670. Tom Holland Meets Paul McCartney

Hello everyone, it's Tom here with news of a rest is history special. I am interviewing none other than the great the one and only Paul McCartney He has a new album out the boys of Dungeon Lane lots of the songs on that album are about his early years growing up in Liverpool So I'm talking to him about that about the context the history that gave rise to the Beatles and We have a world exclusive here because one of the songs from that album salesman saint will be featuring in the interview So incredibly exciting enjoy the song enjoy the interview This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years now when you think about it every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements aspiration and Action and a classic example of this from British history the rise of the house of Wessex the family of Alfred the great and his Who between them established the United Kingdom of England? Yes, great story isn't it's on the great lesson in leadership. I think for anybody So Alfred in his heirs they marry idealism and pragmatism They're brilliant at alliances. They're brilliant at managing power They're brilliant. Of course at managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership And of course we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight when it's time to make your next move You can bank on Lloyd's to be ready when you are because from new businesses to new homes and new life chapters backed by generations of hope and ambition You can see Tom why 14 million people trust Lloyd's to help make their dreams a reality based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026 Hello, everyone and welcome to the rest is history and obviously on this show we have Talked about all kinds of world historical figures But today is a first because it's the first time on the show that I will actually be talking to a World historical figure and this is a man who is the greatest composer of the 20th century with the Beatles He was a lightning rod for one of the most transformative decades in modern history and Ever since I was about eight he has been my personal hero So this is unbelievably exciting for me and I am talking about of course Paul McCartney Well, that's quite an intro. It's not too much for you I hope no, not exactly. Hey, come on Adulation So we're talking because you've got a new album Yes, and this is an album that it's not continuously about it but a lot of the songs are focused on your your childhood your teenage years growing up in Liverpool and I was wondering is this telling us something about what made Paul McCartney who he is in other words could Paul McCartney could the Beatles have emerged from any other city apart from Liverpool do you think was there something distinctive about Liverpool? I think so. Yeah, I was thinking about recently. I do think the character of Liverpool is a very sort of strong one I think with the Irish influence and then coming through the war and having to be happy when bombs were falling so there was a lot of music when I was a kid my dad played the piano at home there were a lot of jokes and so they kept their heads, you know above water by laughing at the whole thing and I think that was something that found its way into the Beatles and I think it gave us a good sense of humour no matter what we were going to do like arrive in America and have the New York press ready to make fun of us we gave as good as we got and that was because of our Liverpool upbringing so you in the new album you have this song salesman saint just about your parents your mom and dad and it kind of begins actually in the war because you were born in 1942 all the Beatles were born in the war. How much of a kind of legacy did the Warriors leave in Liverpool and on your kind of personal memories of it? A lot you were very aware of it not the actual bombing I think all of us were a little too young to experience much of that Ringo who's the oldest he might have some memories but I don't but the thing is you know the feeling that the grown-ups had as I say you know having to laugh it off this is a world war yeah but they're just they've got to carry on they've got to talk to each other because that's one of the lines in the song isn't it they had to carry on. Yeah and they did. That's what I say you know and I marvel at that because now you know I mean people can get defeated by the slightest little thing so compare that to not being defeated by bombs literally raining down on your city and you've got to find a way around it and so when I grew up there was a lot of joy I think everyone was just so glad to be out of these terrible circumstances and my uncles were all great joke tell us and I never heard any of them sort of sit and I go oh god like terrible you know there was none of that it just they'd come through it and so it kind of wasn't allowed. So the bomb damage in Liverpool it took a long time to repair right yeah and then you went to Hamburg and Hamburg also was a server had been wiped out so when you were kind of making your music were you aware were you thinking of oh thank god we you know we're not involved in that you avoided national service but I think by about a year didn't you know what it was the fact that the war had passed and you were kind of in a new age and Liverpool starting to get back on its feet was that something that kind of served as an inspiration yeah I think so you know as I say all of us grew up expecting to go in the army or national service so we were all kind of coasting through our teenage years thinking oh my god it's gonna happen soon yeah and then suddenly it was as if god opened the waters and the Israelites could just go through and that was us we suddenly all of that had gone except for the evidence of it yeah so where we played football would be on what we called the bombing which was the bomb site and we didn't think anything of it was just the bombing but as later then you go why do we call it the bombing also if there's an unexplated bomb it could but you know so that was all around us but we just lived with it and kind of made it part of our lives and then we were able to like our parents able to kind of laugh at everything and today is we're recording this on international midwife day apparently and so that song salesman and saying your dad was a salesman yeah and your mom was obviously a saint but she was more specifically a midwife nurse the father was a salesman my mother was a saint working every god given minute to make you know to pay the rent the war was nearly over the peace would soon begin living on the edge of the city that was very important wasn't it in terms of where you would live because as a midwife she would get kind of houses and you can move around upgrading with each house it's true yeah we moved around quite a lot and didn't realize till we were much older that oh that's why we moved but yeah she would and it was often on the edge of the city you know but there were nice houses you know it was always an upgrade to us it was all right it had a indoor toilet didn't I think wow the indoor toilet yeah no it's true so we thought we were going somewhere and my mom was very aspirational like a lot of good mothers she just wanted her kids to succeed do well I mean my wife Nancy she will say to me you don't talk livable she said people love it when you talk level I see yeah but my mom tried to get us not to talk livable she tried to get us to talk posh she thought she was hoping we'd be doctors or something, you know. - But I guess that's a midwife. Oh, she's a community midwife, right? I mean, she's not working in a hospital. So she has to serve all the community. So there would be, I don't know, people in leafy homes, and then there would be people with very little, and she would have to serve them all, and presumably she would know them all. - Yeah, no, it's quite, it's something growing up all my moms and midwives. And you don't really think much beyond that. But now you think, wow, you know, just going out and home delivering all these babies, and the parents being so in love with you. Well, I mean, they come around to our house and bringing little gifts, a little statuette, or something, oh, very cheap stuff. But just to show the gratitude, I have one big memory of her. I was in the winter, and it'd been a heavy snowfall, and she got cold up 'cause we had a phone, one phone in the house, and she got cold to go to a birth. So she got on her bike, 'cause they didn't have cars. She got on her bike in this deep snow, with a uniform on, with a little suitcase on the back, and a little basket on the front. And I have this memory in the street lights. I was cycling out through the snow and thinking, wow, yeah, that's pretty brave. I mean, you know, you did it, they did it. I was asked to ask you this by my wife, who's a midwife, so she would be delighted by absolutely everything you said there. So just sticking with your parents, two other things specifically about Liverpool, maybe what makes it distinctive, related to your parents. So both of them kind of came from Ireland, ultimately, they kind of liked it. I think the origins are in Ireland. So it was that, that kind of generates a sense in Liverpool that it's not quite part of England, doesn't it? Do you think that was a kind of important part of? I'd never thought of it like that, but you're right, yeah. No, we were from Liverpool, and you know, you didn't want to be lumped in with everyone. We were like, we thought we were special. And I think at one point, it was the second city to London, because it was a big porch. Yeah, fabulously rich. Yeah. So, you know, we had a great sense of importance, which waned through the years, you know. But when I was growing up, you definitely thought Liverpool was a very great, grand historic place. You used to go down and see all the liners off. Yeah. They all be going off to Canada, you know, place like that. And it was only later that you learn that this was slave trade. Yeah. That there was a lot of that. Only thing we would see would be the local Caribbean people. So we would know people that would be descended. We didn't talk about it then. But there was, I guess a sense of Liverpool is being open to the world as well as to the rest of England. Yeah. So that what he's often said about Liverpool is that it's more open to, say, musical influences, perhaps the other place. Do you think that was true? Because, of course, you know, your love of rock 'n' roll was fundamental to what became the Beatles. Yeah. And, you know, sailors came back from a particularly merchant navy. A lot of them that we would know came back from America where there'd been to New Orleans or, you know, down south there. And they had records that nobody else had. So how would you get hold of them? You just, you know, saw you borrow off somebody. Somebody would know the sailor who had it and the sailor would let them borrow it. You'd borrow it off them. So it was like a little culture where you'd, the record would go around and we'd all learn it. Because I think for people of subsequent generations, it's hard to get our heads around how difficult it was to access music. You know, we could get it on whatever, just stream it. No, whatever. Now, but the idea that it's actually really quite hard to get the physical records or to find the radio stations that it's being played on. So did that make it, if you were interested in rock 'n' roll or whatever, that you were kind of a self-selecting group of people who would know what you were talking about when you met up and discussed these people? Yeah, that was what it was. You would know certain chords. And then someone would know an extra chord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra chord. And you'd build up your knowledge through things like that. There was none of us ever learned to read or write music, which is kind of an interesting fact about pretty much all the groups out of the '60s. Do I remember talking to Jeff Lynn of ELO? He says, "Oh, we just made it up." And that's what it was, we made it up. But there's a great strength in me showing you a chord or a riff or something. And it's just going from mind to mind. There's no paper involved. All of what we did. I mean, in this very studio would be that. It was really immediate transference of ideas. And I say, if you look back on our histories and our legacy, it was kind of bardic. A lot of them didn't write it down. Irish music was not really, I don't think, written down. It was just played. And you learned it. And then you played it your way. So we had a lot of that. And that was really nice. For transference of ideas, we would come in here on a Monday morning, let's say, if we were going to record during the week. And it would mainly, in the beginning, be John and I. And we would have just written something the week before. Written some songs. And we'd come in and everyone would just gather 10 o'clock, 10, 30 in the morning. And George Martin was like, OK, what is it? What are you going to do? And we'd say, oh, there's this one. And we'd play it, me and John, on two acoustics. We'd play it. George Harrison would look at it and go, OK. There's immediately he knew what we knew. We'd all learned it all together. Ringo would tap out a rhythm kind of thing and we trusted him to know what to do. And then 20 minutes later, we were recording that song that no one had ever heard, including the producer. Well, I think for anyone who's seen the Get Back film, watching you come up with Get Back. It's been revelatory in those terms. Come on, it's Get Back. And you realize, oh, no, he doesn't even know that yet. It's kind of an amazing sequence. But presuming that is what you first bonded with John Lennon over, then you both knew these chords. You knew this music. And that's what happened when you-- what was the Walton Fade? Was that the first time you met him? Do you met him? First time I met John was at the Walton Fade. Through a friend of mine, my best friend at school was called Ivan Vaughn. He was born on the 18th of June 1942, same day as me in Liverpool. And he knew John, so he introduced me to John. But John pretty much knew what I knew. Actually, in the very beginning, John was playing banjo chords on his guitar, because his mom taught him those chords. So I would sort of say, well, that could go like this, and show him how it was done on the guitar. But it was all very just one on one. And did you find that, as the choir man formed, and then you became the silver beetles and the beetles and so on, that as you became better and better, and your kind of musically, you became more sophisticated, more knowing, was the kind of infrastructure that enabled you to access music. And also for your music to be promoted, kind of growing up around you, were there more record shops, were there-- was it easier to get radio stations or whatever? So as the beetles moving towards a point where you could have a global market in a way that maybe even little Richard or maybe even Elvis hadn't back in '95 or something. We were hoping for that. That was the idea that was prevalent at the time, was that you would do what all these other people had done. You didn't quite know how you were going to do it. But I think that's half the battle is just having that bold ambition. So we just assumed we could do it, if they've done it. And we'd learned a lot of their tricks. So when we showed each other how to do it, and then came down to London, and there were certain guys down here, mainly guys, that would know the stuff we knew. So I remember the Isle brothers with something that we knew, an act we knew, because they did Twist and Shout, which we covered. And then you come down to London, and someone say, oh, you know the Isleys? So there was that kind of incredible. I would think, you know, yeah, that was a lot of fun. - But kind of so, again, just to reiterate, it's so mad that this music was so kind of exclusive because you had to know, if you knew, you knew, and if you didn't, you didn't, whereas now, you can just kind of absorb it almost like it's a Moses. - No, it's nothing like it is now. You can just hit a button and you can get all the music in the world. - No, then it was, I think it made it more special. You know, if somebody had an interesting record, John's stepfather was guy called Dijkens, had some cool records. So we'd go round to the house and play the records. And there'd be things like Karl Perkins. So we'd, that all got into our act. So we'd learn it, get all the words down. And so that was how you learned. It was just if someone had a record, you played the record and copied all the words out. Worked out the chords and the riffs. It was a magic moment. I mean, I learned the riff to that will be the day, Buddy Holly. - I think a little Richard and Buddy Holly, where you're in great faith. - No, they were part of the thing. Buddy Holly was great because he played guitar and he sang and he was out front, which not many of the singers did. Elvis had Scotty Moore, who played guitar for him. But Buddy played the lead and did the riffs. So you'd, you'd learn of him. - And he wore glasses, which I always liked. - And he wore glasses, which certainly made life okay for John. John was embarrassed, anytime he saw girls, he took the glasses off, you know. - So you're learning these songs, but then you start to write your own songs. And I saw you interviewed on a film that came out recently, on "Think on the BBC" about your lost base. And you were talking about how, when you have a guitar, you would kind of take it away and sit in a private room and kind of nurse it. Almost like going to a psychiatrist. And you would talk to the guitar, the guitar would talk back to you, and it would talk to you in the form of a song. - Yeah. - I don't think that's what it's like for most people, but clearly that's what it's like for you. When did you discover that guitars could speak to you and give you songs? Must've been amazing. - Oh yeah, I mean, I wrote my first song, or was 14. And I suppose that's when I discovered it, you know. I remember the things that appealed to me about that song. The song was called, "I Lost My Little Girl." And someone pointed out to me, my mum had died not too long before that. So probably at the back of my mind a therapist would probably say, that's what this was about, but the guitar was your therapist. - And the guitar was the therapist really. So, you know, I had a couple of musical ideas. The chords went down, went from G to G7 to C. So there was a bum, bum, bum. And then my melody went bum, bum, bum, bum against it. So you had those little tricks that you just learned just from listening to it music. And yeah, so you put them in and write a song. So once you'd written that first song, it was quite exciting and uplifting. - So when did you and John start to realize that actually your songs were really good, that they could measure up to the songs that you'd been kind of learning and it was all been? - I think we always thought they were good, 'cause we were cocky little bastards. But as they developed and we started to get a bit more mature in the writing, I think then we started. I remember writing a song. We wrote a song together called "From Me To You." And it was pretty straightforward, but in the middle of it, it went to a chord we'd never used before. And I remember thinking, "Wow, we're getting sophisticated." (laughing) This is, we're in C to A minor. Now, suddenly we're doing a G minor. Wow. So around about that period, we started to think pretty good. And then you'd write a song, let's say like, I mean, what would always happen if one of us would come in with the idea. And then the two of us would finish it up. So something like Norwegian Wood, which was a John idea. And then we sat down and finished it together. I think after that, we thought, oh, we're getting somewhere. - Well, 'cause that also, I mean, George introduced the sitar. - The sitar, yeah. - And it was a detail from John, wasn't it? He didn't want to confess that he'd had a fling de synthia. That's what's said. I don't know whether that's true or not. - Oh yeah, I'm not sure. - So around then, the songs are starting to move from, I love you, you love me, she loves you, whatever. To more complicated, more, almost novelistic stuff. - Yeah, and I think that's when we started to think, wow, this is going somewhere, you know? And then you would, you would feel encouraged to write more than just the sort of I love you songs. - I just watched you talking through all the songs in the new album, and you said in that that your song salesman's saying to make your parents that you kind of inspired by the example of Charles Dickens are looking back to his childhood. And I get with you and John as well, is actually how literally you were as well, how informed by reading Lewis Carroll Dickens or whatever. So was that part of what was starting to feed into the songs around six or one of the things made the Beatles special, was that three of us were grammar school boys, so we'd had to learn or be exposed to things like Lewis Carroll, as you say, Dickens, my case, really like Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and stuff. So even though we didn't like it at the time, 'cause it was school, and it's like, oh, this is boring, you know. I think once we started writing, I started to realize, oh, it's fun in its way in here. - It's something through. - Yeah, it's just, you know, like sponges, we'd, we'd, got it all in our beings. And now when we write in songs, you start to realize that like a rhyming couplet, which I would learn about through studying Hamlet from, you know, A-level or whatever. And I was thought that was a cool idea of Shakespeare's. He just finished up the thing with, you know, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it, I've got a bar, and I did it, I did it, I did it, I got into the barb. Wow. - Yeah. - Goodbye. - That's the end of that. So I, I was only years later, I realized I'd used that unwittingly. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. - Proceeding that is golden slumpers, which you've kind of, it's literally word for word taken from. - Yeah. - An anthology of Elizabethan poetry, isn't it? - Yeah. - Again, something else that you said about the new album, I listened to you talking, was you've got a song in it about a woman who has married a complicated man. You know, she's got the measure of him. And you were talking about how you love to write songs about people, almost like a kind of novelist. Like, is Ellen a Rigby the first in that kind of sequence and it goes through another day in Jenny Ren? - Yeah, probably. No, I like that. I like the, the filmic thing. You know, I, sometimes I'll write, and I love her, which is, you know, I love so, very straightforward, and I think fine for what it is. But then you'll, then I'll start to, you know, 'cause you've watched so many films, read so many books, that this character, that I'd kind of known women like this, Ellen a Rigby, lonely old ladies, on the housing estate where we lived, there were always a couple of old pensioners and I would go around and offer to get the shopping for them or stuff. And it was very good because they'd start to tell me stories of the war, or remember one of the old ladies showing me a crystal radio. So it was great, it was very exciting. So I liked these ladies. So they were always a kind of special character for me. So I kind of wrote Ellen a Rigby from the perspective of one of those ladies. Yeah, 'cause it's incredible kind of generosity and compassion in everything that you write. And one other song that, for me, completely exemplified this, was a beautiful song. What's it called, a life can be hard. And people, when I say this song, life can be hard. You wrote it during COVID. People who haven't heard it may be expecting that it's going to be quite dark and sombre. I mean, it is so light and joyous. And that seemed to me the kind of, that is so poor McCartney that you can get joy out of something as awful as COVID. Yes, well, I think, you know, I think the people who were locked down with their family, with their force to be with their family. If you love your family, that could be quite nice. You know, you're suddenly an enforced family time. And I had the song, and many-- I heard myself writing, "Life can be hard." Something told me to just say, "But then." And then that's when we start to get it together again or whatever. I didn't want to go down the dark route. I wanted to say, "Yeah, life can be hard, but." Come on gang, we're going to get this together. We're going to make it happen, you know? So it's like the salesman's sing, song, you know. You know, they had to carry on. I think it's a theme in my stuff, in my writing, that even those stuff is hard. You are going to have to carry on or let it defeat you. And I think that's very much from the wartime years that all of us grew up in. Carry that weight. Yeah. But you know, as I say, I never heard any of the uncles talk about the war. They would always have a joke, some great joke, that they would tell you. And so you kind of learn that even though that had been a terrible period, and we'd seen the film of Hitler's bombers clouding this guy. And you'd seen the belson pictures of the prisoners coming out in the striped uniforms, which is why I can never believe people deny the Holocaust. I mean, that is so insane. But, you know, we'd seen all of that. And yet the people we knew, people who were living amongst, had gone on, and were now so glad to be away from that. That now they were making something of their lives. And I think that's why there was quite a rich period for us, our generation, that we could now do good stuff and say, hey, it may be bad, but we can work this out. We can work it out. So, I mean, I can understand hearing you say that. Why now, so many decades on from your earliest years, that you might want to go back and look at those early years, and see what kind of mirror it holds up to what we're going through now. Can I just end by asking about your memories and the tricks that memory can play? You had a brilliant story about going on a milk float with George Harrison when you were, I don't know, well, do you 16 or something? Yeah, I would have been. You were hitchhiking, yeah. Yeah, and you've got a great story about a kind of electrical accident that happened to George, but he then, he thought that it happened to you. So, he'd just tell people what happened there. Well, we were hitchhiking down south, which is what one of the songs of the new album is about. And we got a lift from a milk float, which was electric. Those were the only vehicles we knew that were electric. We were about four miles an hour, but it was a lift. So, we were quite happy. The driver was sitting on the right hand side. Then there was a battery in the middle, and then there was the passenger seat on the left hand side. And George sat on the batter, George Harrison sat on the battery, and everything's going fine. We're going along, we're getting our lift, and then suddenly, bang, ah, he jumps up. Of course, that was on. And he had a pair of jeans with a zip on the pocket, and he'd connected with the two-point, not on the crotch. No, it was on the crotch. No, this is a back pocket. So, he jumps up, and y'all, buddy, and it connected up in the battery, give him a bolt. And later, when we got to our B and B, he showed me. Yeah, he had a great big zip tattooed into his bum. But, but, and the point of what you were saying was, so that was always my story. And I told it to people, then I met Olivia Harrison, George's widow, quite recently, and she was saying, "Oh, I love that story of you and George going down to Wales and you sitting on the battery and connecting and you got a scar on your bum." I said, "It wasn't me, it was George." But I think it's amazing the way memory does that. It can just morph. And it must be even harder for you because you've been so written about. People know things about you that maybe never happened because it's been reproduced at countless books. That's very true, and that is history. It is, that is, and I now appreciate through all the sort of wrong stories about the Beatles. I realized, you know, that Harold with the arrow in the eye, oh, I get it, it was for the tapestry. Or whatever, you know, all these little things. How can you have accurate history? This is the perfect moat on which you are. Paul McCartney, thank you so much. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks. I think of all the things that the rest of history has bought me. The chance to interview Paul McCartney is absolutely up there at the summit. I mean, that's something that I dreamed of doing since I was about eight. And it was an amazing experience to have him come down the steps from the production booth in which George Martin had messaged them when they recorded, "Please, please, me, gentlemen, you've just recorded your first number one." And there was Paul McCartney coming down the steps, having a little chat with him. It was just amazing when I began the interview. There was a kind of slight tightening of the vocal chords, I think. But he was amazingly generous, amazingly personable. I know he's done a million interviews. So he's very skilled at putting interviewers, getting them to kind of feel easy. But it really did feel like a conversation. The only time when it didn't was when Paul started talking about the recording of Norwegian wood. And I abstracted myself a sudden look down and thought, "Here I am, if that be rude." Listening to Paul McCartney talk about how John Lennon wrote Norwegian wood. And my mind went completely blank at that point. And I had this great lurch of panic thinking, "What on earth am I going to talk to him about now?" But actually the interviewed flowed in all kinds of ways that I wasn't entirely expecting, which is kind of what made it so fun. And I thought, especially at the end when he started talking about the unknowability of the past and, you know, is the Bay of Tapestry adequate evidence for the Battle of Hastings. And it kind of felt then that maybe that was a comparison that he'd never previously drawn in any previous interview. I may be wrong on that. But if so, then I feel very proud. Wonderful that of all the things that he could have first talked about his take on the Battle of Hastings, it was the rest of his history. He struggled between Britain and Russia. 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