Between Abbey Road recording sessions, Paul McCartney gave an interview about his creative process. Speaking with Melvyn Bragg for the first episode of The South Bank Show, McCartney discussed his early resistance to formal training, the origins of songs, and rebuilding his musical life after The Beatles broke up.
Early Influences & Experiences
On his family’s musical background: “There’s a few musical people in my family. My dad was a pianist by ear and trumpet player ‘til his teeth gave out and got false teeth, so he had to give up the trumpet. He was a good pianist, but he would never teach me because he felt I should learn properly. It’s a bit of a drag issue ‘cause I never did end up learning properly and he could have taught me, but I suppose he did actually by ear ‘cause people sort of say I do chords a lot like he used to do and stuff, so I’m sure I picked it up over the years.”
On his resistance to formal training: “I’ve never had to sit down and be forced to do it. The nearest I came was piano lesson. By the time I was being shown that, I’d written little songs of my own — it was only just one chord plunking away. But I didn’t like to have to come back to the discipline, just that kind of hard, rigid discipline of this sort of gonna make me into a great pianist. I wasn’t interested really. I just wanted something to plunk along with.”
On switching from trumpet to guitar: “I got one, but it worked out that I couldn’t sing and play trumpet. That was the complication. So I never really got into that. I swapped it for a guitar which was right-handed and I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t play that, ‘cause I’m left-handed. I got it home, and said, ‘I’m never gonna make it,’ ‘cause there’s the wrong hand. Gotta use the hand you that you’re good with to vamp with. It’s how people normally do anyway ‘cause your sort of rhythm’s there. So I worked it out, turned it around, turned all the strings around, and I was off. Then I wrote a little song on that guitar, it was the first song I wrote called, I Lost My Little Girl.”
On learning about harmonies from his father: “My dad probably was a very big influence, ‘cause as kids he would play the piano and stuff. And he’d teach us things like harmony — just not officially, but he’d say, ‘You hear when I’m singing that, now if you keep singing that, and I sing that, that nice little noise you’re hearing is called a harmony.’”
On getting into rock music: “There was just a big electric atmosphere, it’s that thing where the kids know about something that the grownups don’t know about and that gives it a totally magic air... I loved Elvis. He was my boy, he was the lad. And Little Richard was the other.”
On his father’s opinion of rock: “My dad didn’t particularly like it, but he’d had all stories about how his dad didn’t like his music ‘cause he was playing things like ‘Chicago, Chicago...’ And his dad was saying, ‘Oh, tin can music, son.’ ‘Cause his dad was a brass band player... and he didn’t like what my dad was playing. So my dad was very tolerant with all of that. He knew I had to do something funny that he wasn’t gonna like. So he was ready for all that... He’d say, ‘That’s very nice son,’ but never really liked it.”
On his father’s opinion of his music: “He would say things like, we wrote, ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ And he’d say, ‘Son, there’s enough of these Americanisms around, couldn’t you sing, yes, yes, yes? Just for once. Couldn’t you...’ ‘You don’t understand dad. It can’t be yes, yes, yes. It can’t. It wouldn’t work.’ ‘Are you sure?’ And all that. But that’s great. That’s dads, isn’t it? All that, ‘Can you sing yes, yes, yes?’ [laughs] That’s so typical.”
Beginning of The Beatles
On making music with John Lennon as teenagers: “We used to just sag off school together. And go back to my house where there wasn’t anyone, in the afternoons, and smoke Twinings tea in one of my dad’s pipes. It didn’t taste bad at all actually. [Laughs] We’d sit around smoking that stuff and having a little bang on the piano... It was mainly Buddy Holly stuff ‘cause he had the least chords. And we wrote about a hundred tunes then... before actually getting Love Me Do published.”
On the hundred songs before Love Me Do: “They were sort of just like a period before, it was like an apprenticeship, almost, kind of self-imposed apprenticeship where we then eventually got one, ‘Love Me Do’ I think was the only one came out of that whole period.”
On The Beatles’ early motivation for writing original songs: “You could do songs like A Shot of Rhythm and Blues or something, but then Gerry and the Pacemakers would be doing it and you could do Hippie Hippie Shake, but then The Swinging Blue Jeans would be doing it... People would start doing the numbers you were famous for and you couldn’t stop ‘em ‘cause they could buy the record too and just learn it. So what happened was... we thought, well, if we write a couple, maybe someone will notice us a bit more and we can then say, ‘Dear sir, we have a rock and roll group. The average age of the group is... The members are bass, guitar, drums...’ And then you can say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’ve written a few original compositions.’”
On The Beatles’ artistic identity: “We were a bit conscious of our image. We didn’t just want to be like everyone else... You’d meet people like Derek Jewell from The Sunday Times and he’d be saying, ‘Well what about Cliff Richard, and all that?’ And we felt like the generation after Cliff... People wrote him songs and he was an idol and that sort of stuff. And our thing was a bit anti that.”
On The Beatles’ ambition and touring in America: “We were trying for all those possible levels. It wasn’t as if we were just some dumb group, ‘Oh gee, we’re a hit!’ We were trying for all those things... There was John writing his own book, trying to be a literary person. We were trying to impress the people from The [Sunday] Times and Europe across... We were trying to not come out as just dummies. We were trying for stuff that was a bit poetry, and a bit artistic, and a bit new. We were trying to be big in America, for instance. You had a lot of groups who were really top here had gone over to America and played 5th or 20th on the bill to Tommy James & the Shondells, who were big there, and never heard of them here. So we said, ‘We’ll wait ‘til we get it a number one. Then we’ll go to America.’ Because that’s the way to do it—which it was—because we arrived and we were huge.”
Creative Process
On the process of making Eleanor Rigby: “I just sat down at the piano and got that first line about ‘picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been—’ That came outta the blue. So I didn’t have a name—Daisy Mackenzie or something—just a name I knew I didn’t really like—but had this bit about, ‘picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.’ So then I had to explain myself. Now, what’s that about? What’s she doing? I had to sort of think what do those words say? Picks up the rice in the church—oh good—so she’s a lonely old lady type. And you can sort of continue it from there. I remember walking around Bristol one night looking for a name, ‘cause I wanted a kind of really nice name that didn’t sound wrong, sounded like someone’s name, but sounded different enough and wasn’t just Valerie Higgins—it was a little bit more evocative, and I saw a shop which was Rigby’s, and I thought, that’s a great name, Rigby, ‘cause it’s kind of normal but it’s got a little extra thing to it. And then Eleanor just sort of worked with that. So then I got, ‘Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice at the church where a wedding has been—’ And then it just all kind of flowed from there.”
On where music comes from: “It’s funny in a way, trying to talk about music ‘cause music isn’t words. If you could really talk about it, it wouldn’t be music. You don’t sit around like you’d imagine poets do, sort of striking out words in millions of manuscripts, ‘The boiler. No, the oven.’ And gone through all the words and the permutations. I’ve never done that, I can’t explain it, nobody knows how to explain it, but it’s like it comes in out of the blue, it sort of comes at you. I’m sure the funnel that is coming through has a lot to do with it, your little computer in here, my computer’s sort of heard Billy Cotton Band Show going back there, Cole Porter there, and this there, it’s sorted millions of influences through to Chuck Berry... So I suppose it’ll filter out a lot of stuff I don’t like. And that must be very much what my songs are about. But I’ve always felt like it’s not me doing it. Not in a sort of strange way like Beethoven’s coming to me, I’m writing new sonatas, he’s contacted me. But it sort of just comes, all the best little bits of melody.”
On writing Yesterday and other songs: “I just fell outta bed one morning and had the tune Yesterday. I don’t know how I got that, I just had it, and thought I like that one, that’s a nice one. And I didn’t have any words. So for weeks, that was Scrambled Egg, [singing] ‘I scrambled egg, baby, I love your legs...’ And Michelle was a joke, French tune, [imitating french]. That’s all that was. And then after a while you said, ‘Well, that’s quite a good tune, let’s put some real words to it.’ When I’m Sixty-Four, I had that song when I was a kid, about 16, but never did anything with it ‘til I was about 24, and then we put words to it… It’s like magic. It is a kind of magic. You’re just plunking along on a cord and you decide, for some reason, to reach out and see what’s there, see what you can pull down.”
On daring to start crummy: “You can do it any time, this will probably be crummy, but you can just, ‘[Singing] Melvin Bragg, Was in the parlor, And he said that he was going to have some tea—’ I mean that’s not very good but you could work on that, ‘[Singing] Melvin Bragg was in the… And he… Gonna have some tea, Will you have some tea with me? Melvin Bragg—’ It’s not a good name. This is the only problem [Laughs]. I mean, that’s not good, but that’s the kind of thing it comes from. You just dare enough… I mean, that’s silly, I shouldn’t dare to do that. I’m showing what a lousy writer I am. But that’s what it all comes out of. You just plunk around anything. It can be bad three times, but then maybe the fourth time, that a little bit of inspiration will come on that, and just the one little thing will turn that into something good.”
On not learning to write music: “There’s a sort of vague suspicion that it would change how I do it too much. I think if I knew, officially, how harmonies go—I remember there’s a thing where you mustn’t double a third in harmonies. It’s just not supposed to be a good thing to do. And there’s certain things which I, on purpose, once I heard you’re not supposed to do it, I wrote like that just ‘cause why aren’t you? Who says you’re not supposed to do it? You know? And it’s that kind of feeling, the minute you get the expert view—expert views are only good for a few years. I mean, the world was flat once. That was the expert view once. And if you listen to that, you would’ve stayed a dummy.”
After The Beatles
On John Lennon’s criticism: “When the Beatles split up, John did a big kind of thing about me saying, ‘It’s all muzak. It’s a load of rubbish and you couldn’t rock if you tried.’ Which was all rubbish itself, of course, I think. But it did put me off for a while. I must say I’m a bit gullible like that. I kind of listened to people like that. And I sort of listened to it for a few years there and used to think, ‘I can’t write another of those soppy love songs. God, I keep writing those. I’ve gotta get off all that. I gotta get hard and rocking.’ But, in the end, I sort just say, ‘I’ve gotta be myself. If I like all that, well, I just gotta do it.’ It’s the worst to be ashamed of it. I mean, It’s bolder to say, ‘What the hell. I like it.’”
On forming a band with his wife, Linda: “It was the only thing I could think of to do. And that’s about the craziest thing you can do, bring in your wife who’s not had any previous musical experience. But, I didn’t think I was stacking the odds. I thought I was doing just what I knew how to do. The only way I knew how to do it was just get back on the boards again with anything. I was feeling like the longer I waited with another day of no work, another day of nothing to go to, the more I was just getting stagnant. It’s a bit like after an operation where you wanna rest, but you’ve gotta push it ‘cause your body’s just gonna go downhill over time. And I just had to push something and so I just thought, well, the man who sings every day is gonna have a better voice ‘cause he’s practicing every day. So I just hit upon the idea of getting a bunch of people around me who would play, and we could just go out, and it didn’t matter if it was big time or small time or anything, it’d still be just playing.”
On the band’s adjustment period: “We went out, did a couple of lineups and Linda was there on keyboards, terrified out of her mind all the time. Poor kid. I tell you. And she was getting picked on, something silly. People couldn’t accept that we wanted to go back to square one and just become a little skiffle group again. And when you start off—I mean, Ringo got blown off the first Beatles session ever ‘cause he wasn’t considered good enough. He turned into, I think, one of the sort of best rock and roll drummers around. But the very first session, they thought he was rubbish. And we were back at that stage. Where Linda was absolute rubbish. But you don’t always form groups with absolute technical—in fact, I was thinking that if I formed a kind of super group, like something like Blind Faith with Eric Clapton, Ginger, and Stevie Windward, a lot of stars that, that would have its own failings too because it’d be so intense that would have to break up. And so we just decided to go this other funky way and just thought, ‘What the hell? We take a van up the motorway and we’ll just do what I always used to do. At least I’ll get to sing. At least we’d be with people. At least we would get outta this little room.’”
Other Observations
On watching TV: “I’m a telly person. I’m not ashamed of watching telly. I mean, a lot of people don’t buy tellies ‘cause they think it’s a wicked influence and stuff. But I watch it a lot. I get a lot of education off telly, I think. I read bits and pieces, but not much. I’ve kind of been getting into a bit of science fiction and stuff, but I don’t really read much. I used to do most of my reading when it was that little period in my life when I used to take a pipe up until the top deck of the bus and sit there feeling like Dylan Thomas or someone, reading, Beckett plays, or Tennessee Williams.”
On overly academic critics: “I don’t feel like it should be that analyzed. It’s not that precious, but I don’t mean anything bad by that. I just don’t like the way you’ll get some fellow who’s never been into it all his life. He’s been into classical or the rock critic now for the New York Times, John Rockwell, is the opera critic, or was until a year ago, and then went straight into rock and rock. Well, I can’t see that at all. I mean, he starts judging rock and roll by opera, ‘In the first verse he states this…’”
Source: The South Bank Show (aired January 1978)