Paul McCartney talked to Clash about his new LP, The Boys of Dungeon Lane.
Some highlights:
“Once I’d written ‘The Days We Left Behind’,” says McCartney of the album’s elegant and spare lead single. “That was very much me looking back on my days as a kid in Speke in Liverpool. I knew that was definitely nostalgic. And then I wrote about my Mum and Dad.” This became ‘Salesman Saint’, which time travels to the 1940s with bursts of big band music as though blaring from a gramophone. “I don’t want people to get the idea that it’s just totally nostalgic,” he cautions. “But there is a lot of it on there.” Why? “Cos I like thinking about the past! I’ve got such a rich past.”
It’s some of that past that he wants to talk about today. “I was very lucky,” he says unprompted. “It was a really good, northern family. Working-class. Sometimes people who aren’t working class, or have been brought up with a bit of money, will feel sorry for working-class people. A little bit looked down on, and assume that they’re pretty thick.” He says this with the casual intonation and drooping vowel sounds synonymous with his speech, a little California sunshine breaking through the Scouse street.
“You can be very surprised about working class people’s knowledge or hobbies,” he continues. “You meet some guy and he knows all about the American Civil War! I’m a big fan of that.” His Uncle Harry could – “when he’d had a drink or two” – recite Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Wreck of The Hesperus. McCartney’s dad Jim left school at 14, but “was a big fan of words.”
It’s why he’s still a reader. “I read quite a lot,” he tells me. “I have a bedtime book. I’m reading about Lincoln at the moment.” He likes how the advent of trains allowed the 16th President to campaign from state to state. “I read a book on Mark Twain. I like Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby. That was like: wow. He paints a great picture of that period of British life.”
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