“Why am I doing all these songs about memories?” Paul McCartney asked himself, sitting in front of a small, rapt invited audience at Abbey Road Studio 2 on Tuesday afternoon. “Well, it’s where your big bank of information is.”
McCartney has memories of a life lived like nobody else, and over the course of 90 minutes at an exclusive album listening party, he regaled the lucky few with anecdotes and recollections that have inspired his forthcoming album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane: his early life in Liverpool, including pre-Beatles adventures with John Lennon and George Harrison; teenage crushes; encounters with hard knock scouse ruffians; the sacrifices of his parents. “Quite a few of the songs on this album go back in time,” he said. McCartney also revealed a vocal performance from Ringo Starr on “Home to Us” – the first time the living Beatles have ever duetted on a song. “Me and Ringo, finally!” he said, punching the air at the song’s end.
It’s not like he’s never looked back, but McCartney is clearly in a stage of life where the past is becoming more and more of preoccupation, and a creative source. The flurry of McCartney nostalgia – Peter Jackson’s Get Back; his post-Beatles documentary Man on the Run; his photography book 1964: Eyes of the storm; BBC’s McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass; the Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Beatles biopics – has clearly bled into the themes of his songs in the same way that reuniting with The Beatles on 1995’s Anthology series influenced his 1997 album Flaming Pie. But where that was more of a musical influence, it seems he is returning to his most innocent self as he is about to turn 84.
A Hard Day’s Night was filmed in crisp black and white in London at the height of Beatlemania (Photo: United Artists/Archive Photos/Getty Images)At the very suitable Abbey Road – he joked The Beatles were relegated to “the tradesman’s entrance” while the “posh people” like producer George Martin were in the studio upstairs – McCartney sat on a yellow chair, acoustic guitar by his side, in a cosy living room-like set that brought comparisons to the one he grew up in at 20 Forthlin, Allerton in south Liverpool: a shelf with books, records, and old black and white family photographs; a record player, the Dungeon Lane road sign, and framed drawings and ornaments of birds (in his teens he used to go birdwatching, he told us).
Relaxed and at ease – he spent the time during the tracks endearingly mouthing along to the words, playing air guitar and having a rare old time – even when he stumbled over the odd sentence (“you try doing this!”) or forgot the chords to the intro to one song he wanted to play (“anyone else doing this would have practised”).
The nostalgia has brought with it an openness from the most guarded of superstars. He’s never been one to give away too much of himself, but age has brought new reflections of his pre-fame days that he seems genuinely moved to tell: even when they are, as on the album’s first track “As You Lie There”, about him fancying a girl called Jasmine, his first ever crush, who lived in the block of flats opposite his Forthlin Road home.
“I didn’t know how to approach her,” he tells us. “She did knock on the door once but I was disposed. I was on the toilet. How romantic!” He told another story about getting mugged down the road from Dungeon Lane near the Mersey shore. “The trouble in Liverpool is if you don’t make eye contact, they don’t like it. But if you do make eye contact it’s ‘what you looking at?!’” he said in exaggerated scouse accent. They stole his watch. “I reported them to the police and they found them. I said, ‘I’m taking up karate,’” he promised so he could get revenge. “I never did.”
Paul McCartney playing drums in 1979 (Photo: Linda McCartney)Elsewhere, the memories tug at the feelings. Like on “Days we Left Behind”, the only released song so far, the wistfulness works so well because we are so invested in his history. When he told the audience about hitchhiking with George and John before the track “Down South” – “must have been my idea; that doesn’t sound like John” – and the subsequent japes jumping lifts in milk floats in Wales and Chester, he enjoyed it, but it felt poignant.
“I still get a little bit emotional talking about John and George,” he said. But he admits to fallible memory. He told the story of one milk float ride, and of George Harrison getting his jeans zip caught on the battery that powered the float. It exploded; McCartney did a fine impression of getting electrocuted. “I spoke to Olivia Harrison and she said ‘yeah, George told me that story about you getting your zip stuck in the battery.” He smiled. “I maintain it was him.”
Most movingly of all was McCartney talking about his parents. “I’ve never written about my mum and dad before,” he said. But “all the turbulence in the world, Gaza, all these places”, got him thinking about how he was born during the Second World War in 1942, and what his parents must have gone through in not just surviving, but raising him. He evoked Hitler’s bombing of Liverpool, and empathised with his dad, a fireman, and his mum, a nurse, doing their bit to help after the devastation. “Imagine any minute now you’re expecting bombs to fall,” he said looking to the skies.” I wondered what that would do to you.” It’s a subject he’s rarely directly addressed.
There were other themes: the obligatory love song about his wife, Nancy, “Ripples in a Pond,” and a charming story about how a new-born baby relative of Nancy’s inspired “Life Can be Hard”, written during Covid. He’d play the song to the baby, “and they’d bash the guitar like this”, he said, mock hitting the instrument. One song, the trippy “Mountain Top”, was inspired by Glastonbury and the “hippy mood” of the people there. “You know, magic mushrooms talking to you.”
Paul McCartney, left, and John Lennon on the film set of “Help”, Bahamas, March 2nd 1965. (Photo: William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton )He enjoyed being in Abbey Road – his son James was in attendance – and told one story of how The Beatles blew up a battery using an oscillator making Magical Mystery Tour; he also mentioned how he’d recorded “Down South” with a four-track tape machine for the first time since The Beatles days. He spoke about working with producer Andrew Watt at his basement studio (that used to belong to Charlie Chaplin). Watt has worked with The Rolling Stones but comes from a pop background. “I had one of those days – what am I doing working with Andrew, he’ll take my song and make it sound like Justin Bieber!”
But his Ringo track felt like the encapsulation of the project. He said three Beatles – John was the exception – grew up on a council estate. “Americans think that sounds like Downton Abbey,” he joked. But they were happy. “We didn’t care that it was rough. It didn’t matter to us. It was all we knew.”
McCartney would go on to know an awful lot more, but right now he seems happiest back in that place, an artist reckoning with age and his life journey in the comfort of his past.
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