Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

Pushkin.

We're so sorry, Uncle Louder.

So we look at Albertbert. Yeah, I actually had an Unclouder.

We're so sorry, Uncle loud. Unclouds worked with my dad in cotton firm. Dad was a salesman.

Cloud I think was there was something a little higher.

We certainly had more money, but it was you know, our family gatherings were always very great, very friendly, very humorous occasions, and they would get pissed.

A lot of the.

Uncles were were referred to as piss artists and the drink a bit.

Yeah, so sorry, Ocao, that.

Was standing on the table and recite the Bible shit, you know.

Keep everyone straight in the way of the light.

And Paul will do. And I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era.

And will you look at me?

I'm going up to I'm actually a performer.

That is sir Paul McCartney. We work 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.

Actual, I'm a songwriter. My god, well that that crept up on me.

This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music in this episode, Uncle Albert, Admiral Halsey. In nineteen sixty three, their manager Brian Epstein, relocated the Beatles' base operations to London. By the end of the nineteen sixties, when Paul McCartney wrote, Uncle Albert, his old life in Liverpool seemed far away.

I'd moved away from Liverpool quite firmly by this point, and I wouldn't see the family anywhere near as regularly we might go back up for a.

New Year's Eve party.

After I moved to them, I would sometimes throw a New Year's party with the idea of reassembling family in the good times.

So there were a lot of jokes, a lot of songs, a lot of wit, a lot of play. All my uncles I can't think of war wasn't funny. But it became less and less as time went on. They became less and less. They died, so the older generation, my Dad's generation, and they're all gone now.

So yeah, there was a nostalgic feeling for you know that, and also this feeling of I've moved myself so far out of what you know, what Uncle Albert knows about the cotton exchange, and then getting up on the table and getting drunk smoke in his pipe.

As Paul McCartney left his family behind in Liverpool, he was also leaving behind an era of war and poverty that framed the decades of his youth, the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties.

This is a part of Liverpool, a city of nearly a million inhabitants and one of the biggest ports and shipbuilding areas in the world. During the war, it was a target for air raids which laid waste whole areas.

Even though they were surrounded by these bombed out areas, the McCartneys weren't directly affected by the war. Paul's father worked at a cotton mill and as mother was a nurse. It was a striving working class home. But the effects of the war were still very much felt in Liverpool, a city which throughout the nineteen fifties had rationing protocols in place and was littered with bomb sites on Rove toward From all.

Of that, it was just like as if it had just gone just because of the circumstances of your life.

Yeah, it had kind of gone mentally and were also physically. It was like I was in a film. You'd just see that set drift off.

Now the City Council are rebuilding fast. One of the most interesting achievements of the council was to establish, over one hundred years ago, public wash houses, where even now, thousands of Liverpool housewives bring their weekly wash.

On top of the physical distance McCartney had put between himself and his hometown of Liverpool, he had also taken up a lifestyle that was light years removed from his humble beginnings.

We're so sorry, un.

We're not really saying I'm sorry, but I'm saying you wouldn't get where I am now.

I'm like in the Beatles, I'm like living in a big house in London.

But isn't that also saying I want to be with you. I'm so sorry.

If we course you any pain, there's no one left from home.

But I believe on a round.

It's just that a distance.

I'm sorry. I'm not only by that, but you don't want that distance. You yourself don't want that distance.

I don't didn't all you didn't well I didn't.

That's like saying you don't want anyone to die.

I mean, it's it's an unfortunate reality, that distance it must have unless you still live with your moment. Dad, I gave you the one and all Bobulous.

The people's wild popularity meant that Paul was living an extravagant life in London. His uncle Albert didn't I actually do much calling, but his aunt Jin would occasionally make the trip down to check in.

I mean, you go back into the sort of bosom of your family when when your auntie comes to visits and.

You just do sort of all the old things.

And so I was just sort of sitting around playing a bit of piano, and then in the evening swedes Horda sit around, have a drink and play cards and just talk and everything, you know. And she originally come down. One of the reasons she'd come down was to talk to me about the sin of smoking pot. She'd been sent down. She was they called it, used to call her control. She'd been sitting down as an emissary.

And who would have sent her on.

The family family? Who knows which one or how many? I don't know, really, I think you know the word that just got back that our pole's going a bit wild in London, you know, so go and check him out, Jenny.

In the song, McCartney sings the first verse in a tone aligned with his younger, naive self, new to London far from home, apologizing for his departure, promising to get in touch only if he has something to report.

We're so sorry when we have name day, We're so sorry.

Oh cool.

Me so so, I'm saying I used to hear from him a lot, and so now I'm saying we haven't heard a thing all day. So sorry, I'm but anything should have movie show to get a ring. It's just that sort of dismissing thing, you know. Back pap pat on my head, will be in touch.

Neither speaker of the song seems to talk down to his relatives, who cannot possibly understand his fabulous new life in the city.

Yeah, I just imagine him now as a character.

There is uncle.

But we're so sorry, but we haven't done a bloody thing all day. And I go into character now and I'm now some sort of very arrogant POSHTI.

Now I'm so sorry, La, I'm doing a bloody thing all day. You know, we've got another life here and I'm afraid you know, I'm dismissing you.

So the act, the shift and accent is enough. I'm trying to remember and I how you do this?

Yeah, that's right.

By the time Paul McCartney wrote the song Uncle Albert in nineteen seventy, even the shine of London had worn off, the stodgy business meetings, the decline of the Beatles, fame and glamour losing their luster. The band had once carried the playful, spontaneous energy of their hometown, but at the end of the decade this playfulness had fizzled out. Once again, McCartney would have to create a new life.

So then it goes into hands across the water, across the This is more now bringing you, This is more Me and Linda, hands.

Across the water, you know, American and British, Okay, heads across the sky.

I like that in which a lot of hands across the water, heads across the sky.

It's interesting, it works for Anglo American.

Yeah sort of thing, couldn't.

As the song shifts into a kind of carellesque nursery rhyme, another character enters the scene. This is William Bull Halsey, an admiral in the American Navy during the Second World War, and who you can tell from interviews, wasn't an especially nursery rhyme like character.

We have not done our playing. We have branded them. We have drowned them, and I just planning to brand I ad a drowned.

It does Halsey in any particular?

Is that a historical I don't know where I got any more Halsey from.

I wasn't just read it or heard it somewhere. And then now I'm in.

I'm in this arrogant upper class person who's got into the song and I'm just having fun with it.

I like that. Yes, he goes, So it's a playlet.

Basically, it's a little plays elect But I suppose if this was a play you could give these lines to different characters.

Before he couldn't get the thing.

I had another, and I had a couple of the plane. Admiral Halsey needs a birth to get to see, but the narrator is ignoring him, is too busy having a cup of tea and some butter pie.

The border wouldn't also put it in the pie.

I like that.

Amid the bleak negotiations surrounding the Beatles and the impossibility of returning home to Liverpool. McCartney found the humor and lightheartedness he remembered from his extended family in his new wife Linda Eastman.

But is this little pats you get around? This is me and Lenda at that time, and this is sort of what we do.

What did you do? Want to the rigid systems we were living in.

Mine was apple business, alan Cline takeovers all of that, and I always I wanted to buy my own Christmas tree. I didn't want the office to send a Christmas tree around for me. That's a great, great web I did. I started actually doing that, or chopping one down in the forest in the back of the land rover. It's not as strong as a rebel, but we were rebellious rebels with a sense of humor that we were doing

Then there would be cooking and stuff.

We got vegetarian and now she's going to figure out how we do turkey. So we do a macaroni turkey. It's like mac and cheese, but it goes solid and then we'd slice it and we'd have that. I saw a macaroni tack.

Paul and Linda managed to cut free and establish not only a new family, but a creative partnership. The song Uncle Albert, credited to the Husband Wife Jo, was number one on the American charts. In their new, more bohemian lifestyle, Paul and Linda could also establish the family life they wanted,

It was a good up front of me, and I thought everyone's families were like that.

John and here about his family life. He was like, oh my god.

Yeah.

So I really praised my family for that because it was so rich.

It really was rich. And I think a lot of what I am and a lot of what I write about a lot of what I think is that, you.

Know, I often say I've met a lot of very amazing influential people in the world.

Yeah, Sacha bark Palm, you know, the one and only Sir Paul McCartney, Thank you so much.

Oh some of my Liverpool family I think was was better. We just had something going for them. Besides this niceness and besides this good mamics. Sense of humor was ridiculous. They were always being funny. And my theory is because they just got out of a bloody war. Unlike a lot of their friends. They just escaped being bond.

H with THO.

Sorry but we had a name.

With those, Sorry.

Uncle Albert, Admiral Housey from Paul and Linda McCartney's nineteen seventy one album Ram.

But we have a plenty name Monday.

We're so sorry aloud but the candles out the oil and were.

Going away.

In our next episode.

And if I said I really knew you well, what would your answer be?

If you readed day.

Here Today a love song to John Lennon had a conversation that never took place. McCartney A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries