When it came time to make one last Beatles record in the spring of 1969, John Lennon felt he didn’t have much reason to stay in the group. Which meant he didn’t have many songs to contribute to the recording sessions. Aside from the admittedly brilliant ‘Come Together’, which borrows heavily from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, he brought just two new compositions to the studio for Abbey Road.

These compositions were the evil twins ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and ‘Because’, which Lennon claimed were inspired by Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Otherwise, the Lennon tracks recorded for the album were leftovers from the band’s 1968 trip to Rishikesh in India, which hadn’t made it onto 1968’s White Album. It’s a bit much to call any of ‘Sun King’, ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘Polythene Pam’ “songs” in their own right, although they slotted nicely into the medley The Beatles were putting together for the second half of the album.

Out of the three, ‘Polythene Pam’ is arguably the weakest. And yet it marked the biggest departure from anything the group had recorded before, with its dialect-heavy vocal, high tempo, double-time bass-drum kicks and power-chord riff signalling the way to punk rock. Lennon put on the strongest Liverpool accent he could muster for his lead vocal, deliberately rubbing up against the band’s polished, American-friendly sound and the “yeah, yeah, yeah” backing vocals.

What’s more, he introduced the world of pop and mainstream rock music to the existence of trans identity not long after The Velvet Underground had released the song ‘Candy Says’ to a fringe audience in New York and a year before The Kinks put ‘Lola’ out as a single. “She’s so good-looking but she looks like a man,” Lennon sings. “You should see her in drag dressed in her polythene bag.”

He goes on to mention more specific aspects of the titular Pam’s appearance, from her “jackboots and kilt” to her overall “killer-diller” look. These details suggest that the character is, in fact, a real person Lennon became acquainted with personally.

So, was she a real person?

On separate occasions, the Beatle confirmed that there were two real-life inspirations for ‘Polythene Pam’, who were both people he came across in the group’s early days. The first was Pat Hodgett, a fan of The Beatles from their days performing at the Cavern club in Liverpool. “I got quite friendly with them,” she told Beatles biographer Steve Turner, for his biography of the band A Hard Day’s Write.

Since the Fab Four got used to seeing Hodgett at their gigs and would even give her the odd lift home, they also became familiar with her unusual nickname, Polythene Pat. She explained the origin of this nickname to Turner. “It’s embarrassing really,” she told him. “I just used to eat polythene all the time. I’d tie it in knots and then eat it. Sometimes I even used to burn it and then eat it when it got cold.”