Paul McCartney has revealed that the late Queen Elizabeth II had a crush on him during a podcast appearance. The 84-year-old appeared on the Good Hang with Amy Poehler podcast, released earlier this week.
When asked if any famous person he had met had blown him away, McCartney replied: "The Queen." He added: "And that's an autograph you're not going to get. She's great. I love the Queen."
'She was a babe'
McCartney told host Amy Poehler: "She was a babe. We all used to think, 'Wow, this is amazing.' You know, like, having a king, he's got this girl. This babe. So, we kind of liked her in other ways than we shouldn't have liked her."
"So meeting her was special," he added. McCartney was nine when the Queen ascended the throne in 1952 and said he was around 21 when he first met her in person.
Speaking about her apparent crush, he said: "Nancy [Shevell], my wife now, she says, 'She fancied you.'" He explained: "Now, there's no knowing if there's any truth to that…I like to think it's true."
Meetings with the monarch
Gushing about the Queen, who died aged 96 in 2022, McCartney added that he remembers her having a "good sense of humour." He first met the former monarch alongside his Beatles bandmates in 1963. They met again almost two decades later at the Royal Albert Hall, with their third meeting in 1996 when she opened the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with him.
McCartney, knighted in 1997, saw her at her Golden Jubilee in 2002, where he performed alongside Sir Elton John and Stevie Wonder, among other stars.
Final meeting
Following her death, McCartney wrote about their final meeting on his website: "Looking back, I am honoured and amazed to see that I met Her Majesty eight or nine times, and each time she impressed me with her great sense of humour combined with great dignity."
He wrote: "Our last meeting came in 2018. Because of my respect and love for the Queen and her fabulous sense of humour, when I was given the Companion of Honour medal, I shook her hand, leaned in and said, 'We have got to stop meeting like this,' to which she giggled slightly and got on with the ceremony."
McCartney added: "I did wonder if I was a bit too cheeky after saying this; after all, this was The Queen, but I have a feeling she didn't mind. I feel privileged to have been alive throughout Queen Elizabeth II's reign."
He recalled: "When I was 10 years old, I entered an essay competition in Liverpool and won my division for my essay about the British Monarchy, so I have been a fan for a long time. In 1953, when the Queen was crowned, everyone on our street in Speke, Liverpool, finally got a television set, and we settled down to watch the Coronation in glorious black and white."
Following a visit to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in 1934, the late Queen developed an immediate crush on 18-year-old Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. The two later married in 1947.
