In Paul McCartney‘s “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, there’s a passage on the writing of “Eleanor Rigby.” But the last paragraph is about the string quartet accompaniment, and he mentions that the idea for the stabbing staccato strings came from George Martin, who wanted to imitate Bernard Herrmann‘s Psycho score. I’d never read this until today.
“Rigby” was created in April ’66, which was slightly less than six years after Psycho‘s release. There was no real Bernard Herrmann cult of soundtrack album collectors back then so Martin was purely working from his memory of the film.
