Paul McCartney releases his latest album – The Boys Of Dungeon Lane – today (May 29) and the ex-Beatle/greatest living songwriter has given a fascinating, and thoughtful new interview in the Guardian.
The album is steeped in childhood memories of 1940s/50s Liverpool and the interviewer asks Macca about early sounds he remembers from those days. “There are so many,” he says. He remembers infant school, running indoors with his classmates. He recalls living in Speke (a Liverpool suburb) “hanging out on the grass verge of the dual carriageway, with girls, and listening to them chatting, and one of them said, ‘You’ve got great eyelashes!’” There were also family singalongs of Carolina Moon, Red, Red Robin, Bread and Butterflies.
He also claims briefly that he can remember being born:. “Highly dubious, highly dubious, but I feel the white tiles and chrome instruments and the sounds … It’s probably total bullshit. In fact, it almost certainly is. An imagined memory! And I was a forceps delivery.”
Inevitably he touches on the major losses of his life – Lennon and Harrison. “So, yeah, you do miss them. I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.’ It’s not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it’s life, and it’s what we’ve got.’”
He also talks about the importance of radio and he find out that Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was inspired by a BBC radio play he heard driving up to Liverpool in the late 60s: “I turned the radio on, and it was a play by Alfred Jarry, it was Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded). I loved it! It’s far out: ‘Hand me my shitter pump!’ I thought, yeah, I can identify with this person. And he’s just so outrageous.”
What do you ask Paul McCartney that he hasn’t already answered fifteen million times over a lifetime in music? Well, remarkably, we do find out some new things. He doesn’t like cookies for one thing. “There’s a lot of things I don’t do,”he reveals. “Everyone accepts cookies, and I go ‘No!’ I’m looking for ‘reject all’.”
He’s irritated, too, by one of the banes of modern life – the constant need for big tech to update everything. And being Paul McCartney, he was able to tell Apple CEO Tim Cook personally at the gig last year to celebrate the ‘other’ Apple’s 50th anniversary: “I don’t want updates!” he told him. “I just learned this lot! My feeling is: Look, I bought this device, it’s mine. So it should kinda do what I want.”
And what’s his favourite emoji? Go on – have a guess. “Thumbs up is a big one,” he says. Well, how could it be anything else?
