670. Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

0:00Tom Holland:Hello everyone, it's Tom here with news of a Rest Is History special. I am interviewing none other than the great, the one and only Paul McCartney. He has a new album out, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Lots of the songs on that album are about his early years growing up in Liverpool. So I'm talking to him about that, about the context, the history that gave rise to the Beatles. And we have a world exclusive here because one of the songs from that album, Salesman's Saint, will be featuring in the interview. So incredibly exciting. Enjoy the song. Enjoy the interview. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years.

0:48Tom Holland:Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the House of Wessex, the family of Alfred the Great and his heirs, who, between them, established the United Kingdom of England. Yes, great story, isn't it, Tom? A great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. so alfred and his heirs they marry idealism and pragmatism they're brilliant at alliances they're brilliant at managing power they're brilliant of course at managing their money which is a key part of political leadership and of course we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight when it's time to make your next move you can bank on lloyd's to be ready when you are because from new businesses to new homes and new life chapters backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyd's to help make their dreams a reality.

1:56Tom Holland:Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Rest is History. And obviously, on this show, we have talked about all kinds of world historical figures. But today is a first because it's the first time on the show that I will actually be talking to a world historical figure and this is a man who is the greatest composer of the 20th century. With the Beatles he was a lightning rod for one of the most transformative decades in modern history and ever since I was about eight he has been my personal hero so this is unbelievably exciting for me and I am talking about of course, Paul McCartney.

2:42Tom Holland:Well, that's quite an intro. It's not too much for you, I hope. No. Not excessive. Hey, come on. Adulation, I don't mind at all. So we're talking because you've got a new album out. Yes. And this is an album that, it's not continuously about it, but a lot of the songs are focused on your childhood, your teenage years growing up in Liverpool. and I was wondering, is this telling us something about what made Paul McCartney who he is? In other words, could Paul McCartney, could the Beatles have emerged from any other city apart from Liverpool, do you think? Was there something distinctive about Liverpool?

3:22I think so. Yeah, I was thinking about it recently. I do think the character of Liverpool is a very strong one. I think with the Irish influence and then coming through the war and having to be happy when bombs were falling. So there was a lot of music when I was a kid. My dad played the piano at home. There were a lot of jokes. And so they kept their heads above water by laughing at the whole thing. And I think that was something that found its way into The Beatles. I think it gave us a good sense of humour that no matter what we were going to do, like arrive in America and have the New York press ready to make fun of us, we gave as good as we got.

4:19And that was because of our Liverpool upbringing.

4:22Tom Holland:So you, in the new album, you have this song, Salesman, Saint, which is about your parents, your mum and dad. And it kind of begins actually in the war because you were born in 1942, all the Beatles were born in the war. How much of a kind of legacy did the war years leave in Liverpool and on your kind of personal memories of it? A lot. You were very aware of it. Not the actual bombing. I think all of us were a little too young to experience much of that. Ringo, who's the oldest, he might have some memories, but I don't. But the thing is, you know, the feeling that the grownups had, as I say, you know, having to laugh it off.

5:17This is a world war. But they're just, they've got to carry on, they've got to talk to each other.

5:22Tom Holland:Because that's one of the lines in the song, isn't it? They had to carry on. Yeah. And they did. That's what I say, you know, and I marvel at that. Because now, you know, I mean, people can get defeated by the slightest little thing. So compare that to not being defeated by bombs literally raining down on your city. and you've got to find a way around it. And so when I grew up, there was a lot of joy. I think everyone was just so glad to be out of these terrible circumstances. And my uncles were all great joke tellers. And I never heard any of them sort of sitting around going, oh, God, life's terrible.

6:13There was none of that. It just, they'd come through it, and so it kind of wasn't allowed. So the bomb damage in Liverpool, it took a long time to repair, right?

6:24Tom Holland:Yeah. And then you went to Hamburg, and Hamburg also was a city that had been wiped out. So when you were kind of making your music, were you aware, were you thinking of, oh, thank God, we're not involved in that? You avoided national service by, I think, by about a year, didn't you? A year or two? Yeah. Was the fact that the war had passed and you were kind of in a new age and Liverpool was starting to get back on its feet, was that something that kind of served as an inspiration? Yeah, I think so. You know, as I say, all of us grew up expecting to go in the army or national service. So we were all kind of coasting through our teenage years thinking, oh my God, it's going to happen soon.

7:09And then suddenly it was as if God opened the waters and the Israelites could just go through. And that was us. We suddenly, all of that had gone, except for the evidence of it. So where we played football would be on what we called the bomby, which was the bombsite. And we didn't think anything of it. It was just the bomby. But later, then you go, why did we call it the bomby? Also, if there's an unexploded bomb. It could. But, you know, so that was all around us. But we just lived with it and kind of made it part of our lives. And then we were able to, like our parents, able to kind of laugh at everything.

8:00Tom Holland:And today is, we're recording this on International Midwife Day, apparently. And so that song, Salesman and Saint, your dad was a salesman. Yeah. And your mum was obviously a saint, but she was more specifically a midwife. Yes. My father was a salesman. My mother was a saint. Working every God-given minute. To make it not to pay the rent.

8:37The war was nearly over. The peace would soon begin. Living on the edge of the city.

8:52Tom Holland:That was very important, wasn't it, in terms of where you would live? Because as a midwife, she would get kind of houses and you kind of move around upgrading with each house. It's true, yeah. We moved around quite a lot and didn't realize until we were much older that, ah, that's why we moved. But yeah, it was often on the edge of the city, you know. But there were nice houses, you know. It was always an upgrade to us. Because North End Road had an indoor toilet, didn't it, I think? Wow, an indoor toilet. Yeah, no, it's true. So we thought we were going somewhere. And my mom was very aspirational, like a lot of good mothers.

9:40She just wanted her kids to succeed, do well. I mean, my wife, Nancy, she will say to me, you don't talk Liverpool. She said, people love it when you talk Liverpool. I say, yeah, but my mom tried to get us not to talk Liverpool. She tried to get us to talk posh. She thought she was hoping we'd be doctors or something, you know.

10:03Tom Holland:But I guess as a midwife, she's a community midwife, right? I mean, she's not working in a hospital. So she has to serve all the community. So there would be, I don't know, people in leafy homes, and then there would be people with very little. And she would have to serve them all, and presumably she would know them all. Yeah, no, it's quite, it's something growing up, oh, my mum's a midwife. And you don't really think much beyond that. But now you think, wow, you know, just going out and home delivering all these babies and the parents being so in love with you. I mean, they would come around to our house and bringing little gifts, a little statuette or something.

10:48Very cheap stuff. But just to show the gratitude. I have one big memory of her. It was in the winter and it had been a heavy snowfall. And she got called up, because we had a phone, one phone in the house. And she got called to go to a berth. So she got on her bike, because they didn't have cars. She got on her bike in this deep snow with her uniform on, with her little suitcase on the back and her little basket on the front. And I have this memory in the streetlights of us cycling out through the snow and thinking, wow, that's pretty brave. I mean, you know, you did it. They did it.

11:38Tom Holland:I was asked to ask you this by my wife, who's a midwife, so she will be delighted by absolutely everything that you've said there. So just sticking with your parents, two other things specific about Liverpool, maybe what makes it distinctive, related to your parents. So both of them kind of came from Ireland, ultimately. I think their origins are in Ireland. So that kind of generates a sense in Liverpool that it's not quite part of England, doesn't it? Do you think that was a kind of important part of... I'd never thought of it like that, but you're right, yeah. No, we were from Liverpool. And, you know, you didn't want to be lumped in with everyone.

12:16We were like, we thought we were special. And I think at one point it was the second city to London because it was a big port. Yeah, fabulously rich. Yeah. So, you know, we had a great sense of importance, which waned through the years, you know. But when I was growing up, you definitely thought Liverpool was a very great, grand historic place. You used to go down and see all the liners off.

12:47Tom Holland:Yeah. They'd all be going off to Canada, you know, places like that. And it was only later that you learn that this was slave trade. Yeah. That there was a lot of that. Only thing we would see would be the local Caribbean people. So we would know people that would be descended. We didn't talk about it then. But there was, I guess, a sense of Liverpool as being open to the world as well as to the rest of England. Yeah. So that what is often said about Liverpool is that it's more open to say musical influences perhaps than other plays. Do you think that was true? Because of course, you know, your love of rock and roll was fundamental to what became the Beatles.

13:34Tom Holland:Yeah. And you know, sailors came back from a particularly merchant navy. A lot of them that we would know came back from America, where they've been to like New Orleans or, you know, down south. And they had records that nobody else had. So how would you get hold of them? You just, you know, you borrow them off somebody. Somebody would know the sailor who had it and the sailor would let them borrow it. You'd borrow it off them. So it was like a little culture where you'd the record would go around and we'd all learn it Because I think for people of subsequent generations It's hard to get our heads around how difficult it was to access Music mmm, you know, we can get it on whatever just stream it now whatever now But the idea that that it's actually really quite hard to get the physical records or to find the radio stations that it's being played on.

14:33Tom Holland:So did that make it, if you were interested in rock and roll or whatever, that you were kind of a self-selecting group of people who would know what you were talking about when you met up and discussed these people? Yeah, that was what it was. You would know certain chords, and then someone would know an extra chord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra chord, and you build up your knowledge through things like that. None of us ever learned to read or write music, which is kind of an interesting fact about pretty much all the groups out of the 60s. I remember talking to Jeff Lynn of ELO.

15:18He says, oh, we just made it up. And that's what it was. We made it up. But there's a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff or something. And it's just going from mind to mind. There's no paper involved. All of what we did, I mean, you know, in this very studio would be that. It was really immediate transference of ideas. And, you know, I say, if you look back on all our histories and our legacy, It was kind of bardic. You know, a lot of them didn't write it down. You know, Irish music was not really, I don't think, written down. It was just played and you learned it and then you played it your way.

16:06So we had a lot of that. And that was really nice for transference of ideas. You would just, we would come in here on a Monday morning, let's say, if we were going to record during the week. And it would mainly in the beginning be John and I, and we would have just written something the week before, written some songs, and we'd come in and everyone would just gather 10 o 'clock, 10.30 in the morning. And George Martin would say, okay, what are you going to do? And we'd say, oh, well, there's this one. And we'd play it, me and John, on two acoustics, we'd play it. George Harrison would look at it and go, okay.

16:55Because immediately he knew what we knew. We'd all learned it all together. Ringo would tap out a rhythm kind of thing, and we trusted him to know what to do. And then 20 minutes later, we were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer.

17:12Tom Holland:Well, I think for anyone who's seen the Get Back film, watching you come up with Get Back, It's been revelatory in those terms. You're kind of, come on, it's get back. Then you realize, oh no, he doesn't even know that yet. It's kind of an amazing sequence. But presumably that is what, that's what you first bonded with John Lennon over. Then you both knew these chords, you knew this music. And that's what happened when you, well, did you first, was the Walton Fate? Was that the first time you met him or did you met him before? The first time I met John was at the Walton Fate. Yeah, through a friend of mine, my best friend at school was called Ivan Vaughn.

17:51He was born on the 18th of June, 1942, same day as me in Liverpool. And he knew John, so he introduced me to John. But John pretty much knew what I knew. Actually, in the very beginning, John was playing banjo chords on his guitar because his mom had taught him those chords. So I would sort of say, well, you know, that could go like this and show him how it was done on the guitar. But it was all very just one-on-one.

18:24Tom Holland:And did you find that as the Quarrymen formed and then, you know, you became the Silver Beatles and the Beatles and so on, that as you became better and better and musically you became more sophisticated, more knowing, was the kind of infrastructure that enabled you to access music and also for your music to be promoted kind of growing up around you? Were there more record shops? Was it easier to get radio stations or whatever? So were you kind of, as the Beatles, moving towards a point where you could have a global market in a way that maybe even Little Richard or maybe even Elvis hadn't back in 1955 or something?

19:03We were hoping for that. You know, that was the idea that was prevalent at the time, was that you would do what all these other people had done. They didn't quite know how you were going to do it, but I think that's half the battle, is just having that bold ambition. So we just assumed we could do it, if they've done it. And we'd learned a lot of their tricks. So we showed each other how to do it and then came down to London and there were certain guys down here, mainly guys, that would know the stuff we knew. So I remember the Isley Brothers was something that we knew, it was an act we knew because they did Twist and Shout, which we covered.

19:54And then you come down to London and someone say, oh, you know the Isleys? So there was that kind of in-crowd thing, you know. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun.

20:03Tom Holland:But kind of so, again, just to reiterate, it's so mad that this music was so kind of exclusive because you had to know. If you knew, you knew. And if you didn't, you didn't. Whereas now you can just kind of absorb it almost like osmosis. No, it's nothing like it is now. You can just hit a button and you can get all the music in the world. Now then it was, I think it made it more special. You know, if somebody had an interest in record. John's stepfather, who was a guy called Dykins, had some cool records. So we'd go round to the house and play the records. And there'd be things like Carl Perkins.

20:51So that all got into our act. so we'd learn it, get all the words down and so that was how you learned it was just if someone had a record you played the record and copied all the words out worked out the chords and the riffs it was a magic moment I mean, I learned the riff to That'll Be The Day, Buddy Holly I think Little Richard and Buddy Holly were your great favourites they were part of them Buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front, which not many of the singers did. Elvis had Scotty Moore, who played guitar for him. But Buddy played the lead and did the riffs, so you'd learn off him.

21:38And he wore glasses, which I always loved. And he wore glasses, which suddenly made life okay for John. John was embarrassed. Anytime he saw girls, he took the glasses off, you know.

21:48Tom Holland:So you're learning these songs, but then you start to write your own songs. and I saw you interviewed on a film that came out recently, I think on the BBC, about your lost base and you were talking about how when you have a guitar you would kind of take it away and sit in a private room and kind of nurse it, almost like going to a psychiatrist and you would talk to the guitar and the guitar would talk back to you and it would talk to you in the form of a song. I don't think that's what it's like for most people but clearly that's what it's like for you. When did you discover that guitars could speak to you and give you songs?

22:26Tom Holland:It must have been amazing to realise it. I mean, I wrote my first song when I was 14. And I suppose that's when I discovered it, you know. I remember the things that appealed to me about that song. The song was called I Lost My Little Girl. And someone pointed out to me, my mum had died not too long before that. So probably at the back of my mind, a therapist would probably say, that's what this was about. But the guitar was your therapist. And the guitar was the therapist really. So, you know, I had a couple of musical ideas. The chords went down, went from G to G7 to C. So there was a bam, bam, bam.

23:08And then my melody went bam, bam, bam, bam against it. So you had those little tricks that you just learned just from listening to music. And yeah, so you put them in and write a song. So once you'd written that first song, it was quite exciting and uplifting.

23:35Tom Holland:So when did you and John start to realise that actually your songs were really good, that they could measure up to the songs that you'd been kind of learning and... and absorbing. I think we always thought they were good because we were cocky little bastards. But as they developed and we started to get a bit more mature in the writing, I think then we started, I remember writing a song, we wrote a song together called From Me To You and it was pretty straightforward. But in the middle of it, it went to a chord we'd never used before. And I remember thinking, wow, we're getting sophisticated. We're in C to A minor.

24:25Now, suddenly we're doing a G minor. Wow. So, right about that period, you know, we started to think pretty good. And then you'd write a song, let's say like, I mean, what would always happen is one of us would come in with the idea and then the two of us would finish it up. So something like Norwegian Wood, which was a John idea. And then we sat down and finished it together. I think after that, we thought, oh, we're getting somewhere.

24:55Tom Holland:Well, because that also, I mean, George introduced the sitar. The sitar, yeah. And it was a detail from John, wasn't it? He didn't want to confess that he'd had a fling to Cynthia. That's what's said. I don't know whether that's true or not. Oh, I'm not sure. But so around then, the songs are starting to move from I love you, you love me, she loves you, whatever, to more complicated, more almost novelistic stuff. Yeah, and I think that's when we started to think, wow, this is going somewhere, you know. And then you would feel encouraged to write more than just the sort of I love you songs. I just watched you talking through all the songs in the new album.