Strawberry Fields, Under the Spanish Sun

Sixty Years Under the Spanish Sun

This autumn marks sixty years since John Lennon spent several weeks in Almería — and began writing Strawberry Fields Forever. We thought that was worth remembering.

In the autumn of 1966, Lennon exchanged the extraordinary noise surrounding The Beatles for something very different: several weeks in Almería, where the Mediterranean light, unfamiliar surroundings and distance from everyday life offered an entirely different rhythm.

Somewhere during those weeks in Spain, his thoughts wandered back to childhood, Liverpool and Strawberry Field — the Salvation Army children's home near where he grew up, whose gardens had become part of his childhood world.

“It was quite a long way to travel to remember somewhere close to home.”

Music, Distance and Geography

Perhaps artists understand particularly well what a change of place can do to us. A different landscape changes the rhythm, distance creates space, and somewhere completely unfamiliar can make something deeply familiar return with surprising clarity.

Music has a similar disregard for geography. A few notes can return us to a room, a summer, a person or a version of ourselves we thought we had left behind, usually without asking permission first.

That may be one reason Strawberry Fields Forever still feels so powerful sixty years later — and why this small piece of Beatles history feels particularly at home in Soniqa Lounge, where we spend a great deal of time thinking about homes, sound and Mediterranean living.

John Lennon needed Almería to remember Liverpool. There is something rather beautiful in that. Sometimes the places we discover help us understand the places we came from — and occasionally, if we are very lucky, someone writes a rather good song about it.