Polythene Pam

"Polythene Pam" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road, the fourth piece in the album's climactic medley. It is a brief, brisk character sketch of a woman from the North who, dressed in a bag made of polythene, roams the streets at night and earns coverage in the tabloid paper News of the World. John Lennon wrote it during the group's 1968 sojourn in India. While a third source has been proposed, Lennon moulded the character of Polythene Pam from two women he knew personally. The first is "Polythene" Pat Dawson, an early Beatles fan so named for her appetite for the plastic; the second is Royston Ellis' girlfriend Stephanie, who spent a night in bed with Ellis and Lennon clad in a polythene bag. The song was to be recorded for the Beatles' 1968 White Album but instead made Abbey Road, a contribution of Lennon's to the medley (also dubbed the Long One) that he viewed with frigidness. In fact, he later called the song, along with another of his medley pieces, "bits of crap I wrote in India". The band recorded "Pam" on three separate days in July 1969 as a continuous piece with "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window", which comes after in the Long One. Generally described as a rock and roll song, critics have spotlighted "Pam"'s driving rhythm and Lennon's singing in an aggressive Scouse accent. It is one of the Long One's several character sketches and builds narrative unity by linking to the previous track "Mean Mr. Mustard", a portrait of an old miser whose sister is Polythene Pam. As for its musical role in the medley, "Pam" intactly leads to the resolution back to A major in the beginning of "Bathroom Window", returning...