On this day in 1967 The Beatles scored their thirteenth Number One hit with ‘Penny Lane’

Written primarily by Paul McCartney, the band began recording the song in December of 1966 with the intention of including it on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Instead, it was later issued as a single after demands were made for new material by record companies.

Penny Lane is a road in the south Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill, and a frequent stopover point on early bus journeys for the band. McCartney said of the song in 2009 that “‘Penny Lane’ was kind of nostalgic, but it was really [about] a place that John and I knew … I’d get a bus to his house and I’d have to change at Penny Lane, or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story.”

The song quickly went to number one in the US and top five throughout Europe. This made the song the groups thirteenth number one song. It was also just the first of three number one songs by the band for 1967.