‘How far do you want to go back?” In his office overlooking Soho Square in London, Paul McCartney and I sit together on a small sofa, reminiscing. The room smells deep and resinous and faintly ecclesiastical. There is a large green glass candle on the windowsill, and beyond, a view of plane trees, a flood of early afternoon sunlight.
The building was bought by McCartney in 1974, and has long served as a home for his publishing company and other enterprises. On another floor, two members of his team survey prints of his late wife Linda’s photographs, spread out on the boardroom table. An assistant is busy arranging a bagel order, while in the small lift, someone is ferrying a trolley full of drinking glasses up to the kitchen, a convivial clink-clatter echoing through the floors.
McCartney and I are discussing the earliest sounds he can remember, what Seamus Heaney once called “linguistic hardcore”; that is, the sounds that unconsciously bed the ear, providing a kind of aural foundation. The Boys of Dungeon Lane, McCartney’s 18th solo album, has been billed as “a collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared”, and is rich with such sonic detail: skylarks, train whistles, the sound of a bus braking as it draws up to a stop. But the record is no syrupy-stringed exercise in nostalgia; instead an adventurous and youthfully energetic take on guitar music.
McCartney casts his mind back. “OK, well, now we get into dubious territory, because I have a feeling I can remember being born,” he says. “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.” He pauses, and his face is full of warmth and mischief. “I don’t quite understand what that is. I think they had to pull me out with some pliers.”
He returns to the subject of sounds. “There are so many,” he says. “We could be here for a few hours.” At infant school, running indoors with his classmates. At 10 years old, living on Western Avenue in Speke, “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 the family singalongs of Carolina Moon, Red, Red Robin, Bread and Butterflies; a joke told by some uncle-or-other, for which he can only remember the punchline: “Repartee.” He can remember the first time he heard the word “ubiquitous”.
“Lots of memories,” he says. “Really deep. They’d be absolutely meaningless to anyone else, really.”
The curious fact in the life of Paul McCartney is that nothing is regarded as meaningless. As the foremost songwriter of his generation and beyond, every detail of his 83 years has been dissected. Thousands of books about the Beatles have been published; there are now multiple Beatles podcasts, fan forums, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary Get Back. At time of writing, there are at least two screen projects in production: Sam Mendes’ ambitious plan for four interconnected films, and Christian Schwochow’s BBC drama series Hamburg Days, charting the band’s formative time in Germany. And of course there are the songs themselves; so familiar now as to conduct themselves not so much like music, but family.
Almost everyone feels they know McCartney, so to be in his presence is discombobulating. How should one behave? Today he makes it easy – a jovial figure in a blue plaid shirt and dark jeans, idly filing his nails when I arrive. When I mention how much I like the new album, he rejoins with a folksy: “Well, you can come again.”
McCartney says that when he writes songs, “I don’t particularly know what’s going to come out.” He doesn’t think there was “anything conscious” behind the decision to revisit his past – it was just an opportunity for storytelling. The Dungeon Lane of the album title was a birdwatching destination close to the house on Ardwick Road ...The Dungeon Lane of the album title was a birdwatching destination close to the house on Ardwick Road where the McCartney family moved in 1950. “Rows and rows and rows of council houses,” he says. “But they were great council houses.” The marked upgrade was the indoor toilet, but there was also a spaciousness that invoked pride whenever relatives would visit.
On the wages of his mother, a midwife, and father, a salesman for a cotton merchant, there were few luxuries, but there was an upright piano, a radio, and a carpet where he could lie and listen to them both. “Radio was really a source of great information and music – the BBC was very good for all those things. I’m a big BBC fan,” he says firmly. The Boys of Dungeon Lane’s first single was premiered on the corporation’s local radio station, BBC Merseyside.
He remembers listening to “great little classical pieces, and they bore into your brain”. To this day, he can recall the names that appeared in the broadcast’s end credits: “Orchestra conducted by Harry Rabinowitz …” He delivers the name with a kind of delicious potency. “I love radio because it just sends your imagination wild.”
He liked radio plays and comic sketches, the vivid possibility that lay in the unseen. In the late 1960s, he drove up from London to Liverpool in his new Aston Martin. “And I turned the radio on, and it was a play by Alfred Jarry, it was Ubu Cocu [Ubu Cuckolded],” he says. “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.”
Ubu Cocu would inform much of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, which appeared on the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road. “The radio just gave me that,” he says. “I don’t think I would’ve ever read it otherwise.”
It was the radio that brought him rock’n’roll, too: Jack Jackson’s Record Round-up on the BBC Light Programme, and David Jacobs, “who was a very posh BBC announcer, but he was very hip, and he suddenly comes out: ‘There’s a marvellous American record by Ray Charles called What’d I Say?’” My god, thought the young McCartney, what is this? He smiles. “So, radio blowing your mind again.”
When he first heard himself across the airwaves it was 1963, and he was driving his Ford Classic. “I remember exactly where I was,” he says, “going past the Grafton in Liverpool, and Love Me Do came on.” He did not pull over. “No, I just kept going, thrilled. But it was something.”
Some years ago, McCartney produced a book, and corresponding podcast series, with the poet Paul Muldoon. The singer had harboured an early ambition to become a poet, and together they explored the lyrics to more than 150 of his songs with a somewhat literary tilt. Among those was Penny Lane, the 1967 hit in which McCartney draws on his memories of a street in the Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill, where he and John Lennon and George Harrison would change buses at the Smithdown roundabout terminus.
“It was a place that featured very much in my life and in John’s life,” he told Muldoon. “And the nice thing was in writing it, John knew exactly where I was talking about.” He told of the bus shelter, the roundabout, the striped pole of the barber’s shop. “When we evoked it in the song, it was a pleasant thing for John and I to share again.”
Many of the songs on The Boys of Dungeon Lane roam similar territory. How strange it must feel to write about this landscape, this time, without one’s great correspondent. In Ian Leslie’s recent book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, he writes of how after hearing Lennon’s composition Strawberry Fields Forever, McCartney wrote Penny Lane as “a kind of answering song about childhood – and not just his own childhood, but the one he had in common with John”. The two songs were released as flip sides of the same single. “We should imagine them facing each other,” Leslie writes, “deep in conversation.”
McCartney’s partnership with Lennon had shifted before the Beatles split in the spring of 1970, but when Lennon was killed in late 1980, the conversation ended entirely; every song left unanswered. “My collaborator was probably one of the best writers of the century, so, yeah, you’re going to miss him,” McCartney says now. “But when I write [about a specific place], I kind of know he would’ve known it.” So whatever place McCartney might visit with a song, “I can gauge his reaction: that’s good, stick that in.”
“But that’s life: you lose people,” he adds. The Beatles’ long-time producer George Martin once warned him about the sudden loss that comes with age: “Oh, the terrible thing about it is all your mates start popping off …”, McCartney remembers him saying. “Now I’m probably at that age, and I’m very conscious of that, having lost John and George [Harrison] – two big touchstones for anything we’re talking about.”
There is a song on the album called Down South, that recalls the days when he, Harrison and Lennon would go hitchhiking. The three of them would meet on the Chester Road, at the point where all the lorries set off. “George would’ve known exactly what I meant, and where we went, as would John,” McCartney says. “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.’”
McCartney’s collaborator on The Boys of Dungeon Lane was the producer Andrew Watt, a 35-year-old American, famed for his work with Elton John, Lady Gaga and Ozzy Osbourne, and for helming the last two albums by the Rolling Stones (McCartney even appears on their latest, out in July).
Watt had never been to the Chester Road, but somehow they found common ground. Indeed, he encouraged a greater specificity in McCartney’s lyrics. “I was writing a bit in Days We Left Behind where I was saying ‘We met at Forthlin Road …’” McCartney recalls. “And I thought: Should I put that in? I know where Forthlin Road is, but does everyone?” Everyone has a Forthlin Road, Watt assured him. “You don’t have to know or have been to the place, but you get it,” McCartney says.
Watt and McCartney first met over tea at the producer’s studio. The night before, Watt had woken in a cold sweat. Over the phone from Los Angeles, he recalls his thought process: “Shit: I play the guitar right-handed and he plays the guitar left-handed.” He immediately began a frantic online search for the left-handed guitars he knew McCartney played – a Höfner, a Martin D28, an Epiphone Casino. “Just in case he asked for a guitar …”
And he did. “I was talking to him about how you write a song,” McCartney says. “And I said it can happen in all sorts of ways, but one of the things I do lately is just put my fingers on the piano and see if it’s good.” He could try the same approach on a guitar, he suggested. Watt was ready with the left-hander. McCartney put his fingers on the strings and played. “There you go,” he told Watt, “that’s a wonky chord.” He had no idea what it was, but it would become the beginning of the album’s spectacular opener, As You Lie There.
He claims he still doesn’t know what the chord is. “I’ll tell you what, I would like to know,” he says now, picking up the guitar that has been sitting quietly to his left. “I know quite a few chords like … E!” he plays. “A! B G C F … I know all those. But I’m interested in what this is. Someone will know; someone with some musical knowledge.” He plays the chord for me. I wonder what emotion it conjures for him. “Sort of a little bit of strangeness,” he says. “A little bit of romance. Stranger than fiction.”
Watt describes working with McCartney as “the greatest experience of my life”. He was a lifelong Beatles fan, but the singer made sure he never felt overawed. “He knows exactly who he is and what he’s done. When he comes into the room, he comes with no ego. It’s as if he invites you to come up a little bit to his level, and he comes down a little bit for you. He makes it very open.”
Watt has an abundance of memories from their time in the studio: how he was brought to tears by the vulnerability of Days We Left Behind, and how Home to Us – a duet with Ringo Starr which began life with a Ringo drum track – came to sound so strikingly fierce and loud. “We did not have pretty childhoods,” McCartney told Watt; it was important that the song should be just as tough. In the middle of the song’s recording, McCartney went to see Oasis, and was inspired by the enormity of the band’s sound. “Forget about Spinal Tap’s 11,” he told Watt, “the amps are on 12.” He sought a similar immensity.
As we sit on the sofa, McCartney’s conversation flows on: from the album’s other guest turns (Chrissie Hynde, Sharleen Spiteri), to midwives’ housing in the 1950s; how Liverpool’s bus network was arguably as transformative as the railroad in the time of Lincoln; how sometimes he thinks about his parents, caring for him as a newborn in the war, and how it becomes impossible not to relate it to the current situation in Ukraine or Gaza, “where any second, bombs could be dropping, and you have to cope with that knowledge”.
Such dark imagery hangs in the shadows of Dungeon Lane: a sense of life pressing hard, with rent to be paid and “no food in the larder”; husbands getting high, families who “couldn’t take any more / But they had to”. The album seems to draw a line between those febrile days and our own fevered times. McCartney is confounded by much of the current age, its politics, technology, belligerence. “Who would’ve ever thought you’d have an American president like that?” he wonders. “You wouldn’t have thought they could get away with it. Or the secretary of war? That I can’t believe.
“I still think humanity’s got great resilience and great spirit, and most of the people I meet are cool, good, nice people, family people,” he continues. “And I think we all have reasonably similar values. And often, if I’m writing a love song, I think, ‘Oh, this is not local. They’re doing this kind of thing in China. They’re falling in love and having babies.’ It’s a human thing. So I have every hope that we’ll get through it.”
He pauses. “My way is to kind of ignore a lot of it,” he admits. “So there’s a lot of things I don’t do.” Such as? He looks animated. “Cookies!” he says – referring not to biscuits, but to the eternal internet vexation. “Everyone accepts cookies, and I go ‘No!’ I’m looking for ‘reject all’.”
Recently, McCartney played a gig for Apple’s 50th anniversary. “Apple 2, as we call them,” he smiles, the original Apple being the Beatles’ own record label. The singer found himself in conversation with then-chief executive Tim Cook, and seized the opportunity to chide him for the iPhone’s constant need to update its software. “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.”
He picks up his phone and shows me a picture he took of a vase of hydrangeas in his house. “Mainly it’s a camera for me,” he says. Does he use emojis? “Yeah. I like emojis,” he nods. What are his favourites? “Thumbs up is a big one. I have the little cowboy face. And then I get a little bit creative – I will have strong arm, heart, strong arm,” he smiles, hopefully. “I think it looks a little bit like a person.”
