Although John had been writing more obviously autobiographical songs for over a year now, it was with 'In My Life' that he felt he'd made the breakthrough that Kenneth Allsop had encouraged him to make in March 1964, when he suggested focusing on his own interior life.

Recorded in October 1965, the song was a long time in gestation. It started, John said, as a long poem in which he reflected on favourite childhood haunts by tracing a journey from his home on Menlove Avenue down to the Docks.

Elliot Mintz, who was hired by Yoko Ono to carry out an inventory of all John's personal possessions after his death, remembers seeing the first handwritten draft of the song. "It was part of a large book in which he kept all his original Beatles' compositions," says Mintz. "He had already told me about how the song was written and that he considered it a significant turning point in his writing."

In a later single-page draft of this rambling lyric, John listed Penny Lane, Church Road, the clock tower, the Abbey Cinema, the tram sheds, the Dutch cafe, St. Columbus Church, the Docker's Umbrella and Calderstones Park. Although this fulfilled the requirement of being autobiographical, John realized that it was no more than a series of snapshots held loosely together by his feeling that once familiar landmarks were fast disappearing. The tram sheds were now 'without trams' and the Docker's Umbrella had been 'pulled down'. "It was the most boring sort of 'what I did on my holidays' bus trip song and it wasn't working at all..." he said. "Then I lay back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember."

John jettisoned all the specific place names, and worked up the sense of mourning for a disappeared childhood and youth, turning what would otherwise have been a song about the changing face of Liverpool into a universal song about confronting the facts of death and decay.

He later told Pete Shotton that when he wrote the line about friends in 'In My Life', some of whom were dead and some of whom were living, he was thinking specifically of both Shotton and former Beatles Stuart Sutcliffe, who had died of a brain tumour in April 1962.

The lyric bears a surprising resemblance to Charles Lamb's 18th-century poem 'The Old Familiar Faces' which John could well have come across in the popular poetry anthology Palgrave's Treasury. The poem starts:

I have had playmates, I have had companions
In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Six verses later it ends:

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

The source of the melody in dispute, John has said that Paul helped out with a section on which he was stuck. Paul still believes he wrote it all. "I remember that he had the words written out like a long poem and went off and worked something out on the Mellotron," he said. "The tune, if I remember rightly, was inspired by the Miracles." He was almost certainly referring to 'You Really Got A Hold On Me'.