In virtually every interview he’s given since 1970, Paul McCartney has been asked about his relationship with John Lennon. You might well ask what else is there to discover about the friendship that changed music history? But, just occasionally, Macca reveals something we weren’t aware of.
The occasion this time was a conversation with the filmmaker Judd Apatow that followed a screening of the Wings documentary Man On The Run in Los Angeles earlier this week. The two men dug deep into McCartney’s early 1970s, when, after the long, drawn-out pain of the Beatles split, Macca gradually got his mojo back again.
Apatow asked him how he felt about John Lennon’s then-irritation at his old friend’s more light-hearted approach in Wings - “Was it a joyfulness to it while he's doing primal scream and you're having fun? What do you think got under his skin about it?”
McCartney replied: “Well, I don't know. I think maybe he expected more from me. He expected something different from me, and I wasn't doing that.
"I was just doing ‘madcap’. I always thought John was very cool, and I still do. But he could be a complete idiot, over some things.”
“And the thing is, if you look at his life, there’s reason for him to be crazy,” he explained to Apatow. “A lot of bad things happened to him. His father ran away from home when he was three or something, so he never knew his dad until we got famous and his dad came back and was working at the pub down the road near where John lived.”
“And John’s mum, who he idolised and I idolised, was a beautiful lady called Julia. And she got run over and killed outside the house… So he’s had to deal with all of that, you know, and so he had a lot of anguish and a lot of this is why all the primal scream and everything - he had a lot of stuff to get out.”
Apatow also asked the ex-Beatle why there were so few photos of Wings from the time they were making Band On The Run in Nigeria. It seems that Linda McCartney had shot several reels of film (along with some McCartney demos) that were lost forever when the couple were mugged at knifepoint in Lagos.
“You think there’s some guy in Africa and his entire house is filled with all those photos?” Apatow asked.
“They stole Linda’s camera, all the cassettes, and we always wondered… We all said, ‘I bet they recorded over them.’” McCartney said, adding that he’d always imagined the thieves putting the cassettes into the player and wondering, “Oh, what’s this shit?”
