670. Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

I am interviewing none other than the great, the one and only Paul McCartney.

He has a new album out, the boys of Dungeon Lane. Lots of the songs on that album are about his early years growing up in Liverpool, so I'm talking to him about that about the context, the history that gave rise to the Beatles. And we have a world exclusive here because one of the songs from that album salesman saint will be featuring in the interview, so incredibly exciting, enjoy the song, enjoy the interview.

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internal customer data from March 2026. Hello everyone and welcome to the rest of history. And obviously on this show, we have talked about all kinds of world historical figures, but today is the first because it's the first time on the show that I will actually be talking to a world historical figure. And this is a man who is the greatest composer of the 20th century with the Beatles. He was a lightning rod for one of the most transformative decades in modern history. And ever since I was about eight,

he has been my personal hero. So this is unbelievably exciting for me. And I am talking about, of course, Paul McCartney. Well, that's quite an intro. It's not too much for you. I hate it. No, not exactly. Hey, come on. Adulation. So we're talking because you've got a new album. Yes. And this is an album that it's not continuously about it, but a lot of the songs are focused on your childhood, your teenage years growing up in Liverpool. And I was wondering,

is this telling us something about what made Paul McCartney who he is? In other words, could Paul McCartney, could the Beatles have emerged from any other city apart from Liverpool, do you

“think? Was there something distinctive about Liverpool? I think so. Yeah, I was thinking about”

recently. I do think the character of Liverpool is a very strong one. I think with the Irish influence, and then coming through the war and having to be happy when bombs were falling. So there was a lot of music when I was a kid. My dad played the piano at home. There were a lot of jokes. And so they kept their heads above water by laughing at the whole thing. And I think that was something that found its way into the Beatles. And I think it gave us a good sense of humour

that no matter what we were going to do, like arrive in America and have the New York Press ready to make fun of us. We gave us good as we got. And that was because of our Liverpool upbringing. So you in the New album, you have this song Salesman St. which is about your parents, your mum and dad. And it kind of begins actually in the war because you were born in 1942, all the Beatles were born in the war. How much of a legacy that the warriors leave it in Liverpool

and on your personal memories of it? A lot. You were very aware of it.

“Not the actual bombing. I think all of us were a little too young to experience much of that.”

Ringo who's the oldest. He might have some memories. But I don't. But the thing is, you know,

But they're just, they've got to carry on. They've got to talk to each other. Because that's one of the lines in the song is that they had to carry on.

“Yeah. And they did. That's what I say, you know. And I marvel at that. Because now, you know,”

I mean, people can get defeated by the slightest little thing. So compare that to not being defeated by bombs literally raining down on your city. And you've got to find a way around it. And so when I grew up, there was a lot of joy. I think that everyone was just so glad

to be out of these terrible circumstances. And my uncles were all great joke tell us. And I never

heard any of them sort of sitting like, oh God, like terrible, you know, there was none of that. It just, they'd come through it. And so it kind of wasn't allowed. So the bomb damage in Liverpool took a long time to repair, right? Yeah. And then you went to Hamburg and Hamburg also, was it? Yeah. It had been wiped out. So when you were kind of making your music, were you aware, were you thinking of, oh, God, we, you know, we're not involved in that,

“you've avoided national service by, I think, by about a year, didn't you? Yeah, it was the fact”

that the war had passed and you were kind of in a new age and Liverpool started to get back on

its feet. Was that something that kind of served as an inspiration? Yeah, I think so, you know, as to say, all of us grew up expecting to go in the army or national service. So we were all kind of coasting through our teenage years thinking, oh my God, it's going to happen soon. Yeah. And then suddenly it was as if God opened the waters and the Israelites could just go through. And that was us. We suddenly, all of that had gone except for the evidence of it. So where we played

football would be on what we called the army, which was the bomb site. And we didn't think anything of it was just the army. But I was later than you go, why did we call it the army? It's also, it's an unexpected bomb. But you know, so that was all around us, but we just lived with it and kind of made it part of our lives. And then we were able to, like our parents, able to kind of laugh at everything. And today is, uh, we're recording this on, um,

international midwife day. Oh, wow. And so that's song, um, salesman and saying, your dad was a salesman. Yeah. And your mom was obviously a saint, but she was more specifically a midwife. Yes. Father was a salesman. My mother was a saint. Working every God given it to making not to pay the rent. That was really over. The beast would soon begin living on the edge of the city. That was very important, wasn't it, in terms of where you would live,

because as a midwife, she would get kind of houses and you kind of move around upgrading with each house. It's true. Yeah. We moved around quite a lot and didn't realize till we were,

“what's older, that, that's why we moved. But yeah, she would, and it was often on the edge of the city.”

You know, um, but there were nice houses, you know, it was always an upgrade to us.

It was all right. It had an indoor toilet, didn't I think. Wow. The indoor toilet. Yeah, no, it's true. So, you know, we thought we were going somewhere. My mom was very aspirational, like a lot of good mothers. She just wanted her kids to succeed, do well. I mean, my wife, Nancy, she will say to me, "You don't talk liveable." She said, "People love it when you talk little." I say, "Yeah, but my mom tried to get us, not to talk liveable." She tried to get us to talk,

"Push." She thought, "She was hoping we'd be doctors or something." You know, but I guess that's a midwife. She's a community midwife, right? I mean, she's not working in a hospital. So, she has to serve all the communities. So, there would be, I don't know, people in

and presumably, she would name them all. Yeah, no, it's quite, it's something growing up,

“oh, my mom's a midwife. And you don't really think much beyond that. But now, you think,”

you know, just going out and home delivering all these babies and the parents being so in love with you. I mean, they come around to our house and bringing little gifts a little statue at or something. Oh, it's a very cheap stuff. But just to show the gratitude, I have one big memory of her. It was in the winter and it's been a heavy snowfall and she got cold up because we had a phone, one phone in the house and she got cold to go to birth.

So, she got on a bike because they didn't have cars. She got on a bike in this deep snow

with a uniformant with a little suitcase on the back and a little basket on the front. And I have this memory in the street lights. I was cycling out through the snow and thinking, wow, yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty brave. I mean, you know, you just, but you did it. They did it. I was asked to ask you this by my wife who's a midwife, as she would be delighted by absolutely everything. You said there. So just sticking with your parents,

two other things specifically about Liverpool, maybe what makes it distinctive related to your parents. So both of them kind of came from Ireland, ultimately, they kind of liked their origins. That origin is a family in Ireland. So was that kind of generates a sense in Liverpool that it's not quite part of England, doesn't it? Do you think that was kind of important part of

had never thought of it like that, but you're right. Yeah. No, we were from Liverpool. And you know,

you didn't want to be lumped in with everyone. Yeah. We were like, we thought we were special.

“And I think at one point it was the second city to London because it was a big port.”

Yeah, fabulously rich. Yeah. So, you know, we had a great sense of importance, which waned through the years, you know, but when I was growing up, you definitely thought Liverpool was a very great ground historic place. You used to go down and see all the line as off. Yeah. They all be going off to Canada, you know, place like that. And it was only later that you learned that this was slave trade. Yeah. That there was a lot of that. Only thing we would see

would be the local Caribbean people. So we would know people that would be descended. We didn't talk about it then. But there was, there was, I guess a sense of Liverpool is being open to the world as well as to the rest of England. Yeah. So that what is often said about Liverpool is that it's more open to say musical influences, perhaps them, other place. Do you think that? That was true because of your, you know, your love of rock and roll was fundamental to what became the

beat. Yeah. And, you know, sailors came back from particularly merchant navy. A lot of them, we would know, came back from America with their been to New Orleans or, you know, it's down south. And they had records that nobody else had. So how would you get hold of them? You just, you know, some you borrow of somebody, somebody would know the sailor who had it and the sailor would let them borrow it, you'd borrow it off them. So it was like a little culture where you'd, the record would

“go around and we'd all learn it. Because I think for people of subsequent generations,”

it's hard to get our heads around how difficult it was to access music. You know, we could get it on whatever, just stream it. No, whatever now. But the idea that it's actually really quite hard to get the physical records or to find the radio stations that it's being played on. So does that make, did that make it if you were interested in rock and roll or whatever, that you were kind of a self-selecting group of people who would know what you were talking about when you met up and

discuss these people. Yeah, that was what it was. You would know certain chords and then someone would know an extra chord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra chord and you build up your knowledge through things like that. There was none of us ever learned to read or write music which is kind of an interesting fact about all the pretty much all the groups out of the 60s.

what it was we made it up. But there's a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff or something

“and it's just going from mind to mind. There's no paper involved. All of what we did. I mean,”

you know, in this very studio would be that. It was really immediate transfer and some ideas. And you know, I say, if you look back on our histories and our legacy, it was kind of barric. You know, a lot of them didn't write it down. You know, Irish music was not really, I don't think. Written down it was just played and you learned it and then you played it your way. So we had a lot of that and that was really nice for transfer and some ideas. We would just, we would come in here

on a Monday morning, let's say, if we were going to record during the week and it would mainly

in the beginning be John and I and we would just written something the week before. Written some songs and we'd come in and everyone would just gather 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock in the morning. And George Martin was so good chance, what is it, what are you going to do? And we'd say, over this this one and we'd we'd play it, man John on two acoustics would play it. George Harrison would look at it and go, okay, there's immediately a new what we knew is we'd all learned it all together. Ringo would

tap out a rhythm because I think and we trusted him to know what to do and then 20 minutes later we were recording that song that no one had ever heard included in the producer. Well I think I mean I think for anyone who's seen the get back film watching you come up with get back and it's been revelatory in those terms. You'll come on it's get back and you realize oh no he doesn't even know

“that yet it's kind of an amazing sequence. Yeah but presumed that is what that's what you first”

bonded with John Lennon over and then you both knew these chords, you knew this music and that's

what happened when you were teaching what was the Walton Fate was that the first time you met him

when you met him. The first time I met John was at the Walton Fate through a friend of mine, my best friend at school was called Ivan Vaughan. He was born on the 18th of June 1942, same day as me, in Liverpool and he knew John so he introduced me to John but John pretty much knew what I knew. Actually in the very beginning John was playing banjo chords on his guitar because his mum had taught him those chords so I would sort of say well you know that could go like this and

show him how it was done on the guitar but it was all very just one and one. And did you find that as a corpsman formed and then you know you became the beat silver Beatles and the Beatles and so on. That as you became better and better and you're kind of musically you became more sophisticated more knowing. Was the kind of infrastructure that enabled you to access music and also for your music to be promoted kind of growing up around you, were there more record shops, were there

was it easier to get radio stations or whatever so were you kind of as the Beatles moving towards a point where you could have a global market in a way that maybe even little Richard or maybe even Elvis hadn't back him kind of. We were hoping for that you know that was the idea that was prevalent at the time was that you would do what all these other people had done.

“Didn't quite know how you were going to do it but I think that's half the battle is just having”

that bold ambition. So we just assumed we could do it if they've done it and we'd learned a lot of their tricks so we showed each other how to do it and then came down to London and there were certain guys down here mainly guys that would know the stuff we knew. So I remember the Iasley brothers were something that we knew was an act we knew because they did twist and shout which we covered and then you come down to London and someone say oh you know the Iasley's so there was

that kind of in crowd thing you know you know it was a lot of fun but kind of so again just to reiterate it's so mad that this music was so kind of exclusive because you had to know if you knew you knew and if you did it there was now you can just kind of absorb it all my slightly asmoses.

No then it was I think it made it more special you know if somebody had an interesting record John's stepfather was guy called Dickens had some cool records so we'd go round to the house and play the records and there'd be things like Carl Perkins so we'd that all got into our act so we'd we'd learn it get all the words down and so that was how you learned it was just if someone had a record you played the record and copied all the words out and worked out the

chords and the riffs it was a magic moment I mean I learned the riff to that will be the day

“buddy Holly. I think little Richard and buddy Holly we were. Yeah I think there was part of”

him buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front which not many of the singers did Elvis had Scottie Moore who played guitar for him but buddy played

the lead and did the riffs so you'd you'd learn off him and he wore glasses which I always

and he wore glasses and it's certainly made life okay for John he's almost embarrassed and he didn't really saw girls who took the glasses off you know. So you're learning these songs but then you you start to write your own songs and I saw you interviewed on a film that came out recently on the BBC about your lost base and you were talking about how when you have a guitar you would kind of take it away and sit in a private room and kind of nurse it almost like going

to a psychiatrist and you would talk to the guitar and the guitar would talk back to you and it

“would talk to you in the form of a song. Yeah I didn't think that's what it's like for most people”

but clearly that's what it's like for you when did you discover that guitars could speak to you

and give you songs must be an amazing to realize. I remember first song was 14 and I suppose that's

when I discovered it you know. I remember the the things that appealed to me about that song the song was called I lost my little girl and some one pointed out to me my mom had died not too long before that so probably at the back of my mind with therapist would probably say that's what this was about but the guitar was your therapist. Under guitar was the therapist really so you know I had a couple of musical ideas the chords went down on from G to G7 to C so there was a bump

bump and then my melody went bump up against it so you had those little tricks that you just learned just from listening to music and yeah so you put them in and write a song so once you written up first song it was quite exciting and I'm lifting. So when did you and John start to realize that actually your songs were really good that they could measure up to the songs that you'd

been kind of learning and and I think we always thought they were good because we were a cocky little

bastards but as they developed and we started to get a bit more mature in the writing I think then we started I remember writing the song we wrote a song together called From Me to You and it was pretty straightforward but in the middle of it it went to a chord we'd never used before and I remember thinking wow we're getting sophisticated this is we're in C to A minor now certainly we're doing a G minor wow so right about that period you know we started to think pretty good and then you'd

write a song let's say like I mean what would always happen is one of us would come in with the idea and then the two of us would finish it up so something like Norwegian word which was a genre idea and then we sat down and finished it together I think after that we thought oh we're getting some more but because that also I mean you George introduced the sitter and it was a detail from John wasn't

“it he wasn't he didn't want to confess that he'd had a fling to sit there that's what said I don't”

know whether that's true or not but it's but then the songs are starting to move from I love you you love me she loves you whatever to more complicated more almost novelistic stuff yeah and I think

feel encouraged to write more than just the sort of I love you songs I just watch you talking

through all the songs in the new album and you said in that that your your song sales me saying to make your parents that you kind of inspired by the example of Charles Dickens are looking back to his childhood and I get with you and and John as well is actually how kind of how literary you were as well how informed by reading Lewis Carroll Dickens or what and

“so was that part of what was feed starting to feed into the songs yeah I think that's one of the things”

that made the readles special was that three of us were grammar school boys so we'd

had to learn or be exposed to things like Lewis Carroll she say Dickens my case

would be like Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and stuff so even though we didn't like it at the time because it was school it's like oh this is boring you know I think once we started writing I started to really oh it's it's it's funny and it's way in here something crazy yeah it's just you know like sponges we'd we got it all in our being and now we were writing songs you start to realize that like a rhyming couplet which I would learn about through study

in Hamlet from you know a level or whatever and I was thought that was a cool idea of Shakespeare's you just finished up the thing with you know I'm going to go to do a bar and they did a little little go into the bar wow yeah goodbye that's the end of that so I was only years later I realized I'd used that unwittingly and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make proceeding that is golden slumber which you could it's literally word for word taken from

yeah and our apology of Elizabeth and poetry yeah again something else that you said about the new album what I listened to you talking was you've got a song in it about a woman who has married a complicated man you know she she's got the measure of him and you were talking about how you love to write songs about people almost like a kind of novelist like it is Eleanor Rigby the first in that kind of sequence and it goes through another day in Jenny Ranley yeah probably no I

I like that I like the the filmic thing you know I sometimes I'll write and I love her which is

“you know I love so very straightforward and I think fine for what it is but then you'll then I'll”

start to you know because I see you watch so many films read so many books that this character that I'd kind of know women like this Eleanor Rigby lonely old ladies are on the housing

estate where we lived there were there were always a couple of old pensioners and I would go around

an offer to get their shopping for them or stuff and it was very good because they'd start to tell me stories of the war or remember one of the old ladies showing me a crystal radio so it was great it was very exciting so I like these ladies so they were always a kind of special character for me so I kind of wrote Eleanor Rigby from the perspective of one of those ladies yeah because it's incredible kind of generosity and compassion in everything that you write and one of the song

that for me completely simplified this was a beautiful song what's it called a life can be hard and people when I say this song life can be hard you wrote it during COVID people who haven't heard it may be expecting but it's going to be quite dark and so I mean it is so light and joyous and that seemed to me the kind of that is so Paul McCartney that you can get joy out of something is

“awful as COVID yes well I think you know I think the people who are locked down with their family”

who are forced to be with their family if you love your family that could be quite nice you know you're suddenly an enforced family time and I had the song and many I heard myself writing life can be hard something told me to just say but then and then that's when we start to get it together

but common gang we're going to get this together we're going to make it happen you know so it's

“like the salesman say song you know you know they had to carry on I think it's a it's a theme in”

my stuff my writing that even though stuff is hard you are going to have to carry on all let it defeat you and I think that's very much from the wartime years all of us grew up in

carrying that weight yeah but you know as I say I never heard any of the uncles talk about the war

they would always have a joke some great joke that they would tell you and so you you kind of learned that even though that had been a terrible period and we'd seen the film of the Hitler's bombers sort of cloud in this guy and you'd seen the bells and pictures of the the prisoners coming out in the striped uniforms which is why I can never believe people deny the Holocaust I mean that is so insane but you know we'd seen all of that and yet the people

we knew people were living amongst had gone on and we're now so glad to be away from that

“but now they were making something of their lives and I think that's why there was quite a rich”

period for us our generation that we could now do good stuff and say hey it may be bad but we can work this out we can work it out so I mean I can I can understand hearing you say that why now so many decades on from your earliest years the you might want to go back and look at those earliest and see what kind of mirror it holds up to what we're going through now can I just end by asking about your memories and the tricks that that memory can play you had a bliss story

about going on a milk float with George Harrison when you were I didn't know how will you 16 or something yeah we were in a hitchhiking yeah yeah and you got a great story about a kind of electrical accident that happened to George but he then he thought that it happened to you so he just tell people what happened to you well we were hitchhiking down south which is what one of the songs of the new album is about and we got a lift from a milk float which was electric those

are the only vehicles we knew that were electric when about four miles an hour but it was a lift so we were quite happy the driver was sitting on the right hand side then it was a battery in the middle and then it was the passenger seat in the left hand side and George sat on the battery George Harrison sat on the battery and everything's going fine we're going along we're getting all lifted and suddenly bang ah he jumps up what's wrong and he's he had a pair of jeans with a zip

on the pocket and it had connected with the two of the points no this is a back pocket so he jumps up and yeah buddy and it connected up in the battery I'll give him a bolt and later when we got to our B&B he showed me yeah he had a great big zip tattooed into his bum

but but and the point of what you were saying was so that was always my story and I told

it to people then I met Olivia Harrison George's widow quite recently and she was saying oh I love that story of you and George going down to Wales and you sitting on the battery and

“connecting and you got a scar on your bum I wasn't it wasn't me it was George but I think it's”

amazing the way memory does that it can just morph and it must be even harder for you because you've been so written about people know things about you that may be never happened because it's been reproduced and countless book that's very true and that is history it is that is and I now appreciate through all the sort of wrong stories about the Beatles I realize you know that Harold with the arrow and the eye oh I get it it was for the tapestry or whatever you know they're all

these little things how can you have accurate history this is the perfect note on which you

I think of all the things that the rest of history has bought me the chance to interview Paul McCartney

“is absolutely up there at the summit I mean that's something that I've dreamed of doing since”

I was about eight and it was an amazing experience to have him come down the steps from the

production booth in which George Martin had messaged them when they recorded please please me gentleman you've just recorded your first number one and there was Paul McCartney coming down

the steps having a little chat with him it was just amazing when I began the interview there was

“kind of slight tightening of the vocal cords I think but he was amazingly generous amazingly”

personable I know he's done a million interviews so he's very skilled at putting interviewers getting them to kind of feel easy but it really did feel like a conversation the only time when it didn't was when Paul started talking about the recording of Norwegian wood and I abstracted myself

“a sudden look down and thought here I am in happy road listening to Paul McCartney talk about”

how John Lennon wrote Norwegian wood and my mind went completely blank at that point and I had this great lurch of panic thinking what on earth am I going to talk to him about now but actually the interview flowed in all kinds of ways that I wasn't entirely expecting which is kind of what made it so fun and I thought especially at the end when he started talking about the the unknowability of the past and you know is the beta for street adequate evidence for the battle of Hastings

and it it kind of felt then that maybe that was a comparison that he'd never previously

drawn in any previous interview I may be wrong on that but if so then I feel very proud wonderful that of all the things that he could have first talked about the the battle of Hastings it was the rest his history