From the new issue of Mojo, featuring Paul on the cover:
In the latest issue of MOJO magazine - on sale now - Paul McCartney talks exclusively about his new album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, to MOJO’s Grayson Haver Currin, while musing on legacy, nostalgia and, naturally, The Beatles. Here, in an online exclusive, we present some extra chat from their in-depth interview, including featuring on the new Rolling Stones album, playing small venues (“It’s definitely more of a thrill”), a tantalizing tape-loop project, channeling Steve Cropper, and why he’s like Charles Dickens…
Do you ever dwell on that, how much impact this “good little group” you were in had on the world?
Yeah, I do. I think about that, particularly because people will tell me the story according to their own experience. So Bruce Springsteen, who I know as a friend, tells a story, and it’s a very similar story to what a lot of Americans tell – seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and being really impressed and saying, “OK, that’s what I want to do with my life.” He said he came down for breakfast the next day, and he’s got his hair combed forward, in a fringe, inspired by what we were doing. It’s the same story I heard from Tom Petty – same, you know, fringe-forward. And David Letterman. Loads of people have been affected in that way, and that’s lovely that you can have that effect on people.
The people you’re mentioning are celebrities – incredible songwriters, comedians. But so many people have that Beatles story. When you’ve heard that story thousands of times, how do you hold space for it, to not get tired of it?
Because it’s a great story. If that story just came from one person, it would just be impressive. But as it comes from loads of people, it’s impressive a lot of times over. I don’t get fed up with hearing it. Every time someone tells me, I imagine them sitting there in front of a little telly, the parents often not liking us, the dad nearly always saying, “Oh, they’re wearing wigs.” (Laughs) I love that we’ve had that effect on people and, you know, to bring it back to the present, we’re still having that effect. The shows I do with my band, we’re still turning people on.
I wanted to ask about these small theatre shows you’ve been doing, whether at the Fonda in Los Angeles or the Bowery in New York, in addition to the stadium shows. Why is that still important to you at this point in your life?
Most people will play to a large audience, as I do, too, but mainly people want to record it on their phones, so you’re looking at a load of phones out there. When you do something like the Fonda gig, there’s no phones. We have the Yonder pouches, and it’s completely different. It’s a real buzz. It takes you back to your origins. You always used to be able to see the people up close, and you used to be able to interact with them. It definitely lifts the buzz of the concert.
It reminds you, I imagine, of the core of this idea: I am playing songs with a rock band for a room packed with people.
That’s the point! We all feel it in the band. The audience feels it. Anyone that we talk to after it – we often have a lot of guests – will just say, “Well, it’s incredible! It’s just completely different!” They’re actually listening to you. They’re listening to the music. They’re reacting instead of recording. It’s definitely more of a thrill to do it that way.
Speaking of the thrill of right now, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane is often about the past, but I don’t get the sense you and [producer] Andrew Watt were trying to recreate the sound of the past. He has done that to some extent with The Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne. Did you want to guard against familiar sounds?
No, that’s right. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. We’re trying to not do that. If you’re working with the Stones, they’ve got the Stones sound, so I think you would be looking to get that sound. And it’s natural to them – it’s the way they sound. I worked on a track on their new album [McCartney plays bass on Foreign Tongues track Covered In You, due out in July], and it was great to do. You sit down and the noise you’re hearing, the record you’re making, it’s the Stones. After the day at the studio, people said, “How was it?” It was great! I mean, I was a session man with the Stones. (Laughs) I really enjoyed that, and it sounds like a Stones record.
But when I’m working on my stuff, I’m open to ideas. Just, for instance, since the ’60s, I’ve liked to do tape loops. It’s funny because, even though now it’s an old technology, it sounds new. It’s definitely unusual. It’s not synthetic. I’m sure you can dial a similar sound up on a synthesizer, but doing it with the loops, it’s all hands-on. I enjoy that. So, that’s the way we approached the whole album: We’ve done that before, let’s do it different. I am not sure we did loops on this, but I’ve done a whole other set of tracks that have loops, that are loop heavy. That’s another project, but it’s representative of the idea of not doing it the normal way – just trying to find something that you haven’t done before. And the main reason is it’s just so, so boring.
You’ve always written about the past, but there is this very plainspoken vulnerability to some of the songs on The Boys Of Dungeon Lane: I’m going to tell you a story about my childhood. When did you realize that such songs needed to be part of this record for you right now, at 83?
I didn’t make a conscious decision. It just so happened that the songs I was writing – like obviously Days We Left Behind – were very much childhood memories or thoughts from that period of mine in Liverpool. That was always going to be nostalgic. And then there’s another song I call Salesman Saint where I’m talking about my parents, so, again, that was going to be nostalgic. I don’t know what it is, really, but I was in a certain kind of mood.
One day, on that song Salesman Saint, I just happened to think, Wow, people these days, raising children – young families, young friends, people I know – it’s hard. It’s a great experience, but you’ve got to work at it. And then I thought, Well, I wonder what it was like for my parents? It wasn’t like I was trying to be nostalgic. It was just a thought: What must it have been like for them? And then, of course, you realize, that was in World War II. That was completely different from anything we know at the moment. These wars are going on, but in other countries. In their case, it was in their country where the bombs were falling. That just struck me as an amazing fact that my actual parents had gone through that stuff, and yet they’d come through. They’d survived. My dad was a fireman during the war. He was directly involved in the wartime effort. My mother was a nurse, a midwife. She was involved in that kind of stuff, too. It just seemed like a really good tale to tell. It’s not that I was trying to be nostalgic but, in telling that tale, it had to be nostalgia, to be referring to the past. Things people write often do refer to the past, but it’s hard to just refer to tomorrow. We don’t know what’s gonna happen then. So you can make it up and stuff, as we often do. But the past is full of stuff. It’s a rich place to mine for ideas.
But all of the songs aren’t nostalgic, of course.
Sometimes I’ll make up a song that’s not based on anything – not nostalgia, not even something I know about. I’m just writing in the same way as Dickens or Thomas Hardy would write. It’s just a story. It’s characters that I don’t actually know. I’m making them up.
There’s a song, Momma Gets By, towards the end of the album. That’s just a flight of fantasy. I’m imagining this woman faced with this guy who seems a bit lazy. I’m making up two characters in a play. I’m messing around with them and thinking, Well, what was she thinking? Why does she think that? It just turned into that song. You take bits of yourself, bits of the life you know, and that’s what’s interesting to me as a writer – writing about what is or what was or what could be.
I do all those things. I draw on all those from my toolkit, and it depends on what kind of mood I’m in. Am I going to just make something up? You know, “Lovely Rita, meter maid…” I didn’t actually ever know anyone called that. It was just that, at the time, they were introducing these traffic wardens, as we call them. But when I heard that Americans called them meter maids, I liked that, so I made the song.
Lost Horizon is an old song that you rediscovered. How did that happen?
That’s got a great origin story, because it came as a surprise. I had an engineer who built my studio, a great guy called Eddie Klein, who’d come from Abbey Road. Eddie was working in the studio one day. We were doing something else, and he was changing old tapes from the format they were in into a more modern format. He would work in the background as we were doing our stuff. And he said to me, “Do you ever remember this song called Lost Horizon?” I said, “No, not really.” He said, “Well, it’s not bad. It’s actually really good.” Well, come on, let’s hear it. The thing that surprised me was, number one, I’d forgotten it. I must have just done it on a holiday one afternoon, and put it down to a tape cassette. It would have been the early 2000s. I’d forgotten I’d done anything until Eddie rediscovered it. And the other thing that was good about it was that it was complete. Sometimes, if I sit down on holiday to write a song, I might just get a couple of verses. But this had the verses, the choruses, the bridges. The whole thing was there, so I thought, Wow, I’ve got to do that.
So we took the demo and kept the structure but re-recorded some of the things on it in exactly the same way as I had done on the demo. Andrew [Watt] said, “Wow, it’d be great if we had a hot little electric guitar going through it.” So I got this old ’56 Telecaster, a beautiful little instrument. I was imagining what Steve Cropper might do, so I was channeling him. We added that to it, not a lot else, All the songs have got these little origin stories, and that one’s about a relic found by good ol’ Eddie Klein. Thank God for Eddie!
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