Used in Help! during the Austrian snow scenes, it was released as a single in April 1965 and had already topped the charts in Britain and America by the time the film came out. Paul confessed to his biographer Barry Miles that the apparently loopy suggestion made by some American Beatles' fans at the time that the song was referring to a British Railways ticket to the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight was partly right. Paul's cousin Betty Robbins and her husband Mike ran the Bow Bars in Union Street, Ryde, and Paul and John had visited them there. Although the song was primarily about a girl riding out of the life of the narrator, they were conscious of the potential for a double meaning.

Don Short, a show business journalist who travelled extensively with the Beatles in the Sixties, was told by John that the phrase had yet another meaning. "The girls who worked the streets in Hamburg had to have a clean bill of health and so the medical authorities would give them a card saying that they didn't have a dose of anything," says Short. "I was with the Beatles when they went back to Hamburg in June 1966 and it was then that John told me that he had coined the phrase 'a ticket to ride' to describe these cards. He could have been joking — you always had to be careful with John like that — but I certainly remember him telling me that."