670. Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

Introduction

0:00Hello 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.

0:35So 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. 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,

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Paul McCartney Interview

3:31Hello, 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.

4:05So this is unbelievably exciting for me. And I am talking about, of course, Paul McCartney. 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.

4:37And 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 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.

5:14So 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, you know, above water by laughing at the whole thing. And I think that was something that found its way into the Beatles. And 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.

5:49And that was because of our Liverpool upbringing. 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.

6:21Not 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, 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.

6:51They've got to talk to each other. 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.

7:23And 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. 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?

7:54Yeah. 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. 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.

8:24You 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. And 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.

8:55So where we played football would be on what we called the bommie, which was the bomb site. And we didn't think anything of it. It was just the bommie. But later then you go, why did we call it the bommie? 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.

9:30And today is, we're recording this on International Midwife Day. Oh, wow.

Childhood Memories

9:37And so that song, Salesman and Saint, your dad was a salesman. Yeah. And your mom was obviously a saint, but she was more specifically a midwife. Yes. Father was a salesman.

9:52My mother was a saint Working 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 roads were going That was very important, wasn't it, in terms of where you would live?

10:26Because as a midwife, she would get kind of houses and you would kind of move around upgrading with each house. It's true, yeah. We moved around quite a lot and didn't realise until we were much older that, ah, that's why we moved. But yeah, she would, and 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 Hawthorne Road had an indoor toilet, didn't it, I think.

10:56Wow, an indoor toilet. Yeah, no, it's true. So, we thought we were going somewhere. And my mum was very aspirational, 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, people love it when you talk Liverpool. I say, yeah, but my mum 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.

11:33But 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.

12:10I mean, they would come around to our house and bringing little gifts, a little statuette or something. Very 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.

12:40So, 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, 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.

13:15So, just sticking with your parents, two other things specifically about Liverpool, maybe what makes it distinctive related to your parents.

Liverpool Roots

13:22So, both of them kind of came from Ireland, ultimately. They're kind of aligned. I think their origins, the family came from Ireland, yeah. 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... 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. Yeah. We 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.

13:54Yeah, 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. 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.

14:26Yeah. 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 places. Do you think that was true? Because, of course, you know, your love of rock and roll was fundamental to what became the Beatles.

15:03Yeah. And, you know, sailors came back from a particularly merchant navy. A lot of them that we would know came back from America, whether they'd 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'd just, you know, you'd 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.

15:35So it was like a little culture where 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. You know, we can get it on whatever, just stream it or whatever now. But the idea that it's actually really quite hard to get the physical records or to find the radio stations that it's being played on. 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?

16:17Yeah, 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. So I remember talking to Jeff Lynne of ELO. He says, oh, we just made it up.

16:51And 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.

17:23You 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. So we had a lot of that. And that was really nice for transference of ideas. We would just, we would come in here on a Monday morning, let's say, if we were going to record during the week.

17:54And 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, OK, what is it, 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, would play it. George Harrison would look at it and go, OK.

18:25Because 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. Well, I think, I mean, 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. And then you realize, oh, no, he doesn't even know that yet.

18:56It's kind of an amazing sequence. Yeah. But presumably that is what, that's what you first bonded with John Lennon over.

Meeting John Lennon

19:02That you both knew these chords, you knew this music. And that's what happened when you, well, did you, what was the Walton Fate? Was that the first time you met him or did you met him before? First time I met John was at the Walton 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 John pretty much knew what I knew.

19:34Actually, in the very beginning, John was playing banjo chords on his guitar because his mum had taught him those chords. So I would sort of say, well, you know, that could go like this. And I would show him how it was done on the guitar. But it was all very just one-on-one. 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 you're kind of musically, you became more sophisticated, more knowing.

20:08Was 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 global 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.

20:44Didn't quite know how you were going to do it, but I think that's half the battle is just having that bold 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.

21:15So 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. And then you'd come down to London and someone would 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. 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.

21:45Whereas 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 interesting record. John's stepfather, who was a guy called Dykins, had some cool records. So we'd go around to the house and play the records.

22:19And there'd be things like Carl Perkins. So 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 Will Be The Day, Buddy Holly. I think Little Richard and Buddy Holly were your great favorites. They were part of them.

22:49Buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front, which not many of the singers did. And Elvis had Scotty Moore, who played guitar for him. But Buddy played the lead and did the riffs. So you'd learn off him. And 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. So you're learning these songs, but then you start to write your own songs.

23:22And 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. And 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?

Songwriting Beginnings

23:56It must have been amazing to realize 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.

24:27So, you know, I had a couple of musical ideas. The chords went down, went from G to G7 to C. So there was a bum, 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 put them in and write a song. So once you'd written that first song, it was quite exciting and uplifting.

25:06So 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 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.

25:36We 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.

25:53We're in C to A minor. Now suddenly we're doing a G minor. Wow. So around 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.

26:25Well, 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.

26:57And 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. And you said in that that you're a song salesman saying to me about 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 John as well is actually how kind of how literary you were as well, how informed by reading Lewis Carroll, Dickens or whatever.

27:30So was that part of what was starting to feed into the songs around 1965?

Literary Influences

27:34I think that's one of the things that made the Beatles special was that three of us were grammar school boys.

27:43So 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 started to realize, oh, it's finding its way in here somehow.

28:15It's keeping through. Yeah, it's just, you know, like sponges, we got it all in our being. And now when we're writing songs, you're starting to realize that like a rhyming couplet, which I would learn about through studying Hamlet from, you know, A-level or whatever. And I always thought that was a cool idea of Shakespeare's. He just finished up the thing with, you know, I'm going to do a bop and a diddle, a diddle, a going to do a bop.

28:49Wow. Goodbye. That's the end of that. So I was only years later, I realized I'd used that unwittingly. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. And I think 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? Yeah. Again, something else that you said about the new album, I listened to you talking, was you've got a song in it about a woman who has married a complicated man.

29:25But, you know, 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. Like, is Eleanor Rigby the first in that kind of sequence? And it goes through Another Day and Jenny Wren. Yeah, probably. No, I like that. I like the filmic thing. You know, sometimes I'll write, and I love her, which is, you know, I love so. Very straightforward and I think fine for what it is.

29:59But then you'll, then I'll start to, you know, because 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. Because on the housing estate where we lived, there were always a couple of old pensioners, and I would go around and offer to get their shopping for them and stuff. And it was very good because they'd start to tell me stories of the war.

30:32Or I remember one of the old ladies showing me a crystal radio. So 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 it's an 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.

31:04What's it called? Life Can Be Hard. And people, 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, you know, I think the people who are locked down with their family, who are forced to be with their family, if you love your family, that could be quite nice.

31:39You know, you're suddenly an enforced family time. And I had the song, and the 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 going to get this together. We're going to make it happen, you know. So it's like the Salesman's Saint song, you know, you know, they had to carry on.

32:14I think it's a theme in my stuff, in my writing, that even though stuff is 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. Yeah. But, you know, as I say, I never heard any of the uncles talk about the war.

32:46They would always have a joke, some great joke that they would tell you. And so you kind of learned that even though that had been a terrible period, and we'd seen the film of Hitler's bombers clouding the sky, and you'd seen the Belsen pictures of the prisoners coming out in their 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.

33:32And I think that's why there was quite a rich period for us, our generation, that we could now do good stuff and say, hey, it may be bad, but we can work this out. We can work it out. We can work it out. So, I mean, 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.

Memories and Reflections

34:06Can I just end by asking about your memories and the tricks 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, were you 16 or something? Yeah, it would have been. We were 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, can you just tell people what happened there? Yeah, well, we were hitchhiking down south, which is what one of the songs of the new album is about.

34:40And we got a lift from a milk float, which was electric. Those were the only vehicles we knew that were electric, were about four miles an hour, 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.

35:13I go, what's that? What's wrong? And he had a pair of jeans with a zip on the pocket, and it had connected with the two points. It was on the pocket. I thought, not on the crotch. No, it wasn't the crotch. No, this is his back pocket. So, he jumps up, and it had connected up, and the battery would give him a bolt. And later, when we got to our B&B, he showed me, yeah, he had a great big zip tattooed into his bum.

35:51But? But, and the point of what you were saying was, so that was always my story, and I told it to people. Then 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 you sitting on the battery, and it connecting, and you got a scar on your bum. I said, no, it wasn't, it wasn't me.

36:21It 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 realise, you know, that Harold with the arrow in the eye, oh, I get it, it was for the tapestry.

36:52Or whatever, you know, all these little things. How can you have accurate history? This is the perfect moat on which to end. Paul McCartney, thank you so much, and thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks.

37:09I think of all the things that the rest of history has brought me, the chance to interview Paul McCartney is absolutely up there at the summit. I mean, that's something that I've dreamed of doing since I was about eight. And it was an amazing experience to have him come down the steps from the production booth in which George Martin had messaged them when they recorded, please, please me, gentlemen, you've just recorded your first number one.

37:40And there was Paul McCartney coming down the steps, having a little chat with him. It was just amazing.

37:48When I began the interview, there was a kind of slight tightening of the vocal cords, I think. But he was amazingly generous, amazingly personable. I know he's done a million interviews, so he's very skilled at putting interviewers, getting them to kind of feel easy. 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. I suddenly looked down and thought, here I am in Abbey Road, listening to Paul McCartney talk about how John Lennon wrote Norwegian Wood.

38:25And 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 interview flowed in all kinds of ways that 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 interview, the unknowability of the past and, you know, is the Bay of Tapestry adequate evidence for the Battle of Hastings? And it kind of felt then that maybe that was a comparison that he'd never previously drawn in any previous interview.

39:04I may be wrong on that. But if so, then I feel very proud, wonderful that of all the things that he could have first talked about, his take on the Battle of Hastings, it was The Rest is History. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

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41:03No place here. You have an Airbus�antwort. You have to pasando in life.