Paul McCartney, musician: I often think about the past

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2:24Mark Savage:This is fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end. For this interview, I met the musician Paul McCartney at his offices in central London. Born in Liverpool, England during the Second World War, he found fame as a member of the legendary British band The Beatles in the 1960s, widely regarded as one of the most influential acts in rock and roll history. McCartney shared primary singing and songwriting duties with his bandmate John Lennon, and along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the four-piece became a global pop music sensation, with hits like Help, Yesterday and Hey Jude.

3:08Mark Savage:They remain one of the best-selling musical acts of all time, alongside the likes of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. McCartney was knighted for his services to music in 1997, but despite his huge achievements, the 83-year-old seems to be showing no interest in retirement. He's releasing The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his 19th solo album in a long recording career, which has changed the sound of music forever. John and I used to really think about outtakes. We used to say we should just delete them all. But in actual fact, it's kind of a good thing we didn't, because they're now still being released.

3:45We thought they were bad at the time, but they're quite good. And they're good to learn from. Like you hear the creative process in action. A lot of people, when they saw the Get Back film, Peter Jackson's film, said that to me. That was the thing that they thought was the best thing, was, as Americans say, they saw the process.

4:10Mark Savage:Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Paul McCartney. I'll start with the really hard questions. Oh, go. I heard this album began over a cup of tea. How do you take your tea? How do I take my tea? It was a green tea, actually. I was in L.A. So I thought, but they're not going to be able to make a sort of good builders. So I said, yeah, do you have any green tea? And Andrew Watt, who's the producer I was coming to see, is very resourceful. So you want a green tea? You got it. Right. So, you know, and if he can't get it, he knows someone who can. so yeah it was a green tea and you start off instantly the first track in the album comes to you as you lie there yeah we were just talking and I said to him you know we were talking about how you write songs because he writes songs as well I said well sometimes one of my recent tricks is to find any weird chord just that I don't even know what it is and then that may intrigue me and I go, ah, well, maybe that could go there and there.

5:24So I picked up the guitar, which he very resourcefully had a left-handed acoustic ready for me. He knew you were coming. He did. He saw me coming. So anyway, I just went... I said, that's a weird chord. So I said, see that kind of thing? And then, because I was talking about it starting something, I changed the top note that note put it there and I made a kind of more reasonable chord and then we had a three chord sequence and so that started the whole thing he joined in on his guitar

6:10Mark Savage:and that's the seed of the album but how great that after all the songs you've written you can still surprise yourself with a new chord on the instrument you've played for 60 years. Yeah. No, I think that's why I thought, let's just do anything weird kind of thing. But I got lucky, because I don't know what that chord is. Somebody classically trained will be able to tell me it's a G, da-da-da-da, demented. Demented. But, yeah, so that's a trick, you know, I sometimes do. on the piano, just bang. And if it's interesting, then you can follow it from there. It just gets you going. And when people hear it, I guess they're going to be hit by the fact it's quite nostalgic.

6:56Yeah, I think that's going to be a little bit of a sort of misunderstanding because there are quite a few nostalgic things on it, but there are also a few that aren't nostalgic.

7:09Mark Savage:Ripples on the Pond, I love. Ripples on the Pond, Lost Horizon. It's probably about half and half. But those are the ones that I've been talking about, the nostalgic ones, because they're interesting stories. And I like to have memories. I like to go over memories because it brings me back to the time. It brings me back to the people. So I think it's a great way to visit your pasts. You know, just remembering, ah, you know, it's just like sitting around talking to people. My old Uncle Jack. Now, Nancy, my wife, if we're at a dinner party with guests and stuff, she will stop me the minute I get to Uncle Jack.

7:53She said, no, not Uncle Jack. What did Uncle Jack do? He was great. He was a great guy. He was a tall guy. He had a kind of raspy voice. And he used to tell jokes. He was like ace joke teller in the family. So the minute I'm getting round to him, she knows I'm going deep and she sort of says, maybe not, let me just stick to sort of what you're doing now, Paul.

8:21Mark Savage:But it's interesting because obviously there's a great oral tradition in your family. Your dad told a lot of stories and I've heard you say he had a very colourful turn of phrase. Do you think that has influenced your lyrics as a writer? Yeah, I think so. He loved words. He loved to do crosswords. and he would be very keen for me to know certain words that you wouldn't otherwise have known. So I was the only kid in the class who could spell phlegm. Right. He said no. And what he used to do, which I think is a really good trick, was he would sound it out so that it became phlegm. So, you know, I knew it was P-H-L-E-G-M.

9:05And now your listeners know. Yeah. But that was the kind of guy he was. You know, he loved words. And so I think I picked up that. And my cousin Bert, again, Nancy probably stopped me. No! No Jack or no Bert. But I loved my cousin Bert. And he used to compile crosswords for The Guardian, Daily Mail. He was, for one of them, he was Mr Thursday. But he was really good. It's not anyone can do that. And can you complete a crossword? I have got out of the habit. I used to do a lot, yeah. You must have been a crossword clue at some point as well. Yeah, I think that's true, yeah. My dad would say, you know, it's anagrams or it's this and that, you look for this and that.

9:55So I became very keen on that. And I say, Cousin Bert was so good that he used to go on cruises as the crossword guy. and in fact Linda took a photo of him to put outside the room, the cabin where he would invite people in and he would talk to you about crosswords.

10:18Mark Savage:Yeah, I think it's all consuming, isn't it? Once you get into the world, particularly with cryptic crosswords. Yeah, and it was all that. But anyway, so there was a lot of that in my family so I got a lot of it from that. Yeah, well tell me about Liverpool and growing up in the 1950s. You sing about what it was like to go down to the shores and bird watch, but also the deprivation that was there, because this is post-war, and the city's experiencing a boom, but it's also rebuilding itself. What are your memories of that time? They were pretty good, actually. I think because the war had ended, all my uncles and aunties and my parents were so relieved that Hitler wasn't sending these bombers anymore.

11:03and my dad had been a fireman so he was putting out the incendiary bombs. You didn't talk much about it. You heard just the odd thing but then once that had finished it was piano, it was music, it was jokes and that was really good. So it didn't matter that you weren't that well off. It was okay. They made it okay and they visited a lot. Uncles and aunties would come visit, we'd go and visit them. That was basically the social thing that happened. But, you know, I found it fascinating just hearing them just talk about ordinary things. I mean, one thing just comes to mind now, one of them sort of saying to the other, do you have a pension with your job?

11:57Have you got a pension? Oh, yeah. That was like, that was really something very special. Brand new, I imagine. Probably. Do you have a pension? I managed to scrape one together now. But it's funny, my grandson was at college and he was doing a thesis. And we'd been talking so much about Liverpool and all my old family, his family, you know, when it goes back. And he was fascinated to hear the story of post-war Liverpool. He said he was going to make it his thesis. And because it was his thesis, he researched it very well, more than I would have ever done. So it turns out that two key things happened when we were kids, and all of us in the Beatles and all the kids in Liverpool.

12:51Transport, there was the Transport Act. so we had buses to everywhere literally there wasn't anywhere you couldn't get to so you think about it, that's pretty amazing it opens the world up and for people who don't have that much money I could just hop on a bus, change at Penny Lane go up, see John so it opened up the world, the city in our case and the other thing was the Education Act So it meant that kids like me, my parents couldn't have afforded to go to a posh school or, you know, a good school. Suddenly you could get a scholarship, the 11 plus it was then. And so there's people like Alan Bennett.

13:39You know, I read some of Alan's stuff and it's very similar to my upbringing. His is just more I lad or I lad, you know, whereas mine's Liverpool kind of thing. But a lot of the stories, a lot of the people he writes about and talks about are very similar. So it was OK. It was good growing up, really.

14:05Mark Savage:You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service.

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15:46Mark Savage:Start your free trial at BritBox.com. I've met Paul McCartney a couple of times over the course of my career. And one thing that always strikes me is his ability to put people at ease. He knows how overwhelming it can be to meet a Beatle, the man that wrote, She Loves You and Penny Lane and Let It Be. So he has a way of disarming all of the tension in the room. On this occasion, he walked straight over to me and gripped my hand and said, oh I know you and instantly it was like we were picking up a conversation that we'd started six years ago when I interviewed him for a previous album. But even with the ice broken there are moments when he picks up a guitar and strums it where your brain is just going this is Paul McCartney.

16:30Mark Savage:But you're also aware that you're there to do a job, that you have to try and get some insight into the man who's been the soundtrack to our lives for seven decades and hopefully over the course of this conversation you do get a little glimpse of McCartney's inner life. OK, let's return to my conversation with Paul McCartney.

17:14great rides because often these guys were going down to maybe Birmingham or somewhere, you know. So you've got some long haul things. And George and I had a couple of great hitchhiking trips. One was down to Harlech in Welsh Wales and the other one was down to Exeter down south. And we just had loads of experiences, you know. We didn't have an awful lot of money, Maybe you had just enough to buy a tin of ambrosia cream rice. And you could have that on your little Bunsen burner, on your little camp stove. The point about all that, though, is that it bonds you. Yes. If you're doing that with a maid, you've got all these stories and you understand each other very well.

18:01Oh, my God, where are we going to sleep tonight? I don't know. Let's knock on this door. Do you know of any bread and breakfasts? It also makes you not shy. It kind of gives you a little bit of sort of outgoing-ness. So we did that, and I did it with John later. He just had an incredible birthday, 21st birthday gift from his uncle in Scotland, who to us was rich because he was a dentist. And he sent John£100, which to this day, I say, that's not a bad birthday present. It's not. And in the 60s, that's a lot of money, right? Yeah, that's what I mean. So it was a fortune,£100. So we hatched this plan to Hitch that we would go down south, take the ferry, go down to Spain.

18:51We were going to go to Spain with this£100. We got as far as Paris and liked Paris a lot, so stayed there and spent it all in Paris. And these aren't musical trips, you're just hanging out, you're friends. Yeah, well, they kind of were musical because we always took our guitars. So you were hitching at the side of the road. And I think we decided that you need a gimmick. So our gimmick was bowler hats. So me and John in, like, leather jackets, bowler hat, and a guitar each slung over the shoulder. And, yeah, so we got quite a few lifts, and we got Forest Paris and the same. Again, though, it was a really bonding thing.

19:30So when I came to write with him, we had all these experiences and we talked about things, found out about each other, as you do on those kind of trips. I found out that he loved Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll, and I did too. I was just singing this morning, actually. I saw it in Poetry Please, the BBC book. And it reminded me that my German teacher in school, in the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, he could do jabberwocky in Latin. What? What is right, you know. Why would you bother? Why would you want to? To show off. That's what he did. So I was looking through it and I was thinking, how could he, because it's all strange words.

20:18The other thing I discovered is I thought that maybe where John got, gu-gu-gu-jub, is jub-jub, the jub-jub bird. So it was that kind of language and that kind of humour and that kind of stuff that we realised we both loved. So it helped with our bond of friendship. And when we came to write, some of the more kind of surrealistic things later on, like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and I'm a Walrus, things like that, that's what we were drawing from.

20:48Mark Savage:Yeah. War-us, I'm the war-us, that's Lewis Carroll. Yes, exactly. I wanted to ask about Lost Horizon. Yeah. Because that's a song that you'd forgotten you had. Yeah. And that came out of the archives. How many of those are there? I don't know. Hopefully there's no more. But I had this lovely engineer, and he was arranging the tapes from cassette tapes to then the latest thing, which was DAT, D-A-T, things. And that came and went quite quickly. But that was his job at that time, to put these onto a more reliable medium. Archive, yeah. Yeah. And so we were in the studio. He said, have you heard Lost Horizon?

21:34Do you remember that? I said, no, what's that? He said, well, it's one of your songs. Because looking through on the cassette, he said, and I like it. We played it. and there it was. It was very complete. Sometimes if you're working to a cassette, you'll have half the lyrics, a little suggestion for the chorus, maybe there, but there it was, complete. So I thanked him and for this album, the new album, we really copied exactly what was on that cassette. Same arrangement. Same arrangement, same lyrics, same melody, same everything. I just added a little bit of electric guitar to it. But that's pretty much what he discovered.

22:18So thank you, Eddie. Yeah.

22:20Mark Savage:But there must be, like you say, you hope there's not that many of those songs. But I imagine there are tapes and hours and hours of material. What are your plans for what happens to that, you know, 50 years from now, 100 years from now? Have you thought about that? Yeah, you know, you do think about it. John and I used to really think about outtakes. We used to say we should just delete them all. In actual fact, it's kind of a good thing we didn't because they're now still being... I think we're done, but until recently, they were still being released. And they're not bad. We thought they were bad at the time, but they're quite good.

22:55And they're good to learn from. Like you hear the creative process in action. A lot of people, when they saw the Get Back film, Peter Jackson's film, said that to me. That was the thing that they thought was the best thing, was, as Americans say, they saw the process. Yeah, it was great to go back to that. I had a strange view of the period because it was business hell. And it was a lot. And I was blamed for a lot of things. I was blamed for the breakup of the Beatles. And I had to sort of shoulder all of that stuff, even though I knew it wasn't true. It's like, you know, the headline on the front of a paper, Paul breaks up the Beatles.

23:34and then, you know, denial is months later on page 14.

23:41Mark Savage:Yes. So I went through a lot of that. But when I saw the film, I thought, oh, no, I'm not like that at all. I'm trying to make a record. I'm trying to encourage these guys to be as great as they are. It took a weight off my mind. Well, isn't it funny, though, how the press coverage kind of changed your own memories of the events? Yeah. It changed my attitude. To me, I thought, OK, I'm overbearing. Yeah, I can be like that. But I remember one day in the studio doing something, and I'm sort of saying, we should do this. Or how about that? We could do that. How about this idea? And someone sort of said, oh, yeah, all right, all right, you know, back off.

24:28So I took that to mean don't ever suggest an idea ever again. So I stopped for about a week, and then one of the guys came up and said, come on, come on, what are you doing? You've normally got suggestions. I said, what did you tell me to stop?

24:47But that sort of stuff does affect you, I think. You have to bulldoze through it and be quite sort of brave and sort of think, no, I'm all right.