Paul McCartney is in love again and he’s also released a new album that’s a love letter to the golden era of songs he grew up listening to in Liverpool. Alan Corr meets the once and forever Beatle in London and talks about his old band (not Wings), growing up in Liverpool, and the future
“I took piano lessons when I was 21 and they wanted to take me back to the basics but by then I’d written Eleanor Rigby and I did not want to go back”, says Paul McCartney. He raises his eyebrows in mock surprise and an impish smile plays across his curiously youthful face. This is classic Macca – an acknowledgment that hey, he’s just a normal lad from Liverpool but hey, let’s face it, he’s also a Beatle.
I am sitting across from McCartney in an art gallery (where else?) in the basement of a five-star boutique hotel in London, the perfect location for a keen painter and the most arty Beatle. We are here to discuss his past, his present, his future and the release of his cheekily titled new album, Kisses on the Bottom. As a life-long Beatles fanatic, it is hard for me not to stare but McCartney has had people gawping at him for half a century now. One more lovesick fanboy isn’t going to make much difference.
The animal rights activist, Everton/Liverpool FC supporter, proud owner of a £750 million fortune, father of four, most successful songwriter in history, and veteran of over 3,000 gigs, is in chipper form. Moments before sitting down, McCartney, dressed simply in black jeans, trainers, a black waistcoat and crisp pink shirt, could be seen chatting to a line of young women from his record label. Then he turned, shimmied across the room and did an Elvis-style hip roll before taking his seat. There are not many men six months shy of their 70th birthday who could do that without looking desperately sad but we are talking about a Beatle here and this Beatle is in love again.
Last October, Macca married New York businesswoman Nancy Shevell in a private ceremony. Nobody can begrudge him his happiness after his last experience of matrimony. And so he is back, as the song goes, singing silly love songs and what’s wrong with that? Sinatra may well have called George Harrison’s Something the best love song ever written but it is McCartney’s Yesterday which is the most covered song of all time (over 2,200 certified recordings) and it is McCartney who has penned some of the most memorable tunes of the last 50 years.
He is also the Beatle who has been invited back in from the cold. Unfairly accused of breaking up the band in 1970, as a solo Beatle he was cast as the syrupy song and dance man while Lennon got increasingly combative, George went into the mystic, and Ringo clowned around. And let’s face it, Wings, despite Alan Partridge’s protestations, were never the band The Beatles could have been. McCartney reacted sometimes wilfully to living in the shadow of the most loved musical act of all time but over the past few years he has sealed his reputation with marathon gigs, a willingness to celebrate his first band as much as anyone else, and by still acting like a Beatle after all these years.
Macca and Nancy
Just in time for St Valentine’s Day, Kisses on the Bottom reaffirms McCartney’s place in global affection but the new album is also a chance for him to pay his own respects to the music that captured his young mind and influenced The Beatles. These are the songs that Paul’s dad Jim used to play on the upright piano in the front parlour when he was growing up in 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool; songs that would seep, static and all, from the valve radio in the sitting room.
Among them are Fat Waller’s 1935 hit I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Right Myself a Letter (from whence Paul got his new album’s title) and two originals – My Valentine and Only Our Hearts – which more than confirm that he can still pen a deceptively lovely song. These oldies are the songs that influenced The Beatles, from the early rock ’n’ roll to Paul’s vaudevillian flights of fancy on ‘The White Album’. Given that his own compositions are more famous than most of the tracks on Kisses on The Bottom, it’s quite a gesture.
“These songs were always in the background when me and John were writing”, he tells me. “Growing up we had my dad’s era of songs, or in John’s case his mother’s era, and when we came to write this informed our rock ’n’ roll songs, so Honey Pie was one I was writing that was definitely harking back to that era of Hollywood, that and Here There and Everywhere. We were influenced by all these old songs and when John and I got together, I said to him ‘oh I’ve written a couple of songs’ and he’d say ‘and I’ve written a couple’ and that got us interested in each other and that started us talking about other music and I’d say I like these old songs.”
With The Beatles
The idea of recording a bunch of covers actually dates back to the very early days of The Beatles. Global stardom, Beatlemania and having a family just seemed to get in the way all the time and more recently, every time Macca attempted to finally get round to making his love letter to the golden era, lesser mortals got there first.
“I never got round to making the album because we were writing Sgt Pepper’s, we were writing ‘The White Album’, so years later every time I came to make the album someone else would make one. I’d think ‘now’s the time’ and then Robbie Williams came out with one. I thought I can’t do it now because it’s gonna look like I’m jumping on his bandwagon and then that dust settled down and then Rod Stewart comes out with one. Oops, I can’t do it now and then just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, Rod released his next one. I decided not to worry about that and just go and make it.”
So he entered Capitol Studios in LA, the iconic building where Nat King Cole and Sinatra had recorded, and began work with singer Diana Krall, wife of his old mate and fellow Liverpudlian Elvis Costello, and a crack team of jazzers, and producer Tommy LiPuma. For the first time ever, McCartney sang in a vocal booth without the crutch of a guitar or piano but he found his sweet spot easily.
“We did it very organically, we didn’t write charts and make it too stiff. We just wanted to figure it out”, he says. “I was using a big voice, shouting out ‘heaven, I’m in heaven!’ (he bursts into song). I said ‘oh god man! That’s terrible!’ I felt very uncomfortable because they were all playing great and I was singing badly so then I started to think of people I liked like Fred Astaire and even some records I’d made in the past where I get in on the mike and sing softly and there’s no effort. That was the key to unlocking this. I suppose I was channelling Fred Astaire and Fats Waller. I’m a big fan of Fats because I love the way he doesn’t take it seriously and the fact that he’s a consummate musician. Afterwards I realised that’s how we recorded with The Beatles – we’d bring in a song that nobody knew, figure it out, kick it around and record it.”
His choices range from More I Cannot Wish You from Guys and Dolls to standards like Bye Bye Blackbird. McCartney used to do an instrumental version of Home (When Shadows Fall), which memorably featured in The Shining, before he formed The Beatles and he has vivid memories of his dad singing It’s Only a Paper Moon on that piano in Forthlin Road. “Dad was a great guy. He was an amateur musician and he’d learn by ear so when I expressed an interest in music I said ‘will you teach me that?’ And he said no, no you’ve got to learn properly. That made it difficult for me and I had to go to piano lessons and I had to go three times in my life to learn properly and I couldn’t get with it because it wasn’t what I was hearing in my head as a young kid.
“I was with an old lady, the typical piano teacher, and she gave me homework and I hated that. I tried again when I was 16 and it was a younger guy and he kept taking me back to five-finger exercises and I’d already written When I’m 64 at that point . . . You know, I still feel like some kid from Liverpool. How I relate to things is how I related then. I formulated my personality back then. It’s pretty strange but it is great.”
Over half a century later and he’s still got a boyish wonder about him. Paul’s version of The Inch Worm, a song made famous by Danny Kaye in the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen, may be a bit too close to The Frog Chorus for comfort but Kisses on the Bottom is a sweet little album from a man who seems content as he enters the autumn of his years. Anybody who’s seen McCartney live will know that retirement is not an option.
“I must admit that I didn’t expect to be singing and playing at the level I am now but it just kept being interesting, it just keeps being fun”, he says. “We were in South America last year and the crowds were just crazy, just the best. You come out on stage and you get that reception . . . it’s very difficult to retire. Every time I go out on tour somebody says is this your last tour? I don’t know if they’re hoping it is. I think it’s a rumour spread by some unscrupulous promoter – come and see him! It’s his last tour! It’s your last chance! I always say at the end of my concerts, see you next time. And I mean it."
