“I wish I knew I was Paul McCartney. It would be so much easier…”
IT is mid-October 2020, and Paul McCartney has a lot on his mind. At present, he is considering the serendipity that has presented itself, often at unexpected moments, during his 60-year career. “So much of what I’ve done in my life I didn’t particularly mean to do,” he explains, almost by way of an apology. “When you analyse it, people might say, ‘That’s a clever move!’ But, no, it was really just… luck really, like the music that The Beatles just ended up arbitrarily making. When I write songs, I don’t know where they’re going. I’ve not got it on the GPS, I’ve not got my destination locked in. I’m following the route, just seeing where I end up.”
“I FIND FREEDOM CREATIVELY VERY LIBERATING”
Where, then, has Paul McCartney ended up in late 2020? His original plans for the year – a Glastonbury headline slot, the release of Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary and more – were left in tatters in March, with the advent of the pandemic.
Locked down – in “rockdown”, as he calls it – in his Sussex farmhouse with his eldest daughter Mary and her family, McCartney found himself “pottering around” in his home studio, making new music. The result is his first new album since 2018’s Egypt Station. But this latest work isn’t a “posh album”, as McCartney calls one of his usual studio records. Instead, it is a completely unexpected and delightful new album, McCartney III, a stripped-back, questing solo work in the tradition of his 1970 solo debut and 1980’s McCartney II, places where the artist could set himself free from old ways of doing things.
For McCartney, these inventive albums form part of an experimental creative thread stretching back to “Tomorrow Never Knows”, Sgt Pepper and on through his Fireman collaborations with Youth, Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, the Liverpool Sound Collage and beyond. “I’ve always enjoyed grabbing as much freedom as I can,” he insists. “I find freedom creatively very liberating.”
Looking to the future by putting the past in context, McCartney acknowledges the parallels between 1970 and the present day – in both instances, he was self-isolating on a remote farm with his family. Then, of course, he was up in Argyllshire, as far away as possible from London and the collapse of The Beatles. It all seems such a long time ago now – but McCartney bears the weight of his legend with practised ease. He is thrilled, for instance, that one song on McCartney III – “When Winter Comes”, dating from 1992 – was originally produced by George Martin, creating a direct link from The Beatles to the present day.
Today, McCartney is in his London home – sitting in the same room where he recorded the bulk of on a four-track Studer tape machine – just 15 minutes’ walk to Abbey Road. The week before this interview, it would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday; twospeaks to McCartney, it is the 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ first ever recording session in Hamburg. Sit still for long enough and another will be along in a minute.
