Paul McCartney: Beatles and beyond

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0:30us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

0:51This is Susanna Hoffs. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul and I play the bass. Introducing himself to a BBC radio audience in 1963, that's 21-year-old Paul McCartney. At the time, She Loves You was the UK's number one single, while the Beatles' debut LP, Please Please Me, topped the album charts. A year later, the Beatles would storm the US charts as well. My name's Susanna Hoffs and I'm a singer, songwriter, and co-founder of the Bangles. The Beatles music made a huge impression on me as a child. Now, I'm celebrating the legend and legacy of a cultural icon. Welcome to Paul McCartney, Beatles and beyond.

1:43My whole family were Beatles fans when I was growing up. My mom had a best friend who worked for Capitol Records. How lucky were we? She'd bring home early copies of Beatles discs fresh off the press. That music has inspired my whole career, and while my brothers followed John and Ringo, it was always Paul for me. Elsewhere in this tribute, we'll bring his story right up to date, seeing how Sir Paul McCartney is giving back to the city of his birth. By the way, that's the only time I'll be using his full title, Sir Paul. He's always been Paul to me. Although Mike McCartney might call him something else.

2:25From all of you around the world, because it's the BBC World Service, if I ever say our kid again, it doesn't mean my baby or my little child. It's Liverpool slang, Liverpool vernacular for my brother. So now you know. That's Paul's younger brother, Mike McCartney, also known as Mike McGeer of Liverpool Trio, The Scaffold. More from him in a moment. Right now, time to focus on Paul's upbringing. So let's visit the McCartney family home. To set the scene, literally, join me going down to Liverpool in the company of our guide, BBC Radio's Paul Beasley. Well, here we are in Fourthland Road. We're about five miles south of Liverpool's city centre in what would have been a brand new housing estate in the early 1950s.

3:18This was a house that Paul moved to in 1955 with his family, and he was only 13 years of age. When the National Trust purchased this house, one of the great assets they had was Mike McCartney's photographs. What a great thing to have, the great legacy of the fact that Mike was a keen amateur photographer, and now is a published photographer, of course, and they're a very academic organisation, and they used these photographs to very meticulously restore the property back to the way that it would have appeared at the time that the McCarneys lived here. 4th in Road was a little two-up, two-down terraced house where we spent our lives from 12 till 21.

3:58Like learning photography, my brother was learning music and I was in the interesting position of being in the next room, listening to those songs that later became world-famous in their inception. What's fascinating about this extraordinary success for my brother and I is at that time, there was no hope. It was so controlled by the class system. And so to have burst out of that into what happened was quite a shock. Not only to us, but to the world. Mike McCartney on the family's working class background. If young Paul's progress was hampered by class, it helped to be born at exactly the right time.

4:52Beatles historian and author David Bedford. You've got a unique time in British history. School age being extended, full employment, so you could leave school now at 16. So we've got this new brand of teenagers. So music was then being targeted at these teenagers. And again, perfect timing. beginning of 1956, Rock Island Line, Heartbreak Hotel, Long Tall Sally. You look at those three songs, that tells you the quarrymen through to the Beatles. And with Skiffa, with Lonnie Donegan, it's encouraging anybody to pick up an instrument, use your homemade instruments like the tea chest bass and the washboard.

5:33And because these teenagers have got disposable income, you've got all these record stores, like NEMS, it all happened at this one moment in history. NEMS was the place to buy your records. Everybody used to head for NEMS and I had been served a number of times by Brian Epstein because he used to hover around the back of the counter and watch people flicking through the album covers in the racks. Lifelong Beatles fan Gene Catherall on NEMS, the Liverpool record shop owned by the band's future manager, Brian Epstein. Born at the right time, Paul McCartney was also in exactly the right place. The Beatles could only have come from Liverpool.

6:12It's a very, very unique city. As a port, we've always had this cosmopolitan population. So, yeah, you've got the American influences of the Cunard Yanks going over to New York, buying their records, buying their clothes. Liverpool's money was built on the back of the slave trade, part of which was the cotton trade. Most families had somebody either working on the docks or were on the ships. you've also got to build in the irish migration of the 1840s 1850s from the great famine that brought in the irish culture and music you've then got country music happening and Liverpool had the biggest country western scene in Europe you've got the American airbase of Burton Wood with the Americans coming into the city John Paul and George mingling with these people meeting Americans listening to songs that weren't even on the radio yet when I was a kid I I used to go to a coffee shop that was at the bottom of the road where I lived, and they had a jukebox in the corner.

7:13If it hadn't have been for that music coming in from America, it might have taken a little bit longer to get to us. American culture was everything, and in some ways Liverpool's looked more across the Atlantic to New York than it has down to London. American idols were the order of the day, and not just for Paul. A whole generation were influenced by the same artists, fellow songwriter Graham Goldman MBE the writer of millions selling songs for Herman's Hermits the Hollies and the Yardbirds among others there's a lot of songwriters I'll include myself although Paul's a bit older than me who grew up listening to this fantastic music from big band to the early days of rock and roll to Little Richard Chuck Berry the Everly Brothers Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly.

8:02We've got all those in our blood. And then you'd have these people that were a little bit more interesting, a little bit more different, like Bo Diddley and Ray Charles. And then suddenly Little Richard comes on and you're thinking, what the hell is this? This is revolutionary. As well as revolutionary American music, the young Paul McCartney also had another major influence, closer to home, Brother Mike again. Dad, when he was a young man, had a band called Jim Max Band. He'd worked out that when dancers were there, he would put smiles on their faces, entertain people, and he got paid. So my dad had seen that.

8:50Mum came along, serious, a midwife health visitor and i never heard it said but it would be natural all that why dad had to go into the cotton business and not pursue his musical career because it was uncertain it was dodgy mary was very clear what she wanted for her two boys you know the move from speak to allerton was going from working class to lower middle class. She was aspirational. She wanted them to go into the professions. And even though Jim had been a musician, it was not as a full-time professional musician. It was fun. Music may have been fun, but tragedy struck the McCartney household in 1956 when Mother Mary passed away, aged just 47.

9:43If my mum had not died of cancer, breast cancer, when I was 12 years of age, then you wouldn't be talking to a photographer with his brother, who's one of the most famous groups, if not the most famous group in the world. You'd have been talking to Dr. McCartney or Father McCartney. Mum wouldn't have allowed us to have instruments and do that journey only because mum died did dad bringing up two boys on his own did he buy a banjo for me and a guitar for my brother and then a set of drums fell off the back of a lorry into our house it's only because of that situation that it was allowed two weeks after losing his mum paul goes to the empire and sees Lonnie Donegan in concert and he says to his dad I want a guitar I want to do that music was Paul's way of coping with losing his mum you know and I think you can see that in the first original song he ever wrote was I Lost My Little Girl you can read into it it's obvious he's trying to talk about losing his mum he was 14 years old how do you cope and particularly in an era where you couldn't talk about your feelings and I think music ended up being that perfect way for Paul to deal with everything that was going through his head it's one of those sad trade-offs when we have to look back and think he lost his mom but we gained no one of the greatest singer-songwriters the world's ever known.

11:23Paul may have gained his first instrument following his mother's death But there was one priceless musical advantage he had, even without a guitar, as Mike recalls. I've only just worked out the importance of our family harmonies on my brother's world, his existence, and then his group's genius. Why are those harmonies so unique, so powerful? and I suddenly realised, hold on, our family training that we had with the McCartney choirs, that was a very important part of our lives was when we go to parties, family parties, that always, Jim, get on the piano and it was part of his accepted role in life.

12:21They would lie in drinks up for him on the top of the piano and then the sing-along. Walking in the park with Eloise. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And the big thing was to have your own harmony. If you could get a better harmony than Uncle Joe, you would just go, whoa, what's that? That's at the very heart of the Beatles' appeal. Years later, Paul would record his dad's tune, Walking in the Park with Eloise. The debt to Jim is obvious to Graham Goldman. No doubt about it. Every songwriter is influenced by the music that they're hearing growing up. So the fact that Paul's dad was a musician obviously would have influenced him.

13:09It's interesting that Paul and Mike followed their father's lead because, again, they were bereft and so was dad. But dad had the musical background. They were a religious family, Catholic family, and the influence there was very much the mum. But again, there was a void to fill, and the void was filled with music. That's Leslie-Ann Jones, the author of recent McCartney biography, Fly Away Paul. Meanwhile, the McCartney boys were making the most of their new instruments. Both of us were still in school at this time. There's a drum kit in 4th Thin Road in the front parlour, set them all up and so right you're the drummer i'm the guitarist okay we've got to have a sound check got to find out because there's neighbors on either side it's a terraced house so i said to our kid i will bash the hell out of these and then all you do is go out see how far you get before you can't hear the drums so he did and i hit them really hard and he told me he went right down the end of 4th in road he was nearly at the police training college when he couldn't hear me anymore so that was a hell of a kit test in 4th in road our kid was on guitar with john this was before george so no george yet but a first mention of john the stage is set and paul beasley is our guide to a historic event well where we are we're in the village of woolton We're on Church Road, and to our right, we have the parish church of St.

14:48Peter, Church of England Church, and to the left, we have its church hall. This place is, well, arguably, one of the most important meeting places in rock and roll history, because this is the place where John Lennon met Paul McCartney for the very first time, Saturday, 6th of July in 1957. The occasion was the annual parish summer fete And it was on that day that John Lennon and his small group of friends The quarry men were asked to perform for the people coming to the event The group had only just been set up by John Skiffle was the order of the day It was a mutual friend of John and Paul's A boy called Ivan Vaughan who brought them together John had gone to Quarry Bank Grammar School And Ivan had gone to the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys And it was there that he met Paul McCartney Paul was 15.

15:37John was the elder boy, and also he was the leader of the band as well. So he was very much in charge on the day. They were not only the quarrymen. It was not only Ivan and Paul. They had a group of friends with them, and they do recall that Paul played on the day. In fact, he played two songs on the day. He played Bebopalula, which was a very well-known song at the time. And he also played a lesser well-known song called 20 Flight Rock by Eddie Cochran. And Paul knew the song, knew all the words, and that really would have impressed John, perhaps even slightly frightened him as well, who knows.

16:11Going back to that first time John and Paul meet, John's playing banjo chords on a guitar. Here comes Paul, can tune it, plays a right-hand guitar upside down, can play it, can sing, he knows the words. We know from the very, very start, Paul was immediately trying to improve the Quarrymen and to improve John. Music brought John and Paul together, but it wasn't long before they had something altogether more tragic in common. Paul's mother died on the 31st of October 1956. John's mother Julia was killed, knocked down by a car outside Aunty Mimi's house, her sister's house, on the 15th of July 1958.

16:52Almost bang smack in the middle of those two dates, John and Paul met. So those two boys found each other at precisely the right moment. They'd lost their primary source of affection and love, and they needed something to fill that gap. And they created their way out of misery. They started writing songs together as a way of dealing with their grief. When Paul and John first started dealing with their grief, Mike McCartney was there with his camera, capturing the very moment of creation. I'm looking at one of his wonderful photos right now. the two boys hunched over their guitars in fourthland road glancing down at a notebook the song title clearly legible on the page i saw her standing there the opening track on the debut beatles album please please me that photograph is my favorite photo of john and paul john's got his glasses on and they're looking at this famous exercise book that had all this another Lennon-McCartney original song in there and before we had all this technology and iPhones and all that kind of stuff what was it like making music that's what that photo does for me it shows John and Paul doing what they love best which was sitting there with the guitars working on an original song.

18:12Paul had a really good story about that when we had a masterclass with him he was like yeah you know where I saw her standing there when we wrote that one of the lines was she was just 17 and a beauty queen, but we wanted something more cheeky, so we were like, you know, if you know what I mean. And everyone was like, yes, that's way better. Like, we're so glad you changed it. Isn't it so incredible that those two people would meet and look at the material they've released? It's like a meeting of minds. Musician and songwriter Natalie McCool, graduate of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and a huge admirer of Lennon and McCartney.

18:50As to who wrote what, 10 CC's Gran Goldman, himself no stranger to songwriting partnerships, isn't that fussed? I know how it works very well, the to and fro. When you're writing with somebody, it's a matter of chemistry. Some people you hit it off with. Quite often what happens is that, you know, your partner will come up with one part and as they're playing it, you're hearing the next part, you know what it is. When it's happening, it really doesn't matter who contributed what, because your 10 % could be the thing that really made the track work. Paul and John were up and running. In later years, they would rarely write a song together as they did in the Forthland Road days.

19:36But the Lennon-McCartney credit was set in stone. In the space of three years, the quarrymen turned into the Silver Beets, the Silver Beatles, and finally, the Beatles. And by 1960, their first manager, Alan Williams, had got them a residency in Europe, as Mike recalls. I remember our kid. In fact, I think we were on the 86th bus. And I remember our kid working. He's very good at just suggesting things. Right, Mike, Alan Williams has just asked us to go to Hamburg. Hamburg? What? You're joking. Deutschland? We both learned German in school, my brother and I. But, you know, Dad, it's going to be a hard sell, so, you know, you will back me up on it.

20:31Back from Hamburg, by 1962, the Beatles had a new manager in Brian Epstein. They had a new drummer in Ringo Starr. They were regulars at Liverpool's Cavern Club. And they had completed their first BBC radio performance. The genie was out of the bottle. I listened to them on the radio and I was absolutely floored. because at that point I was a rock and roll fan, i.e. on my bedroom wall I had pictures of Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and once I heard the Beatles they all came down and the first pictures I saw of the Beatles in the Liverpool Echo were swiftly cut out and put back on the wall.

21:13The first time I actually got to see them live was at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool on the the 7th of December in 1963. The only thing missing from my Beatles CV is the fact that I actually didn't see the Beatles at the cavern. I was only 14. I was just one year too young and you couldn't get past Paddy Delaney, who was the doorman at the time, even though there was no alcohol at the cavern. With the Beatles, it wasn't just the music, it was the look of them, it was the guitars they used. It was the whole package. I got my first guitar when I was 11. changed my life. And I remember listening to Please Please Me.

21:53And I think it scrambled my brain. It altered me so much so that I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The Beatles changed my life as well, Graham. They're one of the reasons the Bengals happened in the first place. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

22:18Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

22:51So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

23:02This is Paul McCartney, Beatles and beyond. I'm Susanna Hoffs. And as a child, my family were obsessed with the Beatles. some of over 73 million Americans who watched the band on The Ed Sullivan Show, February 9th, 1964. By that time, Beatlemania had already swept Britain. Now I'm celebrating the legend and legacy of my Fab Four fave. Talking of legacy, the Beatles catalog remains hugely important. Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, Sir Lucian Grange. it's critically important to a music company to are there to represent the past as well as the future you can see so much of what we've been doing with the Beatles is also about the future and documentary making and how they want their story and their history and their narrative to continue I think when you look at what the Beatles achieved in those seven years really of making albums every single one of them was a progression they were all experimenting if there's new technology out there they went and grabbed it and they did something with it and they always always pushing themselves and I think particularly sort of mid-60s onwards a lot of that was Paul leading the way and trying to push the boundaries how far can we actually take this I think that's part of the genius of Paul.

24:29Beatles historian and author David Bedford on the genius of Paul, which led to one moment when the Lennon-McCartney credit stretched its credibility, as Paul recalled in a BBC radio interview. The only time it became embarrassing really was on something like, say, yesterday, that was so mine that John hadn't had anything to do with it, that John and the guys weren't on the record. It was just me and a string quartet. And it was really more me and George Martin than anybody. But you wouldn't go calling it McCartney Martin or... You know, it just seemed easy to call it Leonard McCartney. But it used to happen to John, he used to tell me like he'd go into a piano bar and the guy would strike up...

25:12La-da-da, la-dee-doo-dee-john, a bloody song. John was always looked on as the avant-garde member of the Beatles, and Paul doesn't get credit for that, But I think when you look at the music he was listening to, the artist he was looking to produce through Apple Records, he was always looking for something new, for something different. Well, he was very inventive. And he would be listening to these weird, bloody Stockhausens and weird. And he'd have all these bloody tape recorders around the front and the lounge with these tapes. and he'd stretch them, he'd put them from one tape to another tape recorder.

25:53He was always experimenting, always wanted to stretch his brain. I was a bright lad. The records that I've always fallen in love with and the songs that I've always fallen in love with, with his work in particular, is always the ones that just go outside of the box, that really push the limits to sound and recording and what is possible to make a pop record. Award-winning composer, musician and broadcaster Hannah Peel. Before her, Paul's brother, Mike on Paul's inventiveness. And let's not forget Paul, the bass player. His were the first bass lines that stood out for me. Extraordinarily melodic, not just rhythmic, and so connected to melody as a feature of what the Beatles did.

26:40Yet Paul wasn't content to be just a musician. even while they're working on abbey road paul is looking then to produce bad finger i'll just knock off this song come and get it and he's doing a completely different job he's now thinking i've written this song but i'm now a producer and he can go between the two i think with someone you've got that amount of creativity he can spin the plates but he can keep them all spinning and i think come and get it what a great song that would have made for the beatles and it's got paul written all over it. Bad Fingers' version of Come and Get It was a top 10 single on both sides of the Atlantic early in 1970.

27:22By the 70s, Paul was also having a significant influence on another band, as 10 CC's Gran Gouldman recalls. There was a time when I saw a lot of him, when we were recording our sheet music album at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. We were recording the album during the day and in the sort of late afternoon, early evening, Paul would come in with his brother Mike McGeer to record Mike's solo album. And so the studio was completely crammed with gear and two drum kits and Paul's Mellotron and just that having him around seriously affected that record. I mean, a lot of people say that's Tennessee's best album And there's no doubt about it that he is, even though he didn't play on it, but he is in it, so to speak.

28:16No McCartney, no Beatles, no 10cc, as Graham is quoted in the 2023 McCartney biography, Fly Away Paul. Of course, by 1974, there was no Beatles. After 10 number one albums in the UK and 13 US chart-topping LPs, the band ceased to exist following the Let It Be sessions. Whatever the reasons, Paul did fly away to Scotland. Biographer Leslie Ann Jones. When the Beatles disintegrated, and of course he'd met Linda by this time, they married in March 1969. They were going through hell because everybody was blaming Paul for breaking up the Beatles. And they decided to escape. It was Linda, actually, who said, you've got a farm in Scotland, haven't you?

29:07Yeah, he said, well, why don't we go there? So they've got a new baby, which is Mary. They've got Heather, a little girl that Linda came to the marriage with, and they've got a big dog. And they bundle in the car and they drive all the way up there. This was the place where Linda decided they were going to restore him. Only by the time they got there, he was in breakdown mode. He went to bed. He stopped shaving, stopped eating, drank a lot of whiskey. And she's there, seven months married, with two children, one a newborn, in the middle of nowhere, with no resources. But it saved them. It gave Linda the opportunity to really establish the marriage and say to him, come on, you know, you can't lie in bed for the rest of time.

29:53And here's a razor. And by the way, there's two children here who actually could do with some paternal input. And that was the place where that all changed. Paul released his first solo album, McCartney, in April 1970, the same month he announced he was leaving the Beatles. On the road to recovery, with Linda by his side, Ram came out the following year, followed seven months later by Wildlife, the debut album by the new band Wings. I wasn't born till 65, so I never actually witnessed any of the Beatles happening. so for me I knew of the Beatles but my contemporary Paul was Paul with Wings. Wings were where I came in and then discovered the Beatles backwards because I hadn't experienced them in real time so Wings were pivotal for me so hugely important the bottom line is Wings were not really a band Wings were Paul and Linda McCartney and Denny Lane and then a series of hired musicians.

30:59Everyone was anti-Paul at the stage because most people in the UK did not want Paul McCartney and Wings. They wanted the Beatles. Wings became much bigger in the States and always were throughout that entire decade of the 70s. Wings lasted 10 years. As the Beatles spanned the 60s, so Wings spanned the 70s with five consecutive chart-topping albums in the US along the way. Since then, Paul has been solo for 45 years, releasing an album every 30 months on average. I'm Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, and as someone who's released her own solo albums, trust me, that's some body of work. So what's the one solo Paul song that composer Hannah Peel would want for her own?

31:48Without any doubt, it would be from his Paul McCartney 2 album, Waterfalls. I think it's the most beautiful song and beautiful melody. And it has that real Paul McCartney kind of lullaby-esque lean into melody. And if I could have that song for my own, it would be Waterfalls. As well as recording, Paul has now been touring solo for 35 years. Just a few months ago, he thrilled fans by joining Bruce Springsteen on stage in Liverpool. It is fascinating to see this octogenarian still being beguiling and gauche and charming as though he is still a young Beatle in his early 20s. The light has never gone out.