Paul McCartney

than well done. We went in search of historic Paul Paul McCartney, and he told us about how the fiftieth anniversary of Sergeant Pepper's helped inspire work on his new album, Egypt Station, why he likes to walk the streets of New York by himself, and why the recording of the white album itself now getting a box set fiftieth anniversary release, may not have been quite as bad as Beatles legend has it. Eagypt Station is McCartney's first studio album in

five years. It's gotten rave reviews, though it won't exactly change the truism that McCartney's post Beatles music is most undeniable when the cream is skinned for best of collections your playlists, but the comparison to his peers is instructed. Bob Dylan hit a late career stride producing himself, starting in two thousand and one with Love and Theft for his last three albums, Dylan is stuck to covers of

tin pan Alley standards. The Rolling Stones have relied on the same producer, Don Was for the last twenty four years, and their last album, Blue and Lonesome, was a collection of old school blues songs. McCartney, who describes himself as still very competitive in a recent GQ cover story, beat

them both to the covers thing. He did fifties rock and roll with Run Devil Run, which you should definitely hear, and he did Standards in two thousand and twelve with Kisses on the Bottom Him, which you should definitely skip. The producers for new in Egypt Station include Paul Epworth, Mark Ronson, Greg Kirsten and Ryan Tedder, guys who have made some of the biggest hits of recent years with

Adele Bruno, Mars Beyonce, that kind of thing. If Egypt Station is McCartney's first ever solo album to enter the charts at number one, that's partly because the charts have changed in the streaming era, and partly because the dude is seriously trying. Egypt Station has a fair number of what Paul once called little love songs, except some of them like for You are sex songs, and though he's not usually thought of as making protests or political songs, the album has a share of those two three If

you count the anti bullying song who Cares. You might enjoy the swampy groove of people Want Peace but think it's wishful thinking, although you might also think what's wrong with that? But the song, despite repeated warning, sticks a little harder. It uses nautical themes what should we do with the drunken sailor red sky in the morning sailor's warning to paint Donald Trump's presidency is an out of control ship of state, and it was inspired in part

by Trump's climate change denial. Yes, it doesn't seem like people have connected this with another song you did motivated by climbing change, big boys bickering. Yeah, that was quite a few years ago. But at the same thing, you've been doing your homework an America I have. It's what they paid before. It's an American president again refusing to assign a climate accord. But in this case, George H. W.

Bush in you do so this is an important issue? Well, you know the thing is, I think everyone like me who believes in climate change and that's a lot of people. We're looking at these climates accords and these these meetings. There was one in Japan, there was one in Copenhagen, and you know, as these came up, we'd all be looking at and going, this will be the one. We're going to do something about it. Everyone's going to get together, all the nations are going to agree that, you know,

we've got to figure it out. And then it would fail. Oh, I don't believe it. America and China didn't sign it, and it was so disappointing, you know that. Finally when Paris arrived, it's like, yeah, you can't believe it, you know, and then Trump pulls out of it. It's like, oh, you know, that was like really disappointing. But you know, the thing is, as far as I'm concerning, is a reality. I don't think there's any doubt about that. You know,

we're getting this freak weather. And you could say, as some people who deny climate change say, well, you know, there's always been freak weather. It's always been you know, maybe it's just more of the same. But I don't know. I believe scientists, you know, I don't think they're study a bit harder than I do. And they do have science on their side. They're clever man, you know, but the science does indicate that if you warm up the planet, you're going to get these effects. So yeah, I was

in Japan actually, and I saw in the newspaper. I saw this phrase, despite repeated warnings. I can't remember what it was about now it's just about something else. But I thought, yeah, that's a good phrase, despite repeated warnings, and I made the song up about that. And in the chorus, when you say how can we stop them? Grab the keys, lock them up? Are you thinking of those lacquer up chants directed at Hillary Clinton at the Trump I wasn't, actually, you know, but like it kind

of plays into it, don't you know. You're writing a song, so it's not always that logical. You're just writing a song, so whatever it's, you know, you you start off maybe very logical, and then you give yourself the freedom to roam, you know. So I wasn't actually thinking that. I was thinking what did we do with the drunken sailor, I must admit, And I was hoping no one would spot that rebated my head. Well, the captain wasn't this do

what was now. Shortly after we were done talking, Paul went on stage and played in nearly three hour set thirty nine songs, twenty three of them Beatles songs, three from Egypt Station and the rest drawn from the other twenty four studio albums he's recorded solo or with Wings, except for the one song he recorded with Kanye West and another one he recorded in Night with the Quarryman, his band with John Lennon and George Harrison before the Beatles.

Three hours songs, even for a guy who's not seventy six years old, that is a solid night's work. It's roughly twice the number of songs played lately by the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, both still out on the road and long may they run. And it's not even counting the one hour sound check McCartney played earlier in the night for those who bought v I P tickets.

So that's a grand total of about four hours of playing guitar, bass, piano and during his verse and of George Harrison's Something Yuka Lately for those keeping score at home, four hours. That's about half of the marathon eight hours sets the Beatles put in in Hamburg. In n when

McCartney was just twenty years old. That's pretty remarkable. The rock stars of the sixties used to represent an ideal of freedom for their audience, the freedom to live however you wanted, outside of society's rules, and in their septagenarian years, these guys represent a different kind of freedom, the freedom to keep on keeping on, to be able to do in your seventies what you used to do in your twenties. And no one may be a better or more joyous

representation of that than Paul McCartney. Score one for vegetarianism. McCartney's work ethic may come from his dad, Jim, who put in ten hour days as a cotton broker in Liverpool and also played trumpet and piano, leading a group called Jim Max Jazz Band. It goes without saying that Paul does not have to do any of this. It's not just that he changed the world with the Beatles, creating the context that pretty much all of pop music unfolds in today. And and by the way, I mean

that in the most literal sense. The pension for micro hooks that defines current modern pop is prefigured by McCartney's prodigious gift for melody. Take Band on the Run from There must be four songs worth of hooks packed into the first eighties seconds guitar, synthesizer, bass, vocal, And that's

just the intro. Well, really, it's just the first intro, because then there's another intra section with another set of guitars, sand based and vocal hooks, only this time you could count the drum part two, and then there's a horn fanfare and then the song actually starts, so in a different way than his peers, McCartney has an eternal relevance.

But the other thing that makes how hard he works so striking is that McCartney has long been touted as one of the most wealthy figures in the music industry, with a net worth estimated at one point two billion according to Forbes. He added another fifty four million dollars to that pile last year when he was finishing up the seventies seven dates of his One on One tour, making him the thirteenth highest earning artist in the music business,

on a list topped by Diddy, Beyonce and Drake. There's that eternal relevance again, As you're about to find out, Paul McCartney has a pretty optimistic view of the world, and you can hear it just in the way he pronounces the word Winnipeg. At one point he told us that the Beatles never argued about music. If they had an argument, it was about other stuff. And then later he told us about an argument that they had about music.

Does he contradict himself? Maybe he was also there. I think he knows better than you and I so let me get out of the way, because I've always wanted to say this, ladies and gentlemen, Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney, welcome to inside the studio like Joe or a very special edition of Backstage at the Paul McCartney Show. Okay, and here we are in the Winnipeg. In Winnipeg a few months ago, I'm walking up Park Avenue and I pass a guy coming down the street who looks remarkably

like Paul McCartney Park Avenue in eighty nine street. I think, can't be Paul McCartney. No one with him, no one around did a double take. It was Paul McCartney. It couldn't have been him, but it was. You were just walking down the street by yourself and I walked down streets. Therefore walking down I've heard that, you know, I like to get out and about and people say, oh no, you're gonna have acreuse of security behind you and stuff.

But I'd like to just get out, you know, just so as you feel like yourself instead of like a rock star. Are there times you do like to feel like a rock star? You know, when I do the show, that's good, but then you know you need to balance it, so you get off the stage and maybe you know, like you said, you're walking somewhere. So I like to just get out like I always did when I was a kid. So you know, it's just keeps me sane, and it's it's the same feeling as when I was

okay just walking around, only differences. I get recognized. Everyone reaches in their pocket immediately, you know, but no, I got, you know, quite a lot of freedom much and I I value it. And then you know, if I'm out at a restaurant and stuff with my wife, so I'm like, come over to grab a father, I say not not just now. You know, it's a private moment and most

people are very cool, understand it. So I like to keep that, you know, a private bit of my life, and then I like the other bit even more because it's like, wow, this is cool, the other bit being in public, being on stage. Yeah, you have to like it. You are playing these three hour shows. We just saw a one hour sound check, and that's something that people don't actually know that many concerts are preceded by this one hour sound check. I think you have no set

list for that. Many of those songs aren't in the set, right. Yeah. No, we always do that, I mean because it's good because we need to check the instruments we're going to use, just to make sure they're all plugged in, they all work, and I mean there was a little moment there. Normally doesn't screw up too much, but our keyboard players moog

didn't work. So that's good. That's what the sound checks for, instead of just doing all the numbers from the show, which kind of spoils the show for us because when we get a bit bored doing the numbers again, we just use the same instruments we're going to use, but

we switched the numbers. About we do any ill thing, you know, so we'll do kind of like skillful things, folk things, early rock and roll things, like a little solely Things Midnight Special tonight, which was kind of amazing, and we always do Midnight Specially, Yeah, what we often do. You know, You've got certain songs that go way back before I started even playing, you know. I think that's like a big Bill Brunsi song. So he's an old blues sing and they're just songs you learn along the

way and you like them. So if you get an opportunity or something like this where there's a sound check, all you really need to do is just make sure everything's working. Then you can indulge yourself and play something like that, you know, and it's nice. Keeps it all fresh,

you know. Talking about the songs, you do know, there's something I wanted to ask you about in the set list now, is in spite of all the danger, the first song recorded by the Quarryman in nineteen Oh my god, so it's now sixty years old and that can't be true. That's before my time. I will say, for those just listening at home, he could pull that off, because it does look like he's not old enough to have written really,

but thank you. But that said, the amazing thing that I realized is that, you know, you're performing songs from your your newest record, Egypt Station, and the very first thing you ever recorded, So the audience tonight will hear sixty years parmacurns. It's right, Yeah, yeah, it is crazy, you know. It's um. I've been enjoying playing for that long and when I do that song in spite of all the danger, which was just the first little demo we ever did with the Beatles, before we got a

record contract or anything. So I always imagine us all going to this little studio in Liverpool, all paying a pound each for five pound demo and doing this little song, you know, and it's it's so ancient that it's great for me because it's like what it is, it's like

reaching back into your childhood. So it'd be like somebody maybe listening to this thinking of when they were on the beach when they were one, and it's what a great memory, you know, So it makes it special for me just thinking that, Wow, you know, it goes back really before we ever went down to Ivy Road, before we got a record country, before you've been too Hamburg, right,

I mean we've been to Hamburg. Yeah, So it's a great memory for me and I like doing it because we get the audience involved on that one, you know, and so we have fun with it. So it is nice to be able to say this is the very first thing we ever did, first record I was ever involved with, and then we come right up to date and were saying, now this is like the most recent somehow it seems to fit together, you know. You know. So that's twice now that you've mentioned drawing on those

childhood feelings. First when we were talking about walking around by yourself, and now when we're talking about playing that song in spite of all the danger. Is that a wild spring for you going back to that time or

holding onto that energy. Yeah, you know. It's funny. In the Beatles, even when we were like maybe twenty four years old or something in the height of the Beatles, we often would we were trying to work out something on a song or what we're going to do with the recording, we'd often say, what would we have done when we were seventeen, And we check back to our seventeen year old selves, who we thought like, we're like

the coolest opinion in the world. Well, we would have said, yeah, do it, yeah, do it man, or no way that that's no good, you know, so you always refer to that period. You know, it's your formative period, so when you get a lot of your ideas, and in my case, if you're writing songs, those memories are very rich wells

of inspiration. So you know, I can just think I remember walking along the road with our guitars on our backs, me and John just before we were famous, you know, and me writing let us to people, dear sir, we are a rock combo, and you know we would love to play at your place, you know, So all that sort of stuff. It's kind of like magic for me, I think also because of how far I've come. So you've got that very early innocent period. And then we

get famous with the Beatles. What before that? We go to Hamburg, as you say, and then we get famous with the Beatles, and then we get the American fame, and then we make records and we we go through our various phases. So it's a long, long, long journey. And then right now, you know, here I am, you know, making a new album in Egypt station and long behold it goes to number one in America. You know, you can imagine, you know where partying that night was a party,

We'll see. I wanted to ask you about that. Egypt Station enters the charts at number one, so I guess that if you're keeping score at home, that's your first record to debut at number one since the Beatles, since the Beatles, and the first number one and I believe thirty six years. So what was the party? What was the well, you know, the great thing was after the show.

Sometimes if the guys don't have to load out, if they're all in a place and we're going to play the place tomorrow, which was that occasion, I'll say, okay, let's all get together, have a little drink, I have something to eat, and we get the crowd in so we'll get to hang with each other, because it's a bit like a family, your tour family, you know. So we all get together and then our DJ who comes with us on the tour, he'll DJ some nice dance music and stuff. So we were going to have that

little party anyway. And then suddenly that afternoon, right after sound check, on my phone, I get the message Bank congratulations request count in the morning and I'm just about to go to the dressingroomhich I stopped. Oh wait a minute, hey guys, I announced to everyone every number one. You know, So that party that evening, that was special because we had a real great reason to celebrate. We were going to celebrate anyway, just having a party, but it became

really special. We danced the night away. Baby. I was talking to someone at you label in Los Angeles Capital and the people, well, they said back at you. They said, we're amazed at how hard this guy works, seventy six years old, three hour concerts. But also he's out there doing things, taking advantage of opportunities we bring him. If we bring them to a twenty three year old artists, they might complain. I was like, yeah, let's do it

what I always do. Promoting a record used to be quite boring because they would trot out the same old things. You gotta go there, you gotta do thirty six interviews. We're gonna take you to some place central in Europe where all the European territories can come in and it how it was that was Cologne. They always say you're

going to Cologne and said why Cologne? So well, it's in the middle of Europe, and we'll bring the Italians, the French and Swiss and everybody in and so I kind of did it, thinking well, I've got to promote the record, but it was a deadly ball. It was really like, oh no, not that again. So I kind of rebelled one day and the meeting, I said, look, you know, let's make it something that we're excited about. Because if we're excited, we actually have a good time.

So let's cook up some ideas that are like fun and they're different, and it's not going to Cologne and with endless interviews. So we had some great little things. We had playbacks at the studio in l A. We were working at Henson and we had these little playbacks for my heart. These are great little sessions. We just cranked it up, played the album for them. So that was easy. That wasn't like the cancer to Debbey Road

that you did. And we did a CAVN. We went back to my old school and the little concert there, so you know, it made it fun, it made it interesting, and each little thing was different, and so it was Yeah, capital were happy, but I was happy with the ideas we were cooking up together. You know, as long as I have a good idea, is that we're exciting everyone.

We had a blest. You worked with Greg Kirstin and Ryan Tedter on this record, and Ryan, you did the single for you or some might hear it the way I do, MM, which would be a nought of your word, and we can say it for you. There we go. So give you. If you give someone a present, you don't say this is for you, You go, this is for you, for you, okay, if you h okay. So this is my story and I'm sticking to it, okay.

And yet I was immediately reminded of something I grew up reading a Grill Marcus essay in the Old Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll about the Beatles, where he recalls hearing I saw her standing there on the radio immediately in the days after the first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. He writes, Paul's one two three fuck opening. How in the world did they expect to get away with that? And the thing is is, after I read that, I never heard it another way.

I always heard it, but I'll never hear another way. Now. It wasn't that, But I like it. O. Man. You know, you know, it's a kind of nice thing when people kind of misinterpret what you've done, or they put extra meaning on it. I mean, I did the song Hi Hi Hi, which we'll do tonight, and there's a line in it which I was just kind of writing, just like surrealist lyrics. I was like, so I wrote, I wrote lie on the bed and get ready for my polygone.

It doesn't mean anything was a polygon, you know, but people thought it was getting ready for my body gun. I thought, you know what, that is better if you ever sung it that way. Okay, So you know, sometimes the misinterpretation is actually better than the real lyric. You know. Tell me you've said that the songs you you worked on with Greg you brought into the studio, but when you worked with Ryan Tedder, he wanted to make it up in the studio. Yeah, tell me a little bit

about putting that song for you together. As you say. When I was working with Greg, which was most of the time, I had a lot of songs I wanted to record, so I came in and we worked on them together. But they were ready written. And then there was a period there where Great couldn't work. But I had a couple of weeks off, so I took one of the weeks as a holiday. Uh. And then the other week my manager said, you want to keep the

momentum going. You know, you're on a bit of a role here and if you want to keep it going, you know, I can suggest other people you might work with, you know. So he sent me a few suggestions and I liked what I was hearing that Ryan was doing. I didn't know much about him. I phoned him up and we had a great conversation. So I said, well, come to my studio in England and we'll just figure it out. We'll just think of something, you know. So I said, I've got a couple of songs we could

do these. He said, no, no, let's just make it up because we didn't have long We just had the seven days. It might have even been five days, and so we just made them up and we ended up making up three tracks. When you say make them up, were you writing side by side? Were you trying just had ideas, you know, just throwing ideas out. He'd sort of say, what about yeah do John Dodd? I go yeah. So I go out on the mic and go yeah do. And they think, oh God, put us stick some words in.

Hey you want uanu and I eventually put some words to it, and then we put a beat to it, and I put some guitar on or bass on or whatever, and him and his co producers zac, you know, they just got grooving with the sounds, and I'd get sort of thinking of what I was going to do on the vocal. They throw ideas out and he said, what about that? He said, well, let me try it, you know. So some of the things didn't work. We can those.

It was funny because because of this method of work, the trouble was often that yeah dad u dado becomes yeah, I love you baby, and it's like, this is a bit boring. So I said to Ryan in the middle of the week, I said, hey, you know, man, I said, I'm known for doing songs like eleanor Rigby or you know, Living Let Die, which you've got a little bit of meaning to them, you know. So I said, I'm not sure I can do this. Hey, I love your baby.

Said well, I'll tell you what. So we decided what we would do because we'd carry on like that and then I'd revisit it and come up with what I thought were better lyrics. So that was how how we did it. And made a lot of it up as we went along and thought that was good. But the bits I thought were a bit corny. I just rewrote and then went in and fix the vocal with these new words. You know. A week or sore ago, I

was in Los Angeles. I saw a band, Lake Street Dive, terrifically talented band and the will turn and they do in their set let me roll it, and it's it's great. And afterwards I was talking to them, that's terrific, and they looked at me and they shrugged, Yeah, it's a Paul McCartney song. But then they started talking about for You, and he's got a song out now, and the thing is it's so on trend, like it's got these the

drum track and these little drops in it. So they were like amazed at that classic McCartney melotticism up against the sort of modern touches that Bryan Tyder brought to it. YEA, well that's that's what it was. Yeah, Ryan brought that to it, and say Zach is co producers, a young guy called Zack, and the two of them took care of that side of things. What's about this you know list? So they would take a little bit of my vocal and speed it up and drop it back in and

do these little crazy things. And you know the idea was if I didn't like it, I go, oh, no, way man. But most of the time I go, oh, that's cool. I like that. There were three tracks. Only one has been released from that week, but the others

are pretty good too. And then when you were working with Greg that's over a longer period, and you've said that one thing that charged those sessions was seeing this documentary Howard Goodall did about the rerelease the fiftieth anniversary set of Sergeant Pepper's that you actually had this experience of learning wait, wait, that's how we did it. Yeah, yeah, you know. I mean I wasn't really gonna watch this because you know, it's like I thought, well, I kind

of know everything he didn't tell me. I know about this. But then he started in on Penny Lane. He hooked me in because he started to say, oh, now Paul wants to go higher, but he actually modulates down a key. I'm going, did I, oh, wow, that's good. I'm getting impressed by this young twenty four year olds work. You know. Now I'm intrigued. And he got to this pit where he sort of said, and the penny lane piano. I thought, yeah, okay, I know I played it. I know how that went.

And he said, it's not just one piano. And I'm sitting there going, yeah it is. What do you mean it's not just one? And he saw he starts going back to the multi tracks and he goes, well, there's this one piano. I said, yeah, that's it, and he goes and then they got this little spiky piano and then he plays and there's this very trebling, little ding ding ding piano playing along with it, and he goes on.

Then there's this harmonium, and it turned out I'd forgotten, but we'd put all these layers into this piano that eventually sounds like one very groovy piano, so much so that I believed it myself. So I went in the next day with Greg and I said, why wait a minute. You know, so this is a really great idea. So we started messing with like harpsichords and piano and mixing them and getting them very exact so you couldn't tell it was two pianos, but it was like a hybrid.

That's a kind of interesting way to work, and you've been working for almost a year at that point, So were you going back and adding a retexturing tracks the truth we've been doing a bit of that anyway, because

the rerelease of Sergeant Pepper. I was inspired by how experimental we were and the inspiration that we'd had for Sergeant Pepper, and I thought, yeah, you know, that's a kind of good way to go, is to just not make the same old record, just try and think outside the box and think, you know, what can we do now that that's crazy? And at the same time it comes out just like a song. You know, it's still in the end, isn't isn't some crazy mess. It's actually

Penny Lane, you know, your day in the Life. It's it's a proper song. But the approach was very experimental, So we've been doing a bit of that with Greg. But once I saw that program about it, then started to pick apart some of the stuff we've done, made pianos consisting of a few things instead of just the piano. Were there any particular tracks that you remember that you began to to rewire this way. I think the track that's the opening track, the opening song. I don't know yeah.

I think we cooked the piano a bit there, and also we kind of de tuned it because what was anice was I played it in a certain key and song along with it, but I was finding the vocals a little bit too high and I was just going to struggle with it. But Greg, a good producer, says, why don't we just take it down a bit? You know, it would be easier to sing. And what was cool about it was the piano I had already played now got a little bit darker, and it actually is a

bit one of his sounds. I think I heard it on the Adele Hello. I listened to that, and I thought, this is one of Greg's tricks, you know. But it happened anyway to us, and I liked the sound of the piano we were experimenting as well. And the thing is, you know, it keeps it really interesting to you go in each day and instead of thinking, oh I gotta do this song, I'll but do it good. There'd be a bit of that, but mainly it'll be whatever, don't do it good. We'll mess around, you know, we'll get

something that excites us. We'll put a crazy sound on it. And I got yeah, I can see to that, and it's often that when we did a lot of that in the Beatles. I mean, John was particularly fond of putting an echo when he was doing the vocal so he would do what we called the bog echo in Liverpool. Bog means the toilet. You know, I'm going to bog and the toilet traditionally has got a good acoustic so we would call this little delay on the vocal sound

the bog echo. It just gives you a little bit different feeling than when you're just hearing your own voice, plane and straightforward. It's like your eldest days, somebody with a crazy sound on his voice. Jean Vincent, Yeah, you know whatever. The sounds like your old rock idols. So

it inspires you a little bit. You know. It's interesting you you mentioned the darker sound that Greg brought to that to the piano, and then you talk about John's experimentation, because John was sometimes the one bringing in the darker energy, the slight darkness of you know, like it's getting better all the time. It couldn't couldn't get much worse like that. That's the famous example of a little addition that that just adds a different shadow. Yeah, that's true. I mean

we all brought that. You know, this is the thing well has. You know, over time things become legendary, so you'll get John was the dark one, Paul was a cute one, and that's not true because we each had a bit of that or the other. So George could be very much the one who would bring that in. But you know what I'm talking about it. I always use that example of the song getting better. I go, it's getting better all the time, and John goes couldn't get much worse. So you know, that's a good example

of how he would do that. But often it could be George who do it just as much as John would. And I think you know I would sometimes take John's songs and darken them. I mean, Come Together was a very jolly little song when John brought it in and it was like, no, we're not going to do that. Seventeen year old you seventeen year old, Yeah, we would have swamped it out, man. So that's the point in case where John's thing was, and then I would We had those kind of influences on each other. But the

story sticks that John was the dark one. I was the light one. George was the mystic one, you know, and to some degree that's true, but we each had aspects of all those kind of forces. And Ringo too, you know, he would come in sort of put some drumming on it. That would be like whoa, I mean, I had the song get Back and I'm just going to get back, get Back and he comes up with and that drum makes that record, you know, so say, yeah,

we're all four corners of a square. The Beatles. It was a very democratic group, so we all brought ideas in. Maybe John and I wrote most of the songs, but George wrote some of the best songs, you know, like something you know, some of those songs he wrote. So sticking with this idea of it comes the legends that stick and what we might be missing. Will soon hear the fiftieth anniversary box set of the White album. Yeah,

what surprises are in store for us. So the legend, of course is that this is where things get difficult. There's a lot of tension during these sessions that have spread over I think five months or so, and sometimes the group is recording as individuals rather than as a group. Is the legend they're true? Or do you remember those

sessions differently. You know. The thing is, because it was towards the end of the Beatles all the forces that were later going to break the Beatles up, which is mainly business, to tell you the truth, there was a lot of arguing about business and we didn't like that. We'd always traditionally just left that to someone else. But it got a bit dangerous to do that, and that someone else, it was a different someone else actually was

about to nicke it all. So that got This is a period after Brian Epstein's death and the start of Applecord referring to called Alan Klein. You know, it got dangerous. It was an idea that he was maybe going to take over and take over all the money and all the stuff that we'd ever done, and that made it a difficult period. But you know, the great thing was when we got in the studio it all changed because we were just these four guys again and it wasn't

to do with business. It was now to do with music, and so sometimes we did record separately. I would do Blackbird, but only because it's a solo song I did yesterday, and I said to him me, okay, guys, what are you gonna do on this, and they also, well, we can't. It's the solo song. You know. It wasn't because we were arguing some of the great songs like She's So Heavy, John's I mean, we all got right in there. There's no we were at peace. When we were playing music

in the studio. It was always a thrill from the word go when the Beatles were formed to the word stop. You know, we always got in the studio and even if we were arguing, that kind of got superseded by the music. And you know, we argued like families argue. I mean, in the early days, it was always John and George arguing about who would have his amp loudest. They degree, okay, look, you know we gotta yeah, let's

put it at seven. Okay, and they put it at seven, And then you will be playing and you just see George kind of back towards his up and go nine. And then Johnathan noticed, so he quietly sneak towards his ten, you know, and then that would go, hey, well what are you doing? You know, that might cause a bit of an argument, but other than that, you know that when we played music, it came good, but we're not

going to keep you any longer. It is almost time to I'm in a mispronounsis, but they're going mak chow Mick show. Yeah all, that's what they used to say in Germany. I remember the guy's name, Billy. He was the chefts for like the manager of the little club. We first played him and he used to come, okay, chat. We tried to. We weren't very good at MAC and show. Make show in German. Come on, make a show in German.

But sometimes there's people in the audience hold that signal, so it's still you know, there we are, and that is it. I do have to go. Thank you so much, have to go on MAC show. Thanks very much for chatting nice one. Inside the Studio is an I Heart Radio original podcast. This episode was written and hosted by me Joe Levy. We'd like to give a big thank

you to Paul McCartney and Capitol Records. You can follow Inside the Studio on I Heart Radio, or you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.