Since moving to London five years ago, I’ve had one or two memorable nights out, but the night of Wednesday June 10th 2026 might have just kicked them all to the curb. I was among the lucky audience members at Camden's sold-out Roundhouse, there to hear Paul McCartney discussing his exquisite new album The Boys of Dungeon Lane.
The only other time I’d seen Paul was at the enormous O2 - and from a very, very distant position. So, situated closer to the stage this time, seeing the actual man responsible for so much important music in the flesh was special in itself. It was a feeling clearly felt by the other McCartney devotees - many of whom had been queuing all day in heavy rain.
Going in, we’d already clocked the guitar stand amidst the makeshift lounge that had been erected onstage, next to the right-most of the two green armchairs, and had deduced that Paul might play something at the event - but we really weren’t sure what to expect.
Once the beaming figure of comedian and entertainer Rob Brydon leapt upon the stage we knew we were in safe hands.
A self-confessed Paul fan, an eager Brydon informed us that when he got the request to host tonight’s discussion it took him nearly half a second before leaping at the chance.
Thankfully, he kept his introduction brief before welcoming out out Sir Paul himself.
After lapping up the wails and whoops from the crowd, a smiling Paul - riding high from his 24th number one album (across his whole career) - exchanged pleasantries with Brydon. Then the structure of the event became clear to us.
We were going to listen to the album track-by-track with Paul, and he and Rob would discuss the making, inspiration and music of each song.
Brydon explained how Paul - whom he'd met many years prior alongside comedian Steve Coogan - always put people at ease, as most people encountering him are clearly overawed by his legend. Rob asked Paul if grounding people was something he was actively doing when meeting new people.
"Yes," said Paul, before explaining that he knows what it's like - for he has the same feeling of reverence towards others too.
“Who are you still in awe of Paul?”, asked an incredulous Brydon.
“Er, Bob Dylan,” McCartney fired back. With a tone that seemed to imply that much was obvious.
The guitar was in Paul’s hands early as he began to explain the origins of the record’s first song, As You Lie There which he explained was born out of a typical songwriting starting point for McCartney; “I sometimes start with a chord I don’t know, and see where it leads me.” Paul then strummed the mysterious, elusive first chord of the song, before gradually showing us how he moved the notes around to create the central cycle of the song’s verse.
As with most of the nostalgic The Boys of Dungeon Lane, the inspiration came from Paul’s pre-Beatle days. He told us of memories of walking by the house of a girl that he quite fancied (“She was called Jasmine”, Paul recalled), and furtively glancing up at her window.
“I didn’t want her to think I was, y’know, a voyeur” Paul joked, stressing that he kept his glances brief, occasionally catching a glimpse of her silhouette.
The song then, was an attempt to reconnect with the mind of the young, pre-Beatle McCartney, who didn’t know what his future held.
On the song’s lyric, “Do I ever cross your mind?” Rob Brydon joked that it probably had crossed the woman in question’s mind that she could have been married to one of the most famous people on Earth. "But she played her cards differently," chuckled Brydon.
Next up, Lost Horizon - a track which Paul had originally recorded back in the early 2000s, and had been forgotten, only to be found by his longtime engineer and friend Eddie Klein (who sadly passed away in 2020) when sorting through some old DAT tapes.
“I wrote it on holiday, recorded it and put the tape in my bag and had just forgotten it” Paul explained, before explaining that the entire structure of the original demo was retained when making the stomping new version.
For the emotive lead single, Days We Left Behind, Brydon rightfully described is as a truly beautiful piece of work, Paul then delved back into the origin of song’s nostalgic narrative and told us that the misty lyrics were evocations of memories of the suburb of Speke in Liverpool, where he and George Harrison grew up.
Paul would often walk down Dungeon Lane to get to the nearby countryside and clear his mind, or indulge in some birdwatching - equipped with his Observer’s Book of Birds.
Once, however the young Paul was mugged by two unlikely lads as he was having an evening stroll by the banks of the River Mersey.
“They said ‘give us your watch’, so I did” Paul recollected before telling us that - ever the good boy - the teenage McCartney dutifully reported it to the police. "Did they do anything?" asked Rob. "Yeah," replied Paul - who confirmed that the lads were found, and he got his watch back.
“What an unexpected happy ending to that anecdote” Brydon commented.
The song then, is about all those boys, the ones that started their days in Speke, and ended up in wildly different end points.
But, despite the specificity of the title, McCartney explained that the theme was universal;
“We’ve all got days we’ve left behind” he said. “How lucky was I to meet this guy called John Lennon - who lived in the other side of town - and meet George, and introduce them, and then we knew Ringo. We knew each other from being kids - that’s why the Beatles worked so well.”
Ripples in a Pond led McCartney to talk more about the album's producer and co-songwriter Andrew Watt. Paul had admired Watt for a while before working with him across Dungeon Lane's multi-year recording sessions spanning LA and England.
Despite his pop credo, McCartney explained that by the point they’d got to recording his love song, Ripples in a Pond, Paul was not noticing much of what he’d describe as a ‘modern pop’ sound in what had been recorded so far.
Paul, jokingly (we assume) said to Watt, “Look, you’re supposed to be a big pop producer, give me some pop!”
Ripples, then, was the track where Andrew was given maximum freedom to make it as ‘modern pop' as possible, as demonstrated by the hooky backing vocals, shimmering arrangement and kinetic, upbeat sound.
When it came to the psychedelic fairground of Mountain Top, Paul explained that the trigger point was the Glastonbury Festival - a regular destination for Paul and his wife, Nancy.
“Nancy’s a big fan of live music, and she’s turned me on to a lot of things” Paul said, before telling us that he really loves roaming around Glastonbury with her, and seeing all the different types of people in attendance. But of all the types of people, he’s especially fond of seeing the hippies.
In particular, it's those dancing carefree - completely in the moment. Yes, they're likely stoned too, Paul admitted.
Mountain Top reflected Paul’s imagined sense of the inner life of one such enraptured young girl, wrapped-up in the joy of the moment. The psychedelic arrangement was peppered with with Beatles-recalling tape loops.
For Down South, Paul mentioned the late, great former Beatle, George Harrison which elicited a colossal roar from the audience. Paul told the story - now a bit of a staple of his many Boys of Dungeon Lane interviews - about Harrison sitting on a battery (and subsequently burning his backside when his jean zips connected with the current) on a milk float during a hitchhike from Cheshire down south.
“What was the appeal of ‘down south’?” Asked Brydon, to which Paul - in delightfully Hard Days Night-esque deadpan - replied “Well you can only go in two directions can’t you, north or south. It was warmer down south.”
Closing Side A was We Two, a track recorded using a classic four-track Studer tape machine. This led Paul to remember recording with The Beatles, and the now seemingly ludicrous idea of continuously bouncing down multiple individual tracks (which we’d now call stems) to one track, to free up space and maximise the number of elements recorded. Even the epic A Day in the Life was constructed this way.
Paul explained that despite the progress of digital technology, he still preferred analogue.
“But what’s the difference?” Asked Rob,
“It’s warmer” replied Paul.
We Two then, was chosen to be recorded in this purely retro way, harking back to Paul’s past in a more technical way;
“We made it the same way we made The Beatles’ stuff.” During the playback of the song, Paul pointed out the sound of the tape spooling at the end, underlined its old-school ethos.
For the slinky opener of Side B, Come Inside Paul’s comments were humorously minimal. “Er yeah, it’s a banger…” said Paul.
After a bit of an awkward pause, Brydon asked “is that all you want to say about it?”
“Erm, yeah!,” joked Paul.
The album highlight Never Know was birthed by Paul when he was trying to distill the shimmering, Laurel Canyon-era sound of artists like Neil Young and David Crosby. Rounded off with that quintessentially ‘Paul’ sounding recorder solo near the song’s conclusion, an affecting callback to Beatles’ classic, Fool on the Hill.
“Nancy loves that era of music, and she’s done some of the tours of that area [Laurel Canyon]” Paul told Rob.
“I’m guessing without you though - that’d be a bit weird?” laughed Rob, who then wondered if Nancy had got into any conversations with the other people on the tour: “‘Oh, yes, my husband’s a musician actually…’”
On the album’s ebullient, Ringo Starr-duetting second single Home to Us, Paul told us how Ringo came to be involved, and that the track was put together at a distance. It was triggered by Starr coming in to lay down drums on the original (Paul-only) version of the song.
Ringo however, was unhappy with his performance when he heard the original track. “Ringo hated it at first,” said Paul, which led Rob to drop into a cartoonish impression of a slow-voiced, disgruntled Starr.
However, Ringo warmed up to it when Paul and Andrew sent Ringo the track to record his vocals on it - and thus make it the first official duet between the two remaining Beatles.
Originally however, Ringo misunderstood the instructions and recorded just the chorus, so they sent it back and told him to lay down vocals on the whole thing. Once Ringo’s vocals had been received, Watt and Paul would intercut in between the two on the verses - making for the rollocking surviving Beatles-reunion we now know and indeed love.
To be honest, seeing Paul miming along to each song during playback, pointing out musical bits and waving at audience members giddily made us forget that he wasn’t actually playing anything - but Life Can Be Hard had Macca once again picking up the acoustic guitar to play the song’s yearning melody, teasingly singing the introductory “Life can be…” before cutting himself short.
The nursery-rhyme feel of the song had been around for a while (and was even played to Rick Rubin during 2021’s McCartney 3,2,1 documentary series) the hopeful bent of the lyric and melody was rustled up by Paul during the 2020 lockdown - a time when he and Nancy were spending a lot of time with her niece’s baby. Paul remembered how he'd hold the chords down and let the baby strum the strings.
“Did you shout, ‘DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR?’ to the baby?” jokingly asked Brydon.
First Star of the Night was penned during a day off of Paul’s relentless Got Back tour in Costa Rica. Paul had intended to spend his entire free day languishing by the pool and basking in the sunshine.
Unfortunately, torrential rain meant going out was not an option.
“I was indoors and noticed the guitar and thought - I’ll write a song.”
A perturbed Brydon then asked, “Do you ever stop?” A question which the audience - clearly not wanting the nearly 84 year-old legend to hang up the guitar anytime soon - roundly booed.
“I don’t want him to stop!” Brydon insisted to the crowd.
Rob admitted this was his favourite song on the album, and again a real gem. “Do you get a feeling when you know a song is special?” Asked Brydon.
“Yeah I do, sometimes it’s later when I’m in the kitchen [after the mixing process] or doing something else, and I just [put it on] and hear it as a song, then I’m like ‘yeah, this one is good’”.
On songwriting in general, Paul recalled meeting John Lennon back in the late 1950s, remembering that he’d often tell people he wrote songs and that nobody seemed interested, instead moving on to talk about football.
But when he met Lennon, and told him he wrote songs (we assume during that pivotal first meeting at Woolton Village Fete) John enthusiastically responded "So do I!" And history, took its extraordinary course.
Next up, perhaps our own personal favourite of the album, Salesman Saint. A song directly devoted to Paul’s own parents, Jim and Mary.
“I was born in 1942” explained Paul. “So the war still had another three years. I wondered what that fear [of bombs dropping] does to you - and to my own parents” he explained, before referencing the horror still experienced by those living through war today.
On the title, Paul pointed out that, “Well, my dad was a salesman, and my mum was a nurse and a midwife - but to me nurses are saints.” Paul then looked to the audience and asked, “Right?”
Thunderous affirmation naturally followed.
Paul explained how the song balanced a polyrhythmic structure, with the 3/4 waltz-time of the guitar strum creating a new relationship with the 4/4 of the big band music that came in later.
Paul then made Rob tap out the 3/4 rhythm on his thighs before singing a 4/4 melody atop it, to point out the rhythmic results. "I love it," beamed Paul - a man clearly still enthralled by the joy of creation.
On why he added the big band section, Paul said “I wanted to create the feeling of what they [his parents] would have been hearing at that point on the radio.”
For the album’s gorgeous conclusion, Momma Gets By, McCartney explained that the song was written as a sort of ‘musical theatre’ type exercise in portraying another character.
In this case it was the child of two parents. As the verse lyrics, ('Momma gets by, while papa gets high') indicate, this mother seems put upon and beaten-down by her relationship with a lazy father, but, as the chorus pivots, it reveals she has deep wells of strength and agency, and indeed loves him.
The lush strings and swelling cinematic scope of the song concluded the record - and the night - on a triumphant highnote.
Rob pointed out that album was number one in the UK Album Charts (and 5 in the US) partly because its songs were so extraordinary.
“This has been great, “ concluded a clearly gratified McCartney, “It feels like a gig, but I don’t have to do anything, just play my album then go home!”
