Sheila Bromberg joined Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Harpist Sheila Bromberg played in England’s great orchestras, but one night with Paul McCartney changed everything.

Harpist Sheila Bromberg, who played on The Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home, has died in England aged 92.

OBITUARY

Sheila Zelda Patricia Bromberg
Harpist. Born London, September 2, 1928; died Aylesbury, England, August 17, aged 92.

The Beatles composed at least three songs inspired by stories in London’s Daily Mail. Paul McCartney recalls reading a report on an aspiring author – Martin Amis, he believes – and basing the lyrics for Paperback Writer on it (and the Daily Mail is name-checked in that 1966 song). Two tracks on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came from Daily Mail pages.

In January 1967, John Lennon, on reading about the inquiry into the car-crash death of McCartney’s friend and Guinness heir Tara Browne, started work on what became A Day in the Life – “He blew his mind out in a car”.

The following month McCartney spotted a story of London runaway 17-year-old Melanie Coe, forgetting that he had given her a prize for miming and dancing on the television show Ready, Steady Go three years earlier. She’s Leaving Home was born. Lennon and McCartney co-operated on the lyrics, with Lennon suggesting the Greek chorus of parental regret.

McCartney was impatient to record it and called long-time producer George Martin to score the orchestral parts. Martin was busy recording Cilla Black, so McCartney approached Mike Leander to do the job and it is Leander (who later would blot his copy book writing songs with pedophile glam rocker Gary Glitter) who wrote the musical notation for the modal scales played by harpist Sheila Bromberg that so defines the piece. No Beatle plays on She’s Leaving Home and no woman had ever played on a Beatles’ record.

The in-demand Bromberg received a call at home from a “fixer”, someone who could pull in studio musicians at short notice. He asked if she could do a session at Abbey Road the following evening, from 9pm to midnight.

“I looked at the diary. I had a jingle from 8am to 9am, then I was here (Abbey Road) from 10am to 1pm, Then I was at Decca from 2.30pm to 5.30pm,” Bromberg recalled in 2011. She was disinclined to do the later session, but this fixer gave her so many jobs she felt indebted to him. “He didn’t tell me at the time it was for the Beatles,” she said. “You never knew who you were going to play with.”

It was March 17, 1967. Bromberg turned up early to tune her instrument. A hand came up from behind and placed a sheet of music on her stand. A disembodied Liverpool accent asked: “Well, watcha got on the dots?” It was McCartney who, then as now, could not read music. “First of all I played exactly what was written,” said Bromberg. McCartney said, “No, I don’t want that, I want something …”. By midnight there had been six takes, but while McCartney didn’t like any of them he was unable to explain what he was seeking.

When Bromberg heard the record three months later she realised the first take and another had been merged for the sound he was after. “That’s clever,” she remembered thinking.

Bromberg was born into a musical family. Before fleeing another murderous Russian campaign aimed at eliminating Ukraine’s Jews in the first years of the 20th century, her grandfather had been principal trumpeter with the Kiev symphony orchestra. Her father was principal viola player with the Scottish National Orchestra, and Bromberg was a principal in the Royal Liverpool Orchestra.

A cousin is David Bromberg, the multi-instrumentalist who rose from New York’s Greenwich Village scene to become a sideman to Bob Dylan and whose slide guitar style influenced George Harrison. Sheila Bromberg was taught by Gwendolen Mason, who in turn was taught by the legendary harpist and composer John Thomas, both favourites of Queen Victoria.

After graduating from the Royal College of Music in London, Bromberg played in the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic and London Philharmonic, and performed nightly in the pit during The Phantom of the Opera’s first West End run.

A single mother of two, Bromberg was hyperactive in the session music scene of the early 1960s and appeared on the soundtracks to the first and third James Bond movies, Dr No and Goldfinger.

She also did sessions for the Bee Gees, Sammy Davis, Dusty Springfield, Frank Sinatra (his 1962 album, Sinatra Sings Great Songs From Great Britain) and Bing Crosby, and appeared on an Evita stage show soundtrack album and often on English television, including a scene during which she played harp in a wheelbarrow on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

She recalled often that, of all the music she’d performed, “I’m noted for four bars of music. I found that a little bit bizarre.”