670. Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

Summary

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The Rest Is History — Episode 670: Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

Date: May 14, 2026
Host: Tom Holland
Guest: Paul McCartney
Theme: The formative years of Paul McCartney, the historical context of Liverpool, the Beatles’ rise, and how personal and global history shaped one of the world’s greatest artists.

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Episode Overview

In an extraordinary episode, Tom Holland sits down with Paul McCartney to explore the deep historical currents underpinning his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The conversation journeys through McCartney’s memories of post-war Liverpool, the influence of family and Irish heritage, how the city’s unique character shaped the Beatles, and the evolution of songwriting and creativity in a world emerging from devastation. Alongside musical and cultural insights, McCartney reflects on how memory, adversity, and history intertwine in his work, offering a moving perspective on resilience, creativity, and the enduring power of music.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Liverpool’s Impact on McCartney and The Beatles

[04:19]

• Distinctiveness of Liverpool:
  • Paul McCartney: “I do think the character of Liverpool is a very strong one…with the Irish influence and then coming through the war and having to be happy when bombs were falling.”
  • The city’s humor and resilience were crucial for the Beatles. Their playful repartee, particularly with the New York press, “was because of our Liverpool upbringing.”
• Post-war Upbringing:
  • Liverpool’s recovery from WWII, a shared experience among the Beatles (all born during the war), instilled an ability to “carry on” in the face of hardship.
  • Paul McCartney: “They kept their heads above water by laughing at the whole thing.”

2. Family Background and Social Mobility

[09:09]

• Salesman and Saint:
  • The title of McCartney’s song “Salesman Saint” references his father (a salesman) and mother (a midwife).
  • Paul McCartney: “My father was a salesman, my mother was a saint. Working every God given minute to make enough to pay the rent.”
• Aspirations and Social Status:
  • His mother’s ambitions were reflected in their frequent house moves “upgrading” for better conditions, like achieving an indoor toilet.
  • The pressure (and pride) of not “talking Liverpool” at home, an effort by his mother to help her children succeed.

3. Legacy and Identity: Liverpool’s Culture and the Irish Connection

[12:54]

• Both sides of McCartney’s family have Irish roots, giving Liverpool a unique, almost outsider identity within England.
  • Paul McCartney: “You didn’t want to be lumped in with everyone…We thought we were special.”
• The city’s status as a port made it open to global influences.
  • Record-collecting sailors returning from America brought rare music to Liverpool, fueling the city’s musical revolution.

4. Music as Oral Tradition: Learning, Creating, and Sharing

[15:09]

• Access to new music in the 1950s was exclusive and communal; learning a rare chord or riff was a social event.
  • Paul McCartney: “None of us ever learned to read or write music…We just made it up. But there’s a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff…It’s going from mind to mind.”
• The Beatles’ songwriting often happened on the spot; trust and immediacy were key.
  • Paul McCartney, on studio sessions: “…We’d play it, me and John on two acoustics…George Harrison would look at it…Ringo would tap out a rhythm…and then 20 minutes later, we were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer.”

5. Songwriting Evolution: Inspiration, Literature, and Creativity

[23:25]

• McCartney’s songwriting journey began early; the guitar acted almost as a “therapist,” especially after his mother’s death.
  • Paul McCartney: “You would talk to the guitar and the guitar would talk back to you and it would talk to you in the form of a song.”
• As Paul and John matured musically, their self-belief and ambition flourished (“we were cocky little bastards”).
• The Beatles’ exposure to literature (Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare) at grammar school influenced their songwriting’s evolution from simple love songs to “more complicated, almost novelistic stuff.”
  • Paul McCartney: “Even though we didn’t like it at the time…once we started writing, I started to realize, oh, it’s finding its way in here.”

6. Songs as Novels: Character, Compassion, and Observation

[29:07]

• McCartney is drawn to writing songs about people—real “character studies,” beginning with “Eleanor Rigby.”
  • Paul McCartney: “On the housing estate where we lived, there were always a couple of old pensioners…I would go around and offer to get their shopping for them and stuff…So I kind of wrote Eleanor Rigby from the perspective of one of those ladies.”

7. Resilience, Optimism, and the Wartime Spirit

[30:54]

• Even songs about hardship (like his new COVID-era song) carry hope and buoyancy.
  • Paul McCartney: “I didn’t want to go down the dark route. I wanted to say, yeah, life can be hard. But come on, gang, we’re going to get this together.”
• This reflects a consistent theme, rooted in wartime Liverpool: persistence in adversity and finding joy despite difficulty.

8. On Memory and the Unknowability of the Past

[33:16, 34:01, 36:03]

• McCartney recounts how memories, even vivid ones, can morph over time and be misattributed—even by those who were part of the story.
  • Paul McCartney: “It wasn’t me, it was George. But I think it’s amazing the way memory does that. It can just morph.”
• This segues to a reflection on the challenges of historical accuracy, both in his life and in broader history.
  • Paul McCartney: “That is history. I now appreciate, through all the sort of wrong stories about the Beatles…How can you have accurate history?”

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Liverpool’s Spirit:
  Paul McCartney [04:19]: “They kept their heads above water by laughing at the whole thing. And I think that was something that found its way into the Beatles.”
• On Music’s Oral Tradition:
  Paul McCartney [15:09]: “There’s no paper involved…It was really immediate transference of ideas…It was kind of bardic.”
• On Songwriting:
  Tom Holland [18:10]: “…watching you come up with Get Back, it’s been revelatory…come on, let’s get back…and you realize he doesn’t even know that yet.”
• On Optimism:
  Paul McCartney [30:54]: “I didn’t want to go down the dark route. I wanted to say, yeah, life can be hard. But come on, gang, we’re going to get this together.”
• On Memory and History:
  Paul McCartney [36:03]: “That is history. I now appreciate…all these little things. How can you have accurate history?”

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Important Timestamps

• 03:40: Tom introduces Paul McCartney and expresses personal excitement.
• 04:19: Discussion of Liverpool’s identity and its impact on The Beatles.
• 09:09: Reflection on McCartney’s parents and the meaning behind “Salesman Saint.”
• 12:54: Exploring Irish roots and Liverpool’s outsider status.
• 15:09: Oral tradition of music in pre-digital Liverpool.
• 18:10: The songwriting process and creativity within the Beatles.
• 23:25: How personal loss and music intertwined in McCartney’s youth.
• 25:52: Literary influences (Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare) on The Beatles’ songwriting.
• 29:07: Songs as character studies—“Eleanor Rigby” and compassion in music.
• 30:54: Optimism in McCartney’s songwriting, especially during adversity.
• 33:49: Anecdote about George Harrison, memory, and the unreliability of recollection.
• 36:03: Philosophical reflection on the limits of historical accuracy.

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Conclusion

This rare conversation with Paul McCartney, guided by Tom Holland’s historical curiosity, weaves together personal memory, musical innovation, family legacy, and socio-historical context. It paints a vivid picture of how post-war Liverpool, shaped by adversity, humor, and cosmopolitan influences, became the crucible for a global cultural revolution. McCartney’s warmth, humility, and self-awareness shine throughout—a living testament to the possibility of finding creative hope amidst the ruins of history.

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Transcript

[Tom Holland]

Hello, everyone, it's Tom. Here with news of a rest is History special. I am interviewing none other than the great, the one and only Paul McCartney. He has a new album out, the Boys of Dungeon Lane. Lots of the songs on that album are about his early years growing up in Liverpool. So I'm talking to him about that, about the context, the history that gave rise to the Beatles. And we have a world exclusive here because one of the songs from that album, Salesman Saint, will be featuring in the interview. So incredibly exciting. Enjoy the song, enjoy the interview. This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years now. When you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the house of Wessex. The family of Alfred the Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England.

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[Tom Holland]

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[Tom Holland]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Rest Is History.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And obviously on this show we have talked about all kinds of world historical figures, but today is a first, because it's the first time on the show that I will actually be talking to a world historical figure. And this is a man who is the greatest composer of the 20th century. With the Beatles, he was a lightning rod for one of the most transformative

[Tom Holland]

decades in modern history.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And ever since I was about eight, he has been my personal hero. So this is unbelievably exciting for me. And I am talking about, of course, Paul McCartney.

[Paul McCartney]

Well, that's quite an intro.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Well, it's not too much for you, I hope. Not excessive.

[Paul McCartney]

No. Hey, come on. Adulation, it's always a good at all.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

So we're talking because you've got a new album out. Yes, and this is an album that it's not continuously about it, but a lot of the songs are focused on your childhood, your teenage years growing up in Liverpool. And I was wondering, is this telling us something about what made Paul McCartney who he is? In other words, could Paul McCartney, could the Beatles have emerged from any other city apart from Liverpool, do you think? Was there something distinctive about Liverpool?

[Paul McCartney]

I think so, yeah. I was thinking about it recently. I do think the character of Liverpool is a very strong one. I think with the Irish influence and then coming through the war and having to be happy when bombs were falling. So there was a lot of music when I was a kid, My dad played the piano at home, There were a lot of jokes, and so they kept their heads above water by laughing at the whole thing. And I think that was something that found its way into the Beatles. I think it gave us a good sense of humor that no matter what we were going to do, like arrive in America and have the New York press ready to make fun of us, we gave as good as we got, and that was because of our Liverpool upbringing.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

So you, in the new album, you have this song, Salesman Saint, which is

[Tom Holland]

about your parents, your mum and dad.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And it kind of begins actually in the war, because you were born in 1942, all the Beatles were born in the war. How much of a kind of legacy did the war years leave in Liverpool? And on your kind of personal memories

[Paul McCartney]

of it, A lot. You were very aware of it, not the actual bombing. I think all of us were a little too young to experience much of that. Ringo, who's the oldest, he might have some memories, but I don't. But the thing Is, you know, the feeling that the grownups had, as I say, you know, having to laugh it off. This is a world war. But they're just. They've got to carry on, they've got to talk to each other.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Because that's one of the lines in the song, isn't it? They had to carry on. Yeah, and they did.

[Paul McCartney]

That's what I say, you know, and I marvel at that because now, you know, I mean, people can get defeated by the slightest little thing. So compare that to not being defeated by bombs literally raining down on your city. And you've got to find a way around it. And so when I grew up, there was a lot of joy. I think everyone was just so glad to be out of these terrible circumstances. And my uncles were all great joke tellers and I never heard any of them sort of sitting around going, oh, God, life's terrible. You know, there was none of that. It just. They'd come through it and so it kind of wasn't allowed.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

So the bomb damage in Liverpool, it took a long time to repair, right?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And then you went to Hamburg and Hamburg also was a city that had been wiped out. So when you were kind of making your music, were you aware, were you thinking of, oh, thank God, we're not involved in that? You voided National Service by, I think by about a year, didn't you?

[Paul McCartney]

A year or two, yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Was the fact that the war had passed and you were kind of in a new age and Liverpool was starting to get back on its feet, was that something that kind of served as an inspiration?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, I think so. You know, as I say, all of us grew up expecting to go in the army or national service. So we were all kind of coasting through our teenage years thinking, oh, my God, it's going to happen soon. And then suddenly it was as if God opened the waters and the Israelites could just go through. And that was us. We suddenly, all of that had gone, except for the evidence of it. So where we played football would be on what we call the bomby, which was the bomb site. And we didn't think anything of it, it was just the bomby. But later, then you go, why did we call it the bomby?

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Also, if there's an unexploded bomb, it could.

[Paul McCartney]

But, you know, so that was all around us, but we just lived with it and kind of made it part of our lives. And then we were able to, like our parents, able to kind of laugh at everything.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And today is. We're recording this on international Midwife day, apparently. And so that song, Salesman and saint. Your dad was a salesman.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And your mom was obviously a saint,

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

but she was more specifically a midwife.

[Paul McCartney]

Yes, my father was a salesman, my mother was a saint. Working every God given minute to make enough to pay the rent. The war was nearly over, the peace would soon begin. Living on the edge of the city,

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

that was very important, wasn't it, in terms of where you would. Because as a midwife she would get kind of houses and you kind of

[Tom Holland]

move around upgrading with each house.

[Paul McCartney]

It's true. Yeah, we moved around quite a lot and didn't realize till you were much older that ah, that's why we moved. But yes, you would. And it was often on the edge of the city, you know, but there were nice houses, you know, it was always an upgrade to us because Northern

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Road had a indoor toilet, didn't it? I think.

[Paul McCartney]

Wow. Indoor toilet. Yeah, no, it's true. So we thought we were going somewhere and my mum was very aspirational. Like a lot of good mothers, she just wanted her kids to succeed, do well. I mean, my wife Nancy, she will say to me, you don't talk Liverpool. She said, people love it when you talk Liverpool. I say, yeah, but my mum tried to get us not to talk Liverpool. She tried to get us to talk posh. She thought she was hoping we'd be doctors or something, you know.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

But I guess as a midwife, she's a community midwife, right. I mean she's not working in a hospital so she has to serve all the community. So there would be, I don't know, people in leafy homes and then there would be people with very little and she would have to serve them all and presumably she would know them all.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, no, it's quite, it's something growing up, oh, my mom's a midwife and you don't really think much beyond that. But now you think, wow, you know, just going out and home delivering all these babies and the parents being so in love with you. I mean they would come around to our house and bringing little gifts, a little statuette or something, very cheap stuff. But just to show the gratitude, I have one big memory of her. It was in the winter and it had been a heavy snowfall and she got called up because we had a phone, one phone in the house and she got called to go to a birth. So she got on her bike because they didn't have cars. She got on her bike in this deep snow with her uniform on, with her little suitcase on the back and her little basket on the front. And I have this memory in the street lights of us cycling out through the snow and thinking, wow, that's pretty. That's pretty brave. I mean, you know, just. But you did it. They did it.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

I was asked to ask you this by my wife, who's a midwife, so she will be delighted by absolutely everything that you said there. So just sticking with your parents, two other things specific about Liverpool, maybe what makes it distinctive, related to your parents. So both of them kind of came from Ireland. Ultimately. They're kind of like.

[Paul McCartney]

I think their origins.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Their origins are in Ireland. So was that. That kind of generates a sense in Liverpool that it's not quite part of England. Doesn't. Do you think that was a kind of important part of.

[Paul McCartney]

I'd never thought of it like that, but you're right. Yeah. No, we were from Liverpool and, you know, you didn't want to be lumped in with everyone.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Paul McCartney]

We were like. We thought we were special. And I think at one point it was the second city to London because it was a big port.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Yeah. Fabulously rich.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah. So, you know, we had a great sense of importance which waned through the years, you know. But when I was growing up, you definitely thought Liverpool was a very great, grand, historic place. Used to go down and see all the liners off.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Yeah.

[Paul McCartney]

They'd all be going off to Canada, you know, places like that. And it was only later that you learn that this was slave trade. Yeah, that there was a lot of that. Only thing we would see would be the local Caribbean people. So we would know people that would be descended. We didn't talk about it then, but

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

there was, I guess, a sense of Liverpool as being open to the world as well as to the rest of England.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

So that. What is often said about Liverpool is that it's more open to, say, musical influence, perhaps, than other planes. Do you think that that was true? Because, of course, you know, your love of rock and roll was fundamental to

[Tom Holland]

what became the Beatles.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah. And, you know, sailors came back from a particularly merchant navy. A lot of them that we would know came back from America where they'd been to, like, New Orleans or, you know, down south, and they had records that nobody else had.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

So how would you get hold of them?

[Paul McCartney]

You just, you know, some. You borrow them off somebody. Somebody would know the sailor who had it and the sailor would let them borrow it. You'd borrow it off them. So it was like a little culture where you'd. The record would go around and we'd all learn it.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Because I think for people of subsequent generations, it's hard to get our heads around how difficult it was to access music. You know, we can get it on whatever, just stream it, whatever now. But the idea that it's actually really quite hard to get the physical records or to find the radio stations that it's being played on. And so does that make. Did that make it? If you were interested in rock and roll or whatever, that you were the. You were kind of a self selecting group of people who would know what you were talking about when you met up and discussed these people?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, that was what it was. You would know certain chords and then someone would know an extra chord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra chord and you build up your knowledge through things like that. None of us ever learned to read or write music, which is kind of an interesting fact about pretty much all the groups out of the 60s. I remember talking to Jeff Lynn of ELO, he says, oh, we just made it up. And that's what it was. We made it up. But there's a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff or something and it's just going from mind to mind. There's no paper involved. All of what we did, I mean, you know, in this very studio would be that it was really immediate transference of ideas. And you know, I say if you look back on all our histories and our legacy, it was kind of bardic. You know, a lot of them didn't write it down. You know, Irish music was not really, I don't think, written down. It was just played and you learned it and then you played it your way. So we had a lot of that and that was really nice. For transference of ideas, you would just. We would come in here on Monday morning, let's say if we were going to record during the week, and it would mainly in the beginning be John and I. And we would have just written something the week before, written some songs. And we'd come in and everyone would just gather. 10 o', clock, 10:30 in the morning. And George Martin would say, okay, Chaz, what is it? What are you going to do? And we'd say, oh, well, there's this one. And we'd play it, me and John on two acoustics, we'd play it. George Harrison would look at it and go, okay. Because immediately he knew what we knew. We'd all learned it all together. Ringo would tap out a rhythm kind of thing and we trusted him to know what to do. And then 20 minutes later, we were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Well, I think. I mean, I think for anyone who's seen the Get Back film, watching you come up with Get Back, it's been revelatory in those terms. You're kind of, come on, let's get back. And then you realize, oh, no, he doesn't even know that yet. It's kind of an amazing sequence.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

But presumably that is what. That's what you first bonded with John Lennon over, that you both knew these chords, you knew this music, and that's what happened when you. Well, did you. What was the Walton Fate? Was that the first time you met him? Had you met him?

[Paul McCartney]

First time I met John was at the Walton Fate, yeah, through a friend of mine. My best friend at school was called Ivan Vaughan. He was born on 18th June, 1942, same day as me in Liverpool. And he knew John, so he introduced me to John. But John pretty much knew what I knew. Actually in the very beginning, John was playing banjo chords on his guitar because his mum had taught him those chords. So I would sort of say, well, you know, that could go like this. And I'd show him how we. How it was done on the guitar. But it was all very. Just one on one.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And did you find that as the chorum and formed and then, you know, you became the Beat Silver, Beatles and the Beatles and so on, that as you became better and better and your kind of musically you became more sophisticated, more knowing, was the kind of infrastructure that enabled you to access music and also for your music to be promoted kind of growing up around you, were there more record shops? Were there? Was it easier to get radio stations or whatever? So were you kind of, as the Beatles, moving towards a point where you could have a global market in a way that maybe even Little Richard or maybe even Elvis hadn't back in kind of 1955 or something.

[Paul McCartney]

We were hoping for that, you know, that was the idea that was prevalent at the time, was that you would do what all these other people had done. You didn't quite know how you were going to do it, but I think that's half the battle, is just having that bold ambition. So we just assumed we could do it if they've done it. And we'd learned a lot of their tricks. So we showed each other how to do it and then came down to London and there were certain guys down here, mainly guys that would know the stuff we knew. So I remember the Isley Brothers was something that we knew it was an act. We knew because they did Twist and Shout, which we covered. And then you come down to London and someone say, oh, you know the Isleys. So there was that kind of in crowd thing, you know. Yeah, I know it was a lot

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

of fun, but kind of. So, again, just to reiterate, it's so mad that this music was so kind of exclusive because you had to know. If you knew, you knew and if

[Paul McCartney]

you didn't, you did.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Whereas now you can just kind of absorb it, almost like osmosis.

[Paul McCartney]

No, it's nothing like it is now. You can just hit a button and you can get all the music in the world now. Then it was. I think it made it more special, you know, if somebody had had an interesting record. John's stepfather was a guy called Dykins, had some cool records. So we'd go round to the house and play the records and there'd be things like Carl Perkins. So we'd. That all got into our act. So we'd learn it, get all the words down. And so that was how you learned. It was just. If someone had a record, you played the record and copied all the words out, worked out the chords and the riffs. It was a magic moment. I mean, I learned the riff to that'll Be the Day. Buddy Holly.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

I think Little Richard and Buddy Holly

[Paul McCartney]

were your great favourites. They were part of them. Buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front, which not many of the singers did. Elvis had Scotty Moore, who played guitar for him, but Buddy played the lead and did the riffs. So you. You'd learn off him.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And he wore glasses, which I always

[Paul McCartney]

like, and he wore glasses, which suddenly made life okay for John. John was embarrassed. Anytime he saw girls, he took the

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

glasses off, you know, so you're learning these songs, but then you.

[Tom Holland]

You start to write your own songs.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And I saw you interviewed on a

[Tom Holland]

film that came out recently on Think on the BBC about your lost bass.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And you were talking about how when you have a guitar, you would kind of take it away and sit in a private room and kind of nurse it. Almost like going to a psychiatrist. And you would talk to the guitar and the guitar would talk back to you and it would talk to you in the form of a song. Yeah, I don't think that's what it's like for most people, but clearly that's what it's like for you. When did you discover that guitars could speak to you and give you Songs must have been amazing to realize that.

[Paul McCartney]

I mean, I wrote my first song when I was 14. And I suppose that's when I discovered it. You know, I remember the things that appealed to me about that song. The song was called I Lost My Little Girl. And someone pointed out to me my mum had died not too long before that. So probably at the back of my mind, a therapist would probably say that's what this was about.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

But the guitar was your therapist and

[Paul McCartney]

the guitar was the therapist, really. So, you know, I had a couple of musical ideas. The chords went down, went From G to G7 to C. So there was a bum, bum, bum. And then my melody went bam, bam, bam, bam against it. So you had those little tricks that you just learned just from listening to music and. Yeah. So you put them in and write a song. So once you'd written that first song, it was. It was quite exciting and uplifting.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

So when did you and John start to realize that actually your songs were really good. That they could measure up to the songs that you'd been kind of learning and absorbing?

[Paul McCartney]

I think we always thought they were good. Cause we were cocky little bastards. But as they developed and we started to get a bit more mature in the writing, I think then we started. I remember writing a song. We wrote a song together called From Me to you. And it was pretty straightforward. But in the middle of it, it went to a chord we'd never used before. And I remember thinking, wow, we're getting sophisticated. We're in C to A minor now. Suddenly we're doing a G minor. Wow. So round about that period, you know, we started to think pretty good. And then you'd write a song, let's say, like. I mean, what would always happen is one of us would come in with the idea and then the two of us would finish it up. So something like Norwegian Wood, which was a John idea. And then we sat down and finished it together. I think after that we thought, oh, we're getting somewhere.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Well, because that also. I mean, George introduced the sitar.

[Paul McCartney]

The sitar, yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And it was a detail from John, wasn't it? He didn't want to confess that he'd had a fling to Cynthia. That's what's said. I don't know whether that's true or not, but it's.

[Paul McCartney]

I'm not sure.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

But. So around then, the songs are starting to move from I love you, you love me, she loves you, whatever. To more complicated, more almost novelistic stuff.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah. And I think that's when we started to Think, wow, this is going somewhere, you know. And then you would feel encouraged to write more than just the sort of I Love youe songs.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

I just watched you talking through all the songs in the new album. And you said in that.

[Tom Holland]

That your song salesman's saying to me about your parents that you kind of inspired by the example of Charles Dickens,

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

looking back to his childhood. And the sense I get with you and John as well is actually how kind of how literary you were as well, how informed by reading Lewis Carroll or Dickens or whatever. So was that part of what was starting to feed into the songs around songs?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that made the Beatles special was that three of us were grammar school boys. So we'd had to learn or be exposed to things like Lewis Carroll, as you say, Dickens, my case, like Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and stuff. So even though we didn't like it at the time. Cause it was school, it was like, oh, this is boring. You know, I think once we started writing, I started to realize, oh, it's finding its way in here.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Sorping through.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, it's just, you know, like sponges. We got it all in our beings. And now when we're writing songs, you're starting to realize that like a rhyming couplet, which I would learn about through studying Hamlet from, you know, A level or whatever. And I always thought that was a cool idea of Shakespeare's. He just finished up the thing with, you know, I'm going to do bop and I'm going to bop. Wow. Goodbye. That's the end of that. So I was only years later I realized I'd used that unwittingly. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

make preceding that is Golden Slumbers, which you kind of. It's literally word for word taken from an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, isn't it? Again, something else that you said about the new album I listened to you talking was you've got a song in it about a woman who has married a complicated man, but, you know, she's got the measure of him. And you were talking about how you love to write songs about people. Almost like a kind of novelist is Eleanor Rigby the first in that kind of sequence. And it goes through another day. And Jenny Wren.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, probably. No, I like that. I like the filmic thing. You know, sometimes I'll write and I Love her, which is, you know, a love song. Very straightforward and I think, fine for what it is. But then you. Then I'll start to, you know. Cause you'd watch so many films, read so many books, that this character that I'd kind of known, women like this Eleanor Rigby. Lonely old ladies. On the housing estate where we lived, there were always a couple of old pensioners. And I would go around and offer to get their shopping for them and stuff. And it was very good because they'd start to tell me stories of the war. Or I remember one of the old ladies showing me a crystal radio. So it was great. It was very exciting. So I liked these ladies. So they were always a kind of special character for me. So I kind of wrote Eleanor Rigby from the perspective of one of those ladies. Yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Because there's incredible kind of generosity and compassion in everything that you write. And one other song that, for me, completely exemplified this was a beautiful song. What's it called? Life Can Be Hard and people. And when I say this song, life can be hard, you wrote it during COVID People who haven't heard it may be expecting that it's going to be quite dark and somber. I mean, it is so light and joyous. And that seemed to me the kind of. That is so Paul McCartney that you can get joy out of something as awful as Covid.

[Paul McCartney]

Yes. Well, I think, you know, I think the people who are locked down with their family, who are forced to be with their family, if you love your family, that could be quite nice. You know, you suddenly enforced family time. And I had the song, and minute I heard myself writing, life can be hard, something told me to just say, but then. And then that's when we start to get it together again or whatever. I didn't want to go down the dark route. I wanted to say, yeah, life can be hard. But come on, gang, we're going to get this together. We're going to make it happen, you know, so it's like the Salesman song, you know. You know, they had to carry on. I think it's a theme in my stuff, in my writing that even though stuff is hard, you are going to have to carry on or let it defeat you. And I think that's very much from the wartime years that all of us grew up in.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Carry that weight.

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah. But, you know, as I say, I never heard any of the uncles talk about the war. They would always have a joke, some great joke that they would tell you. And so you kind of learn that even though that had been a terrible period and we'd seen the film of Hitler's bombers clouding the sky, and you'd Seen the Belsen pictures of the prisoners coming out in their striped uniforms, which is why I can never believe people deny the Holocaust. I mean, that is so insane. But, you know, we'd seen all of that and yet the people we knew people were living amongst had gone on and were now so glad to be away from that that now they were making something of their lives. And I think that's why there was quite a rich period for us, our generation, that we could now do good stuff and say, hey, it may be bad, but we can work this out, we can work it out.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Say, I mean, I can understand hearing you say that. Why now so many decades on, from your earliest years, that you might want to go back and look at those early years and see what kind of mirror it holds up to what we're going through now. Can I just end by asking about your memories and the tricks that memory can play. You had a brilliant story about going on a milk float with George Harrison when you were, I don't know, how old are you, 16 or something?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, we were hitchhiking. Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And you've got a great story about a kind of electrical accident that happened to George, but he then he thought that it happened to you. So could you just tell people what happened there?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, well, we. We were hitchhiking down south, which is what one of the songs of the new album is about, and we got a lift from a milk float which was electric. Those are the only vehicles we knew that were electric. Went about four miles an hour, but it was a lift, so we were quite happy. The driver was sitting on the right hand side, then there was a battery in the middle and then there was the passenger seat on the left hand side and George sat on the battery. George Harrison sat on the battery. And everything's going fine, we're going along, we're getting our lift and then suddenly, bang. Ah. And he jumps up. What's that? What's wrong? And he's. He had a pair of jeans with a zip on the pocket and it had connected with the two pocket, I thought not on the crotch. No, it wasn't crotch, no, this is his back pocket. So he jumps up and. Oh, bloody. And it connected up and the battery would give him a. A bolt. And later when we got to our B and B, he showed me. Yeah, he had a great big zip tattooed into his bum. But, but. And the point of what you were saying was. So that was always my story and I told it to people. Then I met Olivia Harrison, George's widow, quite recently. And she was saying, oh, I love that story of you and George going down to Wales and you sitting on the battery and connecting, and you got a scar on your bum. I said, it wasn't me, it was George. But I think it's amazing the way memory does that. It can just morph.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

And it must be even harder for you because you've been so written about. People know things about you that maybe never happened because it's been reproduced in countless books.

[Paul McCartney]

That's very true. And that is history.

[Tom Holland]

It is.

[Paul McCartney]

That is. And I now appreciate, through all the sort of wrong stories about the Beatles. I realize, you know, that Harold with the arrow in the eye. Oh, I get it. It was for the tapestry or whatever, you know, all these little things. How can you have accurate history?

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

This is the perfect note on which to end Paul McCartney. Thank you so much, and thank you, everyone, for listening.

[Paul McCartney]

Thanks.

[Tom Holland]

I think of all the things that the rest is. History has bought me. The chance to interview Paul McCartney is absolutely up there at the summit. I mean, that's something that I've dreamed of doing since I was about 8. And it was an amazing experience to have him come down the steps from the production booth in which George Martin had messaged them when they recorded Please, Please Me Gentlemen. You've just recorded your first number one. And there was Paul McCartney coming down the steps, having a little chat with him. It was just amazing. When I began the interview, there was a kind of slight tightening of the vocal cords, I think. But he was amazingly generous, amazingly personable. I know he's done a million interviews, so he's very skilled at putting interviewers, getting them to kind of feel easy. But it really did feel like a conversation. The only time when it didn't was when Paul started talking about the recording of Norwegian Wood. And I abstracted myself. I suddenly looked down and thought, here I am in Happy Road listening to Paul McCartney talk about how John Lennon wrote Norwegian Wood. And my mind went completely blank at that point. And I had this great lurch of panic thinking, what on earth am I going to talk to him about now? But actually, the interview flowed in all kinds of ways that I wasn't entirely expecting, which is kind of what made it so fun. And I thought, especially at the end when he started talking about the unknowability of the past. And is the Bay of Tapestry adequate evidence for the Battle of Hastings? And it. I kind of felt then that maybe that was a comparison that he'd never previously drawn in any previous interview. I may be wrong on that. But if so, then I feel very proud.

[Tom Holland (interviewer)]

Wonderful.

[Tom Holland]

That of all the things that he could have first talked about his take on the Battle of Hastings, it was the rest is history.

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Why did we really go to war with Iraq?

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And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction?

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I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

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And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the Rest Is Classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures, Iraq WMD.

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In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But they were wrong.

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This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting, and far more dangerous.

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Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons.

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In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made, and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.

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The Iraq war reshaped the Middle east and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies. And its consequences are still playing out out today.

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Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who are at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's former communications director Alistair Campbell, and former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.

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So get the full story by listening to the Rest Is Classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club. Wherever you get your podcasts.