Lennon and McCartney sneaked in Liverpool slang or even made up new words or phrases for their songs, Paul McCartney says in a new interview on his official website.
"There was a thing in Liverpool that us kids used to do, which was instead of saying 'f-off', we would say ‘chicka ferdy’, McCartney said.
"It actually exists in the lyrics of The Beatles song Sun King. In that song we just kind of made up things, and we were all in on the joke. 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!"
The phrases 'cranlock navel, cranlock pie’ feature in McCartney's poem Ivan from the 2001 lyrics and poems collection, Blackbird Singing.
"When you are kids you make up silly things, and what’s great about it is you and your friends all know those silly things," recalled the once and forever Beatle.
"So, they don't have to mean anything! 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 ‘cranlock naval, cranlock pie’ doesn't actually mean anything.
"But I suppose at lot of this came from The Goon Show, a comedy show on the radio. Peter Sellers was in it, along with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.
"They got laughs from saying things like, 'Netty, oh Jim boy!' and other nonsense. So ‘cranlock naval, cranlock pie’ fitted in with that era. We just used to say absolutely silly little things."
McCartney added that ‘Cranlock pie' was something that Paul and John's friend Ivan used to say. "He’d be imitating stuff that John would say, and then everyone would just make up things together.
McCartney's poem Ivan is about his late friend Ivan Vaughn, who introduced him to John Lennon. "Ivan said to me, 'Come along to this village fair.' That was in the village of Woolton where John and Ivan lived," recalls McCartney.
"And he said, 'Why don't you come along? It'll be quite a bit of fun, you know.' He said, 'And my friend's playing in one of the bands.' So I arrived there and saw John, and so I was introduced. So it was Ivan who actually introduced me to him."
Lennon was playing with a band called The Quarrymen when McCartney first heard him perform. "They had a repertoire of kind of folksy sort of bluesy things mixed with early rock 'n' roll. And John and the band were playing a thing called Come Go With Me, which was a record for a group called The Del Vikings. It was an early rock 'n' roll record.
"But John obviously didn't have the record, and he probably heard it a few times on radio. And being so musical, he just picked it up.
"And so he was doing a version of it. But what impressed me was, even though he didn't know the words, he would make 'em up and he'd steal words from sort of blues songs.
"So instead of the real words, which I don't know, but he was singing, 'Come go with me down to the penitentiary,' which was more off Big Bill Broonzy or somebody, you know. But I thought, 'You know, that's inventive. That's ingenius.' So I warmed to him immediately hearing that."
