a few words and phrases that if one of us said it, would amuse the others because it was like a secret code.”
So, there we have it: The Beatles classic with the hidden curse word.
