Pushkin. Hi, everyone, it's Paul muldoon. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus.
One thing we used years later in the Sergeant Pepper album was something that I experienced I had as a kid. I would listen to some shows on the BBC, It's the Ken Dot Show, and there would often be a live show, whether it be a comedian. The comedian would come on, came dog, Hello, how are you doing all right? So it's on hey, and there'd be silence and the audience would go arah and laugh and to me that was like, oh my god, what did he just do? And I loved them laughing at the silence because my
imagine was he's dropped his trousers. No he wasn't. On the BBC, He's done a funny face. No, well, what's he done? That to me was the start of a sort of fascination with art of all types. Why did they laugh at that silence? I needed to know and I was never going to find out, so I needed to speculate, and art would let me speculate. You do a comedy with well, don't? I did play around.
I'm Paul will Doon for a while now, I have been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of the era.
And will you look at me? I'm going on to it. I'm actually a performer, that.
Is Sir Paul McCartney.
We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.
It was like going back to an old snapshot album looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a war, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music.
In this episode, day in the Life was in my music room in London, at the top of my house. I had and still have a lotly little room with a daily painted piano, and I'd seen a thing of these guys who'd painted a Cadillac psychedelic. So I rang them up and said, we did do a piano for me in a little bit juribious at first, but anyway, they did it psychedelic painting, and John would come in and we would sort of sit there for a few hours and write things. And one of us nearly always
had the starter. For instance, Ellen Rigby had been my starter and we finished it up together. Day in the life was his starter, which should start by reading the newspapers.
Today a bad lucky man who made the grade, and the news was rather said, I just had to learn.
When John would bring these things in. It's only these days that I would say, was he talking about himself some? It was there some sort of psychological aspect where he's a lucky man who made the grade, And John did round about this time, did get a little bit out in Waybridge doing drugs, and we're a little disillusion because we'd sort of given up playing live. So him bringing that in, I would just go with the picture that
he was painting. He was mind, he didn't notice that changed, and then he blew his mine out in the car. Didn't know the lights of change. This was about a friend of mine particularly called Tara was a Guinness there. We kind of steered clear of heirs and aristocrats, whereas the Stones didn't Stones rather embraced them. A really nice guy, and I say, I used to hang out to go up to Liverpool with him. And yeah, so he died in a car crash and in Chelsea somewhere he'd run
the lights. I think, you know, so he didn't notice the lights of change. So this was in our minds, this was about him. He blew his mind out in the car. So again with the drug references, he blew his mind out, and I think we did think he might have been stoned. But that's what we're talking about. You blow my mind. Of course I told him that kind of way.
Crowd of people, students, they'd seen his face before, nobody was really.
So that was Tara. He's at the lights and he changed. And then so we're now painting a picture a crowd of people stood in stard it's seen his face before, not really sure if he was from the House of Lords. So this is sort of aristocratic thing. But I think once we sort of started off with Tara, it doesn't have to stay with him. It can now be anyone in a car crowd of people looking at who is this guy? Or do I recognize him? Was he that?
Just a crowd of people? Ten away?
John was quite a World War Two buff. He had the works of Winston Churchill. He's a big Winston Churchill fan. I think till later. I think you read a lot about it. Was a good writer, he was brilliant. I've not read any of this stuff John had. They had, they had a complete set. I remember. It's like I said, of encyclopedia, I just had to do. They read so we had the film the War, and I just had to look. Having read the book, it's like a traffic accident,
We have to look. That sort of ties back into that. People turned away this time because they were looking at the traffic accident, and now they've turned away because it's the war. But I just had to look. Love to Turn You On, And that was the conspiracy between the two of us, conspiratorial look between us. As we wrote that Love to Turn It, Oh well, okay, this is going to get people talking. We kind of knew exactly what we're doing and that it was being a bit cheapy.
The other story about it was this this instrumental break musically where I at that time had been looking at a lot of listening to a lot of that. I forgot stuff that would be like Lucy Annaberio and his wife Kathy Beveron, and they did shows that like the wak Moore Hall and Stockhouse and dates to remember Kazang. Yes, so listen to a bunch of that stuff and not so much listening to it, just has just been interested in the concept of it. So I was intrigued by that.
So in the middle of the day in the light, because it was sort of a trippy piece, I wanted to have this extraordinary instrumental moment. So I talked to Jeorge Martin. I said, okay, the instruction. The instruction here is for everybody in the orchestra to start on the lowest note on their instruments and proceed to their highest note on their instrument over the course of a certain amount of barbs. They can proceed at their own pace. However they wished to go because I want the kind
of cacophony of sound. So came the session and George is a bit dubious about shooting a full symphony orcauses is very expensive. We said, that's the Beatles come on, let's go crazy. So and then we started to get fun of the things where he said, what if you're playing all that money? He said, you know, do you want them to dress? Because they will? We said, oh yeah. He said what do you want? Well, you know, dinner suits want the sort of black tie and we said,
well they do funny noses. They did actually, But anyway, so we got to the session and I sort of went around sort of saying to them all, okay, right, thing is crazy starting your bart and I said you can go anyway we want. But they were a bit so George did have to go and rationalize it a bit. So he said to them go from here and be around about there after ten bars, and we round about there after fifteen, so he sort of so they did it anyway, and it was a great sound. We reside
with Berton the Oskar plan, not the Beatles. It encouraged you to think like that, and we were at that period in our growth and we liked the idea that he should be an extension rather than just a continuation.
Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged the comb across my head.
Yeah, and then me I then go back into Fourthland Road, and this is me going to school in the morning. This is my routine. Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a corm across my head.
Found the way downstairs and drank a cup, and looking up, I noticed that I was late.
That would sort of happen every morning to me, and I would just run to the end of my street where the bus stop was barely catch the bus.
Find my coat and grabbed my hat, made the bus and seconds flans.
It was always a rush, and I knew there was a prefect at the other end at the school with the book and he was going to bust me if I was one minute past night.
We upstairs and had a smoke, and somebody spoke, and I went.
Into a dream. You smoked on the upper deck of buses. So if I'm talking about going on the bus and going upstairs, I'm immediately thinking I'm smoking. And the minute I've said the words smoke in the sixties, I'm now talking about cannabis, and the whole upper deck would just be full of cloud of smoke. You know, you would enter that zone.
Did you think of Sorg and Pepper as a big radio program.
In someways kind of kind of you know its scope and its imagination was that and we did use sound effects we found out during during the making of an album like that, you're extending your repertoire and you're imagination, so you're asking for things like a full symphony orchestra. You're asking for things like the sound of elephants running through the jungle. It's interesting.
I mean, we talked about this before, the extent which the radio shows were part of the band in your mind, on the front of your mind, but that that actually might have been quite a strong.
It was a start influence on us all because you know, we'd all listen to radio and you have to use your imagination, whereas in TV it's okay, it's wonderful, and movies the thing, but it's laid out for you. You can see how Henrietta Gibbs looks, whereas in radio Henrietta Gibbs. But that's I live and breathe, and you make your own Henrietta Gibbs. Yes, and that was a great thing. That was why no one could ever visualize Sergeant Beverly. They tried to make a movie of it, did they.
It's like, oh, don't do that, because everyone's already got their own picture, Sergeant Napper.
And as long the Heart Club.
Then the joy of this kind of audio approach was that you made your own pictures. If you heard elephants trampling through the jungle, you saw your own set of elephants. You heard an audience laughing for no apparent reason, you made up the reason. And I think that's a very enriching thing that probably all of us from that generation were helped by sort of synapses that were fired as we sort of, you know, lay on the carpet listening to.
Read news.
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, lankashees.
And then we go back to read the news today, Oh boy, to top and tailored. And now we have to have another verse. We can't have a lucky man and made the grace we have the four thousand holes, which is from the newspaper.
Reported in the Daily Mail, January seventeenth, nineteen sixty seven thousand holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, one twenty sixth of a hole per person. According to a council survey, there were.
Holes in the streets in Like I said, there's four thousand holes in Blackburn.
If Blackburn is typical then there are over two million holes in Britain's roads and three hundred thousand in London.
Oh, the holes were rather small, kinds of comfortable.
Now, I don't know how many.
Older jacks to feel around, So you know, the holes became instead of holes in the road, it became a sort of synonym for people absence, kind of just glassholes.
The inventiveness of A Day in the Life wasn't confined only to the song, but permeated the Beatles approach to the entire album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band.
I was with our roady Mal. We had a big bear of a man was called Mal Evans was our roady, and that's coming back on the plane and he said, will you pass the Sultan Pepper and I misheard him. I said what Sergeant Pepper said, No, Sultan. And I always maintain that one of the things about the Beatles and me and John was that we noticed accidents. Here's the idea we are these four space Cadets, were just these four people in this slightly weird band. But what it's going to do is going to free us up.
So we're not going to be the Beatles, which we are now getting a little bit sort of inhibited by having to be those boys. Will now just chuckle that away and we'll be these guys. So I said to everyone, Okay, now, so I want each of us to come up with a list of favorite people because it so I want, you know, I want us all to know you because we'll have pictures of them.
One of the things that strikes me, and I wonder if you'd like to comment on it, is that being an artist really involves having a sense of the whole, the totality of the project and even the product.
You mean visual artists, any kind of any kind of artists.
Yeah, I mean you had a sense of not only playing the music, writing the lyrics, but you know how those things should look when it gets sided into the world.
I think if you, if you've got a passion for something, you want to be thorough, and I think that's the thing. Sticking with it means that you're actually thinking about it and thinking, well, if we're going to call it's Harder Pepperson House combat, what do they look like? Oh? Okay, well, I've got an idea in my brain. It's just jumped in my brain. But I'll shribble it down, and so that that album was very much like that. But I
do think, yeah, you know that that. I I've always had that totality thing where music, theater performances are concerned. As a kid, I would always do that. Was sitting with my dad just watching TV and a presenter would come on at the stage to a variety shot or something, and I would go, he shouldn't have worn that like gracefuoit. I should have just worn a dark suit. He would have stood out a bit better. I mean, it was
like the Nixon JFK thing. The JFK wore the dark suit and Nixon and it was like, well, he just looked better. So I've always been very involved in that. The Beatles thing, the idea that we had a uniform was sort of one of the original ideas.
I had some very of this uniform existed already or were you designing that there too?
I suppose that are you designing it, yeah, because I don't think you'd used this look you haven't haven't this frock coat? Yeah? With the books, little epaulets and things. I mean, it's it's very beatly. It was an instant. So when the Beatles were going to Hamburg. We had a tailor next door to us, mister Richards. So when I was living in twenty fourth Land Road, like kind of went next door, mister Richards, and you've got some materials chose. She gave us a few nice sholdren to
the guys. We chose a purple sort of wool, the best material for stade, scratchy, little scratchy little wool anyway, so we got purple jacks. And this had come from a very definite experience I'd had when I was eleven in Botlan's seeing this group wear identical clothes and they
won the talent contest. And I still have this really crystal clear image of them walking out of that building to go to the pool, and they were all in gray crew next quarters, Tartan flat caps, twat hats as we call them, and Tartan shorts and each with a row towel and anything else. Five of them. It was like ah, and it was like well mc jay would
later called us the foreheaded monster. That all came from that, that whole sense of wow, if you do that, people are really going to notice you, And I bet it makes you feel homotenous. Yeah, both from with it and from within. So that's sort of what happened with the Beatles.
And it would probably be me pushing that. If you're going to pretend you are Sergeant Papers, only has to be to think, oh, weare this and this is in Sergeant Papers learning sergeant military epaulets, tasitly things buttons, and to me it's what it's what you do to get into character. It's somewhat really And we went down to Less Square where Berman's the costume he lived and who did theatrical and movie stuff, and we all went down there. I arrange a visit for us. We chose our chatterings
and got measured which sort we did. We carried it through. That's what I'm being thorough. It's actually it's a it's a lot of what it's about, but it is at the is that going right through all the way. Day in the life, full symphony orchestra, not just messing around here.
I read the news today.
A battle lucky man who made.
The great.
And though the news was rob said, well, I just had to learn.
I saw the ponograph.
A Day in the Life from the Beatles nineteen sixty seven album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts club Band.
Did that?
Lines changed.
In the next episode, The healing power of music.
Take a sad sound and make it banner. Remember to Lettereal, then you can start to make a banner.
Hey, that's next time on McCartney A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.