The End

Pushkin.

Hi, everyone, it's Paul Molldoin. 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 Plushy.

It was like an operatic undertaking.

We had this little bit and that little bit of the song King Politine Pam.

All these little bathroom window, all these little things.

John I always would tend to finish the frightening into a full song, but at this point we kind of had enough songs for the album. We had these fragments, so we hit upon this idea to put the fragments together into a madly and then it would have its own foldness.

How was that?

And then I wanted an end, and I just happened to think of this little couplet, which in school I had learned that was often how Shakespeare ended with a rhyming couple. And I always thought that was pretty cool that it told his audience at the time, that's it.

Folks, I'm Paul muld don.

For a while now, I've 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 memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most conic figures in popular music. In this episode, the entire Abbey Road Medley Golden Slumbers, carry that with and the end. As a poet, I tend to approach song lyrics as if they were indeed poetry. Sometimes these readings are a stretch,

And the.

BASTI McCartney's choice to conclude Abbey Road with a rhyming couplet. Hearkens back to a long tradition of endings.

For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Robeo.

Shakespeare often marked the end of a scene with a rhyming couplet, which signals to the audience some degree of finality. The couplet indicates the completion of a thought.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

If the two lines and Paul McCartney's the end function as a concluding couplet, I have come to understand the entire Abbey Road medley golden slumbers. Carry that with and then the end as a sort of figurative sonnet. It's not that Paul McCartney ended Abbey Road with fourteen perfect lines in iambic pentameter. There aren't three quatrains following a rigid rhyme scheme leading into the couplet at the end.

Once there was away to get back on.

Paul McCartney was raised towards the end of the golden edge of piano music. Yes, in the mid twentieth century, records were ubiquitous, but it was still not uncommon for families or party guests to gather around the piano in the living room.

You read about Gershwin and it says, you know, in New York at that time, every apartment, every building had a piano. That was the one thing they all had. So I do think a lot of Golden era music came out of that fact. That was the thing that many houses had a piano. So yeah, there were lots of pianists. My dad was our warm his friend at the cotton exchange. Freddie Rimmer was another one for his family, so there was always someone who could sort of.

Play the piano.

And then I think when records came in, then that's how people started to play their music.

Except you know, whenever there was.

A gathering the New Year's Eve do in our case, the boo and the piano were wheeled out, you.

Know, once there was a way to get back.

Home, and the piano would be belting out these old songs that everyone knew like everyone knew them, particularly the Aunties. The Aunties had them down and knew all the verses. But the camaraderie of people all standing around in a room getting drunk singing these songs were something very special.

Once there was a way to get back home.

And I always thought my family was just an ordinary family, But I realize now how lucky I was to have that kind of a family where people were decent, good, friendly people, not rich, nobody had any money, but that was almost an advantage because they had to do things themselves.

Once those away.

To get back on, once those away.

To get back home, sleep really darn do not cry, and I will sing another bye.

In the final days of the Beatles, McCartney took a trip back home to Liverpool. He was visiting his father, who had remarried and was living with his wife, Angela and her daughter Ruth. Even though Paul McCartney didn't know how to read sheet music, he went riffling through his stepsister's piano bench to see what he could find.

I always look in a piano seat because people always have sheet they always used to. Definitely now sometimes it can be empty, but I always look to see. And this time I think either in the pianosy door it might have been up on the music stap. Was this song, Golden Slumbers.

The sheet music here, performed by the Cambridge Singers, was a Victorian piano melody accompanying a seventeenth century poem called Cradle Song. The poem came from a play Patient Griselle, which was written by the Elizabethan dramatists Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle and William Houghton.

Golden Slumbers, fill your I smiled awake when you're a sleeping I do not cry, And I was in a lullaby. That chorus that I've used the course literally is the lyrics to an old Victorian.

Song is isn't we called sampling? Well, it's called stealing.

But because I don't read music, I didn't know what the melody that went with this was.

So I put my own melody to.

It and just took these words. It's turned out to be quite soulful. I think that's what attracted me to those lyrics in the first place. It's like, you know, that sort of consoling the baby or reading kids bedtimes story. I find that something very deep in that, I mean, very human and international.

It strikes a chord with me.

Sleep very dark, do not Cry, and I will sing another of DIY.

When I saw those lyrics golden slumbers fill your eyes, it just seemed like a beautiful way to say, go to sleep, my dear smiles, awake you when you rise. I like that too, that's nice and very optimistic.

You wear last, Sleep very dark, do not cry.

And then I did the other bit.

Once there was a way to get back home, because I think at that point.

I hadn't been home for a.

Long time to get back and here I was at my dad's house. Now this wasn't quite home because it was a house I'd bought him.

You know.

When I got some money. So it wasn't quite home, but it was Liverpool and it was homewood.

It was his home once those.

Away to get back home.

Sleep really darn, do not cry, and.

I will sing.

So you know, here I was seeing this lovely lullaby lyric and thinking of all things warm and wonderful. And you know what's really nice about is talking about this touching a nerve in the human psyche. One of the things I love about writing songs is you'll be watching a film or listen to the radio or something and it'll reappear. It'll appear with someone else singing it, and I just love that it's touched their nerve so much so that they think this would be a good song for this film.

One of the times golden Slumbers reappeared was in the twenty sixteen children's film Sing, where the song was covered by Jennifer Hudson portraying a glamorous and vocally talented animated sheep.

They use golden slumbers to open the thing and it's very powerful, and then right at the end we've had the whole story and everything's worked out, they use it again. So you know, people have said to me, do you remind people doing versions of your song do you think they're distortions of your original meaning? And I say no, no, no, far from it. I'd love to hear another interpretation of one of my songs is a compliment that they thought

What was Blackbird used in recently?

I was used in boss Baby, which is another animation.

Yeah, I haven't seen that either.

Another gap in your cultural picture. It is.

Okay now, I would be too much to say that this is a kind of lumbaby for the Beatles.

I think that's too much to say, right, but you know it. We've been written around that time, and who knows, you know that I could have been feeling.

Down.

I actually can't tell you whether this is true or not, but it's very possible that I was feeling down in London went back up to see my dad. I'm feeling better now I'm in Liverpool and thinking of the troubles down south and thinking, you know, wouldn't it be nice to get home, wouldn't it be nice to have that comfortable feeling again once.

There was away to get.

Back, once there was away.

To get back.

There were, indeed, as bon McCartney said, troubles south of Liverpool about which to feel bad. Down in London, the Beatles were hashing out their business matters and the very future of the band. This was the end of the nineteen sixties. The Beatles were the most famous music in the world, but the tensions brewing in the group were impossible to ignore.

You never give me.

John, George and Ringo wanted to sign a deal with the businessman Alan Klein, but Paul was convinced they would come to regret that decision. The dispute was tearing the band apart. It was becoming a heavy burden to bear.

So that was a heavy that was heavy the business meeting should go in. They were just soul destroying. The would sit around and it was a place you didn't want to be with people you didn't want to be with. And I could just see that this guy was calling to steal everything we put in the bank or invested in Scottish farms or whatever it was was going and this guy was going to have it like he had Sam Cook and he had the Stones.

And I remember asking Mick Jacket for a new one, said what is this kind like?

Because I could see the others were very enamored up for various reasons.

He was was doing a great flannel job on them.

You know, I gave you man, I only seen you man.

And in the middle of the sabres.

I break down.

The band's breakup was so agonizing that McCartney even started to see it as divine punishment. With the paradise of the Beatles success crumbling before him, he wondered if Man's Original Sin could be the blame.

That whole period a year, a couple of years, was very sort of heavy, and it seemed to me, you know, this all tied in very unfortunately with stuff that was out there already, like original Sin, even though my mom, crystalmcathley, we weren't brought up as I thought, it was very depressive to think that you were born a loser.

Fuck, what chance have you got? You know, freak out is you're a sinner?

No lot, I'm a very nice person, I'm a bias idea that because you said, or because some priests or some vicar sets loving.

That, and if contemplating the fall of man wasn't enough, the psychedelic trips at the end of the sixties didn't make these existential questions any easier.

You know, we'd started off smoking part right, and it was just giggles.

It was such fun.

We loved it and it was great and the worst we've happened is you'd fall asleep, and that was fine. But once it got into sort of more serious stuff, you know, lest staying up all night wishing it had were off.

And it wouldn't. It was a bit we were heavy.

Then you were just sort of doing it and there wasn't a slight relief.

It was heavy.

So you know, this idea, boy, you're going to carry that weight was sort of.

Yeah, you know, life's not all joyous. There's a weight to it and you're going to have to carry it.

When taken as two Stanzas in conversation, Golden slumbers and carry that wet seem to be a reckoning with the tenderness and gravity of adulthood. There's a gentle lullaby and then the burden of conflict, longing for the way things used to be, and knowing you can never truly return home. The beginning of the end is a cycle of two bar guitar solos traded off between John George and Paul.

And love.

That was the end, And in the end, the love you tip is equal to the love you make, which is a nice way to end my show.

Now that's how I end my concerts, and it feels very complease.

Yeah, so I'm kind of proud that it is a rhyming couplet, just as I was taught all those years ago on my little literature teacher.

But you know the thing is, you know, I never went on.

To study because I was in the band and the band took over. But that was the path I thought I was headed for with my eye level in literature.

Was this medley a lullaby for the Beatles? Was it meant to capture the sweet, nostalgia, heavy, wet and grand finale of the group. The End is believed to be the last song John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and

When you think about it, it is just a little combination of vibrations and it shouldn't affect our heart strings, but boy it does. And music can make you cry, it can make you laugh, and it shouldn't. It's nothing more than just vibrations with some words attached. And how that happens, I'm not sure, but I know it happens.

I know it happens.

To me. I know it happens to other people, and I'm just proud that my music can do that.

I'm not quite sure how, but it can. I don't mind it being a mystery.

The end from the Beatles nineteen sixty nine album Abbey wrote McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL and Pushkin Industries