Last night at the Roundhouse, Paul McCartney was joined by guest host Rob Brydon to discuss his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, which has just become McCartney’s 24th LP to reach number one in the charts.
“This is pretty strange,” said McCartney, sitting in an armchair opposite Brydon and surveying an adoring, sold-out crowd. “It’s like a non-concert. Just sitting around playing your record.” Over the course of the two-hour conversation, they worked through the whole album and discussed the journey behind each track’s creation, as well as how he came to work with producer Andrew Watt and record his first ever duet with Ringo.
At 83, it’s clear he hasn’t lost his wonder for the process of making music. Discussing a class he teaches at LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts), he says to help calm students’ nerves, he tells them, “I’ve no idea how to do this… and I don’t want to know either - that’s the fun of it.” During the interview, Macca often sang along to the tracks they’d pressed play on and even grabbed an acoustic guitar occasionally to demonstrate how songs came about, including the ‘wacky chord’ that led to the writing of the album’s opener As You Lie There, a track about a childhood crush.
“A lot of the songs are to do with memories, and I worried ‘Is it just nostalgia?’” he told Brydon. “But how else can you write? You have to write about what’s happened. It’s about things from the past, memories from when I was a kid.”
And, as you’d expect from a chat about a record which focuses so much on childhood and memories, there was a lot of reminiscing. He talked about meeting John - “we met as a couple of kids. I said ‘I like writing songs’ and he said ‘So do I’. He was the first person I met who said that back to me.” He also recalled getting the bus to school with George, as well as a hitchhiking trip which went awry when George electrocuted himself when the zipper of his jeans became an electrical conductor for the battery of an old milk float. This adventure inspired the track Down South on the record. He also remembered hearing Love Me Do on the radio for the first time while driving in Liverpool. “We’ve made it, I thought.”
The title of the record references a road in Speke, the suburb of Liverpool where McCartney spent his childhood. But it’s something more too. “Boys of Dungeon Lane is a metaphor of all the guys I grew up with,” he explained. He remembered how having his watch stolen by ‘two bigger lads’ while he was bird watching made him vow to take up karate “for if I ever meet those guys again”.
All this autobiographical reminiscence from his life served as a reminder that McCartney turns 84 next week (“Vegetarianism and pilates,” is the answer he gave when asked what keeps him so healthy and sharp). In the autumn of his career, he’s both humbly aware of the incredible impact his music has had - and also self-effacing enough to know that this solo stuff won’t have that same resonance. “If we do a Beatles song the crowd lights up like a galaxy of stars, when we play a new song, it’s a black hole.” He was equally modest in discussing his qualities as a songwriter: “I have a hard time doing ‘down songs’, I always try and give it a hopeful ending.”
Not that he needs reminding just how good his back catalogue is. “When you’re doing it you have to be modest. But once the Beatles was over, you can look back and say ‘Wow’. I’m a major fan,” he laughs.
