Reflecting on the Interview

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 Saint, will be featuring in the interview. So incredibly exciting. Enjoy the song, enjoy the interview. This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over two hundred and fifty years. 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. 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Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress. co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Hello everyone and welcome to the rest is history. And obviously, on this show we have um 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. Well that's quite an intro. Well it's not too much for you, I hope. No, not exactly. Adulation uh so we're talking because you've got a new album out. Um this is an album that it's not continuously about it, but a lot of the songs are focused on your 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? I think so. Yeah, I was thinking about recently. I 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 hum or that no matter what we were gonna do like arrive in America and have the New York press ready to make fun of us, we gave as good as we got. And that was because of our Liverpool upbringing. So you in the new album, you have this song Sales man Saint, which is about your parents, your mum and dad. And it kind of begins actually in the war because you were born in nineteen forty two, 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. Um you were very aware of it. Uh 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 grown ups had I as I say, you know, having to laugh it off. This is a world war . Yeah. But they're just they've got to carry on, they've got to talk to each other, they've got the lines in the song, isn't it? They had to carry Yeah. And and they did. I that's what I say, you know, and 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. Um 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, like terrible. You know, there 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? 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 you know 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 the war had passed and you were kind of in a new age and Liverpool was starting t to get back on its feet, was that something that kind of served as an inspiration? Yeah, I think so. You know, um as I say, all of us grew up expecting to go uh in the army or or national service. So we were all kind of coasting through our teenage years thinking, oh my god, it's gonna happen soon. And then suddenly it was as if God opened the wat ers 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 bomb site . And we didn't think anything of it, it was just the bombing. But as l later then you go, why do we call it the bombing? Also if there's an unexploded bomb. It could Yeah . But you know, um 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. And today is uh we're recording this on um International Midwife Day apparently. And so that song um Salesman and Saint, your dad was a salesman. Yeah. And your mum was obviously a saint but she was more specifically a midwife. Yes. Your father was a salesman. My mother was a saint Workin' every God given minute to make it not to pay the rent . The war was nearly over . The peace would soon begin . Living on the edge of the city when the rose 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 would kind of move around upgrading with each house. we moved around quite a lot and didn't real ise till we were much older that ah that's why we moved. But yes, you would o and it was often on the edge of the city, you know. Um but there were nice houses, you know, th it was always a a upgrade to us. Wow. The indoor toilet, yeah no,, it's true. So you know, we thought we were going somewhere. And my mum was very aspirational . Um, like a lot of good mothers. She 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, and people love it when you talk Liverpool. I say, yeah, but my mum tried to get us not to talk Liverpo ol. She tried to get us to talk posh. She thought she was hoping we'd be doctors or something, you know. 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 dunno 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 it's quite it's it's something growing up. Oh my mom's a midwife and you don't really think much beyond that. Um but now you s you think wow, you know, just going out and home delivering all these babies and the parents being so in love with you. Well I mean they they would come around to our house and bringing little gifts, a little statuette or something. Oh very cheap stuff. But just to show the great the gratitude. I I have one big memory of her um I it was in the winter and it'd been a heavy snowfall, and she got called up 'cause we had a phone, one phone in the house, and she got called to go to a uh a berth. So she got on her bike, 'cause they didn't have cars. She got her bike in this deep snow with her uniform on, with her little suitcase on the back, and a little basket on the front. And I have this memory in the street lights of us cycling out through the snow and thinking, wow, yeah, that's pretty that's pretty brave. I mean, you know, just but you did it. They did it. 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 just sticking with your parents. Two other things specific about Liverpool and maybe what makes it distinctive, related to your parents. So both of them kind of came from Ireland ultimately. They're kind of like I think their origins So was that 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 it? I'd never thought of it like that, but y you're right, yeah. No, we were from Liverpool and you know you didn't want to be lumped in with everyone. Yeah. We were like we thought we were special. And b i I think at one point it was the second city to to London because it was a big port. Yeah, fabulously rich. Yeah. So you know it 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 uh great grand historic place. Used to go down and see all the liners off. Yeah. They'd all be going off to Canada, um, 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 uh people . So we would know people that would be dissented. it We didn't talk about it then. But there was 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 um Liverpool is that it's more open to say musical influences perhaps than other plays. Do you think that that was true? Because of course you know, your your love of rock and roll was fundamental to what became the Beatles. Yeah. And you know, sailors came back from uh particularly merchant navy, a lot of them that we would know came back uh from America, whether been to like New Orleans or you know down south there and they had records that nobody else had. So how would you get hold of them? You just, you know, some you borrow 'em 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 that 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. You know, we can get it on whatever, just stream it or 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. And so does that make did that make it um if you were interested in rock and roll or whatever, that you were the Yeah. That was that was what it was. Um 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. There was none of us ever learned to read or write music, which is kind of an interesting fact about all the pretty much all the groups out of the 60s. I remember talking to Jeff Lynn of Yellow. He 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 cord 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 I say if you look back on all our histories and our legacy, it was kind of bardic You know, the a lot of them didn't write it down. You know, uh 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. So we had a lot of that. And that that was really nice um for transference of ideas . You would just should just we would come in here on a Monday morning, let's say, if we were going 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 it George Martin would say, Okay, chaps, well, what is it? What are you going to do? And we'd say, Oh, well, there's this one. And we'd we'd play it, me and John on two acoustics, we'd play it. George Harrison would look at it and go, okay. 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 twenty minutes later we were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer. Well, I think I I mean I think for anyone who's seen the um the get back film, watching you come up with get back has been revelatory in those terms. And you're kind of come on, it's get back. And then you realise, oh no, he doesn't even know that yet. It's kind of an amazing sequence. Yeah. But presumably that is what that's what you first bonded with John Lennon over. That you both knew these chords, you knew this music. Yeah. And that's what happened when you well did you first what was the Wilton Fate? Was that the first time you met him or do you met him? First time I met John was at the Wilton Fate, yeah. Through a friend of mine. My best friend at school was called Ivan Vaughan. He 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 uh John pretty much knew what I knew. Actually in the very beginning, John was playing banjo chords on his guitar 'cause his mum had taught him those chords. So I would sort of say, well , you know, that could go like this and uh show him how we how it was done on the guitar. But it was all very just one on one. And did you find that as the chorum formed and then you know you became the Beat Silver Beatles and, the Beatles and so, on. That as you became better and better, and your your kind of 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? Were there 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 goal market in a way that maybe even little Richard or maybe even Elvis hadn't back in kind of 1955 or something. We were hoping for that. You know, that was the that was the idea that was prevalent at the time was that you would do what all these other people had done. Didn't quite know how you were going to do it, but I think that's half the battle is just having that bol d ambition . Yeah. So we just assumed we could do it if they've done it. And we'd learned a lot of their tricks. So um and 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, uh it was a an act we knew because they did twist and shout, which we covered. And then you come down to London and someone say, Oh, you know the Icel ys. So there was that kind of in crowd thing, you know. Yeah, I know it was a lot of fun. 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 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 had an interesting record. John's stepfather um was guy called D ykins, um , had some cool records. So we'd go round to the house and play the records. And there'd be things like Carl Perkins. So we'd that all got into our act. So we'd 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. Think little Richard and Buddy Holly were your your your brave . Buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front, which uh 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 uh you'd you'd learn off him. And he wore glasses, which I always love. And he wore glasses, which certainly made life okay for John was embarrassed any time he saw girls he took the glasses off, you know. So you're learning these songs, but then you you start to write your own songs. Yeah. And I saw you interviewed on a film that came out recently on the think on the BBC about your lost bass. 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 um 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. Yeah. I don't think that's what it's like for most people, but clearly that's what it's like. Like for you. When did you discover that guitars could speak to you and give you songs? Must have been amazing to realize. I mean I I wrote my first song when I was fourteen. And I suppose that's when I discovered it, you know. I I remember the 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. So uh you know I had a couple of musical ideas, the chords went down, went from G to G seven to C, so there was a bum bum bum. And then my melody went bum bum bum bum against it. So you had those little tricks that you just learned just from listening to music . And yeah, so you'd you put them in and write a song. So once you'd written that first song , it was it was quite exciting and uh uplifting. So when did you and John start to realize that actually your songs were really good, that they could measure up to the songs that you'd been kind of learning and absorbing. I think we always thought they were good, because we were cocky little bastards . But w as they developed and we started to get a bit more mature in the in the writing, I think then we started. I remember writing the songong, we wrote a s 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. This is we're in C to A minor. Now suddenly we're doing a G minor. Wow. So round about that period, you know, we started to think And then you'd write a song, let's say, like uh 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. Well cause that also um I mean you George introduced the sitar. The sitar, yeah. And it was a deal from John, wasn't it? He was he didn't want to confess that he'd had a fling to Cynthia. That's what said. I don't know whether that's true or not. But it's right. But um 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 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. And you said in that that your your song salesman saying to Matt Your Parents, that you're kind of inspired by the example of Charles Dickens, looking back to his childhood And the sense I get with you and and John as well is actually how kind of how literary you were as well, how informed by reading Lewis Carroll or Dickens or whatever. So was that part of what was feeding start to feed into the songs around the beauty? I think that's one of the things that made the Beatles special. Was that three of us were grammar school boys. So we'd had to learn or be exposed to things like Lewis Carroll, as you say, Dickens, my case, be like Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and stuff. So even though we didn't like it at the time, because it was school, it was like, oh, this is boring, you know. I think once we started writing, I I started to realize, oh it's it's it's finding its way in here. Yeah. It's just, you know, we're like sponges, we'd we'd uh uh got it all in our beings and now when we're writing songs, you're starting to s realize that like a rhyming couplet, which I would learn about th through studying Hamlet for from you know an A level or whatever. And um I always thought that was a cool idea of Shakespeare's. He just finished up the thing with, you know, I'm going to go to da da da bop and I'd go to the pop . Wow. Goodbye, that's the end of that thing. So I I it was only years later I realised I'd used that unwittingly in and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. Preceding that is golden slumbers, which you kind of it's literally word for word taken from an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, isn't it? So again, something else that you um said about the new album I listened to you talking was um you've got a song in it about a a woman who has married a complicated man, but you know, she she's got the measure of him. And you were talking about how you love to write songs about people almost like a kind of novelist. Megan, is Eleanor Rigby the first in that kind of sequence and it goes through Another Day and Jenny Wren and Yeah, probably . No, I d I like that. I like the the filmic thing. You know, I I sometimes I'll I'll write And I Love Her, which is you know, a love song. Very straightforward and I think fine for what it is. But then you'll then I'll start to you know, 'cause I s you've watched so many films, read so many books that this character that I'd kind of known women like this, Eleanor Rigby, lonely old ladies. On the housing estate where we lived, there were there were always a couple of old pensioners and I would go around and offer to d get their shopping for them and stuff. And it was it was very good because they'd start to tell me stories of the war, or I remember one of the old ladies showing me a crystal rad io. So it was it was great, it was very exciting. So I liked these ladies. So they were always a kind of special character for me. So I kind of wrote Eleanor Rigby from the perspective of one of those ladies. Yeah, because there's incredible kind of generosity and compassion in everything that you write. And one other song that for me completely exemplified this was a beautiful song. What's it called? Uh, Life Can Be Hard. Um, and people and when I say this song, Life Can Be Hard, you wrote it during COVID. People who haven't heard it may be expecting that it's going to be quite dark and somber. I mean it is so light and joyous, and that seemed to me the kind of that is so Paul McCartney, that you can get joy out of something as awful as COVID? Yes, well I think uh you know i I think the people who are locked down with their family , they're forced to be with their family. If you love your family , that could be quite nice. You know, you suddenly enforced family time. And uh I had the song and minute I heard myself writing, Life Can Be Hard . Something told me to just say, but then . And then that's when we start to get it together again, or whatever. I didn't want to go down the dark route. I wanted to say, yeah, life can be hard , but come on gang, we're gonna get this together, we're gonna make it happen, you know. So it's like the salesman saint song, you know . You know, they had to carry on. I think it's a it's a theme in my stuff, in my writing that even though stuff is uh hard , you are going to have to carry on or let it defeat you . And I think that's very much from the wartime years that all of us grew up in. Carry that weight. Uh yeah . But you know, as I say, uh y I never heard any of the uncles talk about the war. They would all they they would always have a joke, some great joke that they would tell you. And so you you kinda learned that even though that had been a terrible period and we'd seen the film of the hi Hitler's bombers s clouding the sky and you'd seen the Belsen pictures of of the the uh prisoners coming out in the striped uniforms, which is why I can never believe people deny the Holocaust. I mean that is so insane. But you know, we'd seen all of that and yet the people we knew, people we were living amongst , had gone on and were now so glad to be away from that , that now they were making something of their lives. And I think that's why there was quite a rich period for us, our gener ation, that we we could now do good stuff and say, hey, i it may be bad, but we can we can work this out. We can work it out. So I I mean I can I can understand hearing you say that why now so many decades on from your earliest years, that you might want to go back and look at those early years and see what kind of mirror it holds up to what we're going through now. Can I just end by asking about your memories and the tricks that that memory can play. You had a brilliant story about going on a milk float with George Harrison when you were, I don't know, how well you 16 or something. Yeah, I would have been hitchhiking, yeah. Yeah, and you've got a great story about a kind of electrical accident that happened to George, but he then he thought that it happened to you. So could you just tell people what happened there? Well we we were hitchhiking down so uth, which is what one of the songs of the new album's about, and we got a lift from a milk float, which was electric. Those are the only vehicles we knew that were electric went about four miles an ho ur. But it was a lift. So we were quite happy. The driver was sitting on the right hand side, then there was a battery in the middle, and then there was the passenger seat on the left hand side. And George sat on the battery George Harrison sat on the battery and everything's going fine. We're going along, we're getting our lift, and then suddenly bang, ah, and he jumps up. I go, what's that? What's wrong? And he's he had a a pair of jeans with a zip on the pocket and it had connected with the two Not on the crotch. No, it wasn't the crotch. No, this is his back pocket. So it's uh it jumps up and oh bloody and the the it connected up and the battery uh give him a a a a a bolt. And later when we we got to our B and B , um he showed me, yeah, he had a great big uh it was a zip tattooed into his bum. But but and the point of what you were saying was so that was always my story. And I told it to people. Then I I met Olivia Harrison, George's widow, quite recently and she was saying, Oh, I love that story of you and George going down to Wales and and you sitting on the battery and it connecting and you got a a scar on your bum. I said it it wasn was'nt't me. It was George. But I think it's amazing the way memory does that. It can just morph. And it must be even harder for you because you've been so written about people know things about you that maybe never happened because it's been reproduced in countless books. That's very true. And that is history. It is. That is and I now appreciate through all the sort of wrong stories about the Beatles , I realize, you know, that Harold with the arrow in the eye, oh I get it, it was for the tapestry. Or whatever, you know, the all these little things . How can you have accurate history. This is the perfect note on which to Paul McCartney, thank you so much, and thank you everyone for listening. Thanks I think um of all the things that the rest of history has bought me, um the chance to interview Paul McCartney is absolutely up there at the summit. Um I mean that's something that I've dreamed of doing since I was about eight. Um and it was an amazing experience to have him come down the steps from the production booth in which George Martin had uh messaged them when they recorded please please me gentlemen you've just recorded your first number one um and there was Paul McCartney coming down the steps um having a little chat with him it was just amazing um when I began the interview there was a kind of slight tightening of the vocal cords, I think. But um he was amazingly generous, um uh . I know he's done a million interviews, so he's very skilled at putting interviewers, getting them to to kind of feel easy. Um but it really did feel like a conversation. The only time when it didn't was when Paul started talking about the recording of Norwegian wood and I abstracted myself and suddenly looked down and thought here I am in Abbe Road, listening to Paul McCartney talk about how John Lennon wrote Norwegian Wood. And my mind went completely blank at that point and I had this great lurch of panic, thinking what on earth am I going to talk to him about now? But actually the the interview flowed in all kinds of ways that um I wasn't entirely expecting, which is kind of what made it so fun. And I thought especially at the end when he started talking about the um the unknowability of the the past and um you know, is the Bayotapestry adequate evidence for the Battle of Hastings. And it it um I kind of felt then that maybe that was um a a a comparison that he'd never previously drawn in any previous interview. I may be wrong on that, but um if so, then I feel very proud, wonderful that of all the things that he could have first talked about, the uh the bat his take on the Battle of Hastings, it was the rest is history. everybody, we are back with another absolutely colossal update about the rest is history festival. Well, it's massive . So on the 4th and 5th of July, we will be at Hampton Court Palace. So we have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic royal palaces collections. And yes, Dominic, most exciting of all, this is the thing I have been pushing for, and I'm so looking forward to it. We have Medieval Combat, a terrifying, brutal, yet completely thrilling sport . It is going to be an unforgetta ble two days. It is indeed. And um at the core of the festival are these talks, we've got some more talks to add to the lineup. So I will be talking to the brilliant Tudor historian Tracy Bormann about the secrets of the six wives of Henry VIII. I'll be talking to friend of the show and Irish national treasure, Paul Rouse, about whether there is an alternative universe in which Irelands could have remained part of the United Kingdom. We'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Weimar, Germany, and in particular the town of Weimar through history. And Professor Adam Smith will be telling the story of America through three